“But there was shooting just a while ago!”
The explosions stopped perhaps half an hour earlier, but the enormous cloud of black smoke is still hovering over the Tochmash factory.
“Addiction. What can I do?” He smiles. His voice is very pleasant and he looks like a decent person.
“It’s not only your problem,” I joke, pointing at the drunken man, who walks away and soon vanishes behind the apartment buildings.
“Today I have had a drink, too, but only one shot. To calm my nerves.”
There is a short pause, then Sergey turns to me.
“Paulie, it’s just a friendly invitation. Come to my place, we’ll have tea and we’ll talk. Just for half an hour.”
“OK. Let’s go, but I want to come back before it gets dark.”
Sergey lives about a hundred meters from the station. He works, as he claims, in “the supermarket for the rich.” He is a security guard. He was supposed to go to work, but he was awakened by the explosion.
“I heard the shell and I opened my eyes. I checked whether everything was all right,” he says. Everything was all right. His house didn’t suffer, but it was a close call. He lives about four hundred meters from the place where the woman going to work was killed.
“My friend from abroad,” he tells a neighbor standing before the building.
His apartment is very modest. A few closets, a bed, a small table, and a second room whose door is closed. “If you and your friends ever need lodging, here even three people can sleep,” he tries to persuade me. He has two cats who are the apple of his eye.
I notice a flyer from the Donetsk People’s Republic on the table. Sergey is its champion, but he doesn’t seem fanatical, as do many others I have met in cities with a separatist majority. We change the subject and start talking about jobs. There is less and less work because everything is closing down. People live on the last of the savings they have been squirreling away. “If this continues, people will open those closed shops themselves,” claims Sergey. He is planning to go to work tomorrow although he doesn’t know whether it will be peaceful. He says that you have to hold on to any job by hook or by crook because if you lose it, you won’t find another one.
For a few days I didn’t know what really happened in Donetsk. I found out quite accidentally when I met “Pastor” from battalion Donbas.
I left Donetsk on July 22, a day after the shelling of the train station. Leaving wasn’t easy. Due to the dangerous conditions one of the bus stations was shut down and the majority of trains were cancelled. Those that were running were significantly delayed. I hoped to leave Donetsk before noon, but in the end my train left in the evening. Before I reached Artemivsk and battalion Donbas I had to sleep over in Krasnoarmiysk. Traveling by car or by bus at night in those areas was unsafe. Skirmishes between Ukrainian forces and separatists were still going on.
After a few days spent in Artemivsk, I went with battalion Donbas to their bases in Kurakhove and Krasnoarmiysk. That’s where I met Pastor. He was accompanying us on a bus going from one base to another. I found out who was shelling Donetsk. Pastor’s battalion and other units, whose main force, according to him, was Right Sector, tried to take up positions close to the city. This means the shelling was done by Ukrainian artillery. They always reinforce the infantry. No serious action can be successful without them. However, the reinforcements were insufficient, and they had to withdraw. That’s when the artillery fire ceased.
Pastor has been a sniper, but not for very long.
“When they asked me at the recruitment commission what nickname I wanted to choose, I responded: ‘Pastor.’ They stared at me wide-eyed and asked: ‘Why?’ And I really am a pastor,” he laughs. Now he is the unofficial chaplain of his unit. He comes from the Kiev region, but the majority of his battalion, as its name indicates, are people from Donbas. They don’t like separatists and they want to live in Ukraine. They decided to reach for weapons and put up armed resistance against them.
The first time I met battalion Donbas was in Artemivsk, about one hundred kilometers north of Donetsk. They came in the evening to pick me up along with other journalists. It was already dark when two cars pulled over. One was a Mercedes covered with blue-and-yellow stickers saying “United Ukraine,” the other was an SUV. Both cars have logos on them: “Independent Special Battalion Donbas.” There are uniformed men with guns inside.
“Get in,” says a driver. We are going to a boarding school dormitory that serves as battalion base. It is only the next morning that I have a chance to look at other vehicles. Several cars show traces of fighting. One of them, a silver sedan, is missing a grille and a headlamp. You can see a hole in the windshield, right at head level and another, a little lower, at chest level. Supposedly, the car was seized from the separatists. When it was seized, it was full of blood.
All vehicles commencing a military action are covered with yellow adhesive tape, and so are the soldiers. It is the trademark of the antiterrorist forces. The tape is supposed to protect the units from friendly fire.
They walk us through the dark corridors and they don’t even let us turn on our cell phone lights. “Snipers can be over there.”
A guardsman, “Boost,” points to the window. Battalion commander Semen Semenchenko waits for us inside. He is in uniform but without a balaclava. When the photographers want to take his picture, he puts it on.
For a long time Semenchenko hasn’t shown his face and he has never revealed his true name. He has done this for the same reason as many people from Donbas. His family (he has four children) could be in danger. He took his balaclava off only when Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko decorated him with the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, third class. It is awarded for “exceptional service in defense of state security.” By that time his family was already in a safe place. Hiding under the balaclava didn’t guarantee his anonymity. Forty-year-old Semenchenko was one of the organizers of the Euromaidan in Donetsk. He was active in a party called Self-Reliance, so there was a good chance that someone would recognize him. If you googled “Semen Semechenko” you could find scattered photos of a man one might suspect was him. They say that before the conflict he had worked in the field of monitoring and security. He has a diploma in filmmaking and he gained his military experience in the Soviet and then Ukrainian armies. As he tells me the day after I arrived, it was the Maidan that stopped him from leaving Ukraine.
“I hadn’t believed that anything would ever change. Those who went out to protest made it possible to believe in this country again,” he declares. When the separatists reached for weapons, he realized that he should do the same. For the insurgents he became enemy number one.
But Semenchenko has no illusions that everything changed after the Maidan. Chaos, corruption, lies, and shady dealings have remained untouched. Ukraine can’t be transformed if these problems are not faced. And displaying Ukrainian flags in the cities occupied by separatists won’t help.
“If you act like a toy soldier, follow orders respectfully, and if you don’t ask questions, everything is terrific. Well, unless you are hit by shrapnel. But if you talk about what you see, and you want to defend your home, then you meet with resistance,” he says. In principle, very little has changed. According to him, the Maidan was only the first successful battle against the system that is now counterattacking. That’s why Semenchenko decided to bet not only on military force but also on politics. Thanks to the popularity enjoyed by his battalion he intends to carry out his program. For example, in late June he organized a rally whose purpose was to make Kiev’s attitude toward the separatists more belligerent. Several thousand Kiev residents showed up.