The First Panel:

Testimonies of War and
 Everyday Life in
 Donbass

Conference Proceedings

 

On the screen: Guy Mettan. On the table (from left to right): Jean-Christophe Emmenegger, Patrik Baab, Luís M. Loureiro

The morning session of the conference was devoted to the topic Testimonies of war and everyday life in Donbass. It brought together a diverse group of speakers from across Europe, each offering their unique perspectives and experiences. The speeches delivered at this session will be published on this thread as they are received in written form.

Order of Speakers

·      Guy Mettan (Switzerland)

·      Christelle Néant (France)

·      Benoît Paré (France)

·      Jean-Christophe Emmenegger (Switzerland)

·      Patrik Baab (Germany)

The first three participated via ZOOM, while the last two participated in person. The session was moderated by Luís M. Loureiro (Portugal), who introduced the speeches and the speakers and ensured a cohesive exchange among the participants.

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Testemunhos da Guerra e da

Vida Quotidiana na

Donbass

Actas da Conferência

 

A sessão da manhã da conferência foi dedicada ao tema Testemunhos da guerra e da vida quotidiana na Donbass [1]. Reuniu um grupo diversificado de oradores de vários países da Europa, cada um oferecendo as suas perspectivas e experiências únicas. Os discursos proferidos nesta sessão serão publicados neste lugar à medida que forem recebidos por escrito.

A ordem dos oradores foi a seguinte:

·     ● Guy Mettan (Suíça)

·      ●Christelle Néant (França)

·      ●Benoît Paré (França)

·      ●Jean-Christophe Emmenegger (Suíça)

·      ●Patrik Baab (Alemanha)

Os três primeiros intervieram via ZOOM, os dois últimos presencialmente. A sessão foi moderada por Luís M. Loureiro (Portugal), que introduziu os discursos e os oradores e assegurou a interacção entre os participantes.

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Nota editorial

[1] O rio Donets é o principal afluente do rio Don. Donets significa o “pequeno Don” em Russo e em Ucraniano. A bacia hidrográfica do Donets, uma vasta área de cerca de 99 mil Km2 (maior do que área total de Portugal [continente e ilhas]), dá pelo nome de Donbass, que significa “bacia do Donets”. Em Português, há o hábito de enunciar Donbass com o artigo “o”. Não vejo razão para isso, quer tomemos como referente experiencial (denotatum) desse nome a região mineira e industrial do Donets, quer a bacia hidrográfica do Donets. Daí se segue a opção  da comissão organizadora  da Conferência de enunciar  Donbass com o artigo “a” (e não com o artigo “o”) em todos os documentos preparatórios da conferência. Essa não é a opção de outros conferencistas, que, naturalmente, respeitamos. J.C.S.

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What have we done to the people of Donbas?

(introductory notes of the moderator to the morning roundtable on the topic
 Testimonies of war and Daily life in the Donbas)

by

Luís M. Loureiro

 (University of Minho, Portugal)

 

Luís Loureiro during his speech

Friends and Colleagues,

First, I must tell you how deeply honoured I feel to be here, discussing PEACE.

Let there be no doubts. We are gathered here to talk about REAL peace, not some euphemism that we are already sick of listening to, time and time again, on the media oracles, about the infamous, should I say, orwellian trope of “reaching peace through war”.

Therefore, I’m honoured, and I must thank “the four musketeers” for that. Our four good friends that thought of and brought this conference to us.

Wars should never happen, but if there’s one war, this particular war we’re talking about today, this is the one that I’m absolutely certain could have been avoided long ago.

It would have been avoided if the western promises and guarantees of “no NATO expansion”, made in 1990 had been kept.

It would have been avoided, if a country situated on the crossroads of Europe, had been fully respected on its sovereignty and on its democratic choices, instead of being used as a pawn for distant geopolitical interests, and consequently turned against its principal neighbour.

And, as a former journalist and journalism researcher and professor, I also strongly believe that this war would have been avoided, if the media had done their job, with a balanced, honest and nuanced journalistic coverage, since the early 1990s.

The problem is, simply put, we have had loads and loads of fearmongering, enemy creation and warmongering propaganda, instead of journalism, in the last 30 years.

Journalism has become nothing more than a convenient mask for the real powers and their influent lobbies in the war business, to make us, the public, believe on the irresponsible and dangerous narratives we have been fed, throughout these past decades.

The people in the Donbas oblasti are primal victims of this.

No recognition or emotional compensation will do enough for all the families that were torn apart, for the young ones and the children that never lived through their childhood, for the villages, towns and cities that had to learn how to live, every single day, on constant distrust, fear, and death.

They are the primal victims.

Too many of their homeplaces and livelihoods are now destroyed. Too many of them had to run for their lives and never came back.  Too many lost their loved ones.  

All this tragedy, because of what?

This question has been occupying my mind since I first started to focus my personal and academic attention on what was going on in the Donbas region.

I have never been there.

I only know it from reports by comrade journalists, like the one I’m substituting here today, the brave Bruno Amaral de Carvalho, and by the people I had the chance to meet overtime. As a former TV reporter, I was a war correspondent in the Middle East, during the 2006 war that Israel waged on Lebanon.

You always get an incomplete view to a war if you only know another different war. But one thing surely applies: all wars are horrible. All of them.

If you don’t know war in your life, please do everything you can, as a citizen, to never get to know one.

As a university researcher, I have been studying war reporting through the theoretical framework of Peace Journalism, a proposal for a more responsible and peace-facilitating-journalism, elaborated some 30 to 40 years ago by one of the greatest sociologists and peace researchers of our time, recently deceased Norwegian professor Johan Galtung.

Apart from reaching, through my studies, to the obvious and, unfortunately, easy conclusion that we could not be farther from Peace Journalism on our mainstream media coverage of the war in Ukraine, I also learned that there’s only one chance we can reverse that.

That chance is a journalism that gives equal voice to the other side. That chance is making journalism that looks for the root historical causes of a conflict.  That chance is having reporters on both sides of a conflict.  That chance is having access to the stories of all the civilian victims of a conflict. Every one of them.

As the great Roger Waters once sang on his last Pink Floyd album: what have we done? What have we done to the people of Donbas?

As I previously said, no emotional reparation will be enough but at least here we are in this European and Citizens’ Conference for Peace in Ukraine, Russia and Europe, to bring about some justice, to show that reality is much more nuanced than the incredibly narrow views we’ve been shown by our media, to cry out to the world, that between black and white there are myriads of colours. And that we will only reach peace in a truthful, meaningful and enduring way if we open our minds — to get to know the unknown and to embrace the difference.

That is the purpose of this morning discussion.

We are dedicating our next two and a half hours to listen closely, and debate, the Testimonies of war and Daily life in the Donbas, with people that many of us learned to admire for their sheer courage and determination in continuously working to honour the more than a decade long suffering of the people of Donbas.

Let’s not forget all the hardship and life threats that these courageous and free thinking European citizens have been enduring, some of them accused by their own governments and often insulted by their fellow countrymen and women, just because they decided to stand against the western dominant narratives and fight, with their testimony and grounded reporting, against the concrete wall of Western propaganda.

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Short notes of the moderator on each of the contributions to this roundtable topic 

--- Swiss journalist and Member of the Parliament Guy Mettan, author, among others, of the book Russie-Occident, une guerre de mille ans: La russophobie de Charlemagne à la crise ukrainienne [Rússia-Ocidente, uma guerra de mil anos: a russofobia de Carlos Magno à crise ucraniana] focused his intervention on the several signs of hope he recognised when traveling through Donbas. There, he testified for the people’s strong resilience spirit while he witnessed heavy reconstruction going on in cities where that was already possible.

--- French journalist Christelle Néant, creator of the news outlet Donbass Insider (renamed International Reporters), living in Donetsk since 2016, while giving an in-depth look at the present living conditions that still include daily Ukrainian shelling of many civilian urban areas and ongoing water shortages, said what would become the synthesis of all this first roundtable’s messages: «no way the people of Donbas will ever want to be part of Ukraine again».

--- Benoît Paré, a French former army officer and international observer for the OSCE, who became for some time a France-Soir columnist writing under the pseudonym of Jean Neige, and the author of books such as Ce Que J’ai Vu en Ukraine: 2015-2022. Journal d’un observateur international, and Ukraine: la grande manipulation. 2022-2024, described the war in Ukraine as «a long-term war of the US deep state to avoid the rapprochement between Russia and Europe»

--- Swiss former journalist and travel writer Jean-Christophe Emmenegger, who has been working as an independent researcher specializing in the history of intelligence and Swiss/Russian relations (he is the author of the books: "Opération Svetlana: les six semaines de la fille de Staline en Suisse"; "Victor Louis. Un agent très special" and "Un Suisse au Donbass", which will be published in April 2026), testified on why the people in Donbas could never be favourable to an all-out war against Ukraine as they consider Ukrainians as their brothers and sisters, many of them having friends and relatives on both sides of the frontlines. This declaration stood out to the moderator as a summary of the totally different approach the Russian side has on this war, far from the deeply russophobic approach we get from listening daily to Ukrainian official authorities, European politicians and western media.

--- German journalist Patrick Baab, former editor of NDR, north german broadcasting TV company, author of the bestselling book On Both Sides of the Front in which he testified on his traveling to the Donbas, explained the three i’s that characterise the western media coverage of this war: incompetence, ignorance and ideology. This explains why journalistic reports on the war treat the Donbas civilians as subhumans which should be enough, on Mr. Baab’s view, to file many editors and journalists under criminal responsibility for their editorial decisions.

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On the screen: Christelle Néant

O que fizemos nós ao povo do Donbass?

(Notas introdutórias do moderador ao painel matinal sobre o tópico 

Testemunhos da guerra e da vida quotidiana na Donbass)

Luís M. Loureiro

(Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

 

Colegas e amigos,

Em primeiro lugar, devo dizer-vos o quanto me sinto honrado por estar aqui, a discutir a PAZ.

Que não haja dúvidas. Estamos aqui reunidos para falar da paz REAL, não de um qualquer eufemismo que já estamos cansados de ouvir, repetidamente, nos oráculos da comunicação social, sobre o infame, devo dizer, lema orwelliano de «alcançar a paz através da guerra».

Por isso, sinto-me honrado e devo agradecer aos «quatro mosqueteiros» por isso. Os nossos quatro bons amigos que pensaram e trouxeram esta conferência até nós.

As guerras nunca deveriam acontecer, mas se há uma guerra, esta guerra em particular de que estamos a falar hoje, esta é aquela que tenho a certeza absoluta de que poderia ter sido evitada há muito tempo.

Teria sido evitada se as promessas e garantias ocidentais de «não expansão da NATO», feitas em 1990, tivessem sido cumpridas.

Teria sido evitada se um país situado na encruzilhada da Europa tivesse sido totalmente respeitado na sua soberania e nas suas escolhas democráticas, em vez de ser usado como peão para interesses geopolíticos distantes e, consequentemente, virado contra o seu principal vizinho.

E, como ex-jornalista, investigador e professor de jornalismo, também acredito firmemente que esta guerra teria sido evitada se os meios de comunicação tivessem feito o seu trabalho, com uma cobertura jornalística equilibrada, honesta e matizada, desde o início da década de 1990.

O problema é, simplesmente, que nos últimos 30 anos temos sido alvo de uma propaganda incessante de medo, criação de inimigos e belicismo, em vez de jornalismo.

O jornalismo tornou-se nada mais do que uma máscara conveniente para os verdadeiros poderes e para os influentes lobbies do negócio da guerra, para nos fazer acreditar, a nós, o público, nas narrativas irresponsáveis e perigosas que nos têm sido dadas a consumir ao longo das últimas décadas.

As pessoas nos oblasti do Donbass são as principais vítimas disso [1].

Nenhum reconhecimento ou compensação emocional será suficiente para todas as famílias que foram separadas, para os jovens e as crianças que nunca viveram a sua infância, para as aldeias, vilas e cidades que tiveram de aprender a viver, todos os dias, em constante desconfiança, medo e morte.

Eles são as principais vítimas.

Muitas das suas casas e meios de subsistência estão agora destruídos Muitos tiveram de fugir para salvar as suas vidas e nunca mais voltaram. Muitos tiveram de perder os seus entes queridos.

Toda esta tragédia, porquê?

Esta questão tem ocupado a minha mente desde que comecei a concentrar a minha atenção pessoal e académica no que se passava no Donbass.

Nunca estive lá.

Só conheço a região através de relatos de camaradas jornalistas, como aquele que estou a substituir aqui hoje, o corajoso Bruno Amaral de Carvalho, e das pessoas que tive a oportunidade de conhecer ao longo do tempo. Como ex-repórter de televisão, fui correspondente de guerra no Médio Oriente, durante a guerra de 2006, que Israel então lançou contra o Líbano.

Teremos sempre uma visão incompleta de uma guerra se conhecermos apenas outra guerra, diferente. Mas uma coisa é certa: todas as guerras são horríveis. Todas. 

Se nunca passámos por uma guerra na vida, temos o dever de fazer tudo o que pudermos, como cidadãos, para nunca passarmos por uma.

Como investigador universitário, tenho estudado a cobertura jornalística da guerra através do quadro teórico do Jornalismo da Paz, uma proposta para um jornalismo mais responsável e facilitador da paz, elaborada há cerca de 30 a 40 anos por um dos maiores sociólogos e investigadores da paz do nosso tempo, o professor norueguês Johan Galtung, recentemente falecido.

Além de chegar, através dos meus estudos, à conclusão óbvia e, infelizmente, fácil, de que não poderíamos estar mais longe do Jornalismo de Paz na cobertura da guerra na Ucrânia pelos nossos média mainstream, também aprendi que só temos uma hipótese de reverter isso.

Essa hipótese é um jornalismo que dê voz igual ao outro lado.  Essa hipótese é fazer um jornalismo que vá à procura das causas históricas, profundas, de um conflito.  Essa hipótese é ter repórteres em ambos os lados de um conflito. Essa hipótese é ter acesso às histórias de todas as vítimas civis de um conflito. Todas elas.

Como o grande Roger Waters cantou no seu último álbum dos Pink Floyd: what have we done? O que fizemos nós aos povos do Donbass?

Como disse anteriormente, nenhuma reparação emocional será suficiente, mas, pelo menos, aqui estamos nós, nesta Conferência Europeia e Cidadã pela Paz na Ucrânia, Rússia e Europa, para lhes fazermos alguma justiça, para mostrarmos que a realidade é muito mais matizada do que as visões incrivelmente estreitas que nos têm sido apresentadas pelos nossos meios de comunicação social, para gritarmos ao mundo que entre o preto e o branco existem miríades de cores. E que só alcançaremos a paz de forma verdadeira, significativa e duradoura se abrirmos as nossas mentes — a conhecer o desconhecido e a abraçar a diferença.

Esse é o objetivo do debate desta manhã.

Vamos dedicar as próximas duas horas e meia a ouvir atentamente, e a debater, os testemunhos da guerra e da vida quotidiana no Donbass, com pessoas que muitos de nós aprendemos a admirar pela sua enorme coragem e determinação em trabalhar continuamente para honrar o sofrimento de mais de uma década do povo do Donbass. Não nos podemos esquecer de todas as dificuldades e, mesmo, ameaças à vida que estes cidadãos europeus corajosos e de pensamento livre têm suportado, alguns deles acusados pelos seus próprios governos e frequentemente insultados pelos seus compatriotas, apenas porque decidiram opor-se às narrativas dominantes ocidentais e lutar, com os seus testemunhos e reportagens fundamentadas, contra o muro de betão da propaganda ocidental.

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NOTAS BREVES DO MODERADOR SOBRE CADA UMA DAS INTERVENÇÕES  DESTE PAINEL

--- O jornalista e deputado suíço Guy Mettan, autor, entre outros, do livro Russie-Occident, une guerre de mille ans : La russophobie de Charlemagne à la crise ukrainienne [Rússia-Ocidente, uma guerra de mil anos: a russofobia de Carlos Magno à crise ucraniana], centrou a sua intervenção nos vários sinais de esperança que reconheceu ao viajar pelo Donbass. Lá, testemunhou o forte espírito de resiliência do povo, ao mesmo tempo que assistiu à intensa reconstrução em curso nas cidades onde isso já era possível.

--- A jornalista francesa Christelle Néant, criadora do órgão electrónico de notícias Donbass Insider (renomeado e transformado na agência de notícias International Reporters), que vive em Donetsk desde 2016, começou por dar uma visão aprofundada das atuais condições de vida, que incluem bombardeamentos diários ucranianos em muitas áreas urbanas civis, e contínua escassez de água. Fez, depois, aquela que se tornaria a síntese de todas as mensagens desta primeira mesa-redonda da conferência: «de forma alguma o povo do Donbass desejará fazer novamente parte da Ucrânia.»

--- Benoît Paré, ex-oficial do exército francês e ex-observador internacional da OSCE, que, como colunista do France-Soir, escreveu inicialmente sob o pseudónimo de Jean Neige, autor de livros como Ce Que J’ai Vu en Ukraine: 2015-2022. Journal d’un observateur international [O que eu vi na Ucrânia : 2025-2022. Diário de um observador internacional] e Ukraine: la grande manipulation. 2022-2024, [Ucrânia: a grande manipulação.2022-2024] descreveu a guerra na Ucrânia como uma guerra de longo prazo do “Estado profundo” dos EUA para evitar a aproximação entre a Rússia e a Europa.

--- O ex-jornalista e escritor de viagens suíço Jean-Christophe Emmenegger, que trabalha como investigador independente especializado na história dos serviços secretos e nas relações entre a Suíça e a Rússia (é autor dos livros: Opération Svetlana: les six semaines de la fille de Staline en Suisse;  Victor Louis. Un agent très special e Un Suisse au Donbass que será publicado en Abril de 2026), testemunhou sobre o motivo pelo qual os povos do Donbass nunca poderiam ser favoráveis a uma guerra total contra a Ucrânia, uma vez que consideram os ucranianos como seus irmãos e irmãs. Muitos deles têm amigos e parentes em ambos os lados da linha de frente. Esta declaração chamou a atenção do moderador, como um resumo da abordagem totalmente diferente que o lado russo tem mantido sobre a guerra, muito afastada da abordagem profundamente russofóbica que ouvimos diariamente da boca das autoridades oficiais ucranianas, dos políticos europeus e dos meios de comunicação ocidentais.

--- O jornalista alemão Patrick Baab, ex-editor da NDR, emissora pública de rádio e televisão do norte da Alemanha, autor do best-seller On Both Sides of the Front [Em ambos os lados da frente], explicou os três i’s que caracterizam a cobertura dos média ocidentais sobre esta guerra: incompetência, ignorância e ideologia. Isto explica por que razão as reportagens jornalísticas sobre a guerra desumanizam a população civil do Donbass, o que, na opinião do Sr. Baab, deveria ser suficiente para responsabilizar criminalmente muitos editores e jornalistas pelas suas decisões editoriais.

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On the screen: Benoît Paré. 

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Qu’avons-nous fait du peuple du Donbass ?

(Notes introductives à la table ronde matinale sur le thème Témoignages de la guerre et de la vie quotidienne dans le Donbass)

Luís M. Loureiro

 (Université de Minho, Portugal)

 

Chers amis et collègues,

Tout d'abord, je tiens à vous dire à quel point je suis honoré d'être ici pour discuter la PAIX.

Qu'il n'y ait aucun doute à ce sujet. Nous sommes réunis ici pour parler de la VRAIE paix, et non d'un euphémisme dont nous sommes déjà lassés d'entendre parler, encore et encore, dans les médias, à propos du célèbre, devrais-je dire, cliché orwellien « atteindre la paix par la guerre ».

Je suis donc honoré et je tiens à remercier les « quatre mousquetaires » pour cela. Nos quatre bons amis qui ont imaginé et organisé cette conférence.

Les guerres ne devraient jamais avoir lieu, mais s'il y en a une, celle dont nous parlons aujourd'hui, je suis absolument certain qu'elle aurait pu être évitée depuis longtemps.

Elle aurait pu être évitée si les promesses et les garanties occidentales de « non-expansion de l’OTAN », qui ont été faites en 1990, avaient été tenues.

Elle aurait pu être évitée si un pays situé au carrefour de l'Europe avait été pleinement respecté dans sa souveraineté et ses choix démocratiques, au lieu d'être utilisé comme un pion pour des intérêts géopolitiques lointains, et par conséquent retourné contre son principal voisin.

Et, en tant qu'ancien journaliste, chercheur et professeur en journalisme, je suis également convaincu que cette guerre aurait pu être évitée si les médias avaient fait leur travail, en assurant une couverture journalistique équilibrée, honnête et nuancée depuis le début des années 1990.

Le problème, pour faire simple, c'est qu'au cours des 30 dernières années, nous avons été abreuvés de propagande alarmiste, de création d'ennemis et de bellicisme, au lieu de journalisme.

Le journalisme n’est plus qu’un masque pratique pour les véritables pouvoirs et leurs lobbies influents dans le secteur de la guerre, afin de nous faire croire, à nous, le public, aux récits irresponsables et dangereux qui nous ont été servis tout au long de ces dernières décennies.

Les habitants des oblasti du Donbass en sont les premières victimes.

Aucune reconnaissance ni compensation émotionnelle ne suffira pour toutes les familles qui ont été déchirées, pour les jeunes et les enfants qui n'ont jamais vécu leur enfance, pour les villages, les villes et les cités qui ont dû apprendre à vivre, chaque jour, dans la méfiance, la peur et la mort constantes.

Ils sont les premières victimes.

Trop de leurs maisons et de leurs moyens de subsistance sont désormais détruits. Trop d'entre eux ont dû fuir pour sauver leur vie et ne sont jamais revenus.  Trop d'entre eux ont perdu des êtres chers.

Toute cette tragédie, pour quelle raison ?

Cette question m'occupe l'esprit depuis que j'ai commencé à m'intéresser, à titre personnel et académique, à ce qui se passait dans la région du Donbass.

Je ne m'y suis jamais rendu.

Je ne la connais qu’à travers les reportages de camarades journalistes, comme celui que je remplace ici aujourd'hui, le courageux Bruno Amaral de Carvalho, et à travers les personnes que j'ai eu la chance de rencontrer au fil du temps. En tant qu'ancien reporter de télévision, j'ai été correspondant de guerre au Moyen-Orient pendant la guerre menée par Israël contre le Liban en 2006.

On n'a toujours qu'une vision incomplète d'une guerre si l'on ne connaît qu'une autre guerre différente. Mais une chose est sûre : toutes les guerres sont horribles. Toutes sans exception.

Si vous n'avez jamais connu la guerre dans votre vie, faites tout ce qui est en votre pouvoir, en tant que citoyen, pour ne jamais la connaître.

En tant qu'universitaire, j'ai étudié le reportage de guerre à travers le cadre théorique du journalisme de paix, une proposition pour un journalisme plus responsable et favorisant la paix, élaborée il y a environ 30 à 40 ans par l'un des plus grands sociologues et chercheurs en matière de paix de notre époque, le professeur norvégien Johan Galtung, récemment décédé.

Outre le fait d'être parvenu, à travers mes études, à la conclusion évidente et, malheureusement, facile que nous ne pourrions être plus éloignés du journalisme de paix dans notre couverture médiatique mainstream de la guerre en Ukraine, j'ai également appris qu'il n'y a qu'une seule chance de renverser cette situation.

Cette chance, c'est un journalisme qui donne une voix égale à l'autre partie.

Cette chance, c'est un journalisme qui recherche les causes historiques profondes d'un conflit.

Cette chance, c'est d'avoir des reporters des deux côtés d'un conflit.

Cette chance, c'est d'avoir accès aux récits de toutes les victimes civiles d'un conflit. Chacune d'entre elles.

Comme le chantait le grand Roger Waters dans son dernier album avec Pink Floyd : what have we done ? Qu'avons-nous fait au peuple du Donbass ?

Comme je l'ai déjà dit, aucune réparation émotionnelle ne sera suffisante, mais au moins, nous sommes ici, à cette Conférence Européenne et Citoyenne pour la Paix en Ukraine, en Russie et en Europe, pour rendre justice, pour montrer que la réalité est beaucoup plus nuancée que les visions incroyablement étroites que nous ont présentées nos médias, pour crier au monde entier qu'entre le noir et le blanc, il existe une myriade de couleurs. Et que nous ne parviendrons à une paix véritable, significative et durable que si nous ouvrons nos esprits, afin de découvrir l'inconnu et d'accepter la différence.

Tel est l'objectif de la discussion de ce matin.

Nous allons consacrer les deux heures et demie qui viennent à écouter attentivement et à débattre des témoignages sur la guerre et la vie quotidienne dans le Donbass, avec des personnes que beaucoup d'entre nous ont appris à admirer pour leur courage et leur détermination sans faille à œuvrer sans relâche pour honorer plus d'une décennie de souffrances endurées par la population du Donbass. N'oublions pas toutes les épreuves et les menaces qui pèsent sur la vie de ces citoyens européens courageux et libres d'esprit, dont certains sont accusés par leur propre gouvernement et souvent insultés par leurs compatriotes, simplement parce qu'ils ont décidé de s'opposer aux discours dominants occidentaux et de lutter, par leurs témoignages et leurs reportages fondés, contre le mur de béton de la propagande occidentale.

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BRÈVES NOTES SUR CHACUNE DES INTERVENTION LORS DE LA TABLE RONDE

--- Le journaliste e deputé suisse Guy Mettan, auteur, entre autres, du livre Russie-Occident, une guerre de mille ans : La russophobie de Charlemagne à la crise ukrainienne, a axé son intervention sur les nombreux signes d'espoir qu'il a pu observer lors de ses voyages dans le Donbass. Il y a témoigné de la forte résilience de la population et a pu constater les importants travaux de reconstruction en cours dans les villes où cela était déjà possible.

--- La journaliste française Christelle Néant, créatrice du site d'information Donbass Insider (rebaptisé et transformé dans l’agence de presse International Reporters), qui vit à Donetsk depuis 2016, noua a donné un aperçu détaillé des conditions de vie actuelles, qui comprennent toujours des bombardements quotidiens de nombreuses zones urbaines civiles par l'Ukraine et des pénuries d'eau persistantes, avant de conclure par ce qui allait devenir la synthèse de tous les messages de cette première table ronde : «il est impossible que les habitants du Donbass veuillent à nouveau faire partie de l'Ukraine.»

--- L’ancien officier français de l’armée de terre et ancien observateur international pour l'OSCE, Benoît Paré, qui est devenu pendant quelque temps chroniqueur pour France-Soir sous le pseudonyme de Jean Neige, auteur des ouvrages Ce Que J’ai Vu en Ukraine: 2015-2022. Journal d’un observateur international, et Ukraine : la grande manipulation. 2022-2024, a décrit la guerre en Ukraine comme une guerre à long terme menée par «l'État profond» américain pour empêcher le rapprochement entre la Russie et l'Europe.

---- L’ex-journaliste suisse et écrivain-voyageur Jean-Christophe Emmenegger, chercheur spécialisé en histoire du renseignement étatique et auteur des livres Opération Svetlana: les six semaines de la fille de Staline en Suisse ; Victor Louis. Un agent très spécial et Un Suisse au Donbas, prévu de parution le 14 avril 2026), a expliqué pourquoi les habitants du Donbass ne pourraient jamais être favorables à une guerre totale contre l'Ukraine, car ils considèrent les Ukrainiens comme leurs frères et sœurs, beaucoup d'entre eux ayant des amis et des parents des deux côtés de la ligne de front. Cette déclaration a frappé le modérateur, car elle résume l'approche totalement différente que la partie russe a de cette guerre, loin de l'approche profondément russophobe que nous entendons quotidiennement de la part des autorités officielles ukrainiennes, des politiciens européens et des médias occidentaux.

--- Le journaliste allemand Patrick Baab, ancien rédacteur en chef de la chaîne de télévision nord-allemande NDR et auteur du best-seller On Both Sides of the Front [Des deux côtés du front], dans lequel il témoigne de ses voyages dans le Donbass, a expliqué les trois « i » qui caractérisent la couverture médiatique occidentale de cette guerre : incompétence, ignorance et idéologie. Cela explique pourquoi les reportages journalistiques sur la guerre traitent les civils du Donbass comme des sous-humains, ce qui devrait suffire, selon M. Baab, pour engager la responsabilité pénale de nombreux rédacteurs en chef et journalistes pour leurs décisions éditoriales.

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Report from Donbas

Guy Mettan

(journalist,  member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva)

                      

‘‘I am simply bearing witness.”

On the screen: Guy Mettan during his speech

Editor’s Note

Guy Mettan did not write down the speech he gave at the conference. We will therefore have to wait for the video recording of the conference to be released before we can retrieve it.

However, his speech was based on a report he wrote in May-June 2024, which appeared simultaneously in Arrêt sur info, in French, and in the Swiss journal Current Concerns. Die Weltwoche has published German-language translations of Parts 1 and 2 together of the report. We have therefore decided, with his agreement, to publish here the first part [Report form Donbas] and second part [In Ukraine, A War for Memory] of this report as it appeared in The Floutist, in May 11 and June 03, 2024, respectively.

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DONESTK — How could they do this to us? Why does Kiev want to destroy us?

These are the questions that the people of Donbas have been asking themselves for the past 10 years. Considered from Switzerland or France, they may seem incongruous, as we are so used to believing that only Ukrainians are suffering from the war with Russia. We don't want to know that the battle has been going on for a decade and has primarily affected the civilian population of Donbas.

For a week in April, I was able to criss-cross the two provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, visiting towns that had been destroyed and those that were being rebuilt, meeting refugees, and talking to people. This is my report.

I have no doubt that this piece will offend many people who are used to seeing the world in black and white. To them I would say what John Steinbeck and Robert Capa said to their detractors when they visited Stalin’s Russia in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War: I am simply bearing witness, reporting what I saw and heard on the other side of the front. Then it’s up to everyone to form an opinion.

Mine is that Russia and the people of Donbas will never stop fighting until they have won.

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This project began in a very Russian way, through an unlikely chain of circumstances. Nine years ago, in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s capital, I met a Tajik entrepreneur from Moscow who was marrying off his daughter. He didn’t speak English and, without paying any attention to my miserable Russian, he invited the delegation I chaired, comprised of Swiss business people, to the wedding. I made a short speech in honour of the bride and her parents.

Since then, Umar Ikromovitch has become a close friend, one that neither distance nor the linguistic barrier could separate. Once or twice a year, on important holidays, he sends me a message via Telegram. In February, I was surprised when he invited me to join him to tour his work in Donbas, a region he had never visited before. Umar is an entrepreneurial builder—of roads, playgrounds, sports fields, and the like. His company employs several hundred workers in the Moscow region and a few dozen in the reconstruction of Donbas.

So, at 3 a.m. on 3 April, he and Nikita, one of his friends from the Russian Ministry of Defence, were waiting for me outside Vnukovo airport to begin our drive to Donbas. Nikita (and it is best I do not give his surname) had prepared the programme and provided the necessary permits, as well as an experienced driver, Volodia. For 10 hours, with a short coffee break at a newly opened petrol station, we drove at breakneck speed down the 1,060 kilometres of the “Prigozhin motorway,” as I nickname it, between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don—the same motorway on which the late leader of the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had set out upon with his tanks last July.

Nothing could be simpler than a Russian motorway. They are always straight. There's not a single bend along the Prigozhin motorway until you reach Rostov. And as the motorway is clear, apart from 50 kilometres of roadworks shortly before Rostov, the journey was quick and effortless, allowing us to travel from the last snows of Moscow to the soft spring of the Sea of Azov in less than half a day. We saw a steady stream of lorries and a few military convoys, although not many of the latter.

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In Rostov, the bustling port and congested capital of southern Russia, we barely had a chance to put down our luggage and take three steps before setting off on our first visit. This was to an enormous pumping and turbine station, located at the mouth of the River Don some 20 kilometres from the city.

Workers are still finishing the external work. Two gigantic tubes, dozens of 20,000 m3 tanks, and eight pumping stations, each with 11 turbines, now transport fresh water to Donetsk, 200 kilometres away, which is deprived of drinking water because of the embargo Ukraine has imposed. Everything is automated. The 3,700 workers started as soon as the republics were reintegrated into the mother country, in November 2022, and finished the huge worksite and the construction of the high-voltage line powering the turbines six months later, in April 2023.

My first conclusion is that, after such rapid and colossal investments, Russia’s will to fight until its final victory seems unshakeable. And I don’t think Russia will ever again agree to separate itself from the Donbas. This territory is now Russian, full stop.

As night fell, we seated ourselves at a table in one of Rostov’s most popular brasseries, facing the peaceful River Don. It was to be a quiet night, and we slept soundly. The following night, with 40 Ukrainian missiles fired at the nearby Morozov’s air base, would prove more animated.

The next morning we set off for Mariupol, 180 kilometres and three hours away. After Taganrog, a small port near the river’s mouth, the road runs alongside the Sea of Azov and is jammed with convoys of lorries coming and going from Donbas. The road is currently being widened. Military vehicles are clearly marked with a “V” or a “Z”—Roman letters, not Cyrillic, adopted at the start of Russia’s intervention to signify victory.

Checkpoints and various controls succeed one another on either side of the Russian border with the Republic of Donetsk. On the side of the road, long convoys wait to be searched. Thanks to our passes, we are soon on ex–Ukrainian territory. Yevgeny, a Russian from Vladivostok who has volunteered for the Donetsk Republic, takes over. He will be our guide and interpreter throughout our stay.

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Shortly before noon we reach the outskirts of Mariupol and enter the zone of Azovstal, the vast steel complex that was totally devastated early in the war. The factory now is nothing but rusting chimneys, tangles of burst pipes, and twisted ironwork. A vision of apocalypse that immediately evokes the Stalingrad tractor factory of Vasily Grossman, the Red Army war correspondent, and Steinbeck and Capa’s Journey to Russia. None of the surrounding houses and apartment blocks survived.

The city centre, however, has survived the war much better: At first glance, half of it was destroyed, half survived. Mariupol is currently undergoing a major renovation. In the central square, the reconstruction of the famous theatre—bombed or blown up, we’re not sure—is due to be completed by the end of the year. Umar is happy: The children and young mothers have already taken over the park and playground that his company has just completed. The bus routes, with buses donated by the city of St Petersburg, have been re-established. The café terraces have reopened.

Then we head back to the west of the city, which offers a very different landscape. Everything here is new. The old districts have already been renovated; new districts, clusters of buildings, a school, a nursery, and a hospital have all been built in less than a year. A lady walking with her dog tells us that she just moved into her brand new flat a fortnight ago, after living for months in a slum without running water.

This was leveled two years ago. Mariupol, April 2024. (Photo: Guy Mettan.)

Supervised by the Russian Ministry of Defence’s Military Construction Company, with the help of Russian towns and provinces, work goes on day and night. Ten thousand residents have already been rehoused and the town has regained two-thirds of its prewar population of 300,000. In the afternoon, we will visit a second 60–bed hospital, completely new and demountable – designed to be taken apart and moved if the need arises. They are very well equipped and run by volunteer doctors from all over Russia.

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The most spectacular buildings, however, are the schools.

On the seafront, a new naval academy will welcome its first class of cadets at the start of the new academic year in September. Classrooms, dormitories, sports halls, and training facilities: Four gleaming glass-and-steel buildings have been completed in 10 months. Designed to accommodate 560 uniformed pupils aged 11 to 17, I am told they will take in mainly orphans from the two wars in Donbas, 2014–2022 and 2022–2024. With six days of instruction per week, eight to 10 hours a day, there's hardly time to get bored. At the end of the course, students can either continue their training in the navy or enter a civilian university.

A second school is more traditional but even more spectacular. It’s an experimental school, the like of which has never been seen before in Russia (or in Switzerland, to my knowledge). The design is very sophisticated. The classrooms are equipped with the latest technology, including computers, robots, cyber– and nanotechnologies, and artificial intelligence. More traditional are the rooms for drawing, sewing, cooking, painting, languages, ballet, drama, chemistry, physics, biology, anatomy, and mathematics. There is even a room equipped with compartments for learning to drive and fly.

Begun at the end of 2022 and completed in September 2023, this school welcomed its first intake of 500 students last year and expects 500 more at the start of the new school year in September. The pedagogy is in keeping with the building, but without any pedagogical flourishes: Classes last 12 hours a day—8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with six hours of “hard” subjects in the morning—grammar, mathematics, history—and six hours of more recreational or complementary subjects in the afternoon—sport, ballet, music, drawing. The canteen provides three meals a day. The only difficulty, says the headmistress, is finding teachers willing to move to Mariupol. But she doesn’t seem to be one to shy away from the task.

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In the late afternoon, we set off on the brand-new motorway linking Mariupol to Donetsk, 120 kilometres away, making a short stop in the small town of Volnovakha, whose Palace of Culture was hit by HIMARS rockets last November. The roof has collapsed, and scaffolding clutters what remains of the stage and auditorium. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured in the blast, as the show scheduled for that day was moved at the last minute.

As far as the locals were concerned, there is no doubt that the Ukrainians were trying to kill as many civilians as possible. My guide explained that they always fired HIMARS rockets in groups of three—the first rocket to pierce the roof and structures, the second to kill the occupants, and, 20 to 25 minutes later, a third strike to kill as many firefighters, rescue workers, relatives, policemen, friends, and neighbours who had come to help the victims as possible. I heard this kind of story several times.

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Donetsk is a city of one million inhabitants—very spread out, very busy, with heavy traffic. Few buildings or façades have been destroyed. On the other hand, the city is alive with the sound of cannon fire.

I didn’t pay much attention to it when I arrived, because of my fatigue, and the intense emotions provoked by all I was seeing. But when I woke up at 3 a.m., I was suddenly struck by the sound of the cannon. Every two or three minutes, a shot goes off, rattling the windows and lighting up the sky with an orange glow: It is Russian artillery firing on Ukrainian positions a few kilometres from the town centre. The Ukrainians retaliate with missiles, drones, or HIMARS rockets, which trigger Russian counter-battery fire, at a rate of one or two an hour, I believe.

The next morning, I was taught to distinguish one from the other. The HIMARS rockets are silent until the final explosion, the French SCALP and British Storm Shadow missiles make an airplane-like hum, as do the Russian anti-missile batteries, while the ordinary shells fall with a whistling sound. In any case, I have nothing to worry about, my new friends assure me. They have put me up in the only hotel in the city still in American hands, and the Ukrainians would never dare fire on an American target.

Nevertheless, Ukrainian fire continues to cause injuries and an average of one death a week. All civilians, because there are absolutely no soldiers, military vehicles, or military installations in the town. In four days, I haven’t come across a single uniform.

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We start the day with a visit to the “Alley of Angels,” which stands in the middle of a beautiful city park. This is the name given to the funerary monument erected in memory of the children killed by Ukrainian bombing since 2014. A hundred sixty names have already been inscribed on the marble. But the list of casualties now runs to more than 200. Dozens of bunches of flowers, toys, and photos of children pile up under the wrought-iron arch. It’s overwhelming. 

On the way back, we pay a visit to our professional colleagues from OPLOT television and radio, the Donetsk state broadcaster, on the edge of the central square. Their building is regularly targeted by HIMARS. The last studios to be hit have not yet been repaired, but the refurbishing is swift, and the five TV and radio channels are broadcasting without interruption. The management and staff are 90 percent female; the few men on staff are assigned to cover the front line, 10 kilometres away. A small kindergarten—a large crèche would attract the attention of the Ukrainian HIMARS—takes care of the employees’ children. It's the same all over the city, as public crèches have had to close to avoid the strikes.

Initially, in 2014, it was difficult to recruit journalists because of the risk of attack, but that is no longer the case, says editor-in-chief Nina Anatoleva. The Russian intervention in 2022 greatly increased security. But they have lost viewers. Their channels, which used to broadcast widely in the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine, have been cut off—the Ukrainians have blocked the satellite signals—and can now be seen only on the internet or the local network.

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As soon as you leave Donetsk, you feel the proximity of the front.

In the afternoon, we travel to the village of Yasynuvata, close to Avdiivka and therefore very close to the front line. The village, which is very exposed to Ukrainian shelling, is home to a school that has been converted into a reception centre for refugees from recently liberated villages. The road is torn up by shellfire and littered with the debris of collapsed bridges. On our left, two Ka–50 Alligator attack helicopters and an MI–8 helicopter are flying low over the ground as they return from the front. To our right, trenches and three rows of dragoons’ teeth, the equivalent of the Swiss Army’s Toblerone armoured barriers, so named after the Swiss chocolate because of their shape, form one of the lines of Russian defence. Military vehicles regularly drive along it.

Our vehicle is entirely anonymous. No convoy, no press badges, no bullet-proof waistcoats or helmets to attract the attention of Ukrainian surveillance drones. The GPS on our mobile phones has long since been deactivated. It's all about being as ordinary as possible. The road is getting worse and worse, and traffic is now almost non-existent. The driver, the guide, and Umar are perfectly impassive.

The headmistress of the school, a former maths teacher who is now the head of the reception centre, welcomes us. The liberation of Avdiivka and its neighbouring villages at the end of February brought the surviving inhabitants out of the cellars. They are housed here, in the classrooms, while waiting to return to their homes or find new ones. Some of the 160 people housed here have already been able to return to Avdiivka.

Today, it is the turn of Nina Timofeevna, 85 years old and full of verve, to return to her home. She lived in her cellar for two years, making fires on the street. “The Ukrainian soldiers didn’t help us at all,” she assures us, while the Russian army repaired her roof and the windows of her house so that she can return, flanked by two soldiers from the military police who carry her gear. «It is not a war, » she says. «It is a massacre of civilians. They want to destroy us.»

In the corridors, volunteers from the Orthodox Church are unpacking boxes of clothes, bottles of water, and food. In the other rooms, a couple with a beautiful blue-eyed cat, old people. A family with a four-year-old boy: They had their flat blown away by a rocket while trying to find food outside. The father was a factory worker and the mother an accountant at the Avdiivka coking plant. They miraculously escaped death and still can’t believe they survived.

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On the way back to Donetsk, the discussion turns to life during the war, and Yevgeny, our volunteer guide from Vladivostok, tells me that, in Mariupol in 2014, the neo–Nazi Azov Battalion opened a secret prison in a building at the airport, called the Bibliotheka, the Library, because the victims there were referred to as “books,” like the Nazis who called their victims “Stücke,” “pieces.”

According to eyewitness accounts, dozens of people were tortured and killed there during the eight years when the battalion's nationalists, tattooed with Nazi symbols, ruled Mariupol while the local police looked the other way. Investigations are under way to identify the victims, and visits to the premises have been suspended. The Russian press reported on these incidents, but Western media remained silent for fear of undermining the narrative of the good Ukrainians and the bad Russians.

My second conclusion now. At the beginning of April, Donbas celebrated the 10th anniversary of its uprising against the Kiev regime, which, in the spring of 2014, had declared a terrorizing war against it. Thousands of people—civilians, children, and fighters — have been killed. Donetsk has taken on the nickname of “City of Heroes.” After so many sacrifices, the three million inhabitants of the oblast, the province, will fight to the bitter end to defend their republic, whatever the cost and whatever people in the West may think of them.

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In Ukraine, a war for memory

Guy Mettan

 

In defense of what is remembered. At Savur–Mohila hill, Horlivka province. (Photo: Guy Mettan.)

It is now two years and several months since the Russian military began its intervention in Ukraine. And between Russia and the West, between the Ukrainians in Kiev and the former Ukrainians who have become Russians again, the battle is not just a military struggle. It is also a struggle in defence of memory against those who would obliterate it.

In the West, the 80th anniversary of the D–Day landings on 6 June will be commemorated without the Russians. This is an official if symbolic denial that the victory over Nazi Germany was first and foremost a Soviet victory and that Operation Overlord could not have succeeded without the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in the east, to hold off German tank divisions.

Attempts to erase the past in this manner are not at all new. One finds cases of it throughout history. But in the lands to Europe’s east and the Russian Federation’s west it has greatly intensified since 2014, a decade back, when, some months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev, the Western powers marked the 70th anniversary of the D–Day landings and refused to invite Russians to the ceremonies held on the Normandy beaches — this while inviting representatives of the former enemy, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and in Ukraine in particular, history is being turned upside down. Historical statues and war memorials honouring those who defeated the Reich in the Second World War are being demolished to erect steles, inscribed stone pillars, that commemorate not the Soviet’s hard-won victory but the victims of the Soviets. These monuments are also intended to mark the glory of the nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis and massacred Jews, such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevich.

Every day, monuments are taken down and others erected in their place —on the sly, in the silence of the Western media. We seem to forget, to take but one example of many, that the Treblinka death camp was run by a group of some 20 German SS troops and that the exterminations were carried out by a hundred Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards.

This rewriting of history amounts to a war on the past of a people. And if it is waged not on battlefields but at sites of memory [*] the outcome of this struggle is comparably important. To destroy the collective memories of a people is to destroy their common identity. In this way it also destroys their understanding of their place in the world and their ability to act effectively — and so their ability to go forward. If you have no past you have no future, it has been said: this is the ultimate objective of those who attack the shared memories of others.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the people of Donbas. And, true to their motto, “Never forget, never forgive,” they are in response redoubling their commemorative faith and monuments to fallen heroes.

A typical example of this struggle are the annual commemorations of the Holodomor, held each fourth Sunday of November, as the European Parliament mandated in 2008. The Holodomor is the Ukrainians’ name for the famine unleashed by Stalin against the peasantry in 1932. These events occurred mainly in 1932–1933 and were the result of Stalin’s desire to advance the collectivization of the economy. In this cause he confiscated the peasants’ incomes to finance the Soviet Union’s industrialization following the financial boycott of the Western capitalist countries.

But as a memorial the Holodomor commemoratives are incomplete. They attribute this massacre by famine solely to the Russians. Ukrainians are depicted as its sole victims, even though the famine also affected southern Russia and Kazakhstan and was orchestrated by a Georgian, Stalin, and executed by a Pole, Stanisław Kossior, who ruled Ukraine at the time. The present Ukrainian authorities have never acknowledged the collaboration of local and regional Communists. In the Ukrainian narrative of the tragedy, all responsibility for it has been and continues to be projected onto Russia and Russians, even though ethnic Russians played a minor role in that tragedy.

During the two last days of my trip in Donbas, we visited a dozen of the memorials established to commemorate the victims of the slaughters, massacres, and wars that have occurred on the territory over the last century. These are countless. You can find them in cities, in the countryside, and in small villages. This is why, during two full days, we travelled here and there, on small roads and large, throughout the two republics, Donetsk and Lugansk, to visit these testimonials of past dramas.

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Perhaps the most disturbing of these memorials is located near the shaft of Mine No. 4/4–bis in Donetsk. The site was once a coal mine and lies not far from the centre of the city. Mines are everywhere here. The entrance, very sober, appears to be to the side of an ordinary street road of an ordinary suburb. There are no large advertisements for it.

I’d never previously heard of Mine No. 4/4–bis, and I suspect you haven’t either. It doesn’t appear in any of our history books and can’t be found in Wikipedia. This why it is maybe the most disturbing place of death that I visited. In Auschwitz or Babi Yar, in Kyiv, you know what you are facing, and you expect to be moved. But here, you have to add the element of surprise.

Where the Nazis once massacreed many. Mine No. 4/4–bis, Donestsk. (Photo: Guy Mettan.)

It is estimated that 75,000 to 102,000 people were massacred at 4/4–bis from the end of 1941 to September 1943, two or three times as many as at the better documented massacre in 1941 at the ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar. The entire Jewish community of Donetsk (called Stalino at the time) was thrown into the pit, along with tens of thousands of others.

The Kiev government ignored the 4/4–bis memorial after 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence, because it disrupted official narratives and concerned only Russian-speaking people in the east of the country. But for the past year the site has been brought to life again. The restoration work, not quite finished, is still under way. The site is, accordingly, not yet open to the public. But the visible parts are quite impressive: There are prominent sculptures, a wall honouring those killed, landscaped gardens and trees.

A visit to No. 4/4–bis is all it takes to understand why the people of Donbas rose up against Kiev in April 2014, when the regime that emerged from the U.S.–backed Maidan coup wanted officially to ban their language while sending the heirs of their forebears’ executioners to suppress them. This region has a strong tradition of resistance to any kind of invaders, from German Nazis to west–Ukrainian ultranationalists in Nazi–style uniforms. If No. 4/4–bis is about remembering, it is also about determination.

You can destroy monuments, but not memories.

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Seventy kilometres northeast of Donetsk, in the direction of Bakhmut, in the province of Horlivka, the monumental Savur–Mohila cenotaph is another testimony to the battles of the last century. It is erected at the top of the highest hill in the Donbas, on the site of one of the great clashes of the Second World War. That took place in July–August 1943, at the same time as the famous tank battle of Kursk, which was to break the Wehrmacht.

A broad stairway up the hill with a huge spire at the top was built here in 1963. Seven decades later — in August 2014, six months after the coup in Kiev — the hill was the scene of a bitter battle between separatists and units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The monument was hit hard during the battle. When the separatists retook the hill, led by Alexander Zakhartchenko, their prestigious leader, it was a definitive victory for the Donetsk republicans.

But the fighting had devastated the Savur–Mohila site. And after the Russian military operation began in February 2022, President Putin ordered it rebuilt to commemorate two wars—the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 and the Donbas Liberation War of 2014–2022. On either side of a walkway that leads to the spire on top of the hill, large, sculpted steles celebrate the heroes who died for the freedom of Donbas from 1941 to 2022. In this important way, the present is anchored in the past.

This battle to preserve memory against its destruction is probably most intense in Lugansk. I’m welcomed there by Anna Soroka, a historian who has been fighting in the republic’s regiments since 2014.

The first monument she shows me commemorates the 67 children killed by Ukrainian militias from the Kraken and Aïdar battalions, both of them neo–Nazi, who tried to take the city in 2014, failed, and then proceeded to shell it until the Russian intervention in 2022. It was built in the middle of a park that serves today as a kindergarten. Several kids were killed there by targeted Ukrainian shelling — targeted, surely, as the surrounding buildings were not hit.

Children are the objects of an unrelenting information war on both sides. The Ukrainians have filed war crimes charges against the Russians, and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s children’s affairs agency, Maria Lvova–Belova, for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children. Western propaganda repeats these accusations over and over, in media and in the cinema: A full-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson–Rath, featured these allegations and has just won this year’s Oscar for best documentary.

Western media reports naturally fail to pass on the point of view of the inhabitants of the Donbas—who say it is the Ukrainians who are taking children hostage. There is, in fact, a volunteer organization in Ukraine called the White Angels, modelled on the infamous Syrian White Helmets, who, as you will recall, were far from the neutral rescue workers they posed as and, in fact, were covertly funded by Western intelligence and acted in behalf of jihadist groups.

These White Angel detachments were formed in February 2022 by a certain Rustam Lukomsky. The Western (or Western-backed) press has mentioned them on several occasions. The Kyiv Independent (24 March 2024), Le Monde (7 February 2023), the BBC (30 January 2024) are among the media that have reported on this group.

«Amid the thud of explosions and rattle of gunfire,” a typical report reads, “a special police unit called the White Angels goes door-to-door helping evacuate the town's remaining civilians.» Lukomsky, whose background remains unclear, is portrayed invariably as a hero of these operations.

For those in Donbas, the White Angels are something very different. The group’s aim, residents here say, is to force parents in front-line areas to separate from their children under the pretext of protecting them. The children are thus isolated and “taken to safety” in the rear, where they are used as a means of blackmail against their families.

These families are in this way torn between two equally unbearable choices: Either they abandon their homes to join their children, or they remain near the front and are forced to collaborate with the Ukrainian army, which invites them to denounce or sabotage the movements of the Russian army.

One can only imagine the distress of parents faced with such perverse coercion. Testimonies, such as those of Olga V. Zubtsova, from Bakhmut, and Igor Litvinov, from Avdiivka, confirm this version of events. “In Avdiivka,” Igor says, “the ‘White Angels operated completely unhindered and, in the guise of good intentions, offered to evacuate families with children on the Ukrainian side. When the parents refused, they threatened to take the children away.” There are countless rumours circulating on social networks, it bears mentioning, accusing these so-called White Angels of fuelling paedophilic crime networks and child trafficking. But this remains to be proven.

■

The second Lugansk monument is located in a wood just outside the city. Like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it does not appear on our search-engine result pages. And like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it commemorates the site of the massacre of Lugansk’s Jewish community. About 3,000 mainly Jewish women and children and 8,000 adults of various faiths were executed here by the Nazis during the Wehrmacht’s occupation of the city.

«We can’t understand why, today, Kiev is honouring the descendants of those who killed so many of our people during the Second World War,”»Anna Soroka, the historian and soldier, tells me as we tour the site. It has been abandoned to brambles since 1991, when Luhansk Oblast, which was previously part of the USSR, became part of Ukraine following the referendum on independence. The new authorities of the republic decided recently to cut the bushes and to restore it. 

A little further along, on the other side of the road, the republic’s authorities have erected a vast memorial honouring the combatants and civilians killed in the 2014–2022 war. Nearly 400 graves are lined up on either side of a walkway that leads from a Rodin-inspired statue near the entrance to a column and a small chapel at the centre of the site.

Anna personally knew most of the people buried here.

We stop at the grave of a man named Ivan Selikhov.

On 5 May 2014 Ukrainian militias took Ivan from his home and executed him with a bullet to the head — making an example of him because his son had joined the republicans. Before his body was interred here, his neighbours were initially forced to bury him in his garden.

The site, which is exactly where a battle took place that summer, pays tribute to the 397 killed, “victims of Ukrainian aggression”— workers, trench diggers, teachers, schoolchildren, doctors, nurses, and patients hit by the bombardment of their school and hospital, during which the dead numbered 169.

On our way back into Lugansk we pass a large monument to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the city in 1943. And then, after a few more miles, we come upon a Ukrainian tank decorated with flowers and set on a concrete base beside the freeway: Local inhabitants put it there as a reminder that this tank bombed their homes 10 years ago. Below, there is a field still littered with mines where people are strongly advised against walking.

■

The last monuments on this mournful tour of the city are perhaps the most emblematic of the tragic fate of Donbas over the last hundred years. These comprise the Hostra Mohyla memorial, which is set on a small hill southeast of the city.

The presence of the past. Hostra Mohyla hill, near Lugansk. (Photo: Guy Mettan.)

 

Here, a number of different monuments commemorate the communities wiped out over many decades. Various monuments and steles cover the hillside, each erected by a different community or civic organization; among these, the Orthodox Church commemorates its members and believers.

The largest of these memorials, which crowns the top of the complex, holds the key to the psychology of the region's inhabitants. I studied it carefully.

It features four giant statues of soldiers, heroes-in-arms of the four wars that mark the collective consciousness of Donbas: There is a bronze fighter from the Civil War of 1917–1921, a Soviet soldier from the Great Patriotic War, a militant from the anti–Kiev resistance of 2014–2018, and, finally, a fighter from the war of liberation of the oblast that began in 2022 and continues to the present day. Again, the past lives on and informs the present.

More erasure: For the Hostra Mohyla site, as for others, there is absolutely no information to be found on Western search engines despite its popularity with the locals. Google and Wikipedia ignore or have banned these sites from their directories. Only the German Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, provides any information on the Jewish victims.

It is easy to understand, after a brief tour of these sites, built to keep memory alive, why Russia, and its new citizens in what were formerly the eastern provinces of Ukraine, will never give up their fight against Kiev and the West until they win it. The dull rage that seizes them when they think that the Western powers wanted, through Ukrainians, to wipe them off the face of the earth, literally and figuratively, will disappear only with what they consider to be their victory. To defend their past, to preserve memory against those who would destroy it, is to defend their right to live in their lands.

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Notes and References

 

[1] «To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the world. It is among the most vicious methods known to aggressor armies, imperial powers, and dictators —psychologically vicious, vicious because effective — of attacking the psyches and souls of others in the course of violent campaigns to dominate them.

Pierre Nora, the honored French scholar of history and identity, termed the places where people preserve their pasts lieux de mémoire, sites of memory. It is these that are attacked, sooner or later, when one or another kind of power seeks to destroy or conquer other people. You saw this during the Cultural Revolution, when Red Guards defaced as many monuments to China’s past as they could. You have long seen this in the Israelis’ aggressions against Palestinians. And you have seen it this past decade as the Kiev regime continues its war against the people of Donbas.

This war on memory, as Guy Mettan terms it, is in our view a pernicious, quite significant dimension of ethnic cleansing» (The Floutist. Jun 03, 2024)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT I SAW IN UKRAINE

Benoît Paré

(former army officer and international observer for the OSCE)

On the screen : Benoît Paré

Benoît Paré did not prepare his speech in advance and, unfortunately, is unable to recall or reconstruct it from memory. To provide insight into his experiences in Donbass, we proposed that he select a passage from his first book that could offer readers a sense of his journey and perspective.

In response to our suggestion, Benoît Paré provided us with the following answer:

«There is so much information in my 2 books that I would not know what to take out.

So, if you are curious, here are the links to my 2 books, the latest one just came out in English, and is available already printed in French.

En français:

https://www.thebookedition.com/fr/ukraine-la-grande-manipulation-p-423312.html

https://www.thebookedition.com/fr/ce-que-j-ai-vu-en-ukraine-p-415401.html

In English:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/295986011X

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/2959860144

Thank you for your support».

.............................................................................................................................................................

 Travelling alone in Donbass

by

Jean-Christophe Emmenegger

(travel writer, historian)

Jean-Christophe Emmenegger (on the left) during his speech

My personal interest in Russia goes back a long way. I first visited the country as a teenager in 1993, then lived in Saint Petersburg for several months in 2005, and gave a lecture in the Caucasus Mountains in the late 2000s. It was only natural that the events of late 2013 would reawaken my interest in the country. Since 2015, I have returned to Russia almost every year, allowing me to observe its long-term evolution.

I wanted to visit Donbass in 2014, but for personal reasons I was only able to go there in 2023. I visited Donbass and Crimea twice, as a private traveller, in the spring of 2023 and the autumn of 2024. I was invited by a family of friends who have always lived there. I will give you a brief overview of this experience.

Travel conditions

First of all, you may be interested to know about my travel and accommodation conditions in Donbass, as a civilian coming from abroad.

To reach Donbass from Europe, you have to go through Russia, as it is strongly discouraged and even impossible to enter via Ukraine at present, unless you decide to go there on board a Ukrainian army military vehicle, as some Western journalists did not hesitate to do during the invasion of the Kursk region.

To travel to Russia, you must therefore have a Russian visa. From there, with a Russian visa, it is possible to travel throughout Russia. Moreover, any non-Russian citizen who wishes to travel to Russia for travel, tourism or private reasons may do so. As Donbass is under Russian federal jurisdiction, I was assured that, in principle, there would be no problem travelling there with a valid Russian visa. No special authorization is required.

I did, of course, make some enquiries beforehand about the possibility of going to Donbass, specifying, as is undoubtedly important, that I was not going there to observe the front line or sensitive areas, nor to do a journalistic report, and I think it was also clear that I had no hostile intentions.

But I wasn't going there completely blind either. I had been invited to stay with a friend's family in a village near Mariupol. So I had a place to stay. But apart from that, I can tell you that my trip was hardly planned in advance. I didn't know exactly how I would get to Mariupol until the last minute. In short, you fly into Russia from Europe via Turkey, for example, and then, in my case, you go through Rostov-on-Don to get to Mariupol on the coast of the Sea of Azov.

In 2023, in Rostov-on-Don, we had to take a semi-official improvised means of transport, as public transport had not yet been restored after the fighting in the area. At that time, there were still fears of a Ukrainian counter-offensive towards the south.

By 2024, this was no longer the case: a regular bus service had been restored and was now operating. But in 2023, I was given a contact to travel in a shared minibus, which you pay for on the spot. There were eight of us passengers, chosen at random: the driver, three civilians including me, and four soldiers. Everything went well. In the vehicle, there were two soldiers from the Chechen regiment Akhmat Sila/Rossiya Mochtch (Akhmat's Force – Power of Russia). During the journey, the one sitting next to me asked me where I was from and where I was going, without even asking why. He joked around, calling me the ‘Schweizer’ (the German word for ‘Swiss’).

As my phone did not work in the military zone in 2023, these soldiers even helped me by calling the family member who was supposed to pick me up at the entrance to Mariupol to take me to the village where I would be staying, about 18 kilometres from Mariupol.

Between the regions of Rostov-on-Don and Mariupol, a former customs post remains a mandatory passport control point. Then you have to pass through military checkpoints where checks are also carried out.

When I travelled to Crimea in 2024, also by public transport by road from Mariupol, via Berdiansk and Melitopol, there were many more military checkpoints compared to the Mariupol region, which is now peaceful. You could really feel the difference when passing through the other cities of Berdiansk and Melitopol, which are close to the front line, 80-100 kilometres away, and heavily guarded by the military: the journey takes a day and we passed through a dozen military checkpoints before arriving in Crimea, which is a sensitive area. Crossing into the Republic of Crimea involves a thorough check.

But each time, this was done without any aggression towards me as a foreigner. I never felt any hostility, except once, briefly, near Mariupol, when a young Russian soldier panicked at the sight of my Swiss passport and started shouting at me, brutally asking me what I was doing in such an area... then his boss arrived and let me through without any problems, as usual on other days.

Daily life

How did I experience these stays in Donbass and Crimea, which, I should point out, were not just for a day or two, but generally lasted two weeks? Near Mariupol, I lived in Sartana with a local family. I was personally invited by this family, of Greek origin, who have lived there since their ancestors arrived in 1780 and who have experienced all the events since 2014, especially the clash in 2022, when Russian troops, essentially the Donbass militias, encountered the Ukrainian army, which was stationed very close to the village.

This village in the Mariupol area was under Ukrainian control until March 2022. In the spring of 2023, I arrived exactly one year after the end of the fighting in this region. The front line had receded from here, but it was still about 80-100 kilometers away, near Donetsk. And at that time, an ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive raised fears of a return of the nationalists to Mariupol. I can tell you that the people there really feared this. At that time, they also feared that Moscow would abandon them. All the locals told me that if the nationalists came back here, they would have to leave immediately, or they would be massacred...

So I lived very close to the local people. Many of them had fled during the fighting in 2022. The village had a population of around 11,000 before the 2022 conflict, which lasted only three or four days in the village. Around 900 of Sartana's 11,000 inhabitants remained in the village, with just over 200 hiding in the basements of the municipal school and the rest holed up in their homes. The others, several thousand people, fled, many of them to Mariupol, where they thought they would be safer, but unfortunately this was not the case. Many died in the city, due to false information or a total lack of information from the authorities in power at the time, Sartana residents told me.

The residents I met were not soldiers, they were civilians who simply wanted to live in peace. Nevertheless, most of them were explicitly pro-Russian and satisfied with the current situation. My babushka's pension had more than doubled compared to the time of the Ukrainian regime.

The babushka of the family I was living with suffered directly from the repression of Ukrainian nationalists, particularly from the Azov battalion, which had settled in Mariupol in April 2014. For demonstrating in favour of autonomy for the Mariupol region in 2014, she was labelled a ‘separatist’ by the new nationalist authorities who had established an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ regime against Donbass. At the age of 82, she was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and for a year had to report to the police station every fortnight at the other end of the city, which is an hour and a half away by public transport from the village of Sartana.

When I asked two or three people: why aren't the Russian forces defending you advancing more quickly? Couldn't they use more powerful means to end this terrible conflict more quickly? The answer from these former Ukrainian citizens who had become Russian was invariable: ‘We can't do that because there are many of our own people on the other side of the front line, many of whom are like us and would like to live on the Russian side. We can't just bomb them.’

I was free to move around Mariupol and the surrounding area on my own, without any problems, using public transport and taxis. I had spontaneous encounters there. I talked to people. It was a bit surreal in 2023. The destruction was still fresh, but I could already see what our media no longer showed: there were no longer images of devastated streets and courtyards, all the streets had been cleared, some roads were beginning to be resurfaced, and houses were being renovated. Public parks and public buildings were the first to be renovated.

When I returned a year later, in 2024, to Mariupol, the difference was striking. For example, the Mariupol railway station, which I had seen completely destroyed in 2023, had been completely rebuilt in 2024. I visited it, walked through it, and crossed the railway tracks to get to the sea nearby.

In 2024, I also noticed that the situation in Mariupol was clearly more peaceful than in 2023: fewer soldiers, more control at checkpoints, roads were being renovated not only in the city of Mariupol but also in the surrounding suburbs and countryside, supermarkets full of food had opened, two new large supermarkets in the small village where I was staying... The internet and telephone services were working. However, there were some problems with the running water supply.

Quickly on to Crimea. I travelled in one day directly from Mariupol to Yalta, in the south of the peninsula, taking a marshrutka, one of those shared taxis or minibuses. Once again, I was travelling alone, without anyone accompanying me.

The route after Mariupol and up to the entrance to Crimea passes through Berdiansk and Melitopol. I can say that in 2024, it was very militarised around the towns, with checkpoints and military defences at every exit and entrance, passport checks every time and, as I said, thorough checks at the entrance to the Republic of Crimea. In contrast, once I arrived in Yalta, I saw almost no soldiers or even civilian police. It's a place of relaxation, the golden coast, the good life. I did some sightseeing... Then I returned by train from Simferopol to Sochi via the Kerch Bridge.

I will recount this journey in a book scheduled for publication in early April 2026.

Reception of these trips to Russia and Europa/Switzerland

Now I come to what these trips have brought to my country or how they have influenced other places. Perhaps we should start with Russia. Because right after my visits to Donbass, I went to see friends in Moscow.

I remember my time in Moscow in 2023 very well. I was celebrated as the Swiss hero who had been to Donbass. Everyone wanted to know what I had experienced there, what was happening in Donbass? Because we mustn't assume that people in Russian capitals or elsewhere necessarily know better than us what is happening in Donbass. People are very curious and very respectful when talking to people like me who were there. So it was a very interesting time for me, I was given food and drink in exchange for my stories, so to speak!

Conversely, in my country, Switzerland, there has been little change. Among my friends and family, indifference prevails; they don't really want to know, there is no real curiosity, they don't ask me any questions, even though they know I have travelled to these regions.

Have these trips had negative or positive consequences for me?

My travels have nevertheless attracted the attention of a few people. Both negatively and positively.

On the positive side, it earned me an interview with the alternative media outlet NTD France. A French publisher will publish my travelogue on Donbass next spring. And I now write columns for an independent Swiss media outlet called Antithèse & Bon pour la tête.

Negatively, my travels and my stance on the subject have obviously caused mistrust, the loss of certain relationships (offset by the gain of other friendships) and, indirectly, obvious censorship on the part of certain people or entities. In Switzerland, it is not very violent. It is just that you can no longer publish your books or articles as easily as before. Clearly, Swiss publishers and others with whom I had previously published scientific and historical works, even though they had nothing to do with Donbass and the current conflict, are keeping a low profile, not to say that they have put me on some kind of blacklist. I don't know... It is  all very quiet. Although I can understand their caution in the current context…

But we are moving forward regardless of such reluctance.

This conference is generating new opportunities and new relationships, and I hope it will lead to new alliances in a common quest for greater truth, justice and peace.

Thank you for inviting me to participate.

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The Donbas People’s perspective: «Trump’s failing peace plan and the West’s unprovoked war of aggression»

by

 

Patrik Baab

(journalist, writer)

Lisbon, 22 November 2025. From left to right: Jean-Christophe Emmeneger, Patrik Baab, 

Luís M.  Loureiro.

 

We now have a new peace plan for Ukraine. In 28 points, the Trump administration explains that Ukraine should cede large parts of its territory and drastically reduce its armed forces. In order to secure peace, it demands that Ukraine slashes the size of its army to 600,000 and gives up missiles that can hit Moscow. Russia would pay an undisclosed rental fee for de facto control of Donetsk, Lugansk, and parts of Zaporhyzhia and Kherson, officials familiar with the deal told The Telegraph. The plan also calls for Russia to freeze its forces in place in Kherson und Zaporhyzhia and to withdraw Russian forces from Kharkiv and Sumy.

The Russian side reacted cautiously. Today, I can give you one reason why. The reason lies in the mood of the Donbas people. This is completely unknown or underestimated in the West.

The war in Ukraine is seen in the West as an “unprovoked war of aggression”, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, of course, that it was the Russian army that entered Ukraine. This is the only point Western journalists know. They are following the “3-I-Concept”: incompetence, ignorance and ideology. Like most of our politicians, they never were in Russia or Ukraine, they know nothing about the history of the Donbas, and they never were in war zones. That means: They lost the ground of reality.

Unlike many journalists who sit comfortably at their desks and pass judgment on things they know nothing about, as a war reporter, I have spoken to many people in Ukraine and Donbas. It is very clear that I am completely cancelled in German propaganda media. And the journalistic organizations are fighting me, because they subordinated under the power elites and the ruling party cartel.

The historical reality is that NATO’s expansion towards Russia, through Ukraine, and the war waged by the Ukrainian government after the Western organized coup on the Maidan in February 2014, pushed by the West, against the Russians in Donbas, are the real causes of the conflict.

It is absolutely true that, for the Russians, this war is defensive. It is obvious that the Americans and Europeans are the aggressors, having arrived less than a thousand kilometers from Moscow. That is the objective situation. In this perspective, the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24, 2022, but eight years ago, in February 2014, with the coup on the Maidan Square in Kiew and the Maidan massacre, both orchestrated by US, EU and NATO representatives.

According to the study of Ivan Kachanovski of the University of Ottawa, The Maidan Massacre, who collected more than hundred eyewitnesses, evaluated video proofs and went through the investigation files, almost 100 people were killed by snipers placed in buildings occupied by the Right Sector. The snipers came to a large number from Georgia, Poland and Lithuania — professional and militarily trained special forces. The former military leader of the Maidan, Andrij Parubij, was killed in mid 2025 in Lwiw — possibly he knew too much. Ivan Kachanovski quoted eye witnesses, that Western politicians and diplomats were involved in the preparations of the assassinations as well.

After the coup, a wave of violence rolled through Ukraine, against Anti-Maidan protests and demonstrations, who started spontaneously all over the Eastern part of the country. There were many killings, like those in Odessa on Mai 2nd, 2014 and in Mariupol on Mai 9, 2014, when members of the Azow battalion drove with infantry fighting vehicles into demonstrators.

Let me quote some normal people of the war theatre. I interviewed them during the referenda in late September 2022 in Lugansk, Donetsk and Mariupol. The situation was as follows:

At the end of February, Ukraine made a push for negotiations. Moscow agreed. The European Union did not: it supplied weapons worth €450 million. In March, Zelensky offered talks again, and once more the Russians showed themselves willing to talk, but once more the EU prevented this with a second tranche of €500 million. Nevertheless, by the end of March, negotiators in Istanbul had almost reached an agreement. According to this agreement, Ukraine would have regained its territory before the invasion began. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Zelensky on April 2 and visited Kiev on April 9 to urge him to withdraw his proposals, otherwise the West would stop its aid. Thus, it was the West that prevented peace. This reverses the question of who is to blame for the war — to the detriment of the West. In response, Moscow decided to freeze the status quo and incorporate the oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia, and Kherson in the Russian Federation to rule out a return.

The referenda, which in the West can only be described as sham referenda, took place in late September 2014. Here characteristic voices:

Irina Dikaja, the head of the election commission at a school in Lugansk, a woman in her 50s:

«People are lining up to cast their votes. Yesterday it was pouring rain, and people stood under their umbrellas here in front of our school and in front of the election buses throughout the city. Older women cry when they receive the documents and put the ballot in the box. People with disabilities call us and ask us to send someone over, saying, ‘We want to cast our vote.»

And:

«We did not expect such a high turnout. The mood is very positive. Voters hope that this referendum will bring about change. They are voting in the hope that their lives will improve. That is the mood in a nutshell. They are optimistic about their shared future with Russia

A 60-year-old man:

 «This election is very important to me, to my family, and to my country, the Republic of Lugansk. We have been waiting eight years for this referendum. The people of Germany should know that Russian people live here. Everything connects us to Russia: politics, economics, religion; we celebrate the same holidays. We don’t want this kinship to be torn apart... That’s why I want the war to end quickly. And I have great hope for Russia, politically, economically, and in the field of education. I hope for myself, my children, and my grandchildren. Russia is our country, and we are returning to our home port. And I‘d like to tell you something else: we cast our votes without anyone standing behind us with a gun. No one forced us to go to the ballot box. We followed the voice of our hearts.»

This voter recalled that the regions east of Dnjepr were originally Russian. These regions were transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in the year 1922, because they wanted to create a unified administrative zone in order to straighten the Dnjepr River and build a hydroelectric power plant.

A taxi driver on September 24, 2022:

 «That’s your damn market economy. Where are the EU subsidies? We haven’t seen a penny of them here. We starved here in the 1990s. My father was a miner, my mother a housewife, and we were three siblings. We didn’t get paid for months. That was the capitalism that the West brought us. No one knew when there would be money again, when we would be able to buy something to eat. Things only got better after around the year 2000.»

This is how the people of Donbas experienced the blessings of the free West.

A man in his 60s:

«I am glad that it turned out this way. Russia was in ruins, and since Putin began to rebuild the country, people have been able to hope again. The year 2014 showed that a country that forbids you to speak your native language, robs you of your culture, and humiliates you, has plunged the Donbas into civil war.»

A female voter in her mid-50s wearing a purple down jacket at polling station No. 5 in Lugansk:

«I cast my vote so that peace can finally reign again. So that our People’s Republic of Lugansk can become part of the Russian Federation. So that it can develop, become stronger, and we can finally have peace again. We are all eagerly waiting for things to improve here again. We all hope for that very much.»

A second voter in her mid-50s, passport in her hand:

«I hope the war finally ends. That the shelling finally stops and no more children die. I really hope so. Because the Ukrainians fired at us. We were one people in Ukraine. Why couldn’t we come to a peaceful agreement? Why did they always bomb us? It was terrible, people disappeared, children were killed. It was like fascism.»

According to the OSCE, 14,400 people were killed between 2014 and 2021, and according to unofficial figures, more than 50,000.

Viktoria Litvinova, deputy election supervisor at Secondary School No. 60 in Mariupol, at polling station No. 36 013, clearly shows that she has had a difficult few months during the siege of the city, and the street fighting is still fresh in her memory, the city still was completely destroyed by heavy fighting:

“There are also people who have a different opinion, and that is their right. Everyone has the right to his own opinion, and here voters can express it. But as I see it, that‘s the minority. People really like coming to the polls. Older women come and even bless the ballot boxes. I hope for peace, prosperity, and tranquility; that’s what the election should bring. But the most important thing is peace.»

A man with the name Wladimir Jewgenjewitsch Tulow, a teacher of Lugansk:

 «Everything must change. The economic, political, social, and military situation. The most important thing is that people can regain hope. Because we have been living in a circus state run by clowns. In a banana republic where these honorable people talked about sovereignty while simultaneously abolishing it. We have been living in a bandit state. It is still 100% a fascist state. I mean Ukraine, of course, what else?»

 I could quote hundreds of voices like these.

The results of the referendum: in Lugansk, 98.42% voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation; in Donetsk, 97.51%; in Kherson, 87.05%; and in Zaporhyzhia, 93.11%. Anyone unfamiliar with the situation on the ground might easily think these results were fake. But the results reflected the mood of a population that has either been shelled by the Ukrainian army in the separatist republics or arrested, beaten, and terrorized by fascist battalions in formerly Ukrainian areas such as Mariupol. According to United Nations definitions, both fulfill the criteria for genocide.

The results of the referendum also corresponded to the results of previous opinion polls in the region, for example during the election of President Yanukovych in 2013 or a survey conducted by a Ukrainian newspaper in 2016.

The objection that the opponents of the separatists had already fled is also unfounded: Of the more than 6 million people living in Donbas in 2014, just over 1 million were internally displaced persons, meaning they remained in the region, while more than 1 million fled the war to Russia and only a few sought refuge in the West of the country.

The reasons for these results are obvious:

1. The Ukrainians waged war against the population of Donbas from April 2014 onwards as part of a so-called “Anti-terror operation”; people do not flee into the arms of their enemies.

2. Many Donbas residents have relatives in Russia and thus learned that people in Russia had been slowly getting better off since 2000, while the situation in Ukraine was becoming increasingly difficult. This is an important economic reason.

3. The cultural dimension: the language laws of the coup government, with their suppression of the Russian language and culture, were seen by the people of Donbas as an attack on their identity and human rights. In fact, democracy also means being able to live one’s language, religion, and culture. That is why they saw Ukraine, which has even enshrined an ethnically pure state in its constitution, as a terrorist state. Many of the people I spoke to confirmed this. That is why the Donbas people are seeking refuge in Russia.

With the aggression against the Donbas population, the coup government in Ukraine and their Western supporters created the situation that they are currently criticising. It is the responsibility of the West that these people are Russia-oriented. No one in the West cares what people in this war zone want. They are treated like subhumans. This is also a kind not only of Russophobia; this is a kind of racism of Western politicians and Western media.

It is fascinating that these aggressors think they are being attacked and that they are forced to defend themselves. There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe. Especially the media are trigger happy and blood thirsty. They are boosting NATO propaganda and trying to bring people into a war hysteria all over Europe. Therefore, those journalists are responsible for the continuation of the war and for hundreds of thousands of casualties. These journalists have blood on their fingers. They must be held criminally responsible. The first thing to flow in war is ink.

These journalists are belonging to a degenerated Western elite, together with mad politicians, academics and company managers, who want to drive their own countries deeper and deeper into the war in Ukraine. They seem to have a narcissistic passion for the destruction of things, the destruction of men, the destruction of reality. The current psychological state of the West is partly this: nihilism, which leads to a passion for war in people’s minds, and a preference for war in geopolitics. We understand the moral background to the West’s new preference for war. The two main elements of narcissism, according to Sigmund Freud, are: Loss of reality and megalomania.

I will mention some of the wars for which the West is responsible, but without Westerners, who are nihilists without knowing it, being able to understand their responsibility: Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008. That is what is striking today: Westerners provoke wars and fuel wars by telling themselves that they are on the side of justice. But this is not true. This shows that the NATO countries start a century of new wars, because it cannot cope with its own decline.

But since 2014, the people of Donbas have achieved more than just challenging the megalomania of Western politicians. They have stopped the imperialist expansionism of NATO countries against Russia, thereby preventing Russia from being weakened and robbed of its natural resources, as openly demanded by US analysts such as George Friedman (Stratfor) and Zbigniew Brzezinsky, or Republican Senator Lindsay Graham.

Thus, the civil war in Donbas and the ensuing war have initiated and accelerated the decline of the West. This war will claim many more victims. Because neither side can back down. If NATO wins the proxy war in Ukraine, there will be a Russian nuclear strike. If Russia wins and keeps Donbas, stabilizing its economy, then the invincibility of the US will be gone, and the European Union will collapse under the costs of war and reconstruction. After the many sacrifices they have made, the people of Donbas will then stand alongside the rising BRICS states. Because the future belongs to the multipolar world.

Trump’s 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is dead on arrival. This plan is a non-starter for Russia. Public opinion in Russia would turn against President Putin, causing his approval ratings to plummet from about 80 per cent. A DPR soldier told me after heavy shelling in Donetsk:

«Putin has let us down. He should have invaded and come to our aid back in 2014. There would have been far fewer deaths here. »

 For this soldier, a Russian intervention back in 2014 would have avoided the war. No, Russia cannot abandon the Donbas anymore. The people refuse to do so and would continue the fight for their rights; the war would go on, because Donbas people would stand up to a return to Ukraine at all means. This shows that it is easy to enter a war. It is much harder to find a way out.

Peace will not come by Trump’s new peace plan. Peace will only come by accepting Russia’s conditions: the four eastern Oblasts remain part of the Russian Federation; Ukraine remains neutral and does not join NATO; and Ukraine must be denazified, meaning regime change in Kyiv. The 28-point plan will fail because Donbas people will make it fail.