These groups usually don’t have much to do with each other during the trip: all are focused on their own worries and apprehensions about the trip, and keep their thoughts and opinions to themselves.
This six-hour train is a mobile microcosm of the entire Donbas, where people live in parallel realities, in their own information bubbles, with their own plans, and myths – it’s a way of coping with the abnormal situation of war.
At the final stop in Kostyantynivka, flocks of taxi drivers patter up to the passengers with offers to take them to separatist-controlled cities by the fastest and easiest routes. “Horlovka, Donetsk, Makeyevka,” the drivers shout out their itineraries, in Russian.
Also on offer are “non-stop” trips, by which (for an extra fee) drivers will take people through checkpoints without stopping (presumably having previously bribed the soldiers) or by bypassing the checkpoints and small, unguarded side roads.
It’s striking to see how quickly the train passengers, lugging their huge bags, pair off with the taxi drivers and disappear in different directions. In just a few minutes the crowd of passengers and drivers has dispersed.
An entire business has been created in the region, the business of helping people and goods pass over the separation line between the warring sides in the Donbas.
The locals feel frustrated. The pro-Ukrainian side is frustrated by the lack of political change, while the anti-Ukrainian side is upset because too many changes have occurred in their part of the country over two last years.
The first group of locals watches Ukrainian TV stations, while the second one continues to watch Russian TV, which is still widely available in the Donbas. Both groups try to limit conversations on political topics. Both sides often ask journalists when the war will stop.
One pro-Ukrainian woman, who has resettled from the occupied Donetsk to liberated Sloviansk, told me it would be probably better to live in some other Ukrainian region, since it’s painful for her to see how former separatists are no long afraid to “hold their heads high,” in the Donbas.
A pro-Russian man in Avdiyivka called the war “a mere money-making scheme” and described the Ukrainian soldiers “mercenaries,” as they are paid for their service. But fighters on the other side are paid as well.
With the odd exception, soldiers and locals also try to avoid talking to each other.
Residents in front-line towns and villages blame the Ukrainian soldiers for bringing down shelling on their homes, while the soldiers, in turn, blame the residents for provoking the entire war by supporting separatism back in 2014.
Sitting in the trenches on the outskirts of Avdiyivka, the soldiers say that they could easily liberate the separatists’ stronghold in Donetsk, but nobody gives them the order to do so. A soldiers’ myth: Ukraine’s army is not yet nearly strong enough to achieve such a feat. Moreover, the soldiers also admit that many of their comrades still booze a lot, although newly imposed fines of some $320 for drinking alcohol while on duty have made some difference.
The local state authorities also believe the soldiers’ myth that the military liberation of the separatist-controlled Donbas could come soon.
Billboards proclaiming plans to “win back” the rest of the Donbas, signed by the governor of Donetsk Oblast Pavlo Zhebrivsky, emblazon the streets of Kramatorsk, the current administrative center of Donetsk Oblast. The governor doesn’t elaborate on whether he is planning to storm Donetsk personally, together with his staff, or whether he has a better plan.
The billboards seem like a bitter joke for many local residents, most of whom have seen war with their own eyes. Asked to assess the work of the new Ukrainian authorities, local residents often can’t even recall government officials’ names.
The big, white, clean new cars belonging international organizations like the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe of the International Committee of the Red Cross are no longer a novelty to anyone in the Donbas. Some locals are glad to see them, while others are skeptical about the foreigners’ motives.
The hundreds of employees of international organizations and humanitarian missions working now in this area, many of whom are foreigners, are shocked by the locals’ poverty, but also by their apathy. Unlike the local residents, they use the new names of the cities and streets imposed by the law on decommunization.
While the foreigners feel empathy for all of the locals, no matter which side they are on, they themselves live in a parallel world too. They can cross checkpoints without having to wait for hours in the sun, they can visit shops and restaurants that most locals can no longer afford.
Like the people on the train, all of these groups in the Donbas, while being physically in the same place, have wildly differing views of the causes and consequences of the war.
Unlike the people on the train, nobody there seems to know where they are going to end up.
