March 12, 2015

Refugees, now in Kramatorsk, recall their experiences in war-torn east

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Nikita Shulyagin

At a Kramatorsk shelter, Donbas war refugees – mostly women and children – gather at a table with donated food.

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine – Nikita Suprun is a lucky boy, having survived three months of artillery fire that rained down upon his hometown of Artemivsk in the Donetsk region in the autumn.

At the same time, he is burdened with having seen more tragedy at the age of 8 than most people do in their entire lives. He saw how his school was destroyed before he himself was wounded by shrapnel and shell-shocked. Doctors were pessimistic, expecting that he would have to learn to walk normally again.

At a refugee camp in Kramatorsk (a second city that was freed from the separatists in the northern Donetsk region), there was nothing unusual in Nikita’s behavior. He is more interested in the packages of food brought to the camp from Kyiv than in recalling the details of that awful day he was wounded.

About 100 bright bottles of yogurt, more than 30 kilos of chicken and 1,000 eggs suddenly placed on the kitchen table also attract the undivided attention of the other kids. They have plenty of cereal and canned food, thanks to the generosity of local Pentecostal Christians, but rarely do they see milk or meat.

In the weeks leading up to the February 12 Minsk 2 ceasefire, war in the Donbas region escalated to unprecedented levels, resulting in a fresh wave of refugees pouring into the protected cities and towns of the northern Donetsk region, which is still under Ukrainian control.

(The total number of refugees is estimated at 1.04 million since the start of the Donbas war in April, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international NGO.)

Their harrowing stories of violence, proven by their bodies damaged by armed attacks or rape, make it all the more apparent that a full-scale war is under way, which is not tangibly felt in the relatively peaceful streets of Ukraine’s capital.

Nikita Suprun, 8, survived the three-month bombardment of his hometown of Artemivsk in the autumn, but not without the scars of shrapnel shards in his back and suffering shell shock.

Nikita Suprun, 8, survived the three-month bombardment of his hometown of Artemivsk in the autumn, but not without the scars of shrapnel shards in his back and suffering shell shock.

The Kramatorsk shelter is a two-story, Soviet-era building that belongs to Pentecostals, who have taken upon themselves the sometimes risky task of evacuating refugees from the hot spots of the war zone. Their entire building is now being transformed into a refugee camp.

On a late January afternoon, there are 45 people in the camp, mostly women with kids. The youngest is only 7 weeks old, while the eldest is 92, a blind and deaf man. Both are unaware of what is going on around them.

The children have already grown accustomed to their situation, and resemble little Spartans who rarely show any sorrow. But their mothers cry as they share their accounts of a world turned upside-down. Yana Suprun, Nikita’s mother, lifts his shirt to reveal the scars on her son’s back left by shrapnel. She recalls what happened as if she were reliving the horror, partly out of therapy.

“I ask Nikita not to go to school that day, December 8, because I hear shooting in the distance. Then it’s quiet for some time. He’s very bored and pleading to let him go outside. So I let him. Suddenly I hear window glass breaking, I come out to the balcony, everything is in smoke and I start calling my son: ‘Nikita! Nikita!’ and he doesn’t come. And then I see him crawling back and standing up to lean on a handrail. I see that he is limping, and I think that he twisted his ankle. I see that his four layers of clothes have been pierced and there is a piece of shrapnel in his back. We call an ambulance,” she said in a monotone, staring at some invisible spot in front of her.

It was painful for Nikita to even lie down after his surgery in December and he suffered from shellshock afterwards for more than a month.

The boy quickly recovered, despite the doctor’s prognosis, but he still has nightmares. The family left Artemivsk after a mortar shell crashed into their apartment one January day. It destroyed the roof, landed in their pantry and luckily didn’t explode, but it made the apartment uninhabitable.

The Supruns’ new roommate Tetiana sat in the kitchen with them, holding her infant son, asleep under a blanket and unaware of the dangers of the world into which he entered seven weeks earlier.

Tetiana recalled her months of pregnancy spent in a basement in her native town of Avdiyivka that so far is under Ukraine’s control but under heavy bombardment since the New Year by the Russian-backed separatists.

The factory town was under fire even as she was in labor with her son at the local maternity hospital in January. “I didn’t want to go back to the basement with a baby,” she says, deciding to leave Avdiyivka after a shell ruined her house right after she gave birth. Tetiana’s husband decided to stay and keep going to work at the local coke plant, the largest of its kind in Ukraine, that has been attacked by artillery fire on a weekly basis, as recently as March 7.

Refugees are allowed to stay at the camp until they succeed in renewing their social payments (for newborns, for example) at a local Oschadbank (the state savings bank).

Then they usually rent a small apartment, try to find a job and start a new life, usually in Kramatorsk. They have more chances of finding a job in the city, but it isn’t always easy. In their rooms at the refugee camp, at least it’s warm, though tables, beds and baby carriages are lacking. Normally, two or three families share one room and all their belongings are on the floor or on windowsills in bags and packages.

Svitlana Petrianyk (left) and Vita Borysenko escaped with their kids from their hometown of Debaltseve after attacks on the railroad hub escalated.

Nikita Shulyagin

Svitlana Petrianyk (left) and Vita Borysenko escaped with their kids from their hometown of Debaltseve after attacks on the railroad hub escalated.

In a room near the kitchen, there are piles of second-hand clothes and shoes brought to the camp by citizens of Kramatorsk who can empathize with the refugees after having their city taken over by the separatists between April and July of last year.

A few women with children sort out and choose something for themselves. Here we meet Oksana Ageyeva, a mother of three children age 2, 13 and 14. With their grandma, they escaped from Yenakiyeve, the hometown of Viktor Yanukovych that is now under separatist control.

Ms. Ageyeva’s husband didn’t survive the constant bombardment; he died while trying to fight a blaze that ignited on their street. Ms. Ageyeva decided to go to the Ukrainian side of the war zone after experiencing life in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR).

“There are no jobs and no future for the kids,” she explains. “The separatists do that on purpose so that men could be easily recruited to their squads.”

She recalled waiting in a line in Yenakiyeve for a couple of days just to get aid, brought to the city by the foundation of billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, the only organization that has provided food for civilians in the occupied territories. (Mr. Akhmetov is also widely suspected of having ties to the terrorists.)

Many elderly passed out in the frost after standing in line for so many hours. Ironically, Ms. Ageyeva managed to escape from the DNR owing to a one-time payment from separatists of 1,000 hrv to pensioners, which had amounted to a handsome $40 in January. It was Ms. Ageyeva’s mother who received the money that enabled them to pay for their escape to Kramatorsk.

“In that car, I was thinking, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ At first, it was difficult, but now I am sure that I was right. My elder daughter, 14 years old, had a nervous breakdown because of continuous shelling outside our home. Now she feels better and is no longer afraid to go outside. I need a peaceful place for my children,” she says.

Ms. Ageyeva wants to go to work in the springtime at the local supermarket, which will allow her to rent an apartment and move on. Until that time, she will collect her payments for newborns, which are for the first three years after childbirth. She didn’t get them for more than six months in Yenakiyeve.

As with other refugees, she believed that she finally had escaped the war, once and for all. And when we talked to her in the camp, it seemed they had.

However, only a few days later, on February 10, 17 people died in Kramatorsk and 34 were wounded in attacks from the separatist side. Throughout the Ukrainian-controlled Donbas, the war continues to produce new refugees, who remain afraid that their hometown will turn into the latest battle zone on the east Ukraine map.

Among those is Sviatohirsk, located 21 miles north of Kramatorsk, which is surrounded by a pristine pine forest covered by snow that could have easily been transplanted from the Carpathians.

Although the Donbas landscape was often ridiculed by Ukrainians for its mounds of spent coal and other industrial waste, this northern region – which serves as a buffer between the industrial south and the ethnically Ukrainian steppes of the Slobozhanshchyna region – is free of industry and is among the best-kept secrets of Ukraine’s natural wonders.

It remains untouched by war, and it’s hard to believe that the road here is guarded by soldiers posted at roadblocks and lined on either side with bombed-out villages and towns.

Sviatohirsk’s campgrounds, which used to draw kids from all over the Donbas for summertime enjoyment, were hosting refugees on a late January evening. One of them, Camp Little Hawk, has accepted 115 from the ruined town of Debaltseve, offering shelter and food.

Our volunteer group, Wings of Generosity and Care, brings washing machines and electric stoves. We arrive while women are cooking dinner in the kitchen. Residency is free for as long as the refugees choose to stay; most will remain for a long time since their homes have been destroyed.

Kids of all ages are running in a long corridor with about 14 rooms on both sides. A knock on the nearest room in the corridor reveals two families with four kids, who said they recently arrived from Debaltseve, after the attacks escalated.

There are only beds, a few bags on the floor and a little table near the door where they cook meals for the baby.

“We put a white ribbon on a car and wrote ‘dyeti’ (children) on a piece of paper, attached it to a window and left the city in the morning, when it was rather quiet,” says Vita Borysenko.

Her husband, Pavlo, used to work as a locomotive driver, but separatist-launched Grad missiles destroyed the train station.

“In recent weeks, all the shops were closed, there was no electricity and the gas stations didn’t work. Even those who had cars could not leave because they had no gasoline. We were lucky because we had some saved up,” he notes.

Another escapee, Svitlana Petrianyk, says the family moved to a basement in their Debaltseve apartment building after the first bombardment on July 27 and lived there since. “We didn’t want to leave our apartment for months because we worked so hard to buy all our stuff, but we were finally forced to go” by the bombings, she said. “We could only take a bag with disposable diapers and a few clothes.”

When asked if they have any money, Mr. Borysenko shows their savings of around 800 hrv ($30). The Petrianyks are in about the same financial situation as the Borysenkos. Their youngest baby, Yelizaveta, was born last spring in the occupied city of Horlivka. Ms. Petrianyk said she often saw separatists with rifles in the maternity hospital, having brought women from other occupied cities and villages.

“I remember the separatists also gave us peaches. We always had plenty of peaches,” she said rather skeptically, not understanding how they could think the peaches could somehow compensate for the destruction they caused.

It took the war for many refugees to realize that life wasn’t so bad under the Ukrainians. “Now we think that we had a wonderful life. Yes, we had some troubles, but we lived in peace. We still want to live in Ukraine and want this war to stop,” Ms. Petrianyk said.

Tetiana, who has a room down the hall, asks us not to take her photo. She came to the camp a couple of weeks ago, escorted by Ukrainian soldiers. But she is still afraid that separatists can find and kill her. For months, she helped the Ukrainian army by revealing hidden forest paths and passing on information about separatist locations.

She lived in the village of Kamianka, which was under Ukrainian control and is located about 20 miles east of Yenakiyeve, which was under separatist control.

The village was under Ukrainian army control when one January evening two Chechens broke into her house, raped and tortured her, shot her dog and destroyed all the furniture as part of the terror raids they’ve become notorious for.

“They were high,” Tetiana recalls through tears. “They even showed me their documents first and ordered me to reveal Ukrainian army locations.” But she says she didn’t say a word to the terrorists who weren’t afraid to reveal their identity.

When Ukrainian soldiers heard gunshots fired following the rape, they quickly came, but the Chechens managed to flee. They wore camouflage and the Ukrainian soldiers didn’t want to shoot because they were afraid to kill Tetiana by accident.

“I didn’t want to go to the hospital and at some point was close to committing suicide,” she says, sobbing, as she recalls the first days afterwards. She’s says that she’s ashamed to have been raped. The men who guarded her after the attack found a safe place in Sviatohirsk and drove her there a week later.

Tetiana adds that she knows the snitch who passed on the information about her activity to the Chechens, but refuses to name the person, stating only that he’s a former classmate. Another local helped the Chechens sneak inside the village for the attack.

Ukrainian soldiers said there were no footprints from the forest into the village that day, which means that the Chechens were hiding in somebody’s house before the attack. Tatiana is convinced they came with only one aim: to punish her for her supporting Ukraine.

Tetiana wonders aloud how many local people hate Ukraine despite the fact that Ukrainian soldiers often provide them with food and medicine. Now she wants to evacuate from Donetsk her two sons who are staying with a sister, the only one in her family who supports her. Her two other sisters support the separatists and don’t talk to her any more.

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