DONETSK, Ukraine — The blasts were so powerful they nearly knocked Antonina Sumina off her feet and shattered windows on the opposite side of the apartment.
But after five months living under fire, the Grad rocket strike that slammed into the courtyard of her home in Pervomaisk, 80 kilometres north-east of Donetsk, was a familiar event.
“It was just a massive boom, the windows cracked, and we threw ourselves on the floor. We know what to do,” the 53-year-old says, looking out over the stricken courtyard below the fourth-storey apartment.
The Dec. 8 attack ripped apart a nearby apartment building, killed six people, and knocked out the heating station that keeps the neighbourhood warm. In the grim context of the past few months in eastern Ukraine, it was a routine tragedy.
If the people of this rebel-held town are lucky, it may have been one of the last.
Against expectations, a truce that came into force the following day has largely held, raising hopes for a relatively peaceful new year and Christmas, which is celebrated in Ukraine on Jan. 7, according to the Orthodox calendar.
However, on Dec. 24, talks aimed at reaching a stable ceasefire in Ukraine ended in Minsk, Belarus, after more than five hours, with no indication of progress and questions about when the next round might take place.
The rebel faction that controls the town, a detachment of the Russia-based Don Cossack Host, has taken advantage of the lull to open soup kitchens and has begun to distribute Russian-donated aid — mostly clothes — from the cinema. They have even made a point of erecting the traditional municipal Christmas tree on the town square.
But normality is still a long way off.
About 5,000 people have been killed and one million more displaced since fighting broke out in east Ukraine in April. In Pervomaisk alone, only 20,000 of a pre-war population of 80,000 remain.
Kyiv has not paid pensions or wages to public-sector workers since July. People working for private businesses, many of which have been forced to shut down since the war began, have fared little better.
The Ukrainian government has been evicted from the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of the Russian-backed separatists, but they have as yet failed to build much of a functioning state to replace it.
Economic dislocation was compounded on Dec. 1, when a decree signed by Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, suspended all state services and banking operations in rebel-held areas.
The decree is designed to force the rebels to shoulder the financial burden of running the regions they have seized, something they have so far proved incapable of doing.
As a result, institutions from schools and hospitals to prisons and water treatment plants are bereft of funding. Residents must travel across the front line to get access to bank accounts and credit cards have ceased to work.
“No one has any money. If there is food in the shops, we can’t afford to buy it,” says Irina Shtiben, a nursery worker lining up to receive Russian-donated clothes.
“It is worst for the elderly, the grandfathers and grandmothers who cannot leave the house to get to the soup kitchens or do not have family to help. They are the ones who will starve,” she says.
As December wears on, similar lines for food, warm clothes, one-off cash handouts and other kinds of aid are growing in towns and villages in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. But the state of the aid effort is patchy, ill-coordinated and woefully insufficient.
Some, like the clothes handed out by Cossacks in Pervomaisk, comes from Russia and is administered directly by rebel forces. Some foreign agencies, including Médecins Sans Frontières and the Red Cross, have been supplying aid to hospitals. But bizarrely, the most reliable effort is run neither by the Kremlin, nor an international non-governmental organization, but a soccer club.
In 2012, the state-of the art Donbass Arena in Donetsk hosted England during the European Championships. Excluding some minor shell damage to the superstructure, it has been remarkably untouched by the war. The pitch is pristine, but has not seen a match since May. Instead, the action is below the stands.
In the VIP parking lot, an army of volunteers frantically sorts pasta, baby food, sunflower oil, canned meat and other essentials into aid packages for distribution to towns across the region.
“We have 250,000 individual registered users and we shift 20,000 individual aid packages a day. If it was a commercial operation, we would probably be one of the biggest retailers in the region,” says Andrei Sannin, who normally runs Donetsk Shakhtar FC’s stadium management.
Mr. Sannin found himself overseeing the aid distribution when the club’s owner, the reclusive oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, decided to start an assistance program through his charitable foundation in August. It has snowballed into an impressive operation that has earned praise from professional NGO workers for actually getting aid to those who need it. But even this crucial supply line may now be under threat.
Last week, fighters from several Ukrainian volunteer battalions manning checkpoints outside Donetsk turned back a 20-truck convoy destined for the stadium’s makeshift aid depot.
Related
- Ukraine moves toward possible NATO membership, Russia bristles: ‘This is counterproductive’
- Matthew Fisher: Putin may pick Soviet-like aggression over Crimea compromise in response to ruble slide
- Uprising and heartbreak: For this activist-turned-parliamentarian, the crisis in Ukraine can’t get more personal
- Canadian soldiers landing in Ukraine to train military police, defence minister says
Frustrated at the lack of progress at official talks between Kyiv and the separatists, the semi-autonomous battalions said they would allow the convoy through in exchange for the release of Ukrainian prisoners.
If unresolved, such a blockade could be disastrous for civilians already facing a holiday season on the breadline.
“We need those trucks. If they don’t get them through, we’ve got enough to last just a few more days,” says Mr. Sannin. “After that our handouts will just stop.”
The Daily Telegraph, with a file from The Associated Press
Source:: National Post
