Greetings from Novorossiya

8. WAR COMES TO DONETSK

MARINKA WAS SHELLED on July 11. Next day I go there by car with two Western journalists and a fixer from Donetsk who works for them as an interpreter and assistant. There is hardly a single living soul. You can see that out of ten thousand residents of the city not even one in twenty is left. No one has been shooting since yesterday yet the streets are deserted. Driving through the entire city we can count the pedestrians on the fingers of both hands. More often but still rarely you can spot a car packed to the roof. People try to take as much as they can because when they come back to their apartments, the apartments may no longer be there or they will have been plundered.

We stop at a building hit by a projectile. The apartments on the ground and first floors are missing their walls. They have turned into ruins. A garage a few meters away is full of shrapnel. A retired man, Garik, is standing in front of the building. He claims to be the last resident of Marinka. He keeps watch and protects the building from thieves. First and foremost, however, he emphasizes that this is “his land” and he is not going to abandon it. He lives in the building. Why was Marinka shelled? Garik thinks that for Kiev its residents are expendable because they champion the Donetsk People’s Republic.

“During the May referendum we all voted for it,” he admits.

A dozen meters away from where we left Garik we meet a patrol of “volunteers.” One of them signals with a hand gesture that we should approach them. We walk slowly because we don’t know what to expect.

“Journalists? You think we are the ones who are shooting?” asks one of them. He shows us shells stuck in the ground. He hands me a few pieces of metal and says: “It is a Grad. Take it as a souvenir.”

The Grad is a rocket launcher placed on a truck. Developed in the 1960s it can launch forty rockets simultaneously. They hit one by one, every fraction of a second, and when you listen to them falling you may have the impression that it is hailing.

We approach another projectile and suddenly we hear an explosion. The shelling has begun again. The rockets hit the ground a few kilometers from where we are standing. We follow the “volunteers” to one of the basements. It’s very low so we crouch until the shooting ends. After a dozen minutes we run to the car and drive away. Several meters further on the car breaks down. We can’t move and in the distance we hear more explosions. The fixer starts poking around under the hood. We are having bad luck as in a second-rate comedy. In the end the engine starts up and off we go. We return to Donetsk.

Today the rockets didn’t fall on Marinka but on Petrovska, the most western suburb of Donetsk.

In the evenings the Donetsk People’s Republic organizes a cultural program for its residents. Perhaps it is an attempt to relax a very tense atmosphere. For tonight they’ve announced waltzes. The event has started late. A few dozen people have shown up. “We are sorry that some people can’t come because they are fighting,” explains Klavdia, Press Bureau Secretary of the Donetsk People’s Republic. The dancing lasts two, three hours. After that they have organized, among other things, a concert of several unknown bands that play uplifting music but the turnout is a disaster. Eventually, the cultural program is abandoned.

Next day I decided to visit Marinka again. “It’s quiet. Today no one is shooting,” a woman in uniform tells us when we enter the city. She is the first uniformed female militant I have ever seen. She’s dressed like anybody else. She has sunglasses and a rifle. She claims that she must be very famous because everyone passing by takes her picture. You don’t see armed female militants very often. The Ukrainian side is no different. Women usually stay in the bases, work in the kitchens, supervise gifts from the residents, provide medical services, and so on.

I ask the taxi driver if he would mind going to the area that was bombed a day earlier. He says “no” and once again I end up in the shelled housing project. Today I can spend more time here and I hope that new shooting will not ruin my plans. Some local people, collaborating with the separatists, want to show us the destruction. I can finally take a look at the building in which I was hiding a day ago. It’s damaged, too. It must have been hit two days ago. There are holes in the walls, demolished and incinerated rooms, and shattered windows. You can see burned cars in the garages.

The Statistical Office of the Marinka Region took an almost perfect hit. In one of the central rooms you can see a shell casing. The wall panels are ripped off. By the window there is something wrapped in a lace curtain.

“He must have come to the window when the shelling started. Maybe he wanted to see what was going on,” says one of the guides and points his finger at the curtain. He grabs a stick and lifts the curtain part way off the cadaver. I see a stiff hand. There are no traces of the head. “We don’t know what to do with him, so we didn’t take him out,” explains one of the locals.

We leave the Statistical Office and after a moment we hear explosions again. We separate and run in different directions. Two journalists and I rush into a basement. There we meet two elderly men who apparently have stayed in their apartments. They don’t look agitated. They have a bottle of vodka with them. When the shelling stops I tell them they can go out.

“We’re staying. We prefer to drink here,” replies one of them. It turned out they were right. After a few minutes the firing started again. First, we hear the explosions in the distance, but after a while much closer. They sound different. It sounds to us like tank fire. Later on, the separatists would claim that they also saw the tanks.

We were in the middle of the housing project. We were to head for the separatists’ checkpoint where we had met the female militant. There is a shelter there and in it are my cab driver and my photographer. I run as fast as I can. Although my bulletproof vest is quite light, running is not easy. We keep close to the walls and trees as much as possible, so we can hide from the shells if we have to. The fire comes from the south so we cling to the walls facing north.

Suddenly I notice a man sitting on a bench. He may be over forty. He is slouching with his legs crossed. He appears to be relaxing. We stop and I look at him, perplexed.

“Sir? Why aren’t you running away or hiding?”

“I was baptized,” he responds, looking at me almost contemptuously.

I would like to talk to him more but thanks to the sounds of the consecutive exploding shells I change my mind.

We run onto the main road and here the problems begin. There is no place to hide and we have two kilometers more ahead of us. We take a break at a small shop. Then we move on. We try to walk under the trees to be less visible.

We reach the separatists’ checkpoint. They take us to the bomb shelter. You can’t see it from the road and you have to walk between some hangars. The bunker was built in Soviet times. This space, with at least four compartments, covers dozens of square meters. The separatists turned two compartments into bedrooms with cots and mattresses on the floor. Another compartment is a pantry with a fridge and the largest serves as a dining room. You can see a long table with two benches. Everywhere there are vests, a few weapons, and cardboard boxes, most likely with food in them. There is no electricity, but they have a battery-operated lamp. The light is dim but at least you can see what’s on the table: canned food, bread, cookies, water, tea, and so on. As they say, the table is ruled by communism—you can take what you want. And they invite us to dine.

“Try this honey. We’ve gotten it from the locals. It’s without GMOs!”

“Val,” the most cheerful of the entire company, encourages us. He is about fifty. And very devout. Although the majority in the bunker are religious, he is the most zealous. He has an armband with writing on it. As he explains, it is Psalm 80. Val believes that it will shield him from bullets.

“Bullets don’t touch it,” claims Val. This is his only protection from shells since he doesn’t wear a bulletproof vest. He is convinced he doesn’t need it because faith keeps him safe.

Religiosity and conservative values are nothing particularly odd among pro-Russian insurgents. Back in April they created the Russian Orthodox Army. From the very beginning of the Russian Spring numerous groups of pilgrims had been strolling around the Donetsk State Regional Administration building that was occupied by separatists.

Russian Orthodoxy here is strangely connected with antifascism as they perceive it. Everyone who doesn’t support Russia is a fascist. Local antifascists openly talk about the blood unity of Slavic nations and condemn faiths other than Russian Orthodoxy.

“Take my picture,” says Val.

“The photo will be better if you hold some weapon.” I encourage him.

Val picks up whatever is at hand. It is a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“You are holding it the wrong way,” someone is shouting in the darkness.

“It won’t make any difference to these guys.” They burst into laughter.

Then he takes the weapon. This time properly. He doesn’t stop laughing.

Only some of the explosions are heard in the bunker. When the shells from Grads hit the ground one by one you know that something is going on. The firing calms down a little. I go outside to assess the situation and let my friends know I am all right (cell phones don’t work in the bunker).

“It’s odd. The shells are coming from places controlled by our people,” says one of the separatists. When I hear this, I am even more amused by the question everyone asks me: “Who is actually doing the shooting there?”

How am I supposed to know? I am usually on the side that is under fire but I can only hear the explosions. Honestly, it is very rare that you can observe the moment when they fire and the target. How am I supposed to know who is shooting, if even the insurgents and soldiers don’t fully understand what’s happening?

How many insurgents are in the bunker? Including those standing watch (they are also lookouts when there is shooting), there are about fifty of us, claims the unit commander nicknamed Cimmerian. Usually a dozen or so stay in the bunker proper. They are all residents of Donbas. What did they do before the war? Among them there is a miner, a mechanic, and a blacksmith. Outside of their obligatory limited training they don’t have any military experience.

The commander claims that his unit is the only one here and that they cannot count on any reinforcement. Semen Semenchenko, whom I will meet a few days later, is the commander of the volunteer battalion Donbas. Fighting for the Ukrainian side, he will have a different opinion. According to him, there are a lot of artillery forces in the area, so the Ukrainian units can’t fight their way through to Marinka.

“If there had been only fifty people there, we would have dealt with them a long time ago,” he states.

Cimmerian is sitting next to me. At first, he doesn’t say much but finally he starts talking. He and his son, who is also in the unit, know everything about military service. His son got the nickname “Frenchman.” When the father and son talk to each other they use nicknames.

Cimmerian had been in the police, and he retired in March. That’s when the protests began, so he joined them. Then once again he reached for a weapon and signed up with the Donetsk People’s Republic. He had served twenty-five years in the Donetsk police force. He lives somewhere near the city. As often happens in Ukraine, he showed me photos on his phone—of his granddaughter on a horse and of his daughter. There is a picture of Frenchman in uniform; he must have been in the army. In a group photo he is posing with his entire unit. Another photo shows him as a member of the Donetsk mounted police. Finally, Cimmerian shows me photos from the Maidan.

“You were there?” I ask him.

“Yes, several times.”

He shows me more photos.

“How did they talk about it in Poland? Did they support the Maidan?” he asks me.

“Mostly, yes.”

“For what reason?”

I shrugged. “And you were there for what? For Yanukovych?”

“What does Yanukovych have to do with this? We maintained order.”

He starts by saying that everything was the demonstrators’ fault and that the police behaved in exemplary fashion. They only fought troublemakers.

“You were there on December 1?”

“I was there. Look.” He shows me one of the photos in which he is part of the police cordon holding metal shields.

On that day outside the Presidential Administration building a group of demonstrators connected with the rightist organization, the Brotherhood, brought a bulldozer and tried to storm the barricade in front. According to the supporters of the Maidan, it was a provocation. During quite a long time the police were attacked by demonstrators with stones, bottles, and metal chains. They responded with tear gas and stun grenades. Finally, the police reached for their clubs and dispersed the crowd, assaulting whoever was in their path. In these skirmishes about three hundred people were injured. Half of them were police.

“I was beaten by the police there, although they knew I was a journalist,” I tell Cimmerian.

There is a pause. It is the first time he doesn’t respond right away.

“But I wasn’t beating you,” he claims meekly.

I burst into laughter, and we never talk about the Maidan again.

Cimmerian insists that we follow them to the buildings to watch them picking up the residents’ bodies. It is very important to him that it is documented. I try to convince them that we have to leave because we can no longer keep the cabbie who was also in the bunker. “We will give you a ride,” says Cimmerian. We settle accounts with the taxi driver and he quits the bunker. We stay put, waiting for the shooting to fade.

I didn’t check the time carefully, but I think we spent about four hours in the bunker. Finally, Cimmerian organizes the expedition. He takes four volunteers and two local residents. We are going outside. “Single file, five meters apart!” says the commander. We are taking the same route on which I was running away earlier. Cimmerian orders us to walk under the trees. Where there is a clearing, we are to dash to the nearest trees. It will make it more difficult to aim at us.

When we walk by one of the houses, we smell the terrible stench of a decomposing body. They look over the fence but see nothing. “It must be an animal,” asserts one of the locals who clearly is not keen on carrying corpses. So we keep walking.

We have returned to the building with the headless official wrapped in a lace curtain. They are about to take him out when we hear some commotion. We go outside. They have caught two guys who are twenty-something. One of the insurgents has brought a bag full of cosmetics.

“They wanted to steal it. They are marauders,” he says.

The militants tell them to put their hands over their heads and kneel down on the pile of glass that fell from the shattered windows.

“You know what we do with people like you?” asks Cimmerian. The boys have tears in their eyes.

“We are not marauders. We didn’t want to take anything. We came to guard this building.” One of them can barely speak. They are told to lower their heads while the insurgents recharge their weapons.

“It is necessary. They are marauders,” says one of the locals quietly, justifying the insurgents’ behavior.

“OK. We have a different task for you,” says Cimmerian, breaking the dreadful silence. “You will take the corpse outside.”

Their job is to remove the body from the building and place it somewhere. They don’t have gloves. They struggle, but in the end they manage to move it out, carrying it on a lace curtain. They keep smelling their hands, making sure that they don’t smell like death.

Then the boys are walked further. Once again we smell the stink of decomposing corpses near the garages but no one can determine where it’s coming from. After a search we return to the bunker. On the way Cimmerian keeps talking to the detainees.

“They are not marauders,” he asserts when we get back. And he sets them free.

As promised, the insurgents gave us a ride to the city center.

Marinka and the Petrovska suburbs are quite far from the center of Donetsk, so the sounds of the fighting were barely audible in the city. On the other hand, north of Donetsk everyone got used to the shooting around the airport.

“Somebody is shooting there every day. For us it’s a daily routine,” a women living near the train station tells me. No one remembers any more that on May 26, the day after the presidential election, a huge battle took place there. This area was controlled by the Ukrainian forces the entire time. If it had been captured by the separatists, the remaining Ukrainian units would have been pushed out from the city. The Donetsk People’s Republic could then form its own air force and Russia would probably send them some planes.

But the combat zone in Donetsk started to expand, and the residents’ initial indifference was slowly melting. On July 21 the shells coming from the north were falling near the train station. The separatists’ artillery located in the city center was firing, too. The shelling began in the early morning.

“Press, pull over! Tanks are coming,” says a separatist blocking the road to the train station, when I and other journalists arrive. We are near the center. People are walking by the apartment buildings in a large group.

“Yes, we had to evacuate. Thank you, ‘volunteers,’ you are great.” A woman with a plastic bag in her hand is clearly exasperated. Like the others, she has taken only the most necessary items. They are all rushing to catch a marshrutka that will take them to a safe haven. For a while they will be living in the student dormitories in the city center.

A young fellow, Oleksij, is standing near one of the buildings. For now, he is not leaving. He believes all he needs is just to move in with some friends who live in a different neighborhood.

A huge cloud of black smoke hovers over the buildings. Just in front I see a billboard displaying a message with a little dove: “Peace to the world.” The fire is consuming the Tochmash plant that makes products for the mining and military industries. An armored personnel carrier with the flag of the “mass mobilization” is moving toward the factory. After a moment you can hear an engine roaring. A tank from battalion Vostok is advancing toward the train station. Vostok is a Ukrainian-Russian separatist unit responsible for capturing the airport in May. They suffered enormous losses.

I manage to get closer to the station. The neighborhood is practically dead. The only people you spot are those waiting for the evacuation marshrutkas or who flee on their own. Obviously, there are exceptions.

“This is my home and I won’t leave it,” an elderly man tells me at the bus stop. Another man tries to con me into giving him some money in return for super important information. In front of one building there are totally demolished cars. One of them is an old Lada, or rather, what is left of it. According to the witnesses, it was smashed by a car full of separatists who were in a big hurry.

A few militants, Western journalists, and some Donetsk residents sit in the street leading to the train station. The separatists have rifles and uncertain looks on their faces. They get animated when reinforcements pass by. Asphalt on the street has been furrowed by the treads of armored vehicles. Every now and then you can hear more explosions. After a while, a car with some militants pulls over.

“You will come with us. You will see what ‘they’ have done,” says a militant. “They” obviously means Ukrainians.

I return to the devastated Lada. The owner of the shoe shop nearby is taking his goods to the car. The militants standing next to the car don’t say a word. One of them separates from the rest and tells us to follow him. He walks us between the apartment buildings. I can see shattered windows. It is a crucial sign that the place has been shelled. Here a projectile hit a playground. What was left was a hole in the ground, shoes, sunglasses, and a pool of blood. Journalists who were standing there a little earlier claim that just a moment ago a woman’s body was taken away. According to the outraged residents who described the whole event to the journalists she didn’t even live there. She was probably going to work through the courtyards and had bad luck. Dead on the spot. A man who stood nearby was luckier. Shrapnel hit his leg. The residents dragged him to the stairwell and dressed his wound. The entire floor is covered with blood.

A group of residents stands at the playground and they curse the Ukrainians. “But the very first shell came from over there,” says one of them, pointing at the Donetsk center where separatist forces are located. Others start berating him.

“What are you talking about? What’s the difference where the first one came from, if this one obviously came from the north?”

On the other side of the street a projectile fell in front of a multistory building. A few meters from the stairwell you can see a formidable crater. Everything around has been hit by shrapnel. Two nearby cars are good for nothing. They are all perforated. A man is hanging out near a white Lanos. I ask him if the car is his.

“No. It is my daughter’s. It has been robbed,” he says. I notice an open glove compartment and a few things scattered around.

A few people have moved into the basement of the destroyed building. They have water, some food, cardboard boxes, and blankets. They are prepared to stay there a little longer. They don’t want to leave because they are afraid that belongings left in their apartments will share the fate of the white Lanos, that they will be plundered.

“As we know here, ‘What’s war for somebody is as good as it gets for somebody else,’” observes one of the women, recalling a popular Ukrainian saying.

At the Artem Street station I am pestered by an elderly drunken man. His speech is so muddled I can’t understand him. Finally he is interrupted by a man over thirty, who knows him and gets rid of him. His name is Sergey and he lives near the station.

“I had to go out because I ran out of cigarettes,” he says.

“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.

Although Semenchenko gave contradictory answers when asked about his involvement in politics, in the end he took his chances in the elections. He claims that his people in Parliament will have an impact on the army’s structure and operations in eastern Ukraine. The main political objectives of Donbas are a little murky. They include fighting corruption, effecting modernization of the army, and providing support for “patriotic attitudes.”

Many Donbas residents were sold on Ukraine only when they realized what the separatists’ rule was like. Some decided to join volunteer battalions fighting for Ukraine, and most of those joined Donbas. Although the battalion was formed in April, it was given legal status only in May and was integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine.

In the battalion I meet many people connected to the region. One of them is fifty-year-old “Iron Man” from Slovyansk who had been fighting on the Maidan and had been shot by a sniper. He arrived in the unit from Vienna where he had received a titanium implant thanks to international aid. Others, like Pastor, didn’t go to the Maidan, nor did they consistently support it. But once they are in the battalion, they have no doubts which side to take. Another guardsman fled Donetsk after someone wrote his apartment number in the stairwell. He was harassed several times by people with guns. He sent his family away, left Donetsk, and joined the battalion. “I have no place to go back to,” he says quietly, ending the phone conversation. His house has just been shelled.

The difference between volunteer battalions and regular forces is that people are better motivated in the former. After all, it was their decision to reach for weapons. They were not forced to do so by draft boards. Very often their enthusiasm transcends their skills. They haven’t all had military experience, but many have had a spell in the army or police.

Apart from residents of Donbas, you can meet all of Ukraine in the battalion. Some men are from the west—for example, a twenty-something from Lviv. Some are from Crimea. They had to flee the areas occupied by the Russians.

When I sit on the steps in front of the dorm-turned-base, I am approached by “Asker,” which in the Crimean Tatar language simply means a soldier. He sits next to me and he wants to check his email. He plays for me his favorite music, songs of the Crimean Tatars. As I found out much later from another Donbaser from Crimea, Asker was wounded when his battalion was seizing Popasna, a town in the Luhansk region, several dozen kilometers away. He was taken to the hospital and then disappeared. He just vanished into thin air. Men in battalion Donbas suspect that he was kidnapped by separatists.

“I will never forgive them. I will avenge him,” says one of his Crimean buddies. He is a very young person. In his platoon, out of thirty-five men only five remain. He has started abusing alcohol, most probably due to the lack of both proper support and an adequate number of psychologists. Just like one of his five comrades.

“I feel pain here, in my heart. This is really horrible,” he tells me, swaying a little on his feet.

A desire to fight for the motherland is essentially the only motivation of the Donbasers. Their basic pay, promised by the Interior Ministry, amounts only to 1,248 hryvnas, or 47 dollars a month. If you consider rising prices and the declining value of money, every day they earn less and less. Anyway, their money exists only as an idea because nobody has ever received any wages. The guardsmen from the battalion joke that if one day they get all the overdue money, they will at least notice they have received something. So where does Donbas get its money from? In the beginning they were supported by the pro-Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoyskiy. Now they live off donations from people who can send them from 10 to 1,100 hryvnas. Other people provide food. Thanks to all of this Donbas has uniforms, equipment, and provisions.

Theoretically, each guardsman should be provided with proper weapons, but so far the government has not fulfilled its promise. They captured their first weapons in April when they attacked a checkpoint of pro-Russian insurgents. At that time they were a paramilitary organization and they were equipped with automatic rifles. They still don’t have enough weapons, not to mention heavy equipment. Donbas has at its disposal several armored personnel carriers and antiaircraft guns that can also be used to fight light armored divisions.

Although battalion Donbas has its own political aspirations, it was not created around any particular ideology. This is not true of two other volunteer battalions, Azov and Right Sector. Their roots are in the Maidan. That was where a coalition formed of diverse radical organizations. They wanted to separate themselves from other demonstrators: “liberals, lefties and anarchists.” The coalition included such organizations as Patriots of Ukraine, White Hammer, the Ukrainian National Assembly/Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) and the Social-National Assembly. The coalition of organizations became really well known in January 2014 when they stormed the Ukrainian Parliament, launching several days of clashes with police. From the very beginning violence was one of their means to achieve political goals. In the circumstances of the civil war, creating an independent battalion was a natural process. Battalion Azov is rooted in the Social-National Assembly and now is subordinate to the Interior Ministry. You can just look at their logo to realize that you are dealing with an extremely radical group. The logo shows a Wolfsangel and a black sun. Both symbols are used by neo-Nazi movements. After the Azov unit was created, one of my friends joked that, compared to them, Right Sector was almost liberal. It is worth noting however that Azov was also joined by people without any political views or even ideologically “hostile” to neo-Nazis. Even some anarchists fight in its ranks.

It is August 2014. We accompany the soldiers of battalion Donbas from Kurakhove near Donetsk to the base located a few dozen kilometers from Ilovaisk. In the “Ilovaisk encirclement,” Ukrainian volunteer battalions were surrounded by separatist forces backed by Russians in the form of Russian soldiers and Russian military equipment. After their initial victories and having captured at least half of Ilovaisk, Ukrainian units were suddenly isolated and encircled. Eight battalions got stranded in one of the schools on the city outskirts. There were four journalists with them, including Max Levin, a photographer from the Internet magazine Levyj Bereg (Left Bank). I rely on his report below.

They were constantly shelled by separatist artillery. They tried to break free from the encirclement many times but unsuccessfully, although the separatists promised them safe passage. Each time they would meet with fire, even when the promised corridor was used to carry wounded soldiers.

Four journalists traveling in such a column narrowly escaped with their lives. In the end they separated from the column, went off on their own, and managed to reach the areas controlled by Ukrainian forces. Their entire car was perforated with bullets and shrapnel.

According to the Ukrainians, at least two hundred Ukrainian guardsmen and soldiers were killed in the battle of Ilovaisk. However, according to unofficial sources this number may exceed one thousand. In October the separatists were still holding ninety-eight prisoners from battalion Donbas, the main fighting force in Ilovaisk. Many of them had been exchanged earlier for captive separatists.

I go with a group that will try to rescue the Ukrainians from the encirclement. In a supporting unit there is Ilya Bohdanov, a Russian. He is waiting for the Ukrainian passport that should come very soon. He used to be an agent of Russia’s intelligence service. When he realized that what Putin was doing was incomprehensible, he took time off and came to Ukraine. There, he was thoroughly checked by the Security Service of Ukraine and was allowed to join the battalion. In Russia a military court has taken charge of his case. This former agent of the FSB is a very calm, quiet person. He talks very little and remains in the background. Why did he take the Ukrainian side?

“I am a National Socialist,” he declares.

“But why do you support Ukraine? After all, the extreme right is with Putin,” I ask in disbelief.

“Those people are imperialists. The right is very divided. I am a National Socialist and I want a strong, white, and European Ukraine.” The former FSB agent claims that only thanks to such a Ukraine will Putin’s regime be destroyed.

Dmytro Korchynsky, a leader of the Brotherhood, shares his views. That’s why he is doing all he can to ensure that the revolution that started in Ukraine reaches the very center—that is, Moscow. When during the Maidan protests the supporters of the Brotherhood wanted to attack the Presidential Administration building with a bulldozer, they were dubbed provocateurs and Korchynsky fled the country. Individual members of the Brotherhood participated in the Maidan, but they never revealed their party affiliation.

“I left my home on December 1 and I came back only in February,” says Dmytro Linko, one of the battalion’s soldiers.

The Brotherhood members are Russian Orthodox national anarchists. Their logo displays a labarum. It is a symbol of the Roman legions, thanks to which the emperor Constantine was supposed to conquer his enemies. The main slogan on their website says: “Down with democracy! Let freedom live.” Earlier they had the Unit of Jesus Christ, and now they are forming the first Christian Battalion of Saint Mary. The separatist units from the Russian Orthodox Army will have worthy opponents.