You're reading: A look at life in Luhansk Oblast’s ‘tinderbox’ with region’s leader

TOSHKIVKA, Ukraine -- Hennadiy Moskal drives an old car and barely makes $200 a month as governor of embattled Luhansk Oblast, half of which he does not even control. Yet he still thinks he can make a difference.

“See what these monsters are doing?” Moskal asks his counterpart from Mykolayiv Oblast, Vadym Merikov, whom he was showing around the ruins of a school in the village of Toshkivka on a recent day in November.

Local residents think it was extremely lucky that children were dismissed from school just half an hour before a shell from rebel-controlled territory hit the building the week before, destroying the lunch room and gym, and smashing all windows in the building.

Merikov promised to send workers and building materials from Mykolayiv to reconstruct the school as part of humanitarian relief.

The parents, however, will think twice before sending their children back to this school after its reconstruction, fearing another hit. In fact, many of them would like to leave here. To the sound of loud explosions, a group of middle-aged women asked Moskal for advice on whether they should.

In return, he asked them why they voted at the separatist-organized poll on May 11, which then led to the creation of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, which by now has spread over half the region which was once home to nearly 3 million people.

“Didn’t you see it was a scam, ladies?” he said. “Didn’t you understand it could come to all this?”

Six months of war brought Ukraine’s far eastern Luhansk Oblast to the brink of survival, with thousands of residents killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. Heavy fighting and shelling destroyed a good deal of infrastructure in the region, resulting in shortages of water and electricity and grinding businesses to a halt.

There are some 29,000 internally displaced people living in the region, including almost the entire staff of the Luhansk Oblast Administration, who had to flee their provincial capital, which is now under rebel control, and set up shop in the city of Severodonetsk, which is still controlled by the central government.

Sitting at old, worn desks of a former chemistry institute, the officials don’t complain much, though, because “it’s better than work under the bombs.”

Moskal, who used to be a member of parliament before his appointment as governor in late September, drives around the region in an old Volkswagen, the only car the fleeing officials managed to salvage from the governor’s car park in rebel-controlled Luhansk.

In addition to his meager salary, Moskal travels around without bodyguards, so when a tipsy elderly man jumped in front of him, asking for help getting conscripted to military service in the Ukrainian army, Moskal kicked him out of his office, shouting: “I’m not a conscription office, get out of here!”

Known for his sailor-style parlance, Moskal, a former police general, often talks to ordinary people and said he knows well their moods and needs. He says the region has been brutally damaged by war, separating families that now have to cross the warring front lines.

“Have you noticed the lines of people by cash machines? They have all traveled here from occupied territories to get some cash, buy some food and then they will go back,” he says.

Although he’s seeing desperation on the other side, Moskal hailed the government’s decision to stop payments for the residents living the insurgents.

“If the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic decided to take responsibility, then let them take it for everything,” he says. “They shell us with Grads and we should pay them?”

Moskal says the government made a mistake when they decided to keep supplying breakaway regions with water and energy. He says the separatists should be paying for those supplies, but currently they are not.

“We suggested to them to set the issues of gas, water, electricity and bread aside. Let us pick up the dead and wounded from both their sides, and our side,” Moskal says.

But so far efforts to negotiate these issues with the insurgents, with the help of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, have been unsuccessful. “The OSCE has not even responded to us about the results of these negotiations. It seems they’re not interested all that much,” he says.

The warring parties rely on the same infrastructure for electricity, a power plant in the embattled town of Shchastya. The power plant hovers on the brink of stopping because the insurgents do not allow coal supplies to leave their territory. This means that the risk of the region freezing in the winter is very high.

“The fighting might endanger gas, water or electricity,” Moskal said. “We are living on a tinderbox.”

The governor said he is getting plenty of information from the locals about Russian troops operating in the rebel-controlled parts of the region. “They (the Russians) don’t even hide anymore. They openly wear their military uniforms,” Moskal said, adding they were the troops of the Kantemirov tank division and Pskov airborne division.

Most of the residents are desperately trying to make ends meet as the big industrial enterprises, the region’s main sectors of economy, have stopped working because of war. “Local people have almost no money left,” he said.

Moskal said the Severodonetsk chemical plant Azot, which is owned by billionaire Dmytro Firtash, who is fighting U.S. charges alleging corruption, doesn’t work because of disruptions in gas supplies, a key element needed for the production process.

The Lysychansk oil refinery, owned Russian Rosneft, does not function either. Moskal thinks it’s because of political reasons. “I don’t care who their owners are, these plants have to work for people to keep their jobs,” he said.

The local budget is 80 percent filled though payroll taxes. If business in the region is dead, it means an empty budget and no spending, which, in turn, feeds into anti-Ukrainian sentiments, which are overwhelming in the region.

Moskal, who worked as governor of Luhansk Oblast in 2005-2006, said that the former ruling Party of Regions was responsible for cultivating pro-Russian moods and distrust of Kyiv among the locals.

Moskal said that on Oct. 26, when Ukraine was choosing its parliament, he was approached at the polling station by a woman who asked him why the name of Russian President Vladimir Putin was not on the list.

“I told her – take a pen and write it down yourself,” he said. “What can we explain these people? It’s impossible to change the situation here in just a year or two.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]