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Eastern Ukrainians start rebuilding walls, lives

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SLOVIANSK, Ukraine -- For 10 years, the rehabilitation center run by the Good News Church in Krasny Molochar in Sloviansk sheltered lost souls: people made homeless as a result of drug and alcohol addiction or other personal disasters, who wanted to build their lives again. 

On May 20, Alexander Pugach, one of the remaining residents still there after three weeks of
fighting around Sloviansk between the occupying Donetsk People’s Republic and the Ukrainian army, watched Russian-backed insurgent fighters drive up outside. They began
firing machine guns and grenade launchers at the Ukrainian army position.

The
Ukrainians, of course, fired back.

“The army
didn’t know there were civilians here,” Pugach says. He recalls how all the
windows blew out. “The sky just exploded, it seemed like the end of the
world, as if the sky was about to break
open and Christ was going to appear.” 

As soon as
there was a break in the firing, Pugach and the others fled. Three days later a
shell scored a direct hit, blowing a huge hole in the building. 

Nearly
three months on, with Sloviansk under Ukrainian control since July 5, it is hard
to believe the extent of the destruction — and reconstruction.

The roof has been completely repaired
by volunteers, and new walls are going up rapidly. The center is providing
shelter again for another kind of lost soul in search of new beginnings: people
made homeless by eastern Ukraine’s disastrous collective conflict.

Sloviansk
may be peaceful now, but the men sitting round the table in the center’s
makeshift kitchen one day in August come from towns where fighting still rages,
destroying lives and livelihoods. 

Ukrainian
activist Bohdan Novak fled Donetsk when he was warned that he was on the separaists’ list
of enemies to be tracked down and got rid of.

Alexander Syulokov spent four
days in the cellar after a mine landed in their yard in rebel-occupied Krasny
Luch. When the family escaped they had to beg for petrol as they reached
Ukraine-controlled territory, because they had no money left. Alexander had
left Horlivka the day before, driven out not so much by daily shelling as by
the need to find work as he too ran out of money. And Roman, half his face
obscured by cuts and bruising, had escaped militants in Donetsk who cut off his
finger, stole his passport and threatened to press-gang him to dig
trenches.  

These men
tell their stories in breaks from labor.

Refugees from all over Donetsk and
Luhansk oblasts arrive in Sloviansk daily, independently or evacuated by
volunteers supported by local churches and foundations. Some move on to
accommodation elsewhere; others are housed temporarily in holiday camps and
hostels around Sloviansk. Many Ukrainians complain that these displaced people
do not want to do anything to help themselves. But Novak, Syulokov, Alexander
and Roman have come to the rehabilitation centre because they want to work. 

“I’m here
to learn what we will have to do later, in Krasny Luch,” says 22-year-old
Syulokov, who says he hopes to start with rebuilding the family home, damaged
when the mine blew up their car outside. “I hope Krasny Luch will be liberated
soon and will be able to get back to life, just as Slovyansk was liberated and
is a live, working town again.” 

Alexander
from Horlivka did not want to give his last name for fear of reprisals from separatists in the prevalent
atmosphere of suspicion and blame as fighting sets “separatist” against “nationalist,” neighbor against neighbour. 

A 59-year-old miner, mostly he
talks about his fears that the network of mines in Horlivka and Shakhtyarsk
will flood and collapse if fighting continues. He went on working as
long as he could, until his mine was forced to close because there was no
electricity. Workers like him have received no salaries or pensions for months. 

“I left
because I had nothing to live on and I can’t rely on my mother, I have to pull
my weight,” he says. His mother, son and divorced wife remain in the besieged
town, where all post offices, banks and ATMs have long since closed. “I’ll stay
here for now because people need to be helped, but all the same I’ll look for
paid work too, because I’ve got to keep up with credit payments. If I’d had
money, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere,” he says. “I’m a Horlivka patriot.” 

Initial
local support for the  when it appeared in April along with its Luhansk
equivalent the LNR, was often a desperate protest at the closure of industry
that left people here without any income or jobs to take pride in. But the DNR
and LNR regimes have not provided jobs other than as fighters, either for their
supporters or for those who tried not to take sides. Roman, who says he is one
of the latter, was punished with utter brutality by the DNR for his simple
desire to work and support his family. 

Roman, who
was afraid to give his last name, worked in a Horlivka garage until DNR
militants paid a visit to his boss in May. The boss closed the garage
immediately and fled town. With two children to feed, Roman found a job in a
garage in Donetsk. 

Militants
frequently ‘borrowed’ cars without paying. When Roman objected, he was taken to
the DNR security headquarters. In the basement, the people who questioned him
cut off his finger before letting him go.       

Incredibly,
Roman stayed in Donetsk and went back to work. He stopped going home at
weekends, because he didn’t want his wife to know what had happened. “I
understand there’s a war going on but I had to feed the family somehow,” he
says. “I worked to the last, as long as I could I worked.” 

‘The last’
came when militants paid a second visit. When Roman did not give them the keys
to two cars, they beat him and said they would return next morning and take him
to dig trenches. 

He did not
wait to find out if they would make good their threat; as soon as he regained consciousness
he left. As well as the cars, the militants had taken all his documents;
somehow he managed to get through a dozen DNR and Ukrainian army road blocks on
his way to Slavyansk without being checked. Now he fears his stolen passport
will be used to frame him for the theft of the cars. 

No one can
offer Roman or Alexander paid jobs so far in Slovyansk, where the economy is as
damaged as the infrastructure. But at the rehabilitation centre there is plenty
of work rewarded with food, accommodation, and friendship. “I don’t want to
just hang around, I want to do something; help out,” Roman says. He hasn’t seen
his family for two months; his children are in a camp in central Ukraine but
his wife is still in Horlivka where she too is working, baking bread in one of
the only supermarkets still open. 

The
rehabilitation center occupied the second floor of a former collective farm
administrative building; the dilapidated first floor rooms – still adorned with
murals of Marx, Engels and Lenin – were used for storage and workshops. As well
as the structural damage, the building was completely looted of all furniture
and appliances. Now both floors are going to be refurbished with funding from
the Good News Church, providing accommodation for up to fifty refugees as well
as the rehabilitation centre. 

“Unhappiness
helped us to happiness,” says Nona Sokolenko, quoting a Russian proverb as she
describes how the restored building will be better than ever before. One of the
rehabilitation centre’s original residents who survived the shooting on May 20,
Nona came back to cook for the volunteers. Her room is a small airy oasis for
plants salvaged from the wreckage and for a rescued kitten curled up on the
bed. The gaping hole where the window should be looks out through trees to the
highway where armoured vehicles drive past, Ukrainian flags flying. 

With fierce
fighting to the south around Donetsk and north in Luhansk region, the centre
provides a refuge for ordinary people caught up in a war they cannot
comprehend. When asked the reason for the conflict, or why neighbours who lived
alongside each other all their lives suddenly took sides against each other,
their only explanation is to blame distant ‘politics’ and ‘oligarchs’. But they
are clear that they don’t want to take part in any more destruction. 

“War is
never good for ordinary people; no normal person wants war,” says
Alexander. “I’m too old to be called up
but I wouldn’t want to go and fight anyway. We’re all Slavs: Russians;
Ukrainians. I’m Russian although I was born here and lived here all my life.” 

Instead,
they want to work towards rebuilding their region.

“I don’t know why I was on
the (separatists’) wanted list; I’m not important, I don’t represent anything,” says
Bohdan from Donetsk.

When the war started, fellow activists who fled Donetsk
founded the emergency organisation Donbas SOS, or went to Kyiv and to Europe to
speak out about the situation. “I decided my words couldn’t really influence
anything, or other people can do that better than I can,” says Bohdan. “So I
volunteered to work here. I’d never done building work before but I’m ready to
learn new skills and do whatever needs to be done.”

Editor’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, as well as Ukraine Media Project, managed by Internews and funded by the United States Agency for International Development.