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Habit “war”
Views:Four years ago, when the war was just beginning, and the distant sounds of battle in Slavyansk reached Donetsk, which was preparing for a massacre, no one could have imagined, even in their wildest fantasies, that combat would become a way of life. But the war in Donbass will soon continue for 1482 days.
It is too early to call the Donbass conflict the longest in Europe since the end of World War II, but there is very little left to surpass the rest of the European wars.
If we compare it with the totality of civilian wars in the former Yugoslavia, then our war is far away. In total, the war in Yugoslavia lasted 10 years, but it included several conflicts at once, since it was the collapse of a huge country and the parties decided with the help of weapons which territories would go to them. But if we consider each war separately, then only the Croatian conflict lasted longer than the Donbass one.
-Bosnian War - 1347 days = 3 years 8 months
-Kosovo War - 467 days = 1 year 3 months
-Croatian War - 1687 days = 4 years 7 months
In addition, there was also the Ten Day War.
The largest conflict at the moment is the war in Chechnya.
-First Chechen Company - 629 days = 1 year 8 months
-Second Chechen Company - 3540 days = 9 years 8 months
But it is worth clarifying that these are official data on the beginning and end of hostilities. These figures include not only the days of active phases of armed conflicts, but also small battles that continue even after the end of a full-scale war.
In the fifth year of the war
When a war drags on for many years, it turns out that it is possible to get used to it. You can get used to the bad, not as quickly, but still like the good. This is a unique form of self-defense of our psyche. If we did not have such an ability, then most likely we would have long since died out from the terrifying information about what is happening in the front-line zone and the front line.
But this is a double-edged sword. While our psyche protects us from horrors, at the same time there is a feeling that the war is over, and what happens in the “red zone” is not particularly important. People who continue to live in cities relatively distant from the line of contact may have the false impression that somewhere far away, where the fighting does not subside, but periodically can compete with the active phase in the brutality of the fighting, there are no people left, and if they there are, then there are very few of them, statistical error. The cynicism of this thought is that it has nothing to do with reality.
For example, if you come to front-line Dokuchaevsk, which is subject to massive artillery attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, you may be surprised at the number of people living there. There are schools, kindergartens, shops, and ordinary residents continue to live in Khrushchev-era buildings with patched holes. Dokuchaevsk is still an urban-type settlement, that is, a relatively large settlement, but even in small villages the civilian population continues to live.
Visiting Dolomites
I learned about the existence of this village, like many other small villages, during the war. Dolomitnoye is located in the north-west of Gorlovka. This is the same “red zone” where not everyone is allowed, as it is dangerous. The military know all the locals by sight. There aren't many of them left here. I first came to Dolomitnoe in the fall of 2017. At the height of the Indian summer, it was still possible to move around here without fear.
“It’s been quiet here lately. At night, however, sometimes you have to go down to the cellar. It can be noisy at night,” pensioner Lyubov Viktorovna Bagirova told us.
The woman stood next to a shallow cellar where jars of pickles stood on shelves. “A relative refuge. It’s unlikely that it can protect anyone,” I thought then. But there was no other refuge here. At least to reassure me that I did everything possible, it was worth coming down here. I have seen many times how such cellars were torn to smithereens by artillery shells.
Lyubov Viktorovna lived here with her husband and elderly mother, who was 81 years old. The family complained that Ukraine refused to pay them a pension because they lived “in terrorist territory.”
“Let the terrorists pay you, the Pension Fund told us,” Lyubov said.
Having filmed the necessary material, we moved on.
I had to return to Dolomitne a few months later, when the Ukrainian army captured the entire “gray zone” near Gorlovka. Then the Ukrainian Armed Forces occupied Gladosovo and Metalist. Fighting flared up again with the use of heavy artillery, mortars and small arms. The familiar shell explosions from 2015 made it clear that the war continues and has no plans to retreat. We made our way through the trenches, and the dog was with us. You can always meet animals on the positions. Most often these are abandoned pets. Sometimes there are dogs with yellow clips in their ears - before Euro 2012, the Ukrainian authorities vaccinated stray animals, and the clips served as an indicator that the animal was not dangerous. But this dog was not vaccinated. Perhaps he was born already during the armed conflict. “Dog of war,” flashed through my head.
Suddenly shells began to explode very close by. The dog tried to hide indoors. After waiting out the shelling, we jumped into the car to quickly get out of here. We had a few minutes, since most likely the previous shelling was a sighting one. We didn't have time. We barely had time to drive away from our positions when Ukrainian shells flew at our backs. One by one they overtook us. It seemed like they were targeting us. Just at the moment of our hasty escape from the shelling, I noticed a familiar house where a couple of months ago hospitable pensioners treated us to fresh grapes. Even though we were flying at full speed, I noticed a figure running across the yard. They were hiding in that very small cellar, which was unlikely to have saved them.
Underneath the statistics
Society, as before, no longer explodes from the information that somewhere very close, not thousands of kilometers away, but just a few hundred, people like us are dying; The media are not showing the interest they once had, since there is no request from the same society, local shelling is no longer engaging, there needs to be more blood and meat torn to shreds, then the plot will look more impressive. Thoughts about war crowd out everyday worries. There is nothing to blame people for. This is human nature - it turns out that even the death of people, if it occurs regularly and lasts for many years, becomes commonplace, one gets used to it and psychologically overcomes it.
It so happened that at the beginning of the war, everyone shows cordiality: they help, they worry, and then cold cynicism takes the place of empathy, which, in fact, is the same cordiality, only with a negative indicator.
The lives of thousands of people under the sole of bloody statistics...
PS
“I read somewhere that walruses remain completely indifferent when hunters, attacking the herd, kill their neighbors with clubs - and I saw how during the war entire nations behaved in exactly the same way.”
(c) Erich-Maria Remarque “Black Obelisk”
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