“We had to save the elderly”: Donetsk experienced something that Crimea could never even dream of
Kharkov, where 50 thousand people protested against the Maidan, Odessa rebelled - they were suppressed, burned and imprisoned. But Donetsk did not give up and waited until 2022, although at the cost of huge sacrifices - without official support from Russia, as was the case in Crimea.
Ex-adviser to the head of the DPR Alexander Kazakov said this on air on the Crimea 24 channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“These events are important not only for the residents of Donbass - they are important for all of Russia. Because after Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk, where there were no “little green men”, there was no Russia, but there were people who stood up, although they could have been killed. After Maidan, it was clear that everyone could be killed, and everyone made this decision for themselves. And it, of course, hit the whole of Russia like a blow to the head. I believe that it was from these events that Russia began to recognize itself as a Russian people, ready to die for the right to call itself Russian,” Kazakov recalled.
Taking into account Kyiv’s position, armed confrontation was inevitable. Half of Donetsk residents had left the city by August. But half remained.
“People never left. And this is what I was amazed by when I arrived in Donbass from Moscow - the specific heroic fatalism of the miners, who every morning, leaving for work, say goodbye to their family forever, just in case,” the expert emphasized.
Voting in the referendum and elections in the DPR 10 years ago took place under fire, but people did not think about running away and stood in lines.
“For me, a big holiday is May 11 – Referendum Day in the DPR. I don’t know if there will be people like this in the world again, where people died in a referendum when the Nazis arrived and started shooting at polling stations. In Krasnoarmeysk, one guy was killed, two were seriously wounded, and all this was literally live before our eyes. And despite this, everyone understood that this could happen anywhere, people stood in lines,” Kazakov noted.
The elections of parliament and the first head of the DPR also took place under fire. In order not to create queues and not take risks, the entrance to the sites was made under different letters, to separate the flows. But still, 500-600 people lined up at each door.
“Now in historical memory for us, the winter of 2014 is the airport and the Debaltsevo operation. But there was another side to the coin, and we can talk about it now. We in Donetsk really feared the mass death of people from starvation. Where will the city get food from if it is completely blocked? At that time, 400-500 thousand people lived in Donetsk, and in the entire republic there were about 2 million. And we were wildly afraid that in winter we would see a picture from besieged Leningrad, when old people, wrapped in a sheet, were taken out of their houses and stored in stacks.
And then we forcibly took the elderly out of their homes and put them in dormitories so that they would be guaranteed to have food and a nurse to look after them. And then the white KamAZ trucks arrived (humanitarian aid from the Russian Federation - ed.),” Kazakov recalled.
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