Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Calm Streets Mask Divisions in Donetsk
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Ukraine’s east is more deeply divided than at any point in the country’s
history, and residents say it is possible that Sunday’s presidential
election will do little to change that.
Ukraine Faces Struggle to Gain Control of MilitiasCalm Streets Mask Deep Divisions in Donetsk
DONETSK,
Ukraine — To the casual observer, this is not a city at war. Masked men
are confined to a few buildings in the center of town, where children
on in-line skates pass by. City workers tend to flowers in meticulously
planted parks. Crowded open-air cafes spill onto sidewalks and into
parks. Pfizer is holding a conference at the Ramada, where grilled sea
bass is on the menu.
But
inside living rooms and offices, something has changed. A teacher has
been dropped by 20 friends since he posted a picture of himself at a
pro-Kiev protest on a Russian social media website. A construction
worker no longer speaks to his Muscovite father. A journalist has left
the country, afraid for the safety of her 3-month-old son.
On
Sunday, Ukraine will hold its first national election since a bloody
upheaval in February deposed the elected government and pitched the
country into chaos. But the vote itself will not answer the bigger
question of whether Ukraine will hang together as a country. That
question will be decided mostly here, in the country’s anguished eastern
regions, and will turn on whether ordinary people feel that the vote —
and the country that Ukraine is becoming — belongs to them, too.
The
West hopes that the election will heal the wounds and provide stability
to Ukraine. On Friday, even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — who
seized Crimea and, the West believes, worked hard to destabilize
southeastern Ukraine — said his country would respect the outcome of the
vote.
But
the east is more deeply divided than at any point in this country’s
history, and people here say it is possible that the vote will do little
to change that.
“It’s
like two people talking nonsense to one another, and neither is
listening,” said Dmitry Pertsov, the teacher who attended the pro-Kiev
protest and who was born a few months before Ukraine became independent
in 1991. “It’s a sad fact, but many people no longer see one another as
human beings. I’ve stopped understanding the people around me.”
BELARUS
150 Miles
RUSSIA
POLAND
Kiev
Dnieper
River
Lviv
Kharkiv
Donets
River
UKRAINE
Luhansk
Donetsk
MOLDOVA
Don
River
ROMANIA
CRIMEA
Danube River
Black Sea
Russia
and the West have long presented Ukrainians with a zero-sum choice:
them or us. Many Ukrainians say the choice is false and that, in
reality, they are part of both. But the poisonous language and the
violence, while isolated, are forcing people to take sides, leaving
moderates like Mr. Pertsov standing on rapidly shrinking ground.
Mr.
Pertsov, who teaches Russian to foreign students at Donetsk Medical
University, began to notice hostility on Vkontakte, Russia’s version of
Facebook, not long after the government fell. Friends posted aggressive
messages, like “Ukraine doesn’t exist anymore,” and “we are no longer
brothers.” When they took him off their lists of friends, he was sad,
but not surprised.
“When
I say I love Ukraine, people think it’s not worth talking to me, they
say I am a fascist,” he said, sitting in a classroom empty of students,
who were sent home because of the tensions. “When I meet them on the
street, I say, ‘Hey, it’s me, Dima, the same person as before.’ ”
Anti-Kiev
easterners have some legitimate complaints. One person’s revolution is
another’s coup, and many people here, even those who want Ukraine whole,
are troubled by the uprising in Kiev, which they say was a coup, plain
and simple. Some of its symbols rankled, such as the black-and-red flag
of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a nationalist guerrilla group that
fought the Soviets well into the 1950s.
“It’s
like waving a confederate flag in Harlem,” said Keith Darden, a
political scientist who specializes in Ukraine at American University in
Washington.
And
changes to a language law stirred up old fears among people in the
largely Russian-speaking east that they would be codified as
second-class citizens. The changes were later scrapped, but the damage
had been done.
World
War II was effectively a civil war in Ukraine, with most of the country
siding with the Soviet Union against the Nazis, while a clutch of
western regions fought the Soviets in the name of Ukrainian
independence.
“They
say the Soviet Union was an occupying power,” said a 27-year-old
personnel manager sitting in a park. “Well, not in my opinion.”
This
area, referred to as the Donbass, for the Donets River basin, has long
been unique. A Welshman settled here in the late 19th century and
started to produce steel and coal, hiring laborers from outside the
area, mainly from Russia. The workers lived largely apart from the
indigenous Ukrainian peasant farmers.
Mr.
Pertsov, the teacher, said he had pinned his hopes on the potential for
the armed pro-Russian separatists to alienate residents here.
Anna
Kigel, an accountant who wore stylish red glasses, said, “It’s like a
drunk picnic.” But despite her disdain, there was fear. She is applying
for a passport for her 10-month-old son.
“It’s a sticky and unpleasant feeling,” she said. “Like something could hit you in the head at any moment.”
Others
have already left. Alyona Povoliaieva, a journalist and new mother,
left with her infant son and husband for Moscow shortly after
separatists took over the region in March. She supported the uprising in
Kiev, but quickly became frightened at the response here.
Separatists,
shouting slurs, set up camp near their ground-floor apartment, and she
began to receive hate messages because she was a journalist. She and her
husband, a computer programmer with a Russian firm, are now living with
friends from Chechnya, an autonomous republic in Russia with its own
sad history of violence.
“They
told us, ‘Do you want to live in a city that’s going to war?’ ” said
Ms. Povoliaieva, who is 27. “ ‘Your thoughts will be occupied with how
to get water.’ They said it can happen so quickly, you won’t even
notice.”
There
are arguments within families. Vyacheslav, a 33-year-old construction
worker who supported the government’s overthrow, said he had stopped
talking to his father in Moscow, who opposed it. His father is Ukrainian
but became a Russian citizen because Ukrainian workers earned only half
as much.
“That’s Russian brotherhood for you,” said Vyacheslav, who would not give his last name, for fear of retaliation.
He said it was no longer that difficult to imagine Russians and Ukrainians fighting.
“These
are not the Russians I respect,” he said. “They are the armed ones.
They are like wild animals. Their behavior and values are on that
level.”
Roman
Shapoval, a 38-year-old yoga instructor, said the aggression and
emotion would fade as fast as they began, after the oligarchs and
politicians he believes are behind the upheaval make deals.
“When
they need the idea, they bring it out, dust it off, and use it,” he
said of the East versus West talk. “I don’t see a serious danger of war
here. There won’t be shootouts on the street.”
Mr. Pertsov likes to imagine that everyone will come to their senses soon, as if waking from a strange dream.
“It’s like we’re all drunk,” he said. “We’re going to get up tomorrow and say, ‘Oh, why did I say such terrible things?’ ”
He added: “We just can’t turn into alcoholics.”
Grant Slater contributed reporting.
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