Западные журналисты вечно пишут о "российских войсках" в Донбассе, но когда попадают туда, то вечно находят дончан, воюющих с Украиной. Вот и сейчас западный корреспондент побывал в Горловке, пообщался с повстанцами и в очередной раз убедился, что с хунтой воюет Донбасс. Что особенно ценно, данный, на удивление нейтральный, репортаж поместила одиозная газета "Нью-Йорк таймс", занимающая исключительно прокиевские позиции.
Репортаж называется "На передовой на Украине, повстанцы настроены оптимистично и жаждут наступать".
Репортер подтверждает, что подавляющее большинство бойцов, которых ему удалось увидеть, - жители Донбасса. Командир отряда (Батя) из Шахтерска, много лет работал на шахтах. Душа отряда - скромная девушка Ира, которая до войны работала секретарем в детском саду того же Шахтерска. Батя рассказывает про девушку: "Она известна как 01. Она идет на поле боя, чтобы спасти наших раненых бойцов. Плюс она наш лучший снайпер. Она может готовить для нас. Она может управлять нашим танком".
Батя заявил американскому журналисту: "Мы победим, я знаю это. Для нас больше недопустимо жить с этими украинцами. Но как будет выглядеть мир после сражения, я не знаю".
На удивление выдержанный репортаж о донецких бойцах. И это, повторюсь, не где-нибудь, а в "Нью-Йорк таймс"!
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HORLIVKA,
Ukraine — The rebel commander casually led the way down a muddy trench,
shoulder high with shaved walls of moist earth, his boots slapping at
wooden slabs sunk into the muck. Finally, he reached an earth-covered
observation post.
“There,
you see,” he said, pointing a gnarled index finger, its brown nail
twisted after 30 years in the coal mines. A few hundred yards away,
across an icy lake and a field, were some scattered office buildings,
close enough to count the windowpanes.
“There
are the Ukrainians,” said the commander, whose real name is Pavel and
who asked that his surname not be used, for fear of reprisals. His
fighters call him Batya, an endearment for father in Russian and a
common nom de guerre for rebel commanders in eastern Ukraine.
The
smack of artillery fire rose from a village in the valley below,
captured just a few days earlier by Batya’s rebels. A nearby crack, a
tense pause, then a distant thud somewhere beyond the lake.
“Sometimes, at night, they come at us with their tanks,” Batya said. “But we do not let them advance.”
 |
The mood here on the rebel front lines is upbeat these days. Two weeks ago, Russian-backed rebels captured the airport in Donetsk,
kicking off the fiercest round of combat in the region since last fall.
Their commanders declared a four-month-old cease-fire defunct and vowed
new attacks, which began almost immediately, including one in which a
barrage of rockets struck a crowded market in a coastal town on the Sea
of Azov, Mariupol, that left 31 dead.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine
exploded nearly a year ago, after the government of President Viktor F.
Yanukovych was toppled by pro-Western forces. Since then, more than
5,000 people have died as the separatists, backed by Russian money,
strategic guidance, weapons and, NATO says, troops, have defeated all of
Kiev’s efforts to bring them back into the fold.
Now,
powered by what Western officials say was a fresh injection of Russian
aid last month, the rebels feel they have the upper hand.
On
Monday, the top commander, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, said that the rebels
would answer Ukraine’s recent announcement that it would conscript more
troops by organizing a voluntary mobilization of their own that, he
vowed, would increase the size of the rebel army to as many as 100,000.
At
the moment, the rebels are within reach of surrounding a contingent of
hundreds of Ukrainian troops dug into the town of Debaltseve, a crucial
rail hub. “We are on the move and they are trapped,” Batya said.
His
fighters are deployed on the edge of the strategic city of Horlivka,
not far from the only road still connecting Debaltseve — 23 miles to the
east — with Ukrainian-controlled territory to the north. The road has
come under regular fire in recent days and is sometimes impassable.
The
grand house where Batya and his troops make their headquarters used to
belong to a regional prosecutor. But he fled in the face of the
separatist advance, so now the rebels are lords of the manor. The
soaring, two-story entryway, wrapped in a grand wooden staircase, is now
the company canteen, a pot of bubbling stew perfuming the air, boxes of
medical supplies stacked in the corner.
Batya
makes his office in a front parlor, chattering on walkie-talkies with
his troops while his top fighters smoke cigarettes on a sofa and flick
ashes into a shell casing.
“This
is our famous fighter,” he said, laughing happily and gesturing to a
small woman seated beside the window. Her name is Ira, and before the
war she was the secretary at a kindergarten in Shakhtarsk, a town
several miles to the south. Batya is from the same town, as are most of
his fighters — outside of a couple who described themselves as
volunteers from Russia.
“She
is known as 01,” he said, pronouncing it “zero one,” which is an
emergency telephone number, like 911 in America. “She goes into the
field to rescue our fighters when they are wounded. Plus she is our best
sniper. She can cook for us. She can drive our tank.”
He
reached into a corner behind a tattered chair and pulled out a long
rifle with a thick scope. “Here is her sniper rifle,” he said.
Ira sat on the sofa, blushing slightly and rubbing her feet together, clad in fuzzy red slippers.
She had no sniper training. “I just decided to give it a try,” she said.
Batya barked a few orders into his walkie-talkie, then turned and said,
“There will be loud noises soon.” Almost instantly, the company’s tank,
parked down the road, barked loudly and the percussion wave rolled up
the venetian blinds.
 |
Batya
said his troops had held this position for four months, but were
looking forward to moving once the road to Debaltseve is severed. After
that, well, that is another question.
In August, Russian-backed rebel troops routed Ukrainian forces around the town of Ilovaisk,
obliterating entire units of soldiers, leaving about 100 armored
vehicles in smoking ruins and reversing the tide of the war. There is
talk now of “another Ilovaisk” in Debaltseve.
“We
will win, I know that,” Batya said. “We will not accept to live with
these Ukrainians any more. But what the world will look like after the
fighting, really, I don’t know.”
The
venetian blinds danced a few more times. Coffee was served and Ira
traded her fuzzy slippers for leather boots and a fur-lined combat cap.
Batya fingered the medals hanging from his battle tunic; one of them is
for conspicuous bravery, the highest decoration the rebels bestow.
Horlivka
is a crucial position for the rebels, both because of its substantial
industrial facilities and because of five huge water pipelines that
converge here. If Ukraine captures the town, Batya said, it could choke
off the entire region’s water supply.
“Lose Horlivka and we lose the war,” he said. “But we do not lose Horlivka.”
The streets in the center of town were crowded with shoppers over the weekend, most of them elderly women with pushcarts.
The
billboards had not been changed for nearly a year, so the paper on them
hung in shreds, layer upon layer, with only the occasional smiling
eyeball or number peeking through. People waited at stoplights, ran for
buses. A statue of Lenin peered sternly over a central square.
To
the north, though, where the front lines meet the edge of town, street
traffic was sparse. A bus stop had been blasted to bits. A pedestrian
bridge collapsed onto a water pipe. A scorched ninth-floor apartment was
all that was left of a family of three, hit with a shell two nights
earlier.
At
only one point did Batya’s mood sour, when he asked how Americans could
support Ukrainian troops who were doing such things to his people.
“Do we look like terrorists?” he asked. “Do we look like Russian soldiers?”
He
reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a Ukrainian passport —
“See!” he shouted — and then a stack of laminated ID cards, one for each
of the towns in which he has fought, beginning with Slovyansk last
spring.
“Every time we move to a new town, there are new forms to fill out,” Batya said, suddenly smiling again.
After
a brief tour of the front lines, he paused at one of his northernmost
emplacements, just to check the temperature of his troops. An elderly
woman was arguing angrily with a pair of soldiers who refused to let her
through to buy bread, fearing she was a Ukrainian spy.
A
few yards away, Ira smiled again shyly, cradling an automatic rifle
across her chest. On its nose was a grenade launcher carrying a shell
called the frog, because it hits the ground, jumps up and explodes at
stomach level.
“I
saw what happened in Maidan,” she said, referring to the popular
uprising that had unseated the previous, pro-Russian government last
year. “I knew I was against the people who had come to power in Kiev.”
For
her, she said, there was no choice. “I just had a feeling that
something should be done,” she said, “And I thought, ‘Why not me?’”
Correction: February 6, 2015
The Horlivka Journal article on Tuesday, about the upbeat mood
among pro-Russia rebels on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, misstated
the location of Mariupol, where rockets fired by the rebels struck a
market, killing 31 people. It is a coastal town on the Sea of Azov, not
on the Black Sea.
A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Ukraine Rebels Upbeat After an Infusion of Aid.
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