Ольга Донеччанка Olha Donechchanka

"Maybe because of what happened back then, during the Orange Revolution, people here didn't want to accept what was happening in 2014. The same with the people I knew — not all of them, but most of them, and even within our family, we were against what was starting on Maidan, with all the violence there. We supported Maidan until all these Molotov cocktails started. I mean, when Maidan gathered with pro-European slogans, we supported it with our family. Because at that moment our daughter was already living in Europe, we'd been there, we knew that Europe is much better than Russia. We have to go there. And my husband, although he was a Belarusian, he was a Ukrainian citizen in his mind. He said, ‘I'm a citizen of Ukraine, I'd rather be with Europe than somewhere with Russia.’ He even said ‘with Asia,’ not with Russia, but with Asia. Nevertheless, when the violence started, we did not support Maidan, because for us it was like breaking the law. So if we did not support it in our family, imagine all those who were against Maidan before. The mood in our family changed only at the beginning of January. Immediately after the New Year, on 1 or 2 January, we went to Slovakia to go skiing and to meet our daughter there, on neutral territory. She was living with her husband in Vienna, so she had to come to us. When we came, we had to change trains in Kyiv. We came from Donetsk. Unfortunately, our son got sick, he had a fever, and my husband said, ‘I'm staying here, I don't want to go there.’ But I really wanted to see Maidan. I need to see everything with my own eyes. I explained to him that I was a bit of a journalist, although I did not practise journalism, but I knew how the facts could be distorted and what we saw on television was not necessarily the truth. I wanted to go there. They let me go because we arrived in the morning and our train did not leave until after 5 p.m. So I went there and started talking to people on the Maidan. I am so grateful to this unknown man from Dnipropetrovsk who suddenly came out of his tent and saw my face, my eyes, as I watched the march. The moment I arrived, they organised a march with all those "moskaliaku na hiliaku" ("hang Moskal on a branch") [slogan] and stuff. I was against all these nationalists... before that moment I was against these attacks based on someone's nationality, because I had an international family. My husband was half Moskal, half Belarusian, but he was a Ukrainian citizen. I mean, I was so open. We Easterners are more honest and open. I was told that maybe this is our disadvantage, but our reaction is easy to see. And I, being a typical Easterner, could not hide my attitude. He asked me, ‘You don't like it, do you?’ I said, ‘Yes, I don't like the slogans they use on this march.’ And he showed me, ‘Look, I have some people from Dnipro here, we all have higher education.’ And he said, ‘99% of the people in our tent have higher education. How do you think that shows that we are so stupid or so clever?’ First of all, I asked why only 99% and not 100%? He replied, ‘Well, there is one student here. So he hadn't graduated yet, but most of them had.’ I said, ‘So education must somehow help to make the right choices.’ And he started introducing me to people who were there. Here, he said, we have an entrepreneur who has had his business taken away from him, and here is someone else. I looked at him and thought: we didn't have our business taken away like that, our bandits, they didn't hurt their people, and we absorbed the world through the impressions we got on our territory. I talked to him, walked around and talked to others. I am easy to talk to. I remembered those journalistic practices from my past, and I could walk up to people and ask them something. It helped me communicate. I came back and spoke to my husband, who was very determined. He asked me, ‘Well, have you seen enough?’ I said, ‘I have seen enough to understand that nothing is that certain.’

"In Donetsk, I am not talking about small towns, but in Donetsk specifically, there were still more people supporting Ukraine. It will probably surprise you, but although I can't find those surveys now, I remember that before the referendum [illegally held by separatists on 11 May 2014], when we didn't have our Ukrainian journalists anymore, there were journalists from Radio Svoboda and they conducted a survey. I am sure I read about it on the Internet. I read it then, but I never thought I would need it in the future, so I read it and forgot about it. Correspondents from Radio Svoboda did a survey. It was two or three weeks before the referendum. There were already ‘orcs’ with machine guns running around the city, there were people being brought by bus from Russia to these rallies, we saw it, I personally saw those plates. There were also our pensioners among those who came to the rally. They were certainly Ukrainians. They were so in favour of sausages for 2.20, so pro-Soviet, that they could sell their own mother. But the young people, the athletically built men who were aggressively provoking others — they were mainly brought there. I am not saying that we did not have our own hicks, such as wrestlers, ‘titushki’ [paid individuals used to provoke and obstruct pro-Ukrainian activists]. There were such people, but at the time when these rallies were organised, they had not yet received the order to intervene, so they had to be brought in. And even in those circumstances, in such an environment, people responded, and the question was not a neutral one: Should Donetsk be part of Ukraine or Russia? So you had to choose: either this or that. <...> There were no more than 30% for Russia, something like 29% and more than 70%. It was stated there that a certain percentage of people refused to answer. But those who did, given that people were already afraid. We were not yet afraid, not so much, we were still arguing before the referendum itself, and also after it. At work, we were still arguing that Donetsk should be part of Ukraine, and all these events were provoked by Russia."

"Well, this is the situation. You walk down the streets and you don't recognise your city anymore. That was my impression. Everything is the same as it was, nothing was disturbed then. At that time, there was shelling only near the airport and Oktiabrske [a village near Donetsk, since 2016 — Kyslychne]. But we were not there. I mean, I didn't go there, to that area, I drive through the centre, which is still standing, as usual, and the feeling is that it's not your city anymore. You haven't been there for three weeks. Maybe this atmosphere, all this had such an impact. When I came back, my husband was so scared, he said that everywhere they leave, everywhere they go, they immediately loot, and businesses are taken away. We still seemed to be working, going out, although it was a bit scary there, close to the airport, and everything went on. I tried to persuade him that we had to leave. Eventually, he agreed to move closer to Berdiansk. But we left even earlier. We had to leave on Thursday. He had some business to do, but as we were getting our things together, the invasion from last week, from Kramatorsk, from Slovyansk, came and entered the town. You cannot imagine what it was like when they marched in — these bearded, dirty men with machine guns, feeling like they were the bosses with these machine guns. However, we were already used to machine guns because we were going to our summer house and there were Chechens stopping us. There were a lot of Chechens, by the way. They said there were no Russians. The Chechens were at a roadblock between Donetsk and Horlivka, at the Yasynuvata roadblock. But I was less afraid of them than of the others. Because the others looked mad, their eyes were looking somewhere else, and you understood that they were under some kind of drug. And he was talking to you, pointing his gun straight at you, and his arm was shaking like that. We almost got used to it. Chechens — at least they knew you had to hold the barrel like that. You know they will have enough time to point it at you anyway, but they still looked more or less civilised compared to the bastards with machine guns at roadblocks. And when the invasion arrived, my husband said to me, ‘It's a good thing you booked [tickets], it's really impossible here.’ It got to him and he agreed, ‘OK, we'll go.’ We had to leave on Thursday, but on Monday morning, as we were getting ready for work, I got a call from a hidden number, you know when the number is unknown. They immediately addressed me by my name and my father's name. I was a bit confused and they asked me, ‘What are your husband's initials?’ I answered automatically, ‘O. V.’ And then I asked, ‘Who are you?’ — ‘It's not important, you must... — but I was addressed as Olha Mykolayivna, — you have to leave Donetsk no later than Tuesday noon, — or Wednesday,’ so they spoke to me on Tuesday afternoon. So you have to be somewhere else in the morning. I persuaded him not to go to work. I took a long time to persuade him to just get the things he needed. Women's intuition often helps here. At first he argued with me because he thought someone was trying to trick us. I said, ‘It's too scary a trick; besides, it doesn't matter, we wanted to leave on Thursday — so let's leave on Tuesday.’ ‘I have business there.’ — ‘No problem, we can arrange it on the phone.’ Later he had the thought that someone was trying to take his business away from him, like they do there. I asked him, ‘Are you going to stand by your business when they point guns at you? You are more important to me than the business, we will leave everything.’ But the business was like a child to him. A scientist who had left everything and started his own business, he had gone all the way from carrying bags to owning his own company. Imagine, nothing was stolen, as is the case with many of our people. I mean, everything was built with his own hands, little by little, he treated this business like his own child. He did not want to leave it. Until I asked him, ‘Are you going to stand by your business when they point their guns at you? Because if they decide to steal it, they will do it with guns.’ And I managed to convince him. We got our things and left early in the morning. We left, we took our things... there was money, of course, and at that time some people had already had their cars confiscated at roadblocks. It was sheer luck that we were not so rich and had not bought a Range Rover or all that cool stuff, not even an Audi or a Mercedes, we just had a nice, simple Mitsubishi. Maybe it was because of that, or maybe it was just fate, that when we passed the roadblocks we were lucky — someone was driving a SUV just ahead of us, a Mercedes, and they were stopped and checked. We went straight through one of the roadblocks, and they were so.... they must have found something, because they started shouting, and we were just let through. And the same thing happened at another roadblock. We passed through four roadblocks, and during that whole time... we had been living for over a month, because it was July, so it was over a month that we hadn't been able to listen to Ukrainian television. The first thing they did was to cut off Ukrainian TV. It's a good thing we had the internet, it saved us. But we wanted so much to hear something of our own, to see something of our own, and when we finally saw a blue and yellow flag, I burst into tears.”

"I told you that for a year I have been observing how people have changed, how propaganda has changed them little by little. When a decent person, who didn't vote, works at the Institute of Physics and Technology, a woman, not a scientist, but an engineer, still an educated person, meets me and says, ‘So, we talked and we supported Ukraine so much, and look: Ukraine is killing us.’ Not far from our house, in the street next door, she shows me where we met: ‘Look, there is a direct hit.’ Here is an apartment where a famous Donetsk architect lived, he died with his wife, all of them, a direct hit. And I look at them and say, ‘Show me, please, where the airport is.’ She points in that direction. ‘Now show me where the hit came from, you said it yourself, right, that it was a direct hit, it was not something that exploded and destroyed something, it came straight from there.’ She points: ‘There.’ — Look, it is at a right angle, how can shells fly like that? You are an educated woman.’ It is good that I am a physicist. I can explain that. And she says, ‘So it means it came from somewhere in the park — it's called Lenin's Komsomol Park, but that's, let's say, the Donbass Arena district — from somewhere there?’ I confirm. Then I searched the Internet to find out where it came from. I think it is impossible that on the local channels — and then people were not afraid to publish it — nobody wrote anything. That's right, there was a recording, it happened that day, so I took it to her and said, ‘Look.’ I show her: someone heard that from where the children's train runs, from that side, there was a shot fired at that time, so who was it? Then the ‘orcs’ shot at our house... it was damaged, my 9th floor was damaged, the 7th floor even worse, and there was a direct hit on the neighbouring house, on the 2nd floor, there were such shots. It is good that nobody died, only the buildings were damaged, they were shooting from the nearest dump. As a physicist, it was easy for me to calculate the distance because I could see the diameter of the crater. We knew the calibre immediately, and you don't have to be a ballistics expert to read on the Internet that this calibre cannot reach here from the airport or from Avdiyivka, the nearest positions occupied by the Ukrainians. But you had to think, and now imagine uneducated people. If even an educated person, working at the Institute of Physics and Technology, did not think about it, here you have people without education. They are told all the time that they are being shelled by the Ukrainians and that a trolley bus or a bus has been hit and there have been many casualties. And people are told all the time that it was the Ukrainians and those little children are dying. In Donetsk, there is even a monument to children killed by ‘Ukrainian Nazis’ or something like that. With all this brainwashing... Of course, there is a war, it can be our shell, I can assume that. It is now that we have a high-precision weapon, but we did not have it then. But judging by the shells that came out after Donetsk was shelled, I am sure it came from Donetsk because it was not the calibre that could reach that far. These provocations are now the main factor that can convince even those who have not yet decided <...> that Ukraine is killing Donetsk citizens. It is a filthy war. These were very dirty technologies. So, no wonder. On the contrary, I am more surprised that despite such propaganda and brainwashing, there are still people waiting for Ukraine. I can confirm this for sure, because the last time I was there was in December 2021. Just a month or so before a full-scale [Russian] invasion, a little more than a month before that, I was talking to such people. At first, I was afraid to talk to them. But when I heard, ‘Olya, tell us, will we be liberated or have they already left us forever?’ And I said, ‘Of course, you will be liberated. I just don't know when and how.’ But I was even surprised."