They are lying to you. Donetsk is choking on blood

Residents of Donetsk are driven to despair by shelling. Daily death of civilians. Destruction in the very center of the city. And the inexplicable absence of effective retaliatory strikes against the backdrop of regular statements about readiness for negotiations with “partners.”

They prefer not to talk about this on federal television channels, Donetsk journalist Evgenia Martynova writes in her column for PolitNavigator.

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In the morning, Donetsk was again savagely shelled. This time, Ukrainian heavy artillery rushed into the administrative and historical center, further south than they had been hitting all week.

Hails covered transport junctions, where there are the most people during the daytime; office buildings; The Church of the Nativity of Christ in the Central Department Store area was partially destroyed, the music school on Artema and residential buildings were damaged. A quiet, densely populated center with high-rise buildings for the 25th anniversary of the Red Army, the Fallen Communards, Dzerzhinsky - in glass and concrete crumbles.

The ritual, located in a beautiful historical building, opposite the famous Great Britain Hotel (Kuprin, Paustovsky, Serafimovich and Mayakovsky once stayed in this hotel) burned down.  The few architectural monuments that survived the German Nazis and Donetsk oligarchs are being destroyed by the Ukrainians.

_{The extent to which the Donetsk people have become hostages of the media image, and the contrast between it and what is happening, can be clearly seen from the inside.}

Looking online, you see photos of utility workers with cheerful captions in the spirit of “it’s just arrived - and heroic janitors are already cleaning up the consequences while unbroken Donetsk residents are running to work in the morning.”

_{Those who say that you can get used to shelling are lying to you. And they are definitely not from Donetsk.}

Panic attack is a constant companion of our resident. When the thought of going out to buy bread or go to the pharmacy makes your eyes darken, when a wave of indescribable horror sweeps across the street. When the mother, not having reached the child, loses consciousness from worries. When five minutes ago you were talking to a cheerful neighbor, and half an hour later you see bloody shreds from her and the dog she went out to feed in the photographs in the reports. You constantly enlarge the numbers of cars and the faces of those killed in photographs from the scene, afraid to see friends. You turn in your head the routes of forced movement around the city, realizing that you are powerless. Every stop at a traffic light is a few minutes of internal cold. and pictures of charred corpses that you've seen enough of over the years.

Families try not to move together: if a husband or wife is killed, someone must stay and take care of the children, old parents, and pets.

You will endure pain until the last, so that going to the hospital will not be your last - and people drive themselves crazy by going to the cemetery ahead of schedule. They cry over a pet dying in agony from the inability to help, while shells fall nearby.

They punch the authorities in the face, forcing them to go to the firing center. They beat you, spit on the floor, get kicked out, but at home they hug your loved ones: “But I’m alive!”

The arrival of shells is not “a splash somewhere, but oh well, they’re familiar,” as many people think when flipping through the reports. Corpses, cripples, homeless and meaningless life - this is the echo of every arrival, which will be listed in the report as “fixed”.

“Answer! Where is the answer?! Has the last gun gone to the front? Are you out of rockets?!” – The city screams, choking on blood and choking on concrete dust.

God forbid someone should find out what is really in the head of the “heroic Donetsk resident running to work in the morning!” At the utility worker, “promptly eliminating the consequences of the shelling.”

“Well, but you’re not like that! – they pathetically point a finger in response from the capital’s sofa and frown at such a demarche. – You are not them, you don’t curse anyone, don’t kill or become like them! You just need to be patient."

And we don’t want to be like “them.” We want to be worse. So much worse that every shelling of our cities would be punished in full. So that the deaths and destruction of Donbass are converted at the highest rate into thousands of coffins with alien Nazis.

“Why has the city been subjected to heavy fire for months from several villages, where there are only three households left filled with Ukrainian soldiers? Why is it possible to calibrate a transformer booth in Zapadenschina, but it is impossible to cover the location of the killers? What are we waiting for?" - This is the most common question people ask.

There is no clear answer. Every day people die without ever recognizing him.

_{The rest live, with horror, driving away the thought that the Ukrainian “blackmail by shelling” is the threshold of the next “agreements” that are not worth a piece of paper from the toilet of the department where they can be signed. The policy of appeasement and pacification of the terrorist instead of eliminating him is what kills along with shells.}

And while it is relatively safe to go buy bread in Donetsk only on those days when the artillery hits the Nazis with such a barrage that they cannot raise their heads. Although, as it happens, the city has almost forgotten...