Meet Sergei, a veteran from Donbass

Today I met a Donbass veteran called Sergei and wanted to share some answers to questions that any of us might have asked him.  Our encounter got off to a frosty start as Sergei was driving me on a longish journey, as I got into the car he asked me “can’t you hurry up”, “no” was my answer with the follow-up that I’d had knee surgery.  I would have been more diplomatic if it wasn’t for that fact that I had arrived early for the pick-up.  I think Sergei sensed he may have been on thinish ice and explained the terrible fines that get charged after five minutes of free waiting.

Into the journey the frost quickly thawed and we got to chatting about knees, Sergei pulled up a trouser leg and showed a large area of scar tissue, he tersely explained “I served”.  Turns out that Sergei was part of the irregular Donbass Army, he started fighting around 2014 and was badly injured in 2017 and came to Russia after 8 months of rehabilitation in Donbass.  He is “over 50” and his grown daughter has also left Donbass and is now in nearby Rostov-on-Don, just across the border in Russia.  She had recently taken on a mortgage to buy a flat.

“I can tell you, that after Maidan, the Ukrainian Airforce flew helicopters and planes over us and just fired, that really happened.  That’s when I went to get a gun and fight, I fought for the idea of Donbass”.  He explained that the use of the Russian language was being restricted in schools, “okay so they had Ukrainian language lessons, but then they insisted on moving the teaching of maths and other subjects over to Ukrainian, which meant shredding all of our textbooks and curriculums”.  “We put a lot of faith in Yanukovich and he ran away like a little dog after Maidan, that’s when it started”.  I asked him whether the Ukrainian disklike for the ethnic Russians in east Ukraine was something manufactured externally, for example by the Americans.  “No, there were frictions with the Western Ukrainians even back in Soviet times”.  More recently “they didn’t consider the inhabitants of Donbass to be people”.

If Yanukovich had stamped out Maidan this war would have been avoided, “there would have been deaths, yes, but nothing like what we are seeing now, I’ve buried so many of my friends from school”.

He said he was lucky he got treatment for his leg quite quickly after injury (he didn’t advance details), “it is all about time at that point, I would have lost the leg if I hadn’t been able to get speedy treatment in the field hospital”.

He wasn’t too sympathetic about the current plight of people in Kharkov “what should they do during bombings?  They should hide in the basements, the same as we had to when we were being shelled by the Ukrainian army”.

He seemed philosophical about his part in the conflict and the fact that people are hostages to the politicians pulling the strings, “but it’s the women and children dying that gets me”.  He was pretty impressed with Uncle Vova (President Putin), “he knows what he is doing, we just need to support him and ensure he doesn’t get isolated in that way that Yanukovich did” adding “but he should have taken Donbass back in 2014, it would have been much better”.  I asked him about Zelensky “listen it was a protest vote, we wanted anyone that wasn’t part of the Kiev Timoshenko-Yushenko political circus, Zelenskyy was an outsider”.  That didn’t work out too well, he mused.

I explained to him that not everyone in the West supports their governments’ “Putin must fail” mantra.  “Screw them, they are not actually stopping this war, they can talk a lot, probably we’ll have to finish this war”.  He was particularly angry about the Poles and if they kept sabre rattling then they would be taught a lesson.  “We don’t have much here, but if we have to, everyone will get a gun and fight, our grandfathers did it before”.  On sanctions he said, “look at the state of the Soviet Union after the war (World War 2), we got moving after that, they can stick their sanctions”.

I asked him about Ukraine regaining Donbass, “no way, the people there will never accept the Ukrainians, the women whose sons and husbands have been killed will eat them alive, there can’t be reasonable interactions for a generation now”. 

I talked geopolitics and corruption with him, he didn’t seem that bothered “the guy above, he sees everything and when the time comes they will be held accountable”.  The great paradox was that he had lost a lot during the war and obviously appreciated the terrible tragedy of war, but that said, he glazed over when we spoke about Poland, he was ready to go there if he had to.

While our craven political class plays geopolitics in comfortable offices thousands of miles away in London, Washington and Brussels it is the Sergeis of this world that pay the price in blood.

Sergei’s parting thought was “whatever will be, will be” and there is no arguing with that!

Alex