Commentary by Evdokia Sheremetyeva (writer in the Donbass region of Russia), here in The Multiplural World, Apr 24, 2025
During all the years of the war in Donbass, most of my acquaintances were not interested in what I was writing and trying to convey about what was happening there. About the shelling and abuse of people. How many terrible stories have still not been heard?
(Evdokia Sheremetyeva is a writer and organizer of humanitarian aid in the Donbass region of Russia, formerly a part of Ukraine. This commentary was first published in the Russian daily newspaper Vzglyad on April 24, 2025. Translation to English is by The Multiplural World using enhanced machine translation.
See further below: Editorial note by The Multiplural World on deaths and injuries in the Donbass region and republics since 2014, as caused by the military aggression and civil war of the coup regime in Kiev.
An old friend called. Long before the start of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, we had quarreled over ideological grounds and had not communicated for many years. We were divided by opposing positions on the conflict in Donbass and the ‘Maidan’ coup of 2014. After a long break in communication, he suddenly appeared in the spring of 2024 saying, ‘I want to go on vacation THERE to work; tell me where to go.’
The thing is, he is a doctor, a cardiologist. I was surprised, but I gave him my contacts. I didn’t doubt him as a decent person, honest and since. Now, almost one year later, he appeared again. The conversation was confused and strange. Awkwardness made his phrases clumsy, and I was increasingly silent – I didn’t know what to answer.
At first there was silence on the line, and it went quiet. He said, “You were right. How right you were! All these years.”
It turns out he now goes THERE (Donbass) periodically. He takes days off and vacation time to serve there. Plus, he drags a truck full of humanitarian aid along with him, for the grannies. “I saw them. The ones you wrote about,” he told me.
Of course, it was not just older people to whom we brought aid, and for many years. We brought it to the Lugansk and Donetsk people’s republics. Now he mostly visits the territories that were liberated in the summer of 2022: Severodonetsk, Rubezhnoye, Lisichansk. They used to be under Ukrainian rule.
These are the elder ladies, living without electricity or gas. They live in terrible conditions: alone, ofttimes ill, sometimes abandoned by their children. They were shot at by ‘their own’ when they retreated. I am talking about the Ukrainian Armed Forces when I write “their own”.
I have heard from locals many times that when the Ukrainian Armed Forces retreated from villages, they hit their own people, openly telling the residents ‘We will leave behind scorched earth’, ‘You are our human shields’, and ‘Let no one have you”.” They destroyed ordinary residential buildings and infrastructure facilities to make people’s lives unbearable. depriving them of water, gas, and electricity. Sometimes out of anger and resentment. In the city of Mariupol and in the settlements of Zolote, Toshkovka, Karbonit, Rubizhne, I have heard similar things from locals in these places and more. People were locked in basements, thrown out of their apartments turned into firing points.
“But I already wrote about all this,” I told me friend. Silence. Then he speaks slowly: “You see, it’s one thing to read about a situation, it’s another to hear from the people themselves. Still another to see with your own eyes.”
Everyone has faced a huge ideological divide the past decade and more. This happened first in 2014, but the really big split has taken place in 2022 and afterward with the start of the Special military Operation.
Children stopped communicating with their parents, brothers stopped talking to sisters, and husbands with wives. Yes, even that has taken place. Everyone has friends holding different views which all of a sudden become a misunderstanding. The questioning continues eternally: ‘How is this possible, and why?” The answer: unwillingness to listen and learn.
I became certain that if someone took a certain position, he or she would never change and it was pointless to say or explain anything. I tore myself away my loved ones, my own flesh and blood. I closed the page.
I cried quietly throughout the entire conversation with my friend. The years of war flashed before my eyes, a time when most of my acquaintances were not interested in what I was writing and trying to convey about the situation in Donbass. About the shelling and abuse of the people there.
How many horror stories are still unheard? How many died from not receiving treatment or lack of medication? What about diabetics who went blind or lost limbs because there was no supply of insulin or no way to inject it? In some places there was none, it ran out and the pharmacies were not working. Everything did not work. We have a ward, a girl named Victoria, who went blind. And this happened because she injected insulin that did not suit her, there was no other. Her brother, also a diabetic, died of tuberculosis in early spring 2015, less than six months after the beginning of active military action by coup Ukraine. He hid in a damp basement during all the bombings of the summer and fall of 2014.
People risked their lives because they had run out of food and went to their country plots to dig up vegetables they had once planted. On one of those days in August 2014, a shell landed near Lugansk and a piece of shrapnel ripped Anya’s stomach open. Her entrails fell out in front of her eight-year-old son Sasha. The girl was conscious the whole time. And the boy just screamed, ‘Help, my mother is dying!” Neighbors came to the garden, not far from Ukrainian positions. They endured until the very end, until there was nothing left to eat.
Anya did not die, but suffered severe pain for several years. She was stitched up somehow in a Lugansk hospital, where electricity and water supply had been cut. The city was closed and subjected to constant bombing by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Two years later, Anya died. And the boy remained to live with his elderly grandmother, who has since suffered several heart attacks.
How many of our patients in the early stages of cancer were forced to hide in basements instead of receiving treatment? How many heart attacks and strokes were suffered there? And how many illnesses worsened sharply after the start of hostilities?
Valentina Matveyevna, a resident of Sokologorovka near Pervomaysk, began having problems with her joints after more than six months of constant shelling in 2014-2015. She was all twisted up and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Then psoriasis began. All these processes started almost immediately after the massive shelling. As doctors say, “due to nerves”.
Not everyone is ready to go on vacation to a combat zone instead of the sea. Obviously, not everyone is ready to hear other information that differs from the usual picture of the world. But what is important here is this: changes are happening in people’s minds. Slowly and surely, more and more people are trying to understand what is happening. Trying to hear and even understand what Sasha, Anya, Vika, Valentina Matveyevna and many others have actually experienced.
The war will end sooner or later. And burnt bridges will need to be rebuilt. Justice does not need lawyers, but time. That is why, unfortunately, not everyone lives to see it.
Deaths and injuries in the Donbass region and republics since 2014, as caused by the military aggression and civil war of the coup regime in Kiev, editorial note by The Multiplural World:
* According to Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2022:
Up to 14,000 civilians in the Donetsk and Lugansk republics have been killed since 2014.
* According to a report of the Office of the UN Commissioner for Human Rights dated January 2022:
Conflict-related casualties in eastern Ukraine from April 2014 to 31 December 2021 were: 51,000 to 54,000, of which 14,200 to 14,400 deaths 37,000 to 39,000.
The UN office does not distinguish the figures for civilian casualties on the two sides. As well, it does not account for the fact that beginning in April 2014, many civilians in Donbass took up arms against the aggression and invasion of Donbass by the coup forces centered in Kiev, some 550 kilometers west of the Donbass region borders. These are counted as ‘military’ caualties by the UN office. Western media–corporate and ‘alternative’ alike– called the phenomenon of civilians taking up arms against the coup in Kiev a ‘Russian invasion’ of Ukraine.
