Ethnic/Cultural Divides
"There was no ceasefire. Never. They kept shooting before and after. The [Ukrainian] National Guard is currently in the next town, Debaltsevo. That makes Yenakieve the front line."
"I lived in a building with 16 apartments in it. When I left, there were just four of us still living there. Now there are three ... We kept waiting and waiting, always thinking it was going to end. But it doesn't look like it's going to end. I should have left sooner."
"I will go to Siberia, to Irkutsk. They have good hunting and fishing there and better pay. I will get a big excavator machine and continue my profession."
Alexander Ossichenko, Primorka, Russia
"When they say they have 800,000 to one million [refugees], I do not believe them. There's just no proof of those numbers, and they have political reasons to paint Ukraine as a horrible country whose citizens are fleeing."
Svetlana Ganushkina, Russian human rights activist, head, Citizens' Assistance
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| Smoke rises after shelling an area near the Donetsk Sergey Prokofiev International Airport in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, October 12, 2014 (Reuters / Shamil Zhumatov) |
A more trustworthy figure relating to the number of Ukrainians that the Federal Migration Service identify as applying for temporary asylum and residence in Russia would be 190,000 states Ms. Ganushkina. The Rostov regional government is hosting 45,000 Ukrainian refugees with one thousand living in temporary settlements. Tens of thousands more arrived during the summer and have been relocated to other regions of Russia.
Sergei Tyurin, a spokesman for the Rostov regional government said cross-border traffic, going in one direction only once, now travels in both directions; with about 14,000 people fleeing Ukraine daily, at one time, but now equally divided with outflow now matching those deciding to return home to take advantage of the ceasefire. Most of the refugees entering the Pioneer Camp proudly support the rebels in their bit to establish the new state; Novorossiya.
Direct assistance from the Russian military has made that aspiration a potential, even while Moscow continues to deny that Russian military intervention was ever at any time a reality. Any Russians that happen to be fighting with the rebels, they insist, are merely "volunteers"; nothing to do with the state. Mr. Ossichenko did attempt to join the separatist militia but they wouldn't have him because he's 60.
He contends that the Ukrainian army deliberately and with malice shelled civilian areas during the fighting. He's profoundly grateful to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his support of the rebels and their cause. His home town of Yenakieve, once with a population of 80,000 is now almost deserted. Mines and factories that once gave residents jobs are no longer in operation. Fresh food is scarce and expensive.
The ceasefire, meant to create a 15-kilometre buffer between the rebels and the regime hasn't brought peace to the region. The train station in the city of Rostov-on-Don is crowded every night with Ukrainian refugees planning to go further east, to cities like Volgograd, Perm and Irkutsk; thousands of kilometres into Russia, further and further from their old lives and all that was once so familiar.
In the long run it is far, far better for Ukraine to have these ethnic-Russian, Russian-speakers faithful to Moscow, not Kyiv, leaving. Their dream of Russia coming to them has simply been transformed to their coming to Russia, and perhaps that's where they belonged to begin with. The fighting in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions of Ukraine reflect the unwillingness of people to surrender their ethnic and cultural heritage in embrace of one that gave them citizenship.
It is, of course, a two-way street when the country in which they live doesn't recognize the fundamental freedoms that should pertain in a pluralistic society. The Russian government's figure of 800,000 Ukrainians fleeing the oppression and conflict ongoing in Ukraine is inflated for propagandist reasons. Picture Russia being forced by a military power greater than their own to surrender part of their geography.
Remember Chechnya?
Labels: Conflict, Russia, Ukraine
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, October 14, 2014
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