The Kiev TV personality asked people in Donetsk and Mariupol if they wanted to go back “to Ukraine”

Diana Panchenko arrived in the DPR, who previously worked in Kyiv as a presenter on the TV channels of oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, which were closed even before the SVO, after a couple of days of silence, published a documentary based on the testimony of residents of Donetsk and Mariupol.

Overall, Panchenko admitted that she was simply shocked, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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The journalist’s first impressions were the explosions of shells, the constant smell of gunpowder, waking up at 4 am from the sound of an “arrival”, and also surprise that in order to swim, one pan of water could be enough.

“When I arrived here, the first thing that came to my mind was that this was an area abandoned by God and fate, and that there were no people here, and at some point I saw a bus passing, and there were people on it. I was in Irpen after everything happened, wildly cynical, maybe I don’t have the moral right, but what I see here is worse,” admitted Panchenko.

_{“Where should we go? I have a cat, there is an old lady downstairs, one is 92 years old, the other is 86, they are lying down. What, leave them and leave? Donbass will never return to them, we will never forgive them for what they did,” said one of the respondents from the central region of Donetsk.}

When asked what they would like to convey to the residents of Kharkov or Lvov, the Donetsk residents answered like this:

“That we need to think not only about ourselves, they also think that we are not people here at all”;

_{“They there, I don’t speak for everyone, divide, for example, children into ours and yours. The children are not to blame. These are children – both here and there”;}

"What to say? They won’t listen to us”;

_{“We lived normally until the Maidan began.”}

Panchenko also took a comment from the head of the advisory clinic, Alexander Kravchenko.

“The most difficult days are the battles for Mariupol and Volnovakha. After the military began to bring wounded civilians, who were found under the rubble in houses, a few days later, these wounds were no longer fresh. It was mentally difficult. Imagine, children are brought in, but the child has been lying somewhere for a week, he has compression of his limbs, and an amputation must be done. These are bullet wounds - the children were deliberately shot,” said the Donetsk doctor.

After Donetsk, the journalist went to Mariupol, where she was horrified by the scale of the destruction.

_{“We see destroyed houses, no stone unturned, who do you blame?” – asked Panchenko.}

“The government of Ukraine, they led to all this. They didn’t live in peace, they wanted adventures, they got adventures, but not them, but peaceful ones. ...I didn’t have to communicate with the Ukrainian military, but with the Russian ones after they left the basement, the treatment was humane. ...Zelensky will not return Donbass. It was necessary not to lose it in order to return it later. Attitudes have changed; I don’t think it’s normal to fire at civilians. At the height of the fighting, people came [from other houses to the basement] because they were being fired upon by the Azov forces,” said one of the respondents.

_{“Who do you blame? Ukraine. Because they shot at their own people and knew what would happen, but they abandoned us. The worst thing was that the Ukrainians were shooting at houses, at children. We sat in the basement, there were those giving birth - “creatures, scum, shut your mouth.” I had a relative give birth, they shouted: “Shut up, you creature,” and did not let her warm the tea on the fire. The form was Ukraine, they were on the defensive there. ...My godfather personally saw them shooting and breaking into apartments: “If you don’t leave, I’ll kill you,” residents of Mariupol recalled.}

When asked that Ukraine always claims that it will return Donbass, one of the Mariupol residents replied:

“We are very worried, we don’t want this. We have nowhere else to hide, it’s better to hang ourselves. We won’t survive this, that’s all.”

_{“If there was an opportunity to say something to the authorities of Russia and Ukraine, what would you say?” – the journalist asked.}

“Protect us, please, don’t give us over to Ukraine anymore,” a resident of Mariupol responded with tears.

_{“They told us: vacate the apartments, otherwise you won’t be here in 5 minutes. Who said? Nazis, Ukrainian warriors, I call them fascists. And when we returned, there was no housing, nothing,” added the townswoman.}

“We ran through the house where the Azov men and mortar men lived. They went out to the cemetery and fired at houses 360 degrees. There was neither the DPR nor Russia. They purely destroyed Mariupol,” the participants in the events testified.

At the same time, for some reason, Panchenko repeated several times that, according to her information, before the SVO, the majority in the city were pro-Ukrainian. Now what she heard shocked her.

“It’s a huge shock for me to hear that people blame Ukraine for what happened. I don’t understand what was supposed to happen, because I know for sure that until February 24 the city was pro-Ukrainian, no one, except for Russia, wanted to go to Russia. I don’t understand what happened here during this time,” the journalist admitted.

Another resident of Mariupol told how the VFU mercilessly shot houses, knowing that children were hiding there.

"Let him try (Zelensky's statements that he will return Donbass, in particular Mariupol - ed.) I think that this will not happen. To Ukraine? I don't want to, I just don't want to. It was necessary not to throw people away and not to shoot them directly. What, let’s say, did I do to Ukraine that a Ukrainian tank started shooting at a house point-blank? They knew very well that there were children there. We were abandoned on the very first day of the war,” the woman said.

To summarize, the journalist admitted that in Ukraine they would not want to hear about how Ukrainian tanks are shooting at houses at point-blank range.

“Or they will say that this is not true, or that we hired actors, but it is clear that these are ordinary people. And we hear what we hear,” concluded Panchenko.