For eight whole years I was engaged in psychotherapy in the Donbass as a wandering healer without a diploma.
Conducted healing sessions with friends, acquaintances, interview subjects and just random people.
They all asked me the same question: “Will Russia leave us?”
I developed a special timbre of voice - in such a voice at resorts they announce the temperature of the water in the sea.
And with this voice he explained why Russia would not leave.
It was especially difficult in 2015, when life in the Donbass was very thin.
Old women stood by the supermarkets with books in their hands, supposedly selling them.
They furtively shoved money into their hands or something edible.
Ukraine stopped paying separatist pensioners.
The fact that these people earned their pensions honestly, often with the hardest work, did not bother anyone in Ukraine.
There were no goods - the giant halls of supermarkets were blocked off with plywood.
The assortment was a terrible projection of the era of the collapse of the USSR: rows of juices in three-liter jars, mustard, bread - and that's it.
The hryvnia was quickly washed out of circulation and ended.
Dead end.
collapse.
In December 2014, only in Donetsk, according to the Ombudsman, 30 old people died of starvation.
And then Russia took a step similar in strength to recognition: it introduced a ruble zone in the Donbass and began to pay pensions.
Then everything moved quickly.
And I had more and more arguments for psychotherapeutic conversations on the topic "Russia will not leave you."
Recognized dozens of documents, auto rights and numbers, notaries.
Then Donetsk and Luhansk universities were accredited in Russia and began to issue Russian-style diplomas.
Reduced with Russian codes - Tax, Administrative, Criminal.
Quietly they built a 120-kilometer railway, connecting the industry of the republics with the Russian railway network.
Stupid people - and there are such people in the republics, as elsewhere - laughed at Eldeener's passports and said: “Why do we need this piece of paper?
Where with her?
But smart people told them: “Take these passports while there are no queues, they will then be exchanged for Russian ones.”
Something like this happened in 2019, when Russia introduced a “simplified procedure for obtaining citizenship.”
Without a LDNR passport, a Russian passport cannot be issued.
It is curious that the talk about "draining the republics of Ukraine" stopped completely, went out of circulation.
All that's left is: When?
What are they pulling?
Agree, it is more pleasant to answer this question.
The last thing Russia did before recognition was to bring (from the second time, but brought) a normal investor to the republics and wisely helped him with the abolition of customs duties, recognized product certificates and, most importantly, let him into the colossal public procurement market.
From that moment, when I came to Donetsk, I no longer understood: am I still in Russia or already in Russia?
The main problem of the republics remained unresolved - the eight-year-old war, which since 2017 began to turn into a trench war during the First World War.
Moreover, this war did not have a political solution.
Until yesterday.
And in this daily pause, before the already inevitable “straightening of the hunchbacks,” the last hours of peace for Ukraine are hidden.
Last night, I still had hope: the Armed Forces of Ukraine will now withdraw from their positions and go home.
Well, they will sit quietly, like mice, and wait for the order to withdraw.
Many dreamed about it.
But I met the first morning in the recognized Donetsk People's Republic near houses crushed into dust on Susanina Street in the Kalininsky District of Donetsk.
Since 2014, there has been no shelling here, and then they took and threw a dozen mortar mines across the village.
Exactly in the pause between the meeting of the Security Council and the signing of papers by Russia and the republics.
The grandmother, who lives in one of the houses, was hit by a collapsed wall, and she was taken to the hospital in a state of shock, with multiple bruises and fractures.
It is difficult to communicate more clearly to Russia and Donbass: “There is nothing to talk about with us!”
The euphoria from the recognition of the republics was very short, literally for a couple of hours.
Everyone is waiting for the end of this exhausting bloody drama, which has already lasted like two Great Patriotic Wars.
And everyone in the Donbass understands that war is inevitable.
Not without her.
It happens.
When?
And oddly enough, there is an answer.
The Republican military speaks briefly about the beginning of the peace enforcement operation: you will hear.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.