How elderly live in Donbass

Program Director for Russia international human rights organization Human Rights Watch Tanya Lokshina visited the zone of armed conflict in the Donbass, and tells the story of the elderly living in the DNI.

The armed conflict that has engulfed the east of Ukraine in 2014 and glowing so far, led to the exodus of nearly a million people forced to flee from the shelling. They remained mostly weak, the sick, those who are not on that and had nowhere to go. Some weeks, months, hiding in the dark, cheese cellars, listening to the tears – it is up there.

Now that the ceasefire somehow kept for more than eight months, many left back, and former “bomb shelters” were empty, but life is not even close back in the groove, and in a particularly vulnerable are the elderly.

Here, the family pensioners of Uglegorsk in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The city was badly damaged by shelling and street fighting, and 76-year-old Vera Fedorovna with the 78-year-old husband were left without a home.

In February last year in their yard on the street Suvorov pleased two shells, destroyed a garage and a summer kitchen. “What the shells flew from – who knows … Here, then, is the summer, this was going on,” – shrugs Vera Fedorovna.

She and her husband decided was that lucky – because the house itself survived, well povybivalo glass, so it’s okay. That’s just the pieces that left the intricate patterns on the walls, it appears damaged wiring: in a few weeks there was a fire, and the house was gone.

The local administration Vera Fedorovna said that the restoration of aid they should not, because formally house burned down by itself, rather than directly during the shelling.

While old people settled in the house of a neighbor – she left the Uglegorsk in the beginning of the fighting, and still has not returned.

“I pray every day that she did not come back a little longer, – says Vera Fedorovna. – Where do we go, when she returns? Where will we go? I’ve lived all my life, 40 years in the mine worked … And now there is no roof over his head, the war took everything that I had in my life. Why should I pay for this war? I do not know, no one asked me to do with it. Who unleashed the war, continued her – do not think even they do not care about us, we will be alive or dead. “

With Vera Fedorovna we met when she and her two friends looked at the charred pile of construction waste, which has become home to eight apartments, and arguing, which was whose apartment.

“My that’s right here, I tell you” – Hot youngest of the three, Svetlana E., showing the square among the ruins. Her only son, 27-year-old Arthur, disappeared during the fighting in the end of February last year, and it still goes to hospitals and morgues in the hope to find him.

“No! – disagrees Nina Stepanovna, the same age and bosom friend of Vera Fedorovna. – Thy Light was left, and it is – Shura, do not you see? Shura under 80, and from her home a stone was left, here is what to do, tell me, when at that age and suddenly homeless ..? “- it appeals to me.

Nina Stepanovna lucky more than others on this street: she, unlike her friends house remained intact. Looked markedly, led wall of the blast, the glass flew, but you can live, and even vegetable garden helps.

Nina Stepanovna all alone. He receives a pension – two thousand rubles a month. Pensions in the DNR is now regularly paid, but the price for the war greatly increased, so that this is only enough for bread and some of the basic necessities in the house. And very scary fall ill. At the local hospital receiving something for free, but you have to pay for medicines and pay nothing.

In early summer 2014, when the war had just flared up, Nina Stepanovna was leaving Uglegorsk relatives in western Ukraine, and then, in August, called her neighbors and said that her son, 33-year-old Andrew, killed break.

“I wailed so the whole village I could hear the people in the church suffered money, collect me on the road and the funeral … Everywhere, thank God, good people there, from all sides.”

Now Nina Stepanovna one goal in life. Son lies on Uglegorsk cemetery next to her husband, whom Nina Stepanovna had buried even before the war, but no monument. My husband was at the grave of “such a beautiful, granite,” but his shrapnel smashed.

Nina Stepanovna writes and writes to the local authorities, asking for help to restore the monument. She replied that yes, indeed, damaged in the fighting, but the money to compensate for cemetery monuments is not provided.

Give Nina Stepanovna not going to, “How do I put on my new retirement? And his family just in the ground lay the monument can not leave! “

It is clear that the local authorities have enough worries with the restoration and gravestones is not on the priority list. We have to think about the living, and they are unable to settle a human of all those whom the war has deprived a roof over his head, to ensure the humanitarian needs of the poor.

A very important role here can play a humanitarian organization, but to date the work permit in the DNI is only at the Red Cross and the Czech organization “People in Need”.

Last fall, the DNI authorities banned “Doctors Without Borders” – a widely known international humanitarian organization that helps hospitals and provided medical assistance to the needy, including psychological. They worked primarily with the most helpless, like Nina Stepanovna and her neighbors. With the departure of “Doctors without Borders” was a large gap.

In February of this year the authorities have suspended the activities of the local DNR Donetsk volunteer group “responsible citizens”, which almost from the outset of the conflict gave out sick, the elderly and other vulnerable groups of food, medicines. One of the leaders of this organization was held for about a month at the local Ministry of State Security, and eventually all the main activists expelled from the territory controlled by the NPT “without right to return.”

It’s hard to say what guided power DNI, driving gumantarschikov, but clearly in the decision-making process, they did not account for the fate and needs the same old people who have war took away everything.

Sourse, 27/05/2016