Seven years ago I first came to Lugansk. On the streets of the city there were only military men, bread was brought to the shops by the hour, queues gathered an hour before the arrival of the car, the bread was still hot, the smell from it was walking all over the street. Many did not get it, and then people came to the building of the military commandant's office, located on the territory of the registry office, in which only one department worked, where archival extracts and death certificates were issued. The military, with the permission of the commandant, distributed bread from their reserves, clean water and sugar. There was no gas in the houses either, and people gathered in the yards, kindled fires and cooked food, even managed to preserve them for the winter, right on the fires.

They fired all over the city, but with particular regularity - in places of mass gathering of people. There were several in Lugansk where there was a connection and people could call their relatives and say that they were alive. Yulia, my friend, at that moment arrived by minibus to the market to call, but the shelling began. The driver threw her out of the car, but he did not have time to jump out. He died, and Yulia received shrapnel wounds.

The city of Pervomaisk in the LPR was under round-the-clock fire. Old people, children, women, men literally lived in basements. Those who died under shelling were mostly buried in haste, often in mass graves. Four years later, we helped find the burial of his wife to one guy who had two small children left in his arms. His wife did not have time to hide in the basement of the school during the shelling. The widower with babies in her arms was evacuated from the city on the same day, and the woman was buried by the military in one of these graves. I remember how in Luhansk my grandmother of about eighty asked me to buy her something to eat, she was starving. I bought her food and gave her money, and she burst into tears and asked me: "When will it all end?"

Being a journalist in a war is very difficult. Coverage what is happening, write reports, photograph the war. You see not heroes, but exhausted people who look you in the eyes and want to hear that everything will be fine. Around, blood, dirt, cruelty, indifference, a sense of hopelessness, at the same time kindness, support for each other in the hopeless darkness. Should you help the people you write about, can you deviate from a given topic just to help someone else? I am deeply convinced that yes. You do not see changes on the front line and you understand that it is simply inappropriate to talk about professional ethics in such conditions. I knew that many would condemn me for this. And so it happened later, but I didn't care anymore.

In December 2014, for the first time, I took humanitarian aid to Donbass. The gathering was carried out by "Novaya Gazeta", in which I worked then, the action was called "Children's size". Then my editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov supported me, and I brought two gazelles of shoes, diapers and clothes. It turned out that, in addition to clothes and diapers, you need ordinary food - cereals, stew, pasta, flour, sugar, tea, coffee - and the ability to deliver coal to the villages to heat houses. The Tradition charitable foundation helped us with food. So in 2015 I started helping families with children with cerebral palsy. The shelling of Luhansk stopped, decreased in Donetsk, but the war did not recede. People returned to their homes, volunteers and the local administration restored them from the supplies of humanitarian convoys. Donetsk was shelled, and the locals were rebuilding it.

Also on russian.rt.com At gunpoint: how children of Donbass live and grow up in the incessant war

In early spring, there was still snow on the streets.

A cold wind blew through, but there was hope.

Shops began to work, taxis appeared on the streets, vacancies appeared.

At the same time, Luhansk was fired upon again.

We watched the flashes from the windows, and then went to photograph everything.

A night without sleep, and early in the morning a message comes that the city of Stakhanov has been subjected to mortar shelling.

This is the city where civilians were evacuated during active hostilities.

We were informed about the death of the child, but words are few, in this war it is necessary to see everything with our own eyes. We entered the city. Immediately behind the gas station were several five-story brick residential buildings one after another. In one of these houses that morning, mother and daughter woke up and had breakfast. The girl still did not want to part with her toy dog ​​and did not finish her breakfast. Mom gathered the child, persuaded to part with the toys, promising that toys would meet her at home in the evening, and now we must run to the kindergarten to see friends.

From their house to the kindergarten five hundred meters, but they managed to reach only the end of their five-story building - at this time the shelling began. A mine explosion instantly killed a mother and child. A funeral is always very difficult, but especially when innocent people, children, old people die, whose lives were cut short by someone talking about peace and truth with the help of shells.

At the funeral of a little three-year-old girl and her young, beautiful mother, I saw adults moving away and crying like children, fits of rage giving way to complete despair. And the grandmother was burying her daughter and granddaughter at that time. Two coffins in which lay a young woman and a little doll-like girl, and next to her was a small toy dog. Immediately after the funeral, one of the videographers went and took his wife and daughter from Stakhanov to Luhansk. This was not the only childhood death that I saw, and the realization of this only made it more painful. Then I returned to Moscow and hugged my two babies tightly and burst into tears.

Seven years have passed.

Many of the children injured during the 2014–2015 hostilities have grown up and have children themselves, but a significant proportion of them still require medical attention due to childhood injuries.

A lot can be said about children born in wartime.

They grow up, go to gardens, see war, death, cruelty.

They are helped by the local leadership, doctors, psychologists, but mental trauma remains for life.

Should we help these children today - those who were born during the war, and those who were a child at the time of 2014?

Yes.

This was the unequivocal answer of Margarita Simonyan, who, never doubting that she was doing everything right, suggested that I launch a project on RT, which would help people in the DPR and LPR.

Margarita did not hesitate to help many, and I was no exception: she helped me when it seemed that there was no way out.

She told me in the same way that it could not be otherwise in Donbass.

We will write stories of children who need help right now: examinations, treatment, operations, rehabilitation, recovery.

We will help not only targeted, but also improve the quality of medicine.

Improve, because a lot has been done and doctors are working, despite the fact that a war could start at any second.

We need medical instruments, syringe infusion pumps, rehabilitation equipment, we need a turnkey repair of a dental office for the treatment of children with cerebral palsy.

There are a lot of stories, and they are all different.

As of today, it is necessary to collect 1,800,000 rubles in order to complete the repairs in the pediatric oncohematological department of the city of Donetsk at the Husak Institute of High Technologies.

It remains to repair a little: a bathroom for girls, a sanitary room, one ward, an operating room, a corridor, a medicine warehouse, an office and the manager's office.

The rest has already been done for us by the volunteers at their local training camps.

Not so long ago, the entire building was under threat: a crack formed in the foundation, but experts came to the conclusion that it was possible to correct the situation and save the building.

  • Zhenya Sosnitsky

Evgeny Sosnitsky from the DPR is 18 years old. For some, he is no longer a child, but he, like us, wants to live and enjoy this life. Zhenya has acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Several years ago, he overcame cancer and was sure it was over. He lived an ordinary life as a teenager, graduated from high school and entered the Donetsk National Technical University. I helped mom and dad raise their younger brother and sister. But this year, acute lymphoblastic leukemia burst into his life with renewed vigor. Drops, chemotherapy, and punctures began. Zhenya really wants to live, he has endured a lot and is ready to endure even more. Not so long ago it turned out that his dad could be a donor, and it became possible to have a bone marrow transplant operation. Recently it became clear that on May 20 Zhenya will undergo an operation free of charge in the hospital of the Federal State Budgetary Institution “National Medical Research Center named afterV.A. Almazov "of the Ministry of Health of Russia in St. Petersburg. After the operation, there will be a long period of stay in the hospital, and his mother, Natalya Sosnitskaya, will need to rent an apartment in order to be close to her son. The help of our readers is needed here.

Vladik Bakharovsky is now 13 years old. In 2015, his mother died in his own house, the boy himself was seriously injured. The splinter went through the head, the boy lost his eye, and his internal organs were damaged. In 2018, Oleg Nikolaevich, the boy's dad, died, and Vladik stayed with his grandmother. Now they live on the grandmother's pension and the boy's pension for the loss of the breadwinner. The boy is growing, he needs to change his eye prosthesis as he grows. On April 15, within the framework of the project, we were able to find funds to pay for the arrival and stay of the child in Moscow until a new eye prosthesis was installed.

We will do everything in our power, together with the leadership of the republics. Irina Pushilina, the wife of the head of the DPR, is doing a lot for such children today, she told us about Vladik. We will work with individuals (for example, for Evgeny Sosnitskiy's mother, we will announce a charge to the card), and in a one-stop-shop mode with funds and organizations focused on humanitarian projects - this is the Children's Doctor Roshal Charitable Foundation, Liza's doctors and the Russian humanitarian mission. We will write in detail about the rest of the project participants in future publications. With such a team of like-minded people, we can do a lot. Are you on the team?