By Stepan Kravchenko
Tamara Nekrasova never really hated Ukrainians, not even when a shell fired from Ukrainian territory struck her house just a short walk from the Russia-Ukraine border, sending her to the hospital and killing a neighbor. It wasn’t until later, after months of relentless anti-Ukraine reports on Russian television, that anger and antipathy began to consume the 55-year-old former mineworker.
“I feel it now,” Nekrasova said as she packed boxes to move out of her wood-frame hut, where holes from the shrapnel still scar the walls. “I just feel it from the things they’re showing on TV.”
I met Nekrasova on a six-day journey along the Russia-Ukraine frontier -- 2,164 kilometers (1,345 miles) of highways, two-lane roads and muddy paths. Not so long ago, the border was a mostly imaginary line through wheat fields and birch forests. To most Russians, it meant what it did in Soviet times, when it meant nothing at all. That ended with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in March and the ensuing conflict with Ukraine.
Since then, both sides have plowed up fields and cleared forests to build defensive earthworks, and the locals are erecting equally formidable barriers in their minds. As a Muscovite who was just 8 when the Soviet Union collapsed, I’d never felt any animosity toward or from Ukraine. Like most of my countrymen, I considered Ukraine a sister nation -- different but not quite foreign. And like other Russians, I saw nothing unusual or wrong with friendships, families, and marriages that straddled the border.
Old Habits
My friend Nikolai and I embarked on the journey to see just how much things have changed among those living closest to the frontier. We spoke with dozens of residents of the restricted border zone, and to my dismay discovered a country turning inward, a back-to-the-future reversion to old Soviet habits in which citizens and authorities alike are searching for enemies, internal and external, who can be blamed for the tension. Some people asked for our passports as proof we weren’t Ukrainian agents. Most refused to give their surnames for fear of trouble with Russia’s military or the FSB, the successor to the KGB that Putin once ran.
We dodged three hares, killed one partridge, got pulled out of a ditch by friendly locals in a Lada Niva -- the gold-standard of Soviet all-wheel-drive technology – and were detained by Russia’s border patrol for not having a pass allowing travel in the region.
“For 20 years, Ukrainians have been taught to hate us,” one of the guards said, citing a view common along the frontier and reinforced by Russian media. “And now you can really see it.”
Slavic Brethren
Even more than in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in the Russian interior, people on the border see the conflict in stark relief: Supported by U.S. and the EU, they say, the government in Kiev is committing crimes against its own people, who didn’t want to break with their Slavic brethren to join Western Europe. The fighting is perceived as evidence of Ukrainian hatred of everything Russian, which is then turned back into loathing directed at Ukraine.
“We’re only treating them the way they treat us,” said Valery, the owner of an auto repair shop near a town called Veidelevka.
Vodka Shots
As Russian tanks and soldiers flooded the region over the summer -- Valery recalled fixing a flat on an armored personnel carrier, then sharing vodka shots with the troops -- fear and distrust of Ukrainians became the norm. Though the soldiers have largely left since an uneasy cease-fire started on Sept. 5 (we saw only a few tanks, and they were all more than 20 kilometers from the border), the sense of separation between the two sides has proven more difficult to dislodge. Putin himself on Oct. 14 said, “The biggest tragedy has been the alienation of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.”
Elena, a 40-year-old store clerk chatting with friends at a bus stop, told me people living in contested border zones that have declared independence from Ukraine are “our guys.” Ukrainians, she said, “are all the others.”
Nekrasova lives in a quiet neighborhood of Donetsk, a Russian border town that shares its name with the much larger Ukrainian city (and rebel stronghold) 200 kilometers to the west. At about 9 a.m. on a Sunday in July, Nekrasova heard explosions and went to the door, where she saw a large, burning hole in her garden. She was about to step outside when what she now describes as intuition stopped her.
Tamara Nekrasova has moved out of her wood-frame hut, where holes from the shrapnel still scar the walls.
Is This War?
As she turned away, a second shell landed five meters from the house. Shrapnel ripped through the walls, cutting her legs and scattering debris throughout the room. As Nekrasova looked at her wounds and the destruction around her, all she could think of was, “What is this? What is this? Is this war?” she recalled.
Nekrasova moved to Donetsk from the Ural Mountains, 1,500 kilometers to the east, at the age of 16. “When we came here, my grandma warned us: The enemy won’t reach the Urals, but can easily come to the border, where he has already appeared once,” she said.
Our journey started six days earlier at a spot called the Three Sisters, where the borders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus meet roughly 500 kilometers west of Moscow. The closest village is Novye Yurkovichi, a settlement of a few dozen dark log cabins with white or gray moldings around the windows.
That’s where we found Nikolai Ivanovich. The 76-year-old retired tractor driver, who served as a Red Army rocket technician during the Cuban Missile Crisis, was sitting on a wooden bench by his front gate.
Russian News
While the town’s homemade TV antennas reach higher than the trees and can receive both Russian and Ukrainian channels, locals only trust the Russian news, according to Nikolai, who didn’t want to tell us his surname. And presenters and commentators there often compare the current Ukrainian government to the Nazis -- a notion that falls on fertile soil in an area where virtually everyone’s grandfather or great-grandfather served in the Red Army.
Nikolai blames the Ukrainian government for destroying homes, factories and farms in the region -- saying that in some respects they’re even worse than the Germans who passed through in 1941.
“Hitler’s troops spent a night in this village and only one glass was broken,” he said in Surzhyk, the melodious mix of Russian and Ukrainian spoken by many residents of the area. Of the Ukrainian government, he said, “We should hang those fascists by their eggs from a birch tree.”
Unknown Men
From Novye Yurkovichi, we steered my black Hyundai Getz onto the highway for about an hour before turning in to a muddy path through villages where pumpkins lay piled in the backyards and goats and cows grazed in the grass. Like villages across the region, they were largely uninhabited as young people have moved to cities in search of jobs.
We see Natalya, a woman in her mid-40s, weaving through the mud puddles on her bicycle. Natalya said squads of military helicopters flew over every hour weeks ago and border guards patrolling the area would knock on the door to ask for water. Then in early September, it stopped.
Natalya recalled asking her son, a tank gunner, whether he’d been sent to Ukraine to help the rebels. His response: “Mom, that’s something you shouldn’t know,” she said, shouting as the rain intensified.
She declined to give her last name because “two unknown men” confronted a neighbor who had spoken with journalists. The pair, she said, advised the neighbor not to speak with the press again, then underscored the suggestion by letting it slip that they knew she has four children.
A Ukrainian soldier moves along a trench at a position close to the small eastern village.
Physical Gap
After a night in a Soviet-era guesthouse with soiled walls and sweat-stained mattresses, we turned off the main road and headed toward a speck of a village called Maritsa. Across a misty meadow, we spotted a yellow-and-blue post sticking out of the ground. We parked the car, walked down a hill, forded a small stream and found ourselves right up against the border of the world’s biggest country.
Later that day, in the region of Kursk -- site of history’s biggest tank battle, in 1943 -- the growing cultural divide between Russians and Ukrainians became a physical gap. Near a village called Oleshnya, we saw a two-meter deep trench that the Ukrainians are digging parallel to the border. Stretching more than 100 kilometers today, it’s expected to eventually extend to some 2,000 kilometers -- though about a third of the planned route passes through areas that aren’t controlled by the Ukrainian government.
The ditch starts just beyond the shallow valley that separates Oleshnya from Ukraine. As the border has tightened, villagers have stopped visiting their relatives in neighboring Yunakovka just across the green meadows. Several locals told me that they don’t even call anymore. After phoning friends in Ukraine, they say, they have received text messages warning them against communicating with “the other side.”
Monks With a View
From Oleshnya, we headed toward Svyato-Nikolaevsky, a 17th-century monastery that’s home to a dozen monks and postulants. The road to Svyato-Nikolaevsky -– Saint Nicholas -- winds through the fields then climbs to the top of a chalk mountain with a panoramic vista of Ukraine across the slow curves of the Psel river. The view has as much appeal to soldiers as it does to religious ascetics, and last summer the army bivouacked there for several weeks, leaving behind a vast camouflage tent on a nearby hill overlooking the border.
Piroshki and Jam
After vegetable soup and piroshki filled with black currant jam, Ilya, a young man with several days’ stubble on his chin, said the monks pray every day for the Ukrainians to make peace among themselves. They don’t, though, offer prayers for Russian-Ukrainian conciliation since the two countries “are not having an official war.”
Georgiy, 30, was an engineer in Kursk before joining the brotherhood. He keeps an old Nokia phone, not to communicate (“nobody calls me” he said), but to listen to Orthodox sermons and songs stored on its memory card. Among the tracks is a lecture by Alexei Osipov, a popular theologian, who says the Ukraine crisis is a result of the West’s depravity corrupting the Orthodox world. To help Ukraine, he advises listeners to tell friends and relatives that Barack Obama is “satanic.”
After the morning ceremony, Georgiy, a rusty-bearded man who wears a cassock and a black leather belt, climbs to a cross at the top of the hill.
“It’s true that sin comes to us from the West,” but it’s Russians who find the West’s ideals attractive and are embracing them, he said after kneeling to pray before the cross. “The trouble is, we willingly accept it.”
American Ambition
Leaving the monastery, we took a new road built by a local tycoon that covers most of the 40 kilometers to Sudzha, a town of 6,000 that for a month in 1919 served as the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In the two-story building that serves as City Hall, we visit the mayor, a 65-year-old named Vasily Shmatkov, a portly man in a black leather jacket and a red-and-gray plaid tie. On the wall behind his desk stands a shelf with five orthodox icons. Above it is a photo of Vladimir Putin.
“Our president is the best man in the world,” Shmatkov said after offering us tea. “We did a clever thing with Crimea,” he said. “We didn’t rush into war but showed the force of our arms and our decisiveness.”
Shmatkov is typical of the region. Despite his die-hard support for Putin, he has strong ties to Ukraine: His mother was from Odessa, his brother lives in Kiev, his sister in Kharkov. His daughter, who lives just across the border in Sumy, disagrees with his world-view and they often quarrel by phone. He has sympathy for the Ukrainians, he said, and understands the motivation for the protests last winter that kicked off the crisis.
Cold War Rhetoric
“The Ukrainian authorities were ruining the country, and people just had enough of it,” Shmatkov said. But he insists the popular movement was hijacked by Americans who wanted “to get closer to our borders.”
Echoing the heightened Cold War-esque rhetoric common in Russia, he praises the nuclear deterrent inherited from the Soviet Union for keeping American ambitions in check. “Russia wouldn’t exist anymore if we didn’t have nuclear parity,” he said.
A three-hour drive toward the south, we come to the village of Koleshatovka, which borders the notionally independent Luhansk People’s Republic, one of two breakaway regions where rebels have set up their own government. Natasha, a young woman with a kindly smile, is cleaning the windows of her single-story log house that sits directly alongside the road.
Military Hardware
When Russian tanks appeared last summer, she said the earth shook and she had trouble sleeping. When she looked up at the hill south of her house, it bristled with so much military hardware that it “shone like bronze,” she said. Though the troops have pulled back, their trenches are still there, offering an easy firing line to the road winding through the fields along the border.
To get a closer look at those trenches, we parked our car in the bushes just outside Koleshatovka. We had been taking photos for about 20 minutes when a border guard appeared and demanded to see our papers. After checking my camera, he told me to delete the photos we’d taken of the trench. He took our passports, told Nikolai to climb into the police car, and ordered me to follow in mine.
Border Patrol
Ten minutes later, we arrived at a Soviet-era administrative building. Inside the border patrol staff room, armored vests and helmets lay on the desks. A bookcase against the wall was filled with titles such as “Border War,” “Border on Fire” and “Serving the Soviet Union.”
Roman, a timid captain in his 40s, filled out pink carbon-paper forms to fine us 300 rubles (a bit more than $7) for being in the restricted zone without a pass and instructed us to pay it later at a bank.
A young man in civilian clothing came in and invited us to his cubicle, a tight space barely big enough for three chairs and a desk. Yuri, blond, with colorless eyes and a black-and-white plaid shirt, picked up an FSB manual on interrogation techniques, ran his finger down a checklist and started in: personal information, relatives, finances, contacts in the U.S. and Ukraine. As he filled two sheets of paper in his tiny script, he was scrupulously polite.
Are Ukrainians a separate people, I asked.
“There is no difference between us and the Ukrainians,” he said.
“Would you be this polite to me if I were Ukrainian?” I pressed.
“No,” he acknowledged. “I wouldn’t.”
Poet and Composer
Two hours later, Yuri and Roman gave us directions out of town, recommended a local cafeteria for lunch, and shook our hands in farewell. It was after nightfall when we arrived in Donetsk, and we stopped on a dark side street to check our map. An elderly man appeared from the shadows, dragging a huge rolling suitcase and cursing.
“Did they teach you this in the driving school?” he shouted. “Turn off your lights!”
After I dimmed the headlights, the man bent down and peered into my window.
“Viktor Yakovlevich Goncharov, poet and composer,” he said before regaling us with a rhyming verse praising Putin. He launched into a theory not uncommon in the borderlands: The Ukrainian crisis is a ploy by the U.S. to supplant Russian energy supplies to Europe with its own shale gas.
“You know Americans: If an American invests $100, he must take $200 back,” he said.
Red Army Rocketeer
Goncharov knelt at my window for more than an hour. He’s 70 and served in the Red Army as a rocketeer. He now earns a living selling the icons, WWII antiques and old musical instruments stuffed into the suitcase he was hauling around town. We bought a giant Brezhnev-era bayan, an instrument akin to an accordion, for 2,000 rubles.
Goncharov knelt at my window for more than an hour. He’s 70 and served in the Red Army as a rocketeer. He now earns a living selling the icons, WWII antiques and old musical instruments stuffed into the suitcase he was hauling around town. We bought a giant Brezhnev-era bayan, an instrument akin to an accordion, for 2,000 rubles.
“We should just treat those close to us the way we want to be treated,” Goncharov said. As he walked away, we turned on the lights so he could see the road, and noticed he’d been holding a crowbar in his hand the entire time we talked.
About 11 the next evening, we arrived in Maksimov, a village of 300 people on the sandy shore of the Sea of Azov and a few steps from the Ukrainian border. In the dark, we could see almost nothing; a massive thunderstorm had caused a blackout in the area. The border checkpoint just outside town was the only place that still had electricity.
We pulled up to the small gatehouse. A barrier blocked our way and a sylphlike redheaded woman with a machine gun came out of the hut. As I stepped out of the car, I told her I’d heard that the frontier with Ukraine was closed.
“Ukraine is far away,” she said with a smile. “That’s the Donetsk People’s Republic, and they’re keeping it open.”
No comments:
Post a Comment