Russia launches the final battle for Donbas with the aim of achieving the partition of Ukraine

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Basements are not enough.

Neither do the sewers.

On the outskirts of Soledar, at 11 Oktyabrskaya Street, there is a narrow rock-cut corridor that reaches much lower.

"

," says the town's mayor.

It saved them from the years of Nazism, it saved them from the last eight years of war in Donbas, and even now, when the Russian mortars start firing, the 10,000 inhabitants of Soledar (Donetsk region) know what they have to do : Throw yourself into the bowels of the old mine, 300 meters underground, where no Putin thermobaric bomb can reach.

Blessed mine: at the entrance there is even a lucky gnome, made of salt, and in good times people used to kiss him before going down.

The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kirilo Budanov, assured this Sunday that

's objective is the partition of

, after the initial plan to seize the entire country had failed.

"There are reasons to think that Putin is contemplating a Korean-style scenario, consisting of a dividing line between the occupied and unoccupied regions of our country," Budanov, head of the Defense Ministry's intelligence department, said in a Facebook message. .

Last Friday it was the Russian Defense Ministry that concluded the first phase of the intervention in Ukraine and assured that Moscow would now concentrate on the

of Donbas - the self-proclaimed separatist republics in the east of the country.

But more than "control" and its "complete liberation", the Russians are carefully devoting themselves to the destruction of this territory.

They move Wagner mercenaries from Syria and Libya and are deporting more than 400,000 people.

Putin had delivered 700,000 passports to his Donbas "brothers" last fall, practically one per family, but he evidently had to convince them otherwise.

The leader of the self-proclaimed separatist republic of Lugansk, Leonid Paschenik, said today that a

on the integration of this pro-Russian territory into Russia may be held in the "near future".

kyiv's response was that "no country in the world will recognize the forcible change of Ukraine's internationally recognized borders," a Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

The advance seems to continue and the Ukrainians themselves admit that the enemy has managed to create a

In a single day, 44 heavy artillery shells and 140 rockets were counted in Kharkov, says Mayor Ihor Terekhov.

1,143 buildings were destroyed: miraculously, the Soviet skyscraper complex Derzhprom remained standing, a nostalgic construction that Putin's generals did not feel like hitting.

It seems that they did not have the same respect for Ploshcha Krasna, Chernigov's Red Square, which is not named after the center of Moscow (in Old Slavonic, the meaning was "Beautiful Square") and now, according to the Ukrainian government, " It is in the center of a completely destroyed city.

It is even said that

: its 50,000 inhabitants, who once opened the gates of Donbas on the way to Donetsk and Luhansk, have largely fled without time to close the gate.

It was in 2019, almost a century ago, it seems, when the British NGO Halo Trust certified that few areas in the world were as

as Donbas.

A group of Austrian economists also calculated the cost of the destruction: almost 22 billion dollars would be needed to rebuild the region, 16% of the Ukrainian GDP before the invasion.

A rich industrial area turned into ruins

And what is happening now?

The entire Donec Basin is a concentration of smoldering industrial giants and underground mines.

But nobody knows what smoke will rise after the war.

The richest man in the region and in Ukraine, Rinat Ahkmetov, owner of the Shaktar football club, has seen

: Donetsk was his city, he financed his jewels, the Donbas stadium Arena (one of the venues for Euro 2012) and the brand new Russian-style train station.

Another question also arises: What will happen to the great resource, coal?

In Donetsk, black ore has always been a source of pride, but the fury of war has wiped out even the simple and romantic mounds of waste scattered around the city center,

of day and the season.

The whole industry is in crisis: even before the invasion, the coal was extracted with too high a percentage of sulfur and had to be mixed with Russian coal, which ended up being a by-product.

The Donbas that Putin wants, at all costs, is not only the treasure of the steel mills and the oligarchs linked to Moscow.

It is also

from which the Ukrainian Church has broken away.

Armed secession was also played out here in terms of language, because in this area

(although now no one wants to remain under Putin's command).

There is no time or strength to be indignant when visiting the Poltava museum, if the legends that speak of Peter the Great carefully avoid mentioning Russia.

The relationship with the Great Mother has always been complicated.

50 kilometers from the border, in Kharkov's immense square, said to be the second largest after Tiananmen Square, Moscow's faithful used to thrill to the gigantic granite monument dedicated to the five Soviet heroes, depicted walking out to fight with a basket of weapons.

In Kharkov they called it "the five men carrying a fridge".

But those were different times and then different weapons were used, those of irony.

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