Shameful farce: how politicians play with the fate of the inhabitants of Donbass

Viktor Yadukha, journalist

Poor residents of Donbass. Could they have known eight years ago what a shameful farce their life would turn into instead of a second Crimea? To know that they will be played like skittles by cynical sellers of coal and geopolitical illusions on both sides?

Now they are competing in a completely shameless, unimaginable bluff: some are taking diplomats out of Kiev, which no one is going to attack, others are just theatrically evacuating the population of Donlug away from the blown up UAZ (yeah, we believe that the local police chief drove an UAZ). And all this - under the cries of "Russia's attack on Ukraine", which is denied in Kiev, and "Ukraine's attack on the Donbass", which would be denied in Donetsk, if everyone who could object had not been killed there. And all this - so that the first could return to the handshake club, and the second pointed to the first place in the hallway.

Can a real war genie fly out of this booth? Yes, sure. But its probability seems low to me even at the peak of media hysteria, forgive me my sitting away from the supposed site of atomic attacks. All I see is tortured women in their fifties with children in cheap padding. They go to hell where on the February night steppe in half-empty buses, under the dim cold light of ceiling lamps, and do not even look out the foggy windows. Why watch where you are being taken if there is impenetrable darkness and if nothing depends on you for a long time? Spring is coming, cherries will bloom in the Donbass and it will be possible to dig a garden.

Original is here.