The answer to the second question may be found far away from Persian Gulf and Mediterranean, and we are talking about the formerly Ukrainian city of Gorlovka, today in the New Territories of Russia. It has been at war ever since 2014 and is still at it.
Alexander, Deputy Mayor of Gorlovka, has recently been invited to speak out in my Moscow club. The rules of the club presume that you cannot quote the speakers directly, so here I’ve provided him with an assumed first name. While the things he was telling us are generally known next to everyone in Russia, it’s only the tiny and very human details that make all the difference and made the evening with him very valuable.
As an example, Alexander has described an amazing phenomenon, when dogs and children somehow know in advance exactly when the next Ukrainian shelling is going to begin, and both are running away from the street and hiding in basements 5-10 minutes before yet another barrage. Children also know very well that one should never pick up anything from the ground, since Ukrainians have that habit of raining the so-called Flower Petals on cities and villages. These look like twisted splinters of metal, but in reality these are small bombs, exploding on touch and devised against the civilians, and especially against children. There were also cases of children’s toys, also loaded with explosives and strewn over the “enemy’s territory”.
Gorlovka is a rare case in the Ukrainian war due to its location. Today it is only nine kilometers from the Line of Actual Control, that is the new border with Ukraine, and hence is still accessible to artillery strikes, not to mention the drones. It used to be much worse. When the civil war in Ukraine flared up in 2014, the frontline ran exactly in the middle of the city.
2014 was the time when the extreme nationalists grabbed power in Kiev and immediately began to send trainloads of paramilitaries to Ukraine’s former Eastern and Southern territories, that today have shifted to Russia. So, back then in 2014 all of Ukraine’s Southeast rebelled against the coup in the capital and proclaimed two independent republics. After which the regular Ukrainian army was sent to crush the separatists, and the men from the two republics have immediately formed surprisingly efficient militia, repelling that onslaught and pushing the invaders back West. But the artillery barrages kept on.
When the Russian army has, finally, got itself involved and pressed the war further and further to the West, many cities and villages became relatively safe and began to recover and rebuild, but Gorlovka stays in the danger zone even today, being too close to the border with Ukraine. Ukrainian soldiers may have no chance of taking the city, but occasional barrages are something hard to prevent.
Alexander’s presentation at the club is shedding a lot of light on the problem of when the hostilities will end, and on the future of the whole region. One of the key words is water. East Ukraine, aka Donbass, has always been an industrial area, originally based on coal mining. But industry needs a lot of water, and the whole region has always been dependent on the waters of a river, that today is still in the hands of Ukrainian troops, while the rest of Donbass (and neighboring areas) have already passed into Russian hands. One may expect the ongoing Russian spring offensive to capture that water source, after which liberation of Donbass and maybe the whole war will be complete.
To note, ever since 2014 Ukrainians specially targeted anything water-related, so as to turn the rebellious area into a desert. They are still at it.
But how does an area originally inhabited by 6 million people does without water? Alexander says that you can expect no serious industry being rebuilt without water source, while temporary measures allow his city to get two hours of stable water supply a day. These temporary measures include, mostly, new pipes and canals from the Russian areas in the East.
You might have expected the people to flee that war-ravaged and dehydrated area. But Gorlovka is still inhabited by 185 thousand folks, pensioners, women and children prominent among them. That’s exactly a half of what used to be before the war. A lot has moved to other Russian areas, but then there is a steady trickle from the West, that’s people leaving Ukraine.
Here, Alexander says, you have to comprehend what kind of population we have in Donbass in general. That’s a mining and industrial area, ravaged by the occupying Germans in 1942-1945. But after 1945 tens of thousands of people from all of Russia moved to Donbass, mostly professionals in anything technical.
There were others, too. The area still keeps the street and district names like “Italian” or “Argentinian”, since some folks from these countries also moved there after 1945. Their grandsons, in some cases, have joined the local militias in 2014.
Alexander notes that such locals were treated as second-rate Ukrainians ever since 2006-2007, when the extreme nationalists began to grab power in Kiev. That absolutely Pakistani-Benghalian situation have exploded into war much later.
So, he says, we have a special kind of people living in our Gorlovka and around it. Some of them joined the defensive forces or the regular Russian army, others, like workers and engineers, have moved East to Russian industrial areas, but their families often stay in place, keeping their land and houses and expecting men to return and restore the hi-tech industrial glory of the city. That, in fact, is what already happens in other New Territories.
That’s the general picture in one remote European city, and an inevitable question arises immediately: how is all that possible in our age?
It may be wise to track down the origins of the idea that, today, there is no more rules of waging wars. Today you may engage in daily shelling of peaceful city areas or deny water sources to millions of people. Were it Syrian rebels of ISIS who have devised these special terrorist methods of using thousands of civilians in their war? Was it Izrael in Gaza or Lebanon? Was it Izrael and the US in their indiscriminate destruction of city streets in Iran? How about former Yugoslavia back in the 1990-s? Or, still, maybe the real murder and mayhem seriously started in Ukraine in 2014? How about the idea that, while states cannot do it, rebels are allowed to do what they please?
One may imagine groups of nations getting together for confirmation of the traditional approach to war, that is, to the idea that civilians cannot be targeted, ever, by anyone and for any reasons. Other nations may object to that “outdated” approach. It might be interesting to hear their arguments on that matter.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com