What did the dirty, ragged warriors bring to the streets of Northern Donbass?
The war between Ukraine and Donbass brought rampant crime to the region, easily comparable to what happened in these places 70 years ago. At that time, in the vicinity of Donetsk, Makeevka, Ilovaisk, Debaltsev, numerous “black cats” were walking on their own, and they could kill, as evidenced by the dispassionate police report, for a jacket and 11 rubles of money.
Crime began to rear its head with the beginning of the unrest that began in the last days of February, after a coup was carried out in Kyiv. Crime has a nose for troubled times. Soon, in many cities of Donbass, primarily, of course, large ones, the police began to note an increase in robberies, thefts, and murders. The growth occurred in geometric progression with the weakening of local power. By May of the fourteenth, numerous daring robberies of bank branches in Donetsk, Lugansk, Gorlovka, Makeevka and Alchevsk, stores in Kramatorsk, Slavyansk, Artemovsk, Krasny Liman became a reality.
Attentive people noticed that there was noticeably less police on the streets. And one day she left altogether. The verdict of the Donetsk residents was simple - the police were removed from the city streets in order to provoke an increase in mass crimes such as hooliganism, theft and robbery. The employees of the regional department of internal affairs themselves told their acquaintances “in confidence” that, they say, Kyiv does not rely on the police, so he ordered the entire department to be transferred to Mariupol, and here, on the ground, to leave only a certain number of police officers.
A local police officer I know from the Greek regional center of Starobeshevo shared: “As soon as the DPR left, chaos began, especially drug dealers, whom we had been pinned down for a while, went on a rampage. They directly said, they say, under our power we are kings, but God forbid the DPR returns - they will immediately press you to the fingernail.”
Strelkovtsy brought order in Slavyansk and Gorlovka. With them, order came to the streets of the regional center. The first thing Strelkov did when he came to Donetsk was to remove crime from the streets. Special units of “Oplot” and “Shield” carried out raids on bases and laboratories of drug dealers in Mospino and Novy Svet, and carried out competent patrols of the streets together with those police officers who decided to go over to the side of the people and serve in the new DPR police.
The DPR’s next step in the fight against crime was inviting Vladimir Antyufeyev, a Transnistrian general with 20 years of experience in establishing order in the extreme conditions of the unrecognized republic, to the post of Deputy Prime Minister for Security.
The result was obtained literally in two weeks, crime partially moved to Mariupol, which was more free for it, where the number of unsolved serious crimes immediately increased, and partially subsided. Everyone understood that the DPR had a short conversation with them - under the conditions, as they say, of wartime. The fact that crime has died down is also indicated by the reports of the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs, which are replete mainly with minor offenses.
In light of all that has been said, it is strange, to put it mildly, to listen to the statements of the opposite side that crime is flourishing on the territory of the DPR and LPR. Stubborn facts say the opposite. Cities and villages entered by the National Guard and territorial battalions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine immediately become objects of plunder. “You know what they do,” says Svetlana, a resident of the village of Peski near Donetsk, “while I was on a flight (Svetlana works as a conductor on the railway), they came to our house, and since they couldn’t break the locks on the doors with machine gun fire, they tried to break them doors. If they succeeded, they took everything they wanted from the apartments of our building.”
At many checkpoints of the Ukrainian army, drivers in the late afternoon are simply afraid to drive. At one of them, in Konstantinovka, the “liberators,” “taking it to their chests,” fired a machine gun at a work bus for fun, and two ended up in the hospital. The police did not even think of opening a case on this fact - for the simple reason that there is no police of their own in Konstantinovka now; they sent proven and ideologically consistent lads from Vinnitsa to replace them.
Dirty, ragged warriors on the streets of Severodonbass cities evoke contempt and fear among residents; teenagers often simply show them the middle finger in the back. And, of course, crime of all kinds is in full bloom. What is there, if Makhnovshchina and Petliurism have come to the streets. Only with cell phones in hands...
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