15/05/2015 - Ukraine with spring is less news. There was no resumption of hostilities in a big way. The snow goes away but everything else remains.
Donetsk airport, flooded at the time of European football, is an open-air scrapyard: a tongue of rubble, craters and carcasses.
The gray sky looks like a torn pinstripe suit. It's cold in Ukraine, even if it's no longer time.
In a tornado building there is the headquarters of Givi, the commander of the battalion "Somalia", the most beautiful fig tree in the New Russia basket. "Somalia" because there are some differences between its boys and boy scouts ... For Ukrainian media are tagliagolous terrorists; for the Donbass people, courageous patriots.
Approaching it is difficult since the EU has aimed for human rights violations. With journalists there is more sarcasm than love. Here the estimate goes only to those who fight.
Also the press card ATO (Anti Terrorism Operation) issued by Kiev does not help. The Donbass militiamen laugh at us a little, they get angry.
Givi lets himself be photographed, however, while smoking with his personal bodyguards stuffed with weapons. He smokes like a Turk, but ironically, he smokes Armenian cigarettes. The Caucasus has it on us; perhaps they are cigarettes or perhaps, as some say, it is Abcaso. It is not a Latin motorcycle, but a citizen of Abkhazia, a strip of Georgia that at the collapse of the USSR turned its terga in Tbilisi to look at Moscow. (Online Defense will return with a report from Georgia).
Woe to tell Givi though. Sukhumi and all of Abkhazia are also part of Mother Russia for him. For the Caucasus, the story of the characters of Michail Lermontov is valid: where Russia begins and ends depends on the interlocutor.
When you think about it, Givi, in the registry office Mikhail Tolstykh, is caucasian in everything. Although very tall, it is more like a trafficker from the South than a Siberian. It's a mix between George Clooney without vocals and Valerio Mastandrea with reinforced eyebrows. He says he was born in Ilovaisk, behind Donetsk and has always felt Russian. He is contemptuous and narcissistic, but perhaps better than he wants to believe. It has become popular with youtube. Grads were raining, not meatballs, but he smoked quiet ...
Smoke is a refrain in Ukraine: explosions, cold breath, tea cups, drains of wagons, rubble, cigarettes, Western media ... is all a smoke from Ukraine. Gray smoke like the sky and face of Givi.
He knows he likes it; repeats its part with the name in Cyrillic and the patch with the Russian flag on the camouflage jacket. He brings with him a Makarov who wields occasionally to help his myth.
It was he who chased the "cyborgs" (the soldiers of Kiev) from the Donetsk airport. He along with Motorola, which is not a mobile phone but the nickname of Pavlov, the commander of "Sparta", special battalion became legend in the Donbass. They both have great wagon warfare experience. Their fame was born in September at Ilovaisk, with the first great defeat of the Ukrainian army.
To enter the airport, just join the press. To enter the interdicted areas, instead, an "invitation" must be paid. War has a price in everything. Now the "TerminalA" It is a monument to the victory over the Ukrainian coup leaders.
In front of the ugly building of Givi there is a BMP car park and empty ammunition boxes. There is no window, a balcony, a piece of wall without the signs of war.
Givi is proud of it. "Who is not in the forefront is not a man ..." seems to say often. He has 35 years but treats the younger ones as nephews. They say that you shoot on the walls to give the alarm. Some things are legends, other bullshit ... others are still true.
There is a real European generation that smells of war. Not just Ukrainians, but also people who come from outside. One is Motorola, Russian by birth, like many volunteers from the "Vostok" brigade. Like the Serbs who came to help the "Russian brothers": the Zivkovic ceternics and those of the hussar regiment. Like other volunteers from other countries.
It is true that in the smoke of eastern Ukraine blends all in a great gray soup: the myths, the heroes, the violent, the brave, the criminals ...
In the madness of war, among men there are ancient values and countervalues. Elementary principles transform human beings into primordial packs, where absurd feelings are recovered by absurdity.
Givi's voice corroded by cigarettes turns to his. He says "Thank God" every three words. You smoke standing up, with tea in your hand. Big faces, huge necks and big sizes from Eastern men. They are divided between "we" e "their"."We" it is the people of the Donbass according to a deeply felt rhetoric among the militia; "their" it is the coup government of Kiev "That sends to die conscripts of 17 years".
It is an ancient war that of the Donbass. An ancient war between men who share in friends and enemies.
"No one has a greater love than this: to give his life for his friends ". The Gospel says so often and it is often repeated by Motorola ... God increasingly takes Lenin's place in the iconography of the young Russians and Novorussians.
Between a cross and a camouflage, here the leaders make the lecture. The fatherland is a Russian habit: Zakharchenko, the leader of the Donetsk Republic, turns the front and interrogates the Ukrainian prisoners in person, scolding and forgiving (if all goes well). He who is inspired by the ancestors Cossacks is the prototype of the father who scolds his children, as in a novel by Turgenev. Everything seems rooted, severe, martial, cold, gruff, vaguely anti-semitic. In short, deeply Russian.
The war in the Donbass is the page of a poignant, infinite, wonderful and tragic Russian novel. Who reads it quickly, at ease, the American ... only makes great mistakes.
Giampiero Venturi article
photojournalist Giorgio Bianchi
