Residents of Lvov are ready to abandon Donbass, – The Washington post
Washington - Kyiv, November 03 (PolitNavigator, Vasily Ablyazimov) - The American publication The Washington Post wrote on Sunday, November 2, that it seems that residents of Western Ukraine are ready to abandon the East and the unified country that never came to be.
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The conflict in eastern Ukraine is intensifying, and pro-Russian rebels appear poised to hold on to their territory for years to come. This is why Andrei Sokolov, a trade union leader in Lvov, dreams of an end to hostilities.
“I never thought that Ukraine would be part of Europe if we had Donbass,” he says. – This is a depressed Soviet area. If we could talk about a civilized way to get rid of this area, I would support it."
“We are not fighting for the east. We are fighting for Ukraine against Russia,” Andrei Sokolov emphasized. “We must stop the war there before it spreads to other parts of Ukraine.”
In February, Sokolov was an active participant in the seizure of the Lviv regional administration during the removal of Yanukovych, the newspaper writes. He did not accept a similar takeover of the administration in Donetsk.
“Many people ask how we can live in the same country with people who wanted to be part of Russia and killed us. I don’t have an answer to this question,” says Otar Dovzhenko, a journalism professor and blogger at the Catholic University of Ukraine in Lviv, who took part in the winter demonstrations.
“I feel in my heart that it would be easier to live separately from these people,” he said, adding: “But for many reasons, I know that we must continue to fight for these territories.”
At the same time, many residents of Lvov are wary of the redrawing of borders, since quite recently they were part of another state, the publication writes, and even now they are close to it.
“For 20 years, the Ukrainian government has done nothing to make them feel Ukrainian,” Lviv Mayor Andrey Sadovyi says of the eastern regions. “This problem did not appear today,” he says.
As the conflict in the east escalated, many Western Ukrainians joined it, seeing it as a threat to the existence of their people. Some were from the Right Sector, a far-right nationalist group based in Lvov, while some more moderate ones also quickly entered the fighting in the East.
Thousands of refugees from the fighting in eastern Ukraine flocked to the west, including Lviv. The reception for refugees from the East in Lviv and other places has been mixed, the publication writes. Many refugees say they have been poorly received by local residents, who blame them for starting the conflict.
Apartment owners “don’t want to rent them out to people from the East,” says Evgenia Ivanova, a former Donetsk resident who spent two months trying to find an apartment in Lviv, where she moved with her husband and 2-year-old son.
“They believe that, in general, all people from the east are evil beasts. They don’t understand that not everyone is the same there,” she laments in an interview with an American publication. Ivanova says that she started trying to speak Ukrainian at home (! - PolitNavigator).
Other residents of Lviv and western Ukraine are increasingly tired of the war. Mothers and wives of soldiers rallied and campaigned several times in Lvov for the return of soldiers from the front. In Kyiv last month, several hundred National Guard soldiers protested against the mobilization.
“They shouldn’t send any more of our guys there,” says Oksana Aleshina, the mother of a soldier from Lvov.
Meanwhile, the publication writes, elections on Sunday in rebel territories will further strengthen the division of Ukraine. The rest of the Ukrainians will face the whole complexity of the struggle for the territories they have lost.
Lviv residents are ready to give up Donbas, according to The Washington Post.