When Ukraine is no longer Ukraine

The queue stretched for one and a half kilometres. It is hard to wait in a traffic jam when you are running away from war. When people in Semenivka heard the fighting was coming to their home town, most of them decided to flee. One year later, Semenivka looks like the fairyland of mice, with riddled buildings like Swiss cheese castles.

World’s unseen refugee crisis

“All our belongings were destroyed. We don’t have bed linen, we don’t have a fork, we don’t have a spoon”. Natalya Beskorovana’s words, a 35 year-old from Semenivka, condense the every day reality of the majority of Ukrainian refugees or internally displaced (IDPs).

While the fighting in Ukraine is placed in some sort of quarantine in the East, life in other parts of the country is moving along almost undisturbed. Peace and war are enjoying a more than strange cohabitation, so the true impact of the conflict is far from being obvious. The numbers can take many people by surprise: at the of end of June 2015, one year after the war started, there were over 1.35 million internally displaced people in Ukraine, ranking the country 9th worldwide in terms of IDPs. There are over 900000 refugees to the neighbouring countries and the estimated number of people in need of humanitarian aid reaches 5 million. People face shortages in food, health services, shelter and medicines, which are in worryingly low supply in Ukraine.

“We used to have animals before the war, pigs, chickens and ducks. And a vegetables garden. How can I explain it to my child that we don’t have anything anymore?”

At UNHCR’s distribution centre in Kramatorsk, the stacks await like every other morning. Outside, some twenty people line up in the sun to get their turn at blankets, bed linen, candles, pots, diapers and some clothes. But only if they carry the document proving they really are IDPs.

In order to get the IDP status and thus be eligible for some benefits from the state and from humanitarian organisations, people need to register with the Ukrainian social protection department. Actually receiving it may take months. The process faces many other challenges as well. Short distance displacement is one: people move from their destroyed home, but because they do not leave to a different administrative unit than the one specified in their internal passport they cannot become IDPs. Another is when the conflict moves: there are areas around the frontline which the government does not recognise as territories not under their control, does not include them in the official decree stating the origin towns where IDPs came come from, so people running from these areas can’t receive the status and benefits. It is also the case for students and unaccompanied minors, which cannot register without the presence of their legal guardian.

“Of course we need more help; we hope for displacement benefits and money for the child, as now we are really in need”, says Oksana. She is holding the hand of her 7 year-old daughter, Anastasia, and carrying Maxym in her arms. Maxym is only 3 months. She was sick at the time she was close to deliver, so Oksana could not leave Kirovske, Donetsk Oblast earlier to come give birth here, in Kramatorsk. Now, she has to go to court to apply for Maxym’s to be admitted as Ukrainian citizen, as he was not born on Ukrainian territory. It is the only way they can receive the post-birth benefits. She remembers how she found out she was pregnant: “The first time we went to the basement to shield ourselves from the shelling, I felt sick. This is how I realized I was going to be a mother again. We spent 3 weeks and a half in the basement. After that, the gas, water and electricity were cut in the city.”

Further in the queue, Iryna Pridhodko finds the strength to joke about the situation: “I want to marry a foreigner and move to a different country. I am kidding – she feels the need to pint out – I love Ukraine. The young 29 year-old woman arrived in Kramatorsk on November 1^st, 2014 after the big explosion in Donetsk. In order to go back and visit her mother who stayed in Donetsk, she needs a frontline crossing pass. She paid 1000 hryvnia and got it in two days, when the official way can take up to one month, maybe even more. Iryna’s patriotic feelings are very strong. She cannot understand how people back home can hate Ukrainians so much: “I had some problems with friends who stayed in Donetsk. When I went outside for a walk with my kid, there was nobody on the street I could talk to, because we have contradictions in our views. It is very unpleasant for me to listen when they say that in Ukraine all people are bad. I have never heard people in Ukraine saying the all living in occupied territories are bad. Some people there really hate Ukrainians. I even had arguments with my parents as well. This was not the case before this conflict started.”

“Of course there are arguments between people” says Andrej Nicolaevich, a civil activist. “Families got separated due to divergent opinions on this matter.”

People in Semenivka argue about rebel fighter’s tombs. On the side of road, where separatists were killed, some people placed crosses and other religious symbols. Others wonder if it is all right to have such “monuments” for them. “Of course, people were killed. But they were not ordinary people, they were separatists”, some locals think.

At the end of an almost deserted street, a cloud of dust starts taking shape. The gravel makes way for the bicycle wheels. A man in his late 40s hops down and props his bicycle against a green metallic gate. Its green colour is spotted by black and rusty holes. Recent ones. Behind the gate, a broken armchair reigns in what once was Viktor’s living room. “I have left when the fighting broke out. When I came back, it was all ruined.” The separatist forces occupying Semenivka for two months dug their trenches right in front of his home, some 200 metres away. With Ukrainian army positions set 2 kilometres away on the same direction, his house was directly in the line of fire. "The situation was quite good under the rebels”, Viktor recalls. “There was order and they only occasionally asked for some clothes. We were not waiting for anybody to liberate us, we don’t want anybody".

There is some bad blood as well between Oksana Korchma and the army. The 45 year-old then living in Myrnoe, a suburb of Slavyansk, is convinced the shelling that destroyed her house came from the Ukrainian army’s positions. And imagine this: it happened just 3 days before the city was liberated on July 5^th, 2014. “Such a pity, just 3 more days and the war would have been over. During those 2 months of occupation, we lived in a peaceful place. Nothing happened”, Oksana sighs thinking about last year’s events. Oksana and her husband have 10 minors in their care, 3 are their own children and 7 are adopted. When the shelling started, she was in her nightgown. They went to the basement to take cover and did not even realize the house above them was burning. “It is miracle we are alive. Sadly, the house is destroyed, but we are happy to have survived. Our dog is also alive, but our parrots died.” Oksana recalls the terrifying moments following them getting out of the basement, how she had to walk barefoot through the mined field, in her nightgown, holding the family dog in her arms fearing the mines.

The town with twice as many IDPs as locals

The ideological arguments between people are not the only ones tearing families apart as a result of this conflict. Olga Ovsyanykova’s husband stayed back in Donetsk while the family fled to Svyatohirsk. He has a job there, working at a railway station and it is the only way he can make some money to support his family, Olga and their epileptic daughter, Tanya. In Donetsk, they lived very close to the airport, the epicentre of fighting. When the water and electricity were cut, Olga decided to take her daughter to a safe place. They first went to Syedove in the southern part of Donetsk region, close to the Azov Sea, then to Novoazovsk before settling in Svyatohirsk.

Svyatohirsk is a small town, 30 kilometres north of Slavyansk. In better days, it used to be a resort town. Not so much these days. Now, almost all the strangers in the town are IDPs, not turists. Mayor of Svyatohirsk for 8 years, the independent Alexandr Dzyuba says that his town hosts over 10000 IDPs, while the population is of 5000 people. During tense periods with intense fighting in the East, there were more than 15000 displaced here. Dzyuba believes that the reasons for which IDPs choose this town is because Svyatohirsk has never been occupied and there’s an orthodox monastery here, an important factor for many, in the mayor’s opinion.

It is terribly hot in the tiny two-room apartment that Olga and her daughter now occupy in the Holy Mountains collective centre for IDPs. Boiling steam relentlessly comes out of the electric kettle Olga is using every time she needs to cook something. Tanya is obsessively pulling on each and every member of the orange plush teddy bear she holds in her arms. “It is next to impossible to find a job here. The unemployment rate is so high. Besides, I could not even hold on to a job as I need to stay and take care of Tanya.” Svyatohirsk, as a resort town, has no plants, no productive units that can create jobs. There are only shops. Many locals leave the city in search of a better future in other towns. So the only opportunities for IDPs are the temporary summer jobs.

The needs of the internally displaced are changing with time passing. In the beginning, they only needed safety, shelter and some food. Now, one year into the conflict, the challenge of integrating them in the communities they found refuge in arises. But how far this can go does not have only economic implications related to the possibility or lack of possibility to create new jobs, but also political implications. What comes to mind is whether integrating the IDPs could symbolize giving up on Donbass.

For the time being, locals have a rather positive attitude towards the IDPs. “These people are scared. They have to come here where it is safe and quiet, they have no other choice”, says Iryna a 43 year-old housewife, born in Donetsk but married in Svyatohirsk. How these relationships between the locals and IDPs will evolve if the conflict is prolonged, how will competing for jobs feel in towns already struggling with high unemployment rates, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian solidarity is something to look up to.

“It was good in Ukraine when it was Ukraine”, Iryna adds in a nostalgic tone.

Hoping for the return home

The psychological effects of this war are obvious. And not only Kramatorsk kindergarten –shelled twice - children ducking to the floor when they hear loud noises obvious. But also families who lost everything being constantly mentally challenged obvious. Thousands of families have fled their besieged towns, moved among strangers and now they are every day confronted with the choice whether to start fresh, rebuild their life in this new place or wait for the war to be over and the possibility to return home.

For some, though, the return home depends not only on the war ending, but also on its outcome. It is the case of Julia Lomakina, a 39 year-old IDP working as a volunteer at the UNHCR distribution centre in Kramatorsk. “The only case in which I could return home to Donetsk after the war is over is if it is still Ukrainian territory. It is the only way. I don’t understand the values of Donetsk People’s Republic and I can’t live with them.”

The majority of the displaced want Donetsk and Luhansk regions to stay in Ukraine. Others though, fed up with war and homesick, end up saying this is not important anymore: “Of course we want to stay in Ukraine. We were, are and want to be Ukrainians. But we just want peace and if it will be different, it does not matter, because we just want to have bright blue sky and no shelling. I want to go back home, not to Russia, but home”, says elderly Galea from Avdiivka.

Olga Ovsyanykova is homesick too. She says “I miss my home” with sorrow in her voice and starts to cry. Olga hopes and even believes that the two regions will be again in Ukraine. “Russia doesn’t need us. If you compare to Crimea, they needed Crimea. They took it, but gave people pensions, benefits, citizenship. They showed they are ready and willing to embrace them. As for Donetsk and Luhansk, they don’t need us.”

For people to return home, Ukraine needs to be Ukraine once more.

Ukraines’s forgotten ceasefire

“My friend is dead”, says Oleksandr, a young light-haired Ukrainian soldier looking at a green cat-look-alike plush toy attached to his bullet proof vest. The toy looks like it has been through a lot, but then so does the vest. Most of the soldiers’ equipment seems more like the props from a decades-old war movie than actual present day combat gear.

This war costs Ukraine more than a country already confronted with economic recession can afford. The Ukrainian government has repeatedly asked for international support and the reality on the ground shows that Ukraine struggles to wage this unexpected war.

Oleksandr is one of the dozen Ukrainian soldiers mending the military checkpoint in the town of Luganskoje in the Donetsk Oblast, some 15 km away from Debaltseve and the frontline.

Approaching the frontline, private cars on the road become less and less frequent and military vehicles are the only ones left to pass by. The asphalt is so damaged from the tanks that what was once a European road looks and feels like a bumpy country-side road at best. The checkpoints are more numerous and the soldiers, ironically enough, are less and less well equipped.

“We hear artillery fire every night. The last shelling was three weeks ago (a.n. second week of June 2015), but the shots last all night long” says Sergei, a 24 year old from Kiev now stationed in Luganskoje. Sergei is one of the thousands men of Ukraine who have been mobilized to the military that had only 6000 battle-ready troops before the conflict in Donbass started. Due to the war escalation, Ukraine has instated a partial mobilization to fill the gaps in its armed forces. On June 18^th, the Ukrainian government officially began mobilizing its sixth and final wave of troops for active duty in the war in Eastern Ukraine.

“I want my year to be over and to go back home. I am a lawyer, not a soldier” Sergei adds. Very few of them are professional military men. There are some, but just a few. Sergei joined the army in June 2014 and he misses practicing law. “The worst moment was when the rebels were shooting tanks at us”, he recalls one of the moments when they were in position 1 km away from the checkpoint. “That was the worst!”

The soldiers in Luganskoje are now occupying the former house of a local criminal. As rumours go, he was into prostitution and contraband. The shattered-windows building next to their “base” used to be a brothel. “There were more than 70000 people living in this area, including the surrounding towns”, Sergei says somehow trying to explain the need for a brothel in Luganskoje, which now looks like no more than an abandoned village. It is the little stories like this that keep their minds away from war when they are not being shot at.

The soldiers use the one story, one large room building annexed to the actual checkpoint as their kitchen and food storage. Several gas canisters lie around in the warehouse resembling kitchen. Lunch preparations don’t always go smoothly, as the gas canister has to be prepared for 10-15 minutes before cooking, so it provides the right level of heat not to burn the food. Still, the first belyash - deep-fried yeast dough and minced meat filled pastry - were a bit overdone. “I am on a diet”, Sergei confesses. “So this kind of food accessible in the army, fried in oil and all, is not very good for me.”

“It is dog meat”, Vasili jokes. “The army does not have a lot of money so they give us dog meat”. They all laugh. Humour rates high among the Ukrainian soldiers. So does laughter and smiling. I guess it is more than necessary for keeping their moral afloat. Because when you think of it, the soldiers’s situation in Ukraine is pretty particular for war: they are only a few hours’ drive from their family and friends. Yet, they do not see each other in months.

Despite the ceasefire mandated by the Minsk II agreement, signed this year in February, fire along the frontline does not seem to cease at all. The Ukrainian army continues to lose soldiers on a daily bases. So it continues to need men like Sergei or Vasili or Oleksandr or Vladimir to defend its territory and its people.