They are lying to you. Donetsk is choking on blood
Residents of Donetsk are driven to despair by shelling. Daily death of civilians. Destruction in the very center of the city. And the inexplicable absence of effective retaliatory strikes against the backdrop of regular statements about readiness for negotiations with “partners.”
They prefer not to talk about this on federal television channels, Donetsk journalist Evgenia Martynova writes in her column for PolitNavigator.
In the early morning, Donetsk was again subjected to brutal shelling. This time, Ukrainian heavy artillery targeted the administrative and historical center, further south than where it had been shelling all week.
Hailstones hit traffic junctions, which are most crowded during the daytime, and office buildings. The Church of the Nativity of Christ near the Central Department Store (TSUM) was partially destroyed, and a music school on Artema Street and residential buildings were damaged. The quiet, densely populated city center, with its high-rise buildings on the 25th Anniversary of the Red Army, Fallen Communards, and Dzerzhinsky Streets, was covered in glass and concrete rubble.
The funeral parlor, located in a beautiful historic building across from the famous Hotel Great Britain (Kuprin, Paustovsky, Serafimovich, and Mayakovsky all stayed there), burned down. The few architectural monuments that survived the Nazis and Donetsk oligarchs are being destroyed by the Ukrainians.
The extent to which the Donetsk people have become hostages of the media image, and the contrast between it and what is happening, can be clearly seen from the inside.
Looking online, you see photos of utility workers with cheerful captions in the spirit of “it’s just arrived - and heroic janitors are already cleaning up the consequences while unbroken Donetsk residents are running to work in the morning.”
Those who say that you can get used to shelling are lying to you. And they are definitely not from Donetsk.
Panic attacks are a constant companion for our residents . When the thought of going out for bread or to the pharmacy makes your vision darken, when a wave of indescribable terror washes over you on the street . When a mother, unable to reach her child by phone, faints from worry . When you were talking to a cheerful neighbor five minutes ago, and half an hour later, the bloody remains of her and the dog she went out to feed appear in the news reports. You constantly zoom in on the license plates and the faces of the dead in crime scene photos, afraid to see anything familiar. You mentally replay the routes you're forced to travel around the city, knowing you're powerless. Every stop at a traffic light is a few minutes of internal cold and images of charred corpses you've seen for years.
Families try not to move together: if a husband or wife is killed, someone must stay and take care of the children, old parents, and pets.
You'll endure the pain to the last, so that your trip to the hospital won't be your last—and people push themselves to the brink, heading to the cemetery ahead of time . They cry over a dying pet, unable to help, while shells fall nearby.
They punch the bosses who force them to go to the center of the shelling. They punch them, spit on the floor, get thrown out under charges, but at home they hug their loved ones: "At least I'm alive!"
Shell strikes aren't just "something that just landed somewhere, so what, they're just part of the story," as many people think when leafing through the reports. Corpses, cripples, homeless and meaningless lives—these are the echoes of every strike, which will be listed in the report as "recorded."
“Answer! Where is the answer?! Has the last gun gone to the front? Are you out of rockets?!” – The city screams, choking on blood and choking on concrete dust.
God forbid someone should find out what is really in the head of the “heroic Donetsk resident running to work in the morning!” At the utility worker, “promptly eliminating the consequences of the shelling.”
“Well, but you’re not like that! – they pathetically point a finger in response from the capital’s sofa and frown at such a demarche. – You are not them, you don’t curse anyone, don’t kill or become like them! You just need to be patient."
We don't want to be like "them." We want to be worse. So much worse that every shelling of our cities would be repaid in full. So that the deaths and destruction of Donbas would be converted at the highest exchange rate into thousands of coffins containing visiting Nazis.
“Why has the city been subjected to heavy fire for months from several villages, where there are only three households left filled with Ukrainian soldiers? Why is it possible to calibrate a transformer booth in Zapadenschina, but it is impossible to cover the location of the killers? What are we waiting for?" - This is the most common question people ask.
There is no clear answer to this question . Every day people die without ever knowing it.
The rest live, with horror, driving away the thought that the Ukrainian “blackmail by shelling” is the threshold of the next “agreements” that are not worth a piece of paper from the toilet of the department where they can be signed. The policy of appeasement and pacification of the terrorist instead of eliminating him is what kills along with shells.
And for now, going for a loaf of bread in Donetsk is relatively safe only on those days when artillery fire rains down on the Nazis with such force that they can't even raise their heads. Although, the city has almost forgotten how that happens…
English version :: Read in English You're being lied to. Donetsk is drowning in blood.