In 2014, Anne-Laure Bonnel, living in Paris, heard a speech by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The population of Ukraine is split between ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians. President Poroshenko is here addressing the Ukrainian-speaking population about the Russian-speakers. Poroshenko is describing his vision for Ukraine. He is speaking on behalf of ethnic Ukrainians:
We will have work, not them.
We will have retirements, not them.
We will have support for our retirees and our children, not them.
Our children will have daycare and schools, their children will live in caves.
Because they don’t know how to do anything.
And it is like that, exactly like that, that we will win this war.
Understand this: that was the president of Ukraine speaking to the country. He is explicitly declaring a civil war.
In 2014, Bonnel travelled to Donbass in the east of Ukraine to film the lives of the ethnic Russians who live there. Based on that experience, she made a documentary called Donbass, released in 2016. It is a masterpiece of filmmaking. It is the story of what she encountered there in 2014 and 2015, after Poroshenko’s policy, succinctly described above, was set in motion. Bonnel shows that Poroshenko had unleashed the Ukrainian Army on ethnic Russians and was murdering them. It is not subtle.
We meet people throughout Donbass and listen to them. They are living in absolute squalor. We see their homes shelled, half-standing. We see people killed by bombs and snipers. As we spend time with them, there is the constant thunder of bombs exploding nearby. Everyone has lost neighbours and family to the bombardments. They show her the wells and graves where the Ukrainians have thrown the bodies of local people, tortured and beheaded. Pregnant women. You begin to see that the Ukrainian soldiers took to heart their Nazi training regarding the subhuman Russian speakers. That is just what you would have predicted based on Poroshenko’s speech.
I’ll describe the scenes from the documentary in case you don’t take the time to watch it.
We meet a gentle young man named Andre who had joined the Ukrainian Army in 2013. He tells us what he saw in Odessa in 2014. While he’s talking, we see the horrific footage from the event. Remember that Odessa is a largely Russian-speaking port city in southern Ukraine. Its population were the targets of the new civil war. Next to the Trades Building was an encampment of Russian speakers. They were protesting the new law that banned the Russian language in Ukraine. (Yes, Poroshenko’s government banned the use of Russian throughout the nation.) The Ukrainian nationalists came by bus to put a stop to the protest. The Russian speakers, including women and children, took refuge in the Trades Building. The pro-Ukrainians set fire to the building. People jumped out of the building to escape the flames. But the pro-Ukrainians beat them and shot them as they lay on the ground. Some people tried to help them, but masked men beat them to death with clubs and pipes. Who were the aggressors? Surely, the Right Sector, he thinks. (One of a number of Nazi paramilitary groups, funded by the West, that increasingly took over Ukrainian politics.) Why did they do it? They wanted to exterminate the Russian speakers. About fifty people died. The orders came from Kiev. No one was arrested. There is a heart-wrenching juxtaposition between the young man’s quiet, sad recounting of the event and the barbaric scenes on the screen. He’s a local, from Donetsk. He left the Ukrainian Army. He tells us that he’d rather die with his people than kill them. If that doesn’t stop you in your tracks, then fuck off.
In the Pervomaisk Zone , we visit another basement that used to house 150 people. Most have left. They’ve gone to Russia to find work, because everything is shut down here. There is no more work in Donbass. The Ukrainians started bombing 25 July 2014. The sixty-five year old woman we meet says that Europe surprises her. Why won’t they take measures against the Ukrainian government? She has an apartment, but she can’t live there because the bombardments could come at any moment. So, she lives in a dirty basement. This is just what Poroshenko had predicted: “they” will live in caves. Then we go to the hospital and talk with the doctor. He says they get victims of shelling and mines all the time. Plus, psychological problems due to the trauma are on the rise. The hospital itself is bombed. He takes them for a walk around the area. Houses and apartments are bombed. We hear the bombs going off in the background. They talk to the priest. In the cafeteria where some volunteers prepare soup for about 400 locals every afternoon, an elderly woman talks about being afraid all the time, whenever they hear a sound, because they think the bombardments are starting up again.
Then we see a large Russian humanitarian convoy pass by on the road.
At Debaltsevo, we see more apartments shelled out, but still standing. There are holes in the buildings so that you see an apartment had been blasted out while others remained intact, the structure probably weakened. The shelling had lasted a month, from the middle of January to the middle of February. An elderly couple tell us that they worked forty years in the local coal mine. What are we guilty of? They are receiving no help from the government. No pensions, just as Poroshenko promised.
In the area of Debaltsevo, an old guy shows us the destroyed train station. The destruction is general. Four-fifths of the population has gone or been killed. He hopes future generations will not know a fraternal war.
In Oktiabrskii Village, the Ukrainians started to fire in May 2014, when they took the airport and reduced it to rubble. The school has been bombed. (Poroshenko had promised that “their” children would not have schools, remember.) They bombed the electric plant, so there has been no electricity for months. The market was destroyed. It’s general devastation with bombs littering the ground. No more stores. You have to go to the train station to buy anything. We see another apartment building that’s been shelled to the brink. There’s only one inhabitant left. He doesn’t know where to go. There has been no heating nor water all winter. A couple show what’s left of their house. Very little. The walls are mostly destroyed. The Ukrainians bombed them on Christmas day. They don’t have anyplace to go. They hope the house will be reparable. Their daughter is dead, so they take care of their grandson now. The elderly woman saved a few dishes and cups from the shelling. That’s all.
In Lassinovataia, a middle-aged couple sit at the cemetery where their eighteen-year-old son is buried. He took up arms against the Ukrainian Army. He told his mother he had to protect her and his little brother. The mother says that the biggest error is that people outside are being told the Russian Army is prosecuting this war on them. (Western propaganda.) We’re all Slavs, she says, both the Ukrainians and the Russians. The father finally speaks. He’s been sitting lifelessly staring at his son’s grave while his wife talks. He says if only the Russian Army had shown up in Kiev, there would have been peace in a week. This is 2015. (Instead, now seven more years have passed before Russia finally acted.) He says Poroshenko would be better to live in the USA, kissing the ass of Obama. She asks him to not be vulgar. He doesn’t care. She says that she had high hopes for Poroshenko. After all it was Turchinov who started the war.
The documentary ends on that note. Poroshenko frames the film. His short and menacing speech opens the film. Now, we have seen that all that he promised has come to pass. The ethnic Russians are living underground. Their schools and hospitals are bombed. They have no jobs. The retired Russian speakers have no pensions. Now, the distraught father of a killed teenager puts the blame on Poroshenko that he imagines kissing Obama’s butt.
That’s the way it looks to me.