Bakhmut, February 16
In Ukraine, once again winter has come, the time of crises. In the East, in the steel and coal region of the Donbass, where after the Ukrainian turn to the West at the beginning of 2014, the Russian occupation forces has created two heavily armed “people’s Republic”, in spite of countless truce never stopped shooting and death. However, we now have a new line of front. Men and women stand on the rails. Numb from the cold fingers warm over the fire at night. At the makeshift barricades are blocked by heavy freight trains. Day after day, week after week.
Roar of diesel engines, drivers, waiting, but nothing happens. All the wheels were frozen since then, as the Ukrainian war veterans blocked the railway track because they don’t understand why their country still does business with the occupiers on the other side of the dividing line. Why she buys the coal for several years, every day a lot full of freight trains. Why terrorist regimes there, on the Russian side, pays the proceeds from these transactions of his mercenaries, who again fired at the front of their comrades. Why, according to their firm belief, on the Ukrainian side there are the politicians and the oligarchs who made secret deals with the enemy and share in the profits.
And because they don’t understand it all, these women and men blocked three of six rail lines between free and occupied Ukraine — is enough to undermine the country’s energy market, which depends on the anthracite in the territory of the invaders, like a junkie from cocaine. Therefore, the government in Kiev has decided to on Wednesday evening the decision on the introduction of an “energy emergency”.
So they are on the points of the blockade, for example, in the city of Bakhmut, or between stations of the Golden mountain, and the smoke from their furnaces in barrels, which is mixed in the winter air with Chad from pending diesel locomotives. Here Vitaly Chernyavsky, combat pseudonym “Sawa”, the 28-year-old geek from the capital. He was here from the beginning. In February 2014 he was at the Kiev area of Nezavisimosti when the protestors of “euromaidan” liberated the country from the Russian grip. Later, when Russia was attacked, he went to the front in the newly created volunteer battalion “Donbass”. Parents he said he went for a picnic. Meanwhile, it is understood that the oligarchs, whom the revolution would then be overthrown, not only reappeared, but also cashing in on the war with Russia. “Today I know: as long as these people are in power, we will win,” he says.
Here many came from battalion “Donbass”. This division was perhaps the most efficient among the quickly emerging civil defense teams, who were then against the aggression of Moscow. His men often belonged to the Ukrainian middle class, which in 2014 stood at the head of the revolution, and billionaire oligarchs of post-Soviet type could not endure the free middle class. So Nikita, the head of a small notary office in the city of Poltava in Central Ukraine. Or the student Ruslan Boyko from the Lviv region in the far West, on the border with Poland. She was also three years ago on the Maidan, and when her cousin Constantine was killed by militants Vergassola Pro-Russian regime of Viktor Yanukovych, it was no more turning back. She signed up as a nurse to the paratroopers, and everywhere where people were killed in the war, she was near Ilovaysk, Debaltsevo, Donetsk airport.
Meanwhile, after two shrapnel wounds to her service ended. She is studying medicine, and, in fact, needs to sit in the auditorium. But how could she? Now that all say that their government makes deals with the aggressor? So she again put on your vest and a bright green sweater with a hood, because of the cold. Her fighting nickname “the wind” and friends always called her “veterochek”. Now she’s 21 and she’s standing on the tracks before the locomotive. Her gaze became hard as frozen snow, which every ten minutes she throws a cigarette butt slim women’s cigarettes.
But what is still there in the accusations of these wrestlers?— There is no doubt that the Russian occupation has split the industrial region of Donbass and the whole Ukraine that both sides are unlikely to survive one without the other. Although there is a war, but occupied the Donbass continues to receive electricity and water from the free territory and the unoccupied plants of Ukraine burn anthracite from the republics of Russia’s satellite. Basically, Kiev has banned any trade, however, the possible permissions in the form of exclusion, which was issued more than 90 thousand. However, because the anthracite, which consumes a big part of Ukrainian power plants, is produced only in the Russian-controlled territory, then the free part of the country is forced, according to official data, every day to buy the enemy 30 thousand tons. Big part comes from the mines of multi-billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who was before the war, the uncrowned king of Donbass. When attacked by the Russians, he fled to Kiev. However, those of his mines in the occupied territories that were not destroyed by the war, continue to produce anthracite and send it through the front line to its Ukrainian customers.
All of this happens formally, with office paper and printing, nobody argues that. But where there could be the same — is there still something more? Some in Ukraine there are such assumptions. President Petro Poroshenko, despite the fact that in favor of turning their country to the West, the origin is a real oligarch: the multi-millionaire owner of a television channel huge amounts of money in cash and one political party. Therefore, some of the opposition asked certain questions.
For example, the Vice-President of the Parliament Oksana Syroid, one of the leading figures of pronounced Pro-Western party “Samopomich”: how high income, she asks, which is produced in Ukraine with the occupation of coal? The answer comes immediately: very high — because the price for electricity, which is produced by the anthracite of Ukrainian power plants, determined by the state Agency on settlement of prices significantly above market level. But questions linger: could it be a coincidence that power plants that receive this profit, for the most part belong to one and the same person, who they are and in the East — oligarch Akhmetov?
And is it conceivable that the Agency for the settlement of prices, which is subordinate to the President, provides owning such a wide network of oligarch the opportunity to achieve the result of the determination of prices of extra profit without having to somewhere on the sidelines as brothers not to divide the profit?— Such questions have been asked Oksana Rawfoodist and continues to ask then: if between politics and business in Ukraine is already divided such excess profits, then there would be childishly naive to assume that “Russian” also will not require his share of the coal delivered is still controlled territory?
For raw foodists, the answers are obvious: ultra-high prices for electricity, which is derived from the occupation of coal, forcing Ukrainians — the fathers of families, entrepreneurs, as well as parents, whose war with Russia has claimed the lives of sons and daughters, to Finance the murderers of their bills. Part of the profits, which are sent directly to the enemy, she says in an interview with this newspaper. “Otherwise, why the local rulers allowed this profitable export?” And the worst: Poroshenko, President of Ukraine, “also gets his share”. The office of the President in a letter to this newspaper, has denied on Thursday of this reproach.
Anyway: the conclusions that the opposition does, from my observations, monstrous, and raw foodists lists: if the income from the coal is divided, then not funding it then the Ukraine “it is those who are shooting at us?” And besides: I’d think the Western allies? America and Europe imposed sanctions on Russia, from which they themselves suffer. How do they react, if it becomes widely known that some in Ukraine in this war are doing a brilliant business?
However, Petro Poroshenko is counter, and his office have betrayed the public. No coal from the occupied region, he argues, Ukraine would soon have all stopped. According to his calculations, from these raw materials depend 300 thousand jobs, and the government says that without the anthracite of the enemy would soon limit the power consumption in the cities-millionaires: Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv. But then stocks would be enough for only forty days. Therefore, the Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, a supporter of Poroshenko, urged activists blockade in the East is not to overdo it. The fight against corruption, he said, because it is very important. However, it is impossible to allow that this was “the fight against the citizens.”
There, in front of diesel locomotives, they feel themselves to be citizens — as they have to fight “against the citizens”? Sergey Georgievich Achimovich, overall field commander of the siege units on the railroad tracks, has seen the world. Born in the Ukraine, 52 years ago, he has served as a contractor in three States: first on the Pacific coast of the Soviet Union, then on a military base in the Caucasus, the largest product of its collapse — of the Russian Federation.
Later, as a retiree, he returned to Ukraine and became the Director of a bakery in their home country, in the region of Podolia. Then when his country turned to the West, Achimowicz, like many other middle-class supported the “Maidan”. And when he invaded Russia, he voluntarily joined the “Donbass”, which, incidentally, did not reduce his pride during his previous service in the current enemy: his jacket in starosvetsky tradition is full of non-ferrous metals, Soviet and Russian orders of earlier times perfectly coexist with the current Ukrainian.
And such a person needs to lead “the fight against citizens”? “No one will attack us,” he says. Neither the army nor the national guard — after all, they were comrades in this war, which three years later in no way ends, and in the military, where every day are killed men and women, most of them also hate these deals that “those in Kyiv,” concluded with the enemy. So he is not afraid. And also pairs perfectly legal hunting rifles at his men not carrying any weapons.
Young people in positions of the same opinion. When they go to block, they must pass through the field posts of the army — the soldiers nod at them and passed on. On the railway they sit by the fire along with the drivers for weeks waiting on trains. But if I have to go to those in need, they look out for the locomotive. At the lowest level they are unanimous, and if someone is suitable, for example, the guest from Germany, they have for him a message to deliver to Angela Merkel: “Tell her,” they laugh then “she doesn’t need to try harder to send money to Ukraine. Anyway, all stolen.”
