Does "Humanitarian Superpower" Canada Care About the Human Cost of Arming Kiev?
On Thursday, it became known that Canada had allowed its companies to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons. This was reported by the Canadian Journal of Local Government. The Russian Foreign Ministry noted that this decision provokes Kiev to continue military operations in Donbass.
In the meantime, the Ukrainian security forces are intensively bombarding the Lugansk and Donetsk regions. Serious aggravation is recorded even by the OSCE observers. According to the OSCE special monitoring mission deputy head, Alexander Hug, in just one week, almost 20 thousand ceasefire violations were recorded. Only by today's morning, there were 30 shelling for the last day from the Ukrainian side.
Alexander Rogatkin reporting from Donbass.
Outskirts of Gorlovka. Our minibus is moving slowly along the front line, driving round the shell holes. The December forest is treacherously transparent. Somewhere next to us, there’re shots from an automatic grenade launcher.
A volunteer: Here is our fortification area. So, they shoot at us to knock us out of this spot, it holds the road and the direct access to the village.
We’re at the positions of the legendary commander with the callsign Zhelezny, who became so stuffed with bullets and fragments in these years, he's be accepted for scrap metal. Nine wounds. But he didn’t break down. Zhelezny didn’t rust in the trenches.
The situation in this front sector sharply worsened when the Ukrainian army, violating the Minsk agreements, entered the villages of Gladosovo and Travnevoye.
- We appointed elders as if we were under fascists. We gave them white armbands. They let three people go to the village to buy food before lunch. After lunch, it’s over. No one can leave the village.
Now, the Ukrainian positions are in the village vegetable gardens. Snipers work directly from attics, covering themselves with civilians.
Ukrainian patriots from Aidar call this unexpected seizure of two villages in the gray neutral zone the "frog jump strategy". They were jumping on Maidan, and now they’re jumping here. They jump into the nearest unarmed village and put a yellow-blue flag there. A small but still a victory.
Zoya Ivanovna from the village of Gladosovo, she lived there with her daughter. She returned to her house in the village of Golmovsky destroyed by a shell. Now, it’s dangerous everywhere.
- My daughter has just arrived. She moved here, too.
- So, you don’t want to live in Gladosovo, do you?
- How can one want to live there if there’re soldiers?
It became simply dangerous to leave the neighboring villages to go to Golmovsky where people work, receive pensions and buy food.
- Today, people were coming from Gladosovo, and they were shooting.
- At people?
- Yes, they were shooting at people. They opened fire.
- At the people who tried to get out?
- Yes, they tried to get out to come here.
The village of Golmovsky, where some of the residents left, is under constant bombardment. The windows are covered with plastic sheets. In the gardens, there’re shell holes from another shelling. Some houses are completely destroyed. People living on the demarcation line already got tired of changing the windows in their houses and came up with a simple protection against splinters made of sleepers and sandbags. But, as you can see, the bags are already broken too.
- Is there anyone alive?
- It's for protection from fragments so that the window doesn’t break. There’re little children there, well, not that little, three- or four-year-olds, maybe school-aged.
The so-called truce, when everyone is trapped in trenches, is good for snipers. In Ukraine, it even became a business. Everyone can come to Donbass for a safari, to hunt separatists. Deputies, foreign tourists, and even journalists.
At least, that’s what some Alyona Belozerskaya from the Right Sector called herself.
A fighter: One of our fighters died here. A Ukrainian correspondent shot him. She was even showed on TV. She was sitting with a gun and an instructor. He says to her: "So, here he is, let's get started. He’s walking. Do you see him? He got out. Look, look, look, he’s creeping. Bastard!”. Then, we watched this video and understood that this was our fighter. We saw the hit, where she hit, how she shot.
The Donetsk army snipers rarely miss their target. This was shot by the DPR fighters themselves. The grenade launcher firer didn’t have time to shoot. The miners quickly learned how to work with a whip, That's the nickname of Dragunov's rifle because of the sound it makes.
A fighter:
- I’m a miner, I worked with jackhammers. Yes, it does affect you. My hands are broken. This also affected my fate. But everything can be restored, the human body gets used to everything and works accordingly. We didn't want to fight, we were forced to.
Maksim was left-handed and was searching for the enemy with his left eye through the optical sight. But the enemy sniper was quicker:
- It came from the other side. Through the skull, the brain wasn’t hurt. The doctors said that my brain is made out of reinforced concrete so the bullet backfired.
As you give, you receive, decided the fighter and, having left the hospital, began to learn to point with his right eye, the only one.
- I lost my eye, I was left-handed, now I don’t need to squint, I became a right-handed. So, I became a sniper.
Kominternovo. Another village in the war zone. In the very south of the DPR. We’re moving in short bursts. On the asphalt, we can see the shanks from the ruptured mines. The village store is almost destroyed. The sign has just been ripped off by a blast wave. Shop assistant Victoria says that in three years everyone here has already accepted their fate and aren’t even hiding.
Viktoria Pokushalova, Kominternovo resident: You know, sometimes when they shoot, I don’t even want to go to the basement. I just sit and wait for it to pass. It happens that snipers are working, they’re firing at the village. When I go to take out the garbage, it happens that a bullet flies by. Thank God, not me. And that's all.
Victoria isn’t afraid of almost anything. She only has anger and hatred. Recently, she buried her 19-year-old daughter, who was killed by a Ukrainian shell.
Victoria: I would definitely rip them apart, especially the one who killed my child. Why did they take my child’s life? I still can’t find an explanation. My child is gone.
On the outskirts of Kominternovo, right in the destroyed kindergarten, two Ukrainian tanks stopped forever before they could smash the swings with their caterpillar tracks.
Georgy Slesarevsky, 1st battalion commander. "We came here in 2015. We’ve been standing here until now, waiting for the next tanks".
The commanders note that the enemy is carefully preparing for an offensive. They probe the defense along the entire front line, looking for weak spots.
Andrei Oprishchenko, unit commander. "They used to behave like the Ukrainian army, collapsed and unable, and now, they’re like specialists trained in the NATO system. They even have NATO uniforms. Six subversive groups were blown up in our minefields. They became braver. If a person goes to the reconnaissance, into the depths, it means he prepared himself, he won’t go there by himself. The firing became more accurate, they modified their weapons".
The 9th regiment is based on the Azov coast. There’re a lot of volunteers from Russia. It’s only 30 kilometers from the front line to the border.
- They say that Russia is a party to the conflict, that it unleashed the civil war here. What do I think about it as a Russian?
Vyacheslav Kotsenko, volunteer: What Russia? The war was unleashed by those who were throwing Molotov cocktails on Maidan. They unleashed the war.
Oleg Veter comes with a special weapon to the 9th regiment’s trench.
An Afghanistan veteran and the Saur Grave battles participant brings his guitar to the frontline instead of a Kalashnikov more and more often.
Oleg Veter. "One can’t be here without a machine gun. Neither without a guitar".
In the People's Republics, Oleg Veter is famous for his trench truth. People love him here for this.
Edward Davydov: “We almost can’t have any rest. Honestly, we’re constantly stressed because they’re shooting all the time. I get goosebumps all over the body from this music, to be honest. In the morning, we want to live until the evening, and in the evening — until morning.
Alexander Rogatkin, Alexander Smirnov, and Dmitry Rogalyov, especially for the Vesti News of the Week