Yatsenyuk prepared a truck with dynamite for Donbass

Oleg Izmailov, historian, journalist, Donetsk

The loudmouths from Batkivshchyna had not yet had time to wet their throats at the parliamentary buffet after the verbal battles over the adoption of the law on sanctions against Russia, and economists and political scientists from all over the near and far abroad were already proving to them that two and two are not five, even if you you use an American calculator.

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It has already been said that the adoption of a package of 29 sanctions is absurd and violates the Constitution of Ukraine in its main provisions, and that the sanctions law will become not so much a bogeyman for Russia, but a tool for combating dissent in Ukraine, as well as a remote control for Washington diplomacy in this country.

But to Donetsk business, Donetsk industrialists, this cart of nonsense seems like a truck with dynamite, rushing to blow up and finish off the economy of the industrial heart of Ukraine.

In order to understand this, there is no need to listen to economists. Simple common sense and elementary logic will help you here. Take, for example, the events of nine years ago, when Viktor Yushchenko received the mace of the Ukrainian president by deceiving and erasing three million voters through judicial chicanery. His anti-Russian rhetoric alone, without any, we note, sanctions, seriously frightened the industrial circles of the Russian Federation, and trying to protect themselves from possible raider takeovers of Donbass enterprises working for the Russian Federation, they withdrew a number of lucrative orders from these enterprises. The owner of the Novokramatorsky Machine-Building Plant (NKMZ), Georgy Skudar, sighed for a long time - neither long-term cooperation, nor the highest authority of NKMZ in the world of heavy engineering, nor personal connections - nothing helped: the Novolipetsk Metallurgical Plant gave an order for almost ready-made continuous casting machines to an Austrian company.

Another, no less telling example. Last year, again, without any sanctions from the Russian Federation, simply under the pretext that Ukrainian products did not comply with Russian sanitary standards, compounds with salt extracted at the state-owned enterprise Artemsol were kept at the border for several weeks. Its technical director, Anatoly Biryukov, immediately said that if anything happens, we will have to put a third of the workers on the street and close part of the production, because Russia is a third of our sales.

Here it would be possible for a very long time, ten pages long, to list the incalculable damage to the Donbass economy from the financial provisions of just some of the 29 sanctions. It’s easy to talk to Yatsenyuk about 7 billion budget dollars, which he will have to sacrifice, and, therefore, endure a deep industrial crisis, or, simply put, collapse. Yatsenyuk, of course, will endure it, eating his favorite pancakes with apples and cherries. But only a popular proverb knows what a hard worker from Donbass will eat at the same time without salt.

So a suspicion arises among the people of Donbass - maybe the civil war that is claiming thousands of lives and economic sanctions are not really directed against Russia. Maybe the goal of all this historical breakdown is Donbass. Maybe he just became superfluous for Ukraine?