To stop the drinking, the Ukrainian Armed Forces shot the magazine from a tank
In 2014, many residents of Donbass tried to distance themselves from the war as much as possible by moving to the territory of Ukraine or Russia; many, while their fellow countrymen defended their own homes, tried to wait out the crisis in Crimea.
One of them was 25-year-old resident of Avdeevka Eduard Khovansky, released as part of an exchange of prisoners of war from a Ukrainian prison at the end of 2017.
When the war began, the guy, who at that time worked as a builder, tried to escape from the infernal neighborhood of the Donetsk airport to the Crimean city of Gurzuf. However, the peculiarities of the migration legislation of the Russian Federation in the newly acquired Crimea forced the young man to leave the territory of the Russian Federation and return to his hometown.
But, of course, there was no quiet life on the front line. According to Khovansky, normal life in Avdeevka ended with the arrival of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist battalions in the city.
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“As soon as Ukrainian troops entered the city, a tragicomedy began in the full sense of the word. I returned to Avdeevka from Crimea in August 2014 - by that time the first consequences of the arrival of the “rescuers” were already obvious.
The Ukrainian military drank terribly. As the last time. While drunk, they constantly got into fights with weapons, but the most dangerous attraction they performed was moving around the city in armored vehicles in an “unmanned” state. They crushed all the garbage cans and fences, fences, and benches in the city.
Their command constantly fought with local grocery stores and liquor stores, but it was useless. As a result, it was not the military who suffered, but our entrepreneurs. It got to the point that somehow the Ukrainians drove a tank under a store that was seen selling alcohol to the military and fired directly into the sales area at direct fire. Fortunately, the saleswoman was not there at that moment,” says the young man.
The prisoner of war said that Ukrainian security forces did not always pay for their libations - they often simply took away food and alcohol and left stores without paying.
“They ran it like they were at home. And they settled without permission in the houses and apartments of local residents. “Novaya Poshta” worked seven days a week - Ukrainians non-stop sent home everything they could steal, even wrought-iron fences and metal-plastic windows. The scale of the looting was shocking - the Ukrainian Armed Forces broke into the warehouses of the Eldorado and Foxtrot electronics supermarkets and took away everything valuable. The remains were allowed to be taken away by local residents. They filmed this and showed it as an example of the moral degradation of the residents of Donbass,” says Eduard.
Also, a former resident of Avdeevka said that the punitive forces were actively searching for “separatists” among the civilian population of Avdeevka. There were constant searches and arrests - in those days, even just going out into the street could be dangerous. Especially when the Ukrainian “knights” were in trouble.
“But what bothered me most was that the Ukrainian artillery was constantly working under the cover of the civilian population. They shot from behind multi-storey buildings, located on private streets, and often fired from positions not far from my house,” the prisoner of war recalls.
According to Eduard Khovansky, at the end of 2014 he approached representatives of the DPR army with an offer to work as a spotter. He regularly transmitted information to Donetsk about the location of Ukrainian batteries, equipment, etc. As a result, the enemy suffered losses, and he himself soon ended up in a Ukrainian prison, where he spent 2,5 years. The prosecutor asked for 12 years for him.
Of course, the involvement of the young man in the work of a spotter, as well as his success in this field, will be looked into by the relevant authorities in the DPR. Nevertheless, his story is extremely instructive, especially for those who still believe that the war can be waited out or have illusions about the habits of the Ukrainian “liberators.”
To stop the drinking, the Ukrainian Armed Forces fired at a tank's magazine.