Donbass, the war that does not exist: under Ukrainian fire (video)

(To Giorgio Bianchi)
18/03/17

In the third year of the war in the Donbass, Europe insists on not seeing.

We, Community citizens, with this tragedy, we are behaving as if we had an elephant covered with mud in the living room and pretended not to see it.

Yet it is the stop in its place since spring 2014: it has the appearance of rural villages that are never touched by history, devastated by incessant bombings; it has the face of young light-eyed militiamen and the children's face grown too fast; he wears the handkerchief on his head like those poor Babuske who are persuaded not to abandon their casupola and their orchard; you look with the face of those who have seen a great calamity on their head so that they can not even imagine; especially after the 2012, the year of European football in Ukraine and Poland.

In Donetsk, football was a serious matter; there was the Shaktar (which in the local language means miner) that the millionaire Rinat Achmetov had brought to the top of the European teams.

Achmetov at the time had also been eager to build a stadium that was up to his team's aspirations; and this was the Donbass Arena an ultra-modern half-billion-dollar sports temple.

Due to the war the team has moved to government territory and now plays in the Metalist Stadium in Kharkov. Since then, the stadium has stopped lighting the Donetsk nights.

Entering the city in the evening after crossing the border with Russia (and having also done the immigration card for the first time), seeing the stadium lit up again is a real shock. This spectacle is due to the recent nationalization of the facility by the DNR government.

The Donbass Arena is just one of the long list of activities recently nationalized by the separatist authorities. Among these there is even the Mc Donald's chain of the city now Don Mak, where the word Don obviously stands for Donbass.

Inside there are the same maids with cap and short sleeved shirt, balloons and cardboard baskets for children ... All strictly marked Don Mak.

Life in the city as it always runs smoothly.

The traffic has increased and everywhere you can see service providers cleaning the flower beds from the dry leaves to prepare them for roses.

At weekends, sports competitions, performances at the Opera or how best any European city can offer.

In short Donetsk is always Donetsk and if you are in the city center the war looks elsewhere, far away.

But who has been there for many years knows very well that in the city there is a sort of fantastic door that connects two parallel universes: that of normality and that of madness.

This door is near the airport to the trolley bus terminus. You realize you are in the vicinity because in the flower beds there are still the dry leaves but above all because the windows of the buildings still today, in many cases, look like empty orbits.

Passersby are more sparse and the cars have the typical connotation of the cars used by the military to reach the front: two fingers of dust, no license plate and the windshield at best cracked.

But it is above all the noise of the detonations to reveal the presence of that door accompanied by the bursts of automatic weapons.

That magic door is right there, a few hundred meters from the Ukrainian army.

(photo / video: Giorgio Bianchi)