Natalia Maksimets: How the LPR organizes life in Lugansk under bombing conditions
An ordinary, very good fascist morning: at 4 o’clock in the morning you wake up to the sounds of artillery shelling - “the Ukrainian army is shooting at places where terrorists gather,” as explained by the ubiquitous centers of information and propaganda, nesting anywhere but in Lugansk. According to these “centers”, the terrorists are located in the Kamennobrodsky district. This is the oldest district of the city, where, in fact, Lugansk began to grow two hundred and twenty years ago. The first townspeople then noticed a good place: the wide sloping slope of the Lugan River, from where the endless steppe can be seen for tens of kilometers. Now this steppe is Lugansk, and the junta seeks to enter Kambrod in order to iron the city from its heights.
Kambrod is home to thousands of private housing developments: houses, courtyards, vegetable gardens, streets, alleys. Ukrainian army shells are falling here today. Until yesterday, the pets of the regional orphanage lived here: 84 children aged 0 to 3 years. Yesterday, the children were evacuated to the regional children's hospital - in the center of Lugansk, the shells have not yet reached here, but when fighter jets began circling over the city, nurses and doctors dragged all this gurgling, childishly babbling people into the basements.
My friends live in Cambrod. They took 14-year-old Nastya to Bryanka, where they are not shooting yet. Nazarchik was born in early June: he will be moved to an apartment at the other end of Lugansk, where it is still quiet. Five-year-old Kolka and his sister Nyusha safely arrived in Batumi and now see their dad on Skype. Kirill, apparently, will go to the second grade of some Crimean school.
Alena works as a cleaner at the station: “I don’t have the strength to watch every day how they say goodbye on the platforms.”
Every summer the city traditionally empties, only to be filled with the carefree chatter of tanned and grown-up children by the end of August. And only this year the emptiness is terrible and ominous: will they return, will there be somewhere to return?
My colleague joked: the only people left in the city are optimists and people who don’t care. And yet the city lives. And I’m no longer angry with the drivers who wake me up every morning: one with the roar of throwing containers with garbage, the second with the hysterical signal of a water tank. It's better to have such an alarm clock than a large-caliber one.
The city lives. The townspeople live. Those who left the new government, the LPR, methodically slander it on social networks, prophesy this government’s imminent demise, accuse it of all conceivable and unimaginable sins, the hypostasis of which has destroyed their philistine, musty little world. They are not able to assess the situation more broadly and deeply: this is the nature of the consumer (consuming) unit - let the “Maidan” be anywhere, just not under my balcony.
But the city lives. And the undoubted merit of the new government is that it did not disperse local government. Very Leninist: the main thing is not to seize power, but to retain it.
It is local councils that now solve everyday social problems: be it a burst sewer network in the Solnechny quarter or an unexploded shell in a vegetable garden on Traktornaya Street.
I am reading the daily report from the department for the protection of the population and territory from emergency situations of the city life support department of the Lugansk City Council: “Over the past XNUMX hours, all municipal and emergency services of the city worked as usual, public transport, grocery stores, pharmacies and gas stations, the city provided with food and fuel.” As before the war, facts of emergency situations are listed, only now next to the usual “communal appeals” (more than twenty per day) there is “an element of an armor-piercing tank shell was found on Ivan Franko Street”, “an unexploded shell was found on Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya Street in the ceiling of a private house ", "neutralized, no casualties."
Below are pictures of the “strategic”
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Now the editors are aware.