Last November, I went to the Netherlands to visit a good friend of mine who then became my boyfriend, and who just happened to be Ukrainian. He introduced me to a whole new world and a whole new kind of people, and I was delighted to be largely embraced by them. Within that two week trip, I went from knowing one Ukrainian to knowing at least twenty, went to a Ukrainian wedding where I communicated to the non-English speaking family members of the bride and groom through Anna Kendrick’s “Cup Song” (it was just as strange and awesome as you might imagine, and afterwards they drank Scotch and toasted to America), and watched the protest on Independence Square in Ukraine begin.
I won’t reiterate what happened here. If you don’t know, Vice News has a great summing up of the protests, why they began, and how they ended. All I will say is that, despite rampant disorganization and some trying, and nearly succeeding, to take advantage of the confusion, it was a glorious example of a people coming together to rise up against an oppressive government, and successfully overthrowing the figurehead of that government, at the least. (It’s my belief that the true master of Ukraine’s previous regime was Russia, and the war in the East is only a natural progression of what started last November – first the puppet, now the puppet master. But that’s just my opinion.)
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7e6B64Iqqg]
I was first introduced to the Donbas Battalion by Vice News three or four months ago. I was perhaps a little too excited to see what I thought of as the beginning of the unspoken-resistance. In my mind, the war in Ukraine was still something to be discussed over dinner, analyzed, and argued about, and doing so had not taken on the dark, iron-in-the-back-of-my-throat tinge that it does today. The Donbas Battalion was one of the first pro-Ukrainian militias formed in a part of the country where the only news was about pro-Russian militias, whose media-presence sounded a bit like,
“By the people, for the people – your friendly neighborhood pro-Russian militia!”
The Donbas Battalion was formed out of a few angry Ukrainian patriots and led by a man named Semen Semenchenko. They took down Russian flags and put up Ukrainian ones at the local government offices. They went to the local police station and shamed the police, screaming, “There are 300,000 police in this country and no one is protecting Ukrainian speaking people! Who is the guest here – us or you?” They were one of the first civilian-organized volunteer militias, stepping up where the Ukrainian regular military couldn’t. I was elated.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KFGgKPrWfY]
The Donbas Battalion continued to grow, both in numbers and popularity. They were in many of the eastern fights, sometimes critical in the success of battles over crucial territory. They were in Sloviansk, Donetsk, and Luhansk. They, and battalions like them, were the only fighting force in the east against the ‘rebels’ for months, and continue to bare the brunt of much of the fighting going on now.
A few months ago, 55 year-old American investment banker and West Point graduate named Mark Gregory Paslawsky went all the way to Ukraine from Manhattan to join the Donbas Battalion.
His story sounds a little like mine, taken to a whole new level – frustrated and helpless just watching people cry out for help, compelled to try to do what he could.
He’s dead now. As are the vast majority of the Donbas Battalion.
I’ve been obsessively following #Ukraine on Twitter for months now, and the ‘news before it’s news’ thing never hit home until week before last, when I read live Tweets from civilians and journalists crying out about the besieged city of Ilovaisk. The Donbas Battalion was there for a month or more, desperately holding out against increasingly superior opposing forces and begging the Ukrainian government for reinforcements.
Paslawksy was killed on August 19th. Reinforcements never came.
http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/abandoned-donbas-battalion-fights-on-361886.html
Then, a proposal – the remaining fighting men in Ilovaisk would surrender, as long as they were given a safety corridor on which to retreat.
It was agreed. The Ukrainian men surrendered Ilovaisk to either Russian-military-backed rebels, or the Russian military itself depending on who you ask, and left down the safety corridor, where they were ambushed with vastly superior fire power and brutally killed nearly to the man.
The extent of the damage still isn’t known, at least not by me and my news sources. But it looks like hundreds dead, killed in out-right betrayal by a military no one acknowledges is even there. I can’t find out if Semen Semenchenko is alive or dead, but nothing has been heard from him for weeks.
Here’s a terrifying statistic from the Kiev Post article:
“On Aug. 21, the Interior Ministry reported that 25 percent of all those from special battalions killed since the anti-terrorist operation began had been killed in Ilovaisk.”
And here’s Vice New’s coverage of the remains of the ‘safety corridor’ itself. (Warning: extremely graphic.)
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r_Nf2VK5_4]
And here are interviews with some of the survivors.
And both a summing-up of the current situation in Eastern Ukraine and another explanation of the Battle for Iloviask from a German perspective.
The struggles in Ukraine have affected me more deeply than I can describe. I have sat in front of my computer, reading or watching the latest news, with my hands over my mouth and tears on my cheeks more times than I can count. I watched the protestors in Euromaidan and their desperation to form a better country, a better life, and I saw my own face and those of my friends. I watched the men creating their own civilian-led battalions during the almighty panic and confusion after ousted-President Viktor Yanukovych fled and Crimea was invaded, and their faces were the faces of my boyfriend and his friends. I watched the shattered homes and starving, dying civilians in the now war-torn east, furious over the deaths of innocents that no one could explain, and I saw the faces of my boyfriend’s parents, who are still in Ukraine, and sometimes, the faces of my own family.
To say I am losing my faith in humanity would be incorrect. If anything, my understanding of our resilience and our capacity for hope grows by the day. I am realizing, however, how terrible a place the world can be in a way history books and the most heart-wrenching war movies never taught. The despicable pointlessness of all these deaths is what hits hardest – the knowledge that there will never be justice for most of the dead, and for the vast majority of the world, not even the faintest awareness of their sacrifice.
But I am also learning, more deeply every day, that some things are worth fighting for.
Some things are worth dying for, even if no one ever knows about your sacrifice.
Because that’s the only way the good things, the right things, can ever become reality. Through tenaciousness. Through sacrifice. And never, ever giving up hope.
Слава Україні! Героям слава!
Rust Cohle, from one of the best examples of film ever made, True Detective.