After the New Year’s warming between the parties to the conflict in Donbass, when at the end of December the people's republics and official Kiev exchanged prisoners, and before that, even if not without problems, they deployed troops in at least two sectors of the front, the region is again restless and tense.
I will not even refer to dry and boring front-line reports - for those who are in the topic, the eye has long been blurred and the numbers on the number of shellings cease to produce any informational effect. I will share my impressions of a fresh two-week January trip to the Donbass.
Together with the team, we worked on documentaries dedicated to the events of five years ago, when the Donetsk airport and Debaltseve were released. To understand: the shooting did not always take place directly at the front line, since most of the locations we are interested in are now located almost in the rear, or at least a few kilometers away from the current positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Despite this, over the past two weeks we have repeatedly witnessed rather harsh shelling by the Ukrainian military - for example, for two days in a row, explosions from mines and shells fired by the Ukrainian Armed Forces artillery were heard even in the center of Donetsk. I am in the capital of the DPR stably and at least once a month - the Donetsk residents managed to get out of the habit of such noise escort.
Yes, of course, clashes on the Donbass frontline took place even during the period when the Norman meeting was being prepared, but all of them were more or less local in nature. Traditionally, snipers worked, periodically the so-called arrow shooter sounded - shooting from light, mostly automatic weapons, sometimes rocket-propelled grenade launchers and heavy machine guns were used, a little less often the position of the People's Police of the DPR was fiddled with equipment. As a rule, the APU used BMP-2 and 30-mm guns mounted on them.
But one way or another, all this confrontation for a peaceful life going on in Donetsk gradually faded into the background. The everyday worries of civilians prevailed over the front-line traffic, and, no matter how strange it may sound, the relatively close proximity to the front became a matter of course for ordinary residents, which should not be paid any special attention.
However, after the New Year holidays, the population plunged into the waves of front-line flashbacks of the most active phase of the Donbass war of 2014-2015. Walking to the nearest supermarket along the central Lenin Square to the sound of breaks, albeit not so close, but somehow clearly audible, I caught myself thinking that over the past five years it has been extremely rare to walk around Donetsk with such an artillery soundtrack in my ears. And now, for the first time in a long time, a strong feeling arose: the war is returning.
If you look at the latest statements of the Ukrainian president-comedian Zelensky, you get the impression that official Kiev abruptly switched some kind of internal toggle switch and instead of declarations of desire for peace, he stopped pretending to return to normal - circles five years ago.
When the rhetoric of the ardent and perhaps not always adequate Poroshenko, Yatsenyuk, Turchinov set the main vector of Ukrainian politics.
Zelensky, who seemed to be in opposition to the party of the former Ukrainian president, eventually slipped to the use of the same radical trends. His speech in Poland on World War II is a vivid confirmation of this. In fairness, I note that, unlike the serious part of the Ukrainian diaspora living in Moscow, and the near-liberal Russian political scientists of Donbass as a whole, and I personally didn’t have any illusions about the “servant of the people” initially, but still it turned out to be the first time to pretend not bad.
It is important to note that the cannonade, which was heard several days in a row in Donetsk, is not some local phenomenon. When we were shooting in Debaltseve (the city is located 80 km from the capital of the DPR), tension was also floating in the air in the form of artillery echoes from the so-called Svetlodar arc. If you believe colleagues - the legendary Donbass documentary Max Fadeev - in the LPR, things are not better.
“The Armed Forces of Ukraine not only unwind the LPR’s positions in hundreds of mines a day, but also, with the support of artillery, were able to gain a foothold in new positions in the gray zone and began to deploy their strong points” - this is how the documentary described the situation in the neighboring republic of the DPR in one of his recent posts in Telegram
As for the dominance in the gray zone and the creeping offensive of the Ukrainian military there - this is a fact that today, alas, has to be recognized as obvious. Well, loud artillery cannonades, spreading practically along the entire front line, do not bode well, they are confident in the Donbass. Year 2020 promises to be much hotter than the previous one.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.