Konstantin Kovrigin, film scriptwriter, who visited Donbass along with a humanitarian convoy from Crimea
Do you know what a bomb shelter is and how a person behaves when waiting out a bombing in a cramped, dimly lit space?
They won't show you this on television because it is forbidden from a safety and common sense point of view. You can see the war, but watching how dozens of people and, to be honest, you, together with them, in the basement experiencing that state called fear, is on the brink.
No, I didn’t see any panic, I didn’t hear any screams, although the majority of them were women and old people. People were waiting for it to end, wondering where it had fallen, as long as it didn’t hit their house. Just imagine for a moment, you are forced to hide in someone else’s house, not knowing where your children are. Obsessive thoughts are spinning in your head, but you can’t do anything.
On that day, in addition to artillery shelling from Avdeevka and Pesky, 3 Tochki U ballistic missiles were fired at Donetsk. They fell at a distance of 2-3 kilometers from the place where our humanitarian convoy was located. The enormous force of the blast wave turned people over like a broom over fallen leaves. The glass fragments did not make out what was on the way.
After the first explosion, the militia asks everyone to go downstairs. The crowd slowly moves up the narrow stairs, and everything below is packed. We squeeze through the corridor with difficulty. Everyone is silent. Nobody even remembers telephones. There’s another roar upstairs – it seems like it’s far away.
And suddenly an elderly woman, seeing that I was filming, points a trembling finger at me. Here they are afraid of Ukrainian gunners, who use a mobile phone to transmit coordinates for an artillery attack. I'm not a gunner, but go prove it when the whole basement is looking at you. Immediately a machine gun in the side: who is this?
I explain that the journalist and part-time volunteer brought humanitarian aid. -Where is the phone? – The mobile phone is turned off, it’s in my pocket, I’m filming with a video camera...
After checking the documents, the questions are removed, but the frightened woman does not calm down and switches to someone else. It's nerve-wracking. This animal fear is pounding furiously in the temples, torturing the unfortunate brain. And believe me, everyone expresses this in their own way.
However, only one woman panicked. Everyone else sympathized with the old woman and waited... Everyone had to run home, to run errands, to get their children.
Sitting in a bomb shelter during shelling is really scary, but you get used to everything. You are rushing things to yourself, because I have milk on the stove and the children haven’t eaten. In my humble observation, a person in a bomb shelter is in a hurry to relive the moment when someone’s death flies overhead, and is making up in his head for what he didn’t have time for, who he didn’t love.
It's finally over. People come out faster than they came down here, hiding from death. And this is how they live almost every day, despite the renewed truces.
Do you know what a bomb shelter is? I hope no.