Aleppo, Palmyra, Mosul – these Syrian and Iraqi cities made headlines this year. In 2013 and 2014, the war in Syria had still been eclipsed by events in eastern Ukraine, but now it’s the other way round. The fighting in Donbas has virtually disappeared from German and European media.
But people are dying there almost on a daily basis.Ceasefire violations have become a daily routine. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine delivers ample proof of this, recording a massive 300,000 incidents in 2016 alone. Behind those figures looms Donbas’s awful reality – trench warfare between separatists and the Ukrainian army. The civilian population is caught in the middle – dependent on humanitarian aid, putting up with wrecked buildings and disrupted power, water and gas supplies.
