MARYNKA, Ukraine -- The road into Donetsk at sunset is less war zone than purgatory clouded by cheap cigarette smoke.
Apart from the distant sounds of continued fighting between Ukrainian government forces and combined Russian-separatist forces at what used to be the Donetsk Airport, hundreds of local residents stand outside their cars waiting to get back home through the checkpoint near Marynka, a war-ravaged suburb of the once-bustling, cosmopolitan city of Donetsk.
The nameless hordes of ordinary citizens – who for all intents and purposes have ceased to matter in this more than one-year war – are stuck in a never-ending queue to get through the final Ukrainian checkpoint before the land becomes “DNR,” an acronym for the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.
“I’m number 40!” one man cheerfully shouts to a less fortunate driver, number 62, as both of them pace back and forth from the front of the line to their parked cars, counting the number of vehicles in front of them.
It’s a modern-day theater of the absurd, Waiting for Godot with a few hundred angry Donetsk locals listlessly smoking by the roadside until they get permission to pass through.
Some people offer bribes. Some have given up and are now simply lying on the side of the road, admitting defeat. Some are berating the soldiers in vain, just because they have nothing else to do.
Cars full of families with children race up and beg the soldiers to just let them through, because their children are crying or starving or ill.
The Ukrainian government has introduced a strict permit system for those who wish to be able to travel back and forth, requiring each individual to acquire a permit. For those who own vehicles, a permit is required for the vehicle as well. The system has led to grueling checks at the border, with guards verifying information on each individual and vehicle in a computer database.
The checkpoint and the hell it causes for locals is a stark reminder that Kyiv sees Donetsk as a separate planet, yet on Ukrainian soil.
If the trenches, sandbags and armed men aren’t enough to indicate that enemy territory is being entered now, a sign on the checkpoint offers helpful advice on “How to Spot a Separatist” – a less than subtle way of warning drivers not to rub elbows with those armed men kilometers down the road who control Ukraine’s populous coal mining and steel producing heartland, from Donetsk to Luhansk.
Definition: “Anyone who openly opposes mobilization (in the east) and is waiting hopefully for Russia and Vladimir Putin.” While trying to photograph the poster for future reference, a guard warned me that photographing the area was prohibited.
What the guards don’t know – or fail to realize – is that these people have long ceased to care. They couldn’t care less about separatists or “khokhly,” a derogatory term used by Russians to refer to Ukrainians.
They just want a normal life with freedom of movement – one that doesn’t involve waiting for eight hours just to get back into their hometown.
“They do this to deter us from going to Donetsk too much,” says one driver, Yura, who declined to give his surname for fear of future problems at checkpoints. “They want to give us the idea that it’s not worth the hassle so we’ll just stop going. Maybe they’re worried we’ll get too friendly with the separatists.”
“There is no way it could take them this long just to check people’s passports. Look, two cars have made it through in the past hour. There are 10 guards there. How can they only process two cars?”
A day earlier, Yura said, he’d missed the 8 p.m. deadline at the checkpoint and been forced to sleep in his car in the field. He arrived at 4 p.m. and didn’t make it through until 11 a.m. the next day.
Whether or not what Yura says is true, there is no denying that the hassle of getting into Donetsk is alienating local residents.
Andrei, a Donetsk resident who frequently travels into government-controlled territory to see his children, spoke of a balancing act when making the crossing: “The rebel side doesn’t like seeing the word Kyiv in my registration, which is in the Kyiv district of Donetsk. I had one guy freak out once about it and had to explain that ‘Kyiv District’ is not the same as the city of Kyiv.”
“And the Ukrainian side doesn’t like seeing the DNR stamp on my work ID card for a local hospital. So you have to swap out what paperwork you give each side. It’s just stupid,” he said.
Like Yura, he requested anonymity for fear of future trouble at the checkpoint.
As he described it, the individual has been all but lost in the conflict, those most closely involved reduced to archetypes and labels – a reality I quickly ran into myself.
Days earlier I’d been advised – in very dramatic terms – not to make the trip to Donetsk.
“I wouldn’t advise it,” a Ukrainian soldier in Shyrokyne warned me. “Do you have any idea how much Motorola’s gang would get for you on the black market? They’ll detain you and then sell you to the highest bidder. That way they don’t have to feed you.”
Fellow journalists were less hyperbolic but equally ominous.
“An American working for Kyiv? You could be detained for hours, at the very least.”
“You never know how they will greet you at the checkpoints. If they’re drunk, they could shoot you.”
It was a (far-fetched) risk I was willing to take. So imagine my dismay when separatist fighters and members of the Vostok Battalion greeted me with smiles, not batting an eyelash at my American passport, not even bothering to ask a single question about what I planned to cover in Donetsk.
At the press office the next day, I was once again pleasantly surprised when the separatist fighter who guarded the door dropped his stern demeanor and scowls to ask me how I felt about cigarettes and the Chicago Bulls.
None of the dozen or so armed fighters returning from the front seemed the least bit concerned that I was American. I explained that I’d already covered the conflict from the Ukrainian side and felt it was only fair to spend some time on the other side as well. They seemed appreciative.
So too did the press officer, Olga, who lamented the fact that “so many Ukrainian journalists are afraid to come here, so they don’t. But then they sit in their offices in Kyiv and write horror stories about us, having never seen anything for themselves.”
I nodded, knowing that she was only partly right, that plenty of Ukrainian and foreign journalists had made the trip only to be booted off the territory – if they were lucky enough to not be detained and held in a basement from hours to weeks.
Kyiv is no angel in this regard either, though, having responded in kind to Russian journalists and foreign journalists who seemed to side with Russia.
Olga seemed just as fed up with the media wars as I was.
So I was shocked to receive a phone call an hour later saying I’d been denied accreditation and would not be allowed to work in Donetsk. The official reason was that “the leadership does not like your articles.” Asked which ones, she responded: “All of your articles.”
Unofficially, the reason was that I worked for a Kyiv-based newspaper that has made its distaste for the insurgents clear.
So I wasn’t kidnapped, or sold or detained. I was simply denied accreditation – nothing surprising about that, especially during wartime.
But this minor setback is symptomatic of a wider problem: an information blockade – in force on both sides, a blockade that allows each side to build and feed its own narrative without any proper exchange of dialogue.
More than a year after the conflict erupted, this blockade is hardening positions, only prohibiting dialogue and ultimately enabling those parties who want the crisis to continue. It has turned human beings into nothing more than pawns in a tragic farce, all of them told to ignore the humanity of their fellow citizens and act according to labels and associations instead.
At some point in my conversation in the separatist press office, I ceased to be an individual and became simply Kyiv, part of the black-and-white lens with which we now view each other, a lens which obscures all nuance in the conflict and blocks any form of understanding.
There is no longer any individual story, no human element; now it is only black and white, Kyiv vs. Moscow; Russian media vs. Ukrainian media.
That is not to downplay the many incidents of serious mistreatment of journalists – on both sides of the conflict. It’s no secret that some journalists have been beaten, detained and even killed for trying to provide the whole picture.
As officials from Kyiv, Moscow, Brussels and Washington have warned that the smoldering conflict could erupt again into full-scale war, the majority of average civilians on both sides of the checkpoints seem nothing more than tired and desperate for a return to normalcy.
Judging by the people manning the press office in Donetsk, they are too.
Maybe if I’d have gotten accreditation I’d have had plenty of pleasant things to say.
Maybe it would’ve even helped to get dialogue rolling – at least on some tiny level.
Maybe not.
Kyiv Post staff writer Allison Quinn can be reached at [email protected]’s Note: This article has been produced with support from www.mymedia.org.ua, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented by a joint venture between NIRAS and BBC Media Action.
