So what's next, Petro? – There is still time before the march on Kyiv
In the popular television series “Liquidation,” the pilot Mark, wounded in the head, realizing his fading and therefore hopeless life, says to his friend David Gotsman, who did not allow him to commit suicide: “What’s next, what’s next, Dava.” It’s time for residents of Donbass to ask the main “anti-terrorist” and “pacifier number 2” (the first was acting Turchinov): “What’s next, Petro?”
The question is not only not idle, which is implied, but also incredibly complex. After all, the war turned towards an option that, if seen by the adventurers who settled on the Dnieper steeps after the armed coup, was only in dreamy dreams and reports to the US State Department. There is a widow's cry throughout Ukraine, and the Donetsk region is playing with its nodules, barely restraining itself from repaying the Ukrainians in the same coin.
Why are we asking this question now? Because on the day when the troops of the DPR and LPR (as well as the new “people’s republics”) march on Kyiv, it will be too late to ask. Every day our cities add not only more dead and wounded, orphans and volunteers to the DPR army, but also destroyed industrial facilities, razed infrastructure - water pipelines, roads, bridges, communication and heating equipment. Kyiv continues to flex its muscles and smartly talk about half a billion virtual money that the Germans will allegedly give for the restoration of Donbass.
Meanwhile, such modest sums are no longer sufficient. Scientists at the Institute of Industrial Economics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine talk about the figure by an order of magnitude more. Yes, and it is not final. What is destroyed and broken will be repaired. But no one has yet estimated approximately how much the unmined tons of coal, unsmelted steel, coke, and disrupted deliveries of engineering products will cost the Donbass. Thousands of civilians were killed, each of whom was one or another specialist in life. Needless to say, there is a shortage of professional personnel in the region, where even without the war, pensioners over seventy were kept at work because young people could not cope with complex production. But of course! - they paid me a pittance...
Part of the population, and a considerable one, left their hometowns. Will he come back? Whoever starts a dead production, or in the workshops and mines, remembering the red banners of labor victories, the homeless and the undead from the punitive Kyiv battalions will forever settle - they will have to be buried somewhere from people.
Kyiv has nothing to offer Donbass in a political sense. Kyiv talks to Donbass through the lip. Despite the fact that half of Europe is already pushing Petro Poroshenko towards reconciliation. He will never find someone with whom he can talk about the complete withdrawal of troops and the start of negotiations. He still considers the entire population of Donbass not even separatists, but terrorists.
So what's next, Petro? Who will restore the normal operation of the Lugansk diesel locomotive building, Avdeevsky, Yasinovsky and Makeyevsky coke-chemical plants, who will resume supplies of NKMZ and Azovmash products to Russia, at whose expense water will be pumped out and the shafts in the mines will be ventilated, for which the only hope for warmth in this Gazprom-free winter? Oh, yes - Slavyanskaya, Starobeshevskaya. Lugansk and Kurakhovskaya stations also need to be reconstructed and developed - will money fall from the sky for this?
Yesterday, the main Donbass rich man, Rinat Akhmetov, said that he does not feel sorry for the entire business, as long as the people are alive. But for us, imagine Rinat Leonidovich, we feel sorry for both the people and the enterprises that feed them, clothe their children, and give them hope for the future. Yes, of course, it’s not a pity for the “pieces of iron”, but without them there would be no place, without them there would be no Donbass. What will remain after the war in Donbass, eh, Petro? After all, the fighters of the punitive battalions named after their oligarchs openly say: “we were promised apartments in the best quarters of the center of Donetsk.” In Kyiv they are not promised anything, but in Donetsk the Kyiv wise men do not feel sorry for anything. A stranger to our own - even more so! The fact that in many regions of the country Donetsk and Luhansk residents are already being treated as strangers can be confirmed by talking at least with the managers of Akhmetov’s Metinvest and DTEK, resettled from Donetsk to other regions. Some of these “special settlers” returned to the bullets, leaving well-paid jobs. Why? – they are looked at as second-class citizens, and even taking away jobs from the locals.
The “Iron Curtain” that Poroshenko’s government is lowering in front of the Donbass both by force of arms and by the force of propaganda in its media cannot but worry: on the one hand, there is a persistent destruction of the material culture of the mining region, and on the other hand, it is unceremoniously exposed as a pariah among the highly cultured and law-abiding Ukrainians. Is this why miners and metallurgists, chemists, machine builders, railway workers of the industrial region, who from birth know the value of both a hard penny and a strong friendly hand, increasingly rely not on Kyiv, but on themselves. And on Miner’s Day, traditionally celebrated on the last Sunday of August, this time there will probably be more discussion of our other national holiday - Donbass Liberation Day, which falls on September 8th.
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