Eyewitness Donetsk and Lugansk: People on the frontline against fascism

Several days before, Ukrainian forces had attacked a nearby bus stop, attempting to advance. They were pushed back. Now the Prizrak fighters were digging trenches to prevent another advance by the better-equipped enemy forces.

Through the magnifier I had a better view of the Ukrainian base just across no-man’s land, which was visible to the naked eye from our position. In addition to tents, vehicles and people moving around, I could see two flags. One was the Ukrainian national. The other was the black and red flag of the fascist Right Sector.

That was on Sunday, May 8.

A second moment of understanding came the next day, May 9. Celebrated as Victory Day throughout the former Soviet Union, it marks the final defeat of Nazi Germany by the Red Army and partisan forces in 1945, at the cost of more than 27 million Soviet lives.

I was in Lugansk, capital city of the Republic, where I participated in the Victory Day parade with the Lugansk Communists and Komsomol.

Coming out of the Communist Party office in the city center, I saw tens of thousands of people streaming down the main street to the gathering site: youth, elders, veterans, workers, parents with young children, teenagers. Almost everyone was carrying signs bearing photo of relatives who had fought and died in the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet anti-fascist struggle in World War II is called. Many carried the Victory Flag, the hammer-and-sickle banner of the Red Army division that entered Berlin and planted the red flag on the Reichstag.

As I entered the crowd, I thought how difficult it would be to explain this experience to people back home. I’ve been to many demonstrations, including some very large ones, probably bigger than this, but the feeling of single-minded unity and determination was something I’d never felt before. 

And I remembered that this was not only a deeply-felt day of history, shared tragedy and triumph over nigh-impossible odds seven decades earlier. I remembered that just two years ago, fascists were at the gates of the city again – shells were destroying apartment buildings, schools and hospitals, a woman was literally torn apart on the street in front of the government building occupied by the anti-fascists. Tanks were on the roads, and there was gunfire on the streets.

On our way to Lugansk, we had stopped at a memorial by the side of the road – a wrecked tank, less than 2 km from the city. In the spring of 2014, the four-person tank crew volunteered to hold the line against advancing Ukrainian forces, to give the anti-fascist resistance time to prepare a defense of the city. All of them were burned alive inside the tank.

In just the few minutes that we international visitors pulled over to photograph the memorial, at least half-a-dozen cars driven by locals pulled over too. Families brought flowers and ribbons to lay on the tank, an offering of memory and thanks, heaped on top of dozens and hundreds left before.

On Victory Day I stood beside Lisa Chalenko, two years old. She was an infant when Lugansk was besieged. Her parents remember that time, only too well. Thousands of other parents, children, teenagers and grandparents in Lugansk also remember.

For them – and for people throughout the Donbass republics, in Odessa, in Ukraine – the struggle against fascism is not history. It is their life, now, today.

And while here, in the heart of imperialism, in the belly of Wall Street, it is difficult to find anyone who has heard of the war in Donbass, and too many self-proclaimed leftists and progressives would rather ignore or even condemn the resistance in Donetsk and Lugansk – there, everyone understands that the Ukrainian junta, the fascist gangs, the constant, murderous ceasefire violations, could not continue for a single day without the support of the United States.

It’s time the antiwar movement and the left got serious about supporting this struggle and awakening the workers, the youth and progressive movements to its reality.

Because this war, this struggle, isn’t going away.

Wreckage of U.S. war

Everyone I spoke to during my eight-day visit to Donbass agreed on this point, from soldiers to political activists, students and parents, journalists and taxi drivers.

I visited the city of Donetsk, capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic, for a few days before going to Lugansk for the International Antifascist Conference in Krasnodon on May 7. While I was there, I had the opportunity to see firsthand what U.S. support for the Kiev junta means.

Donetsk is a beautiful city, a Soviet city, full of culture and wide boulevards, parks and universities built for the enjoyment of the working class – in that region, primarily miners and metal workers. This was the most working-class region of Ukraine before the war, its population imbued with socialist aspirations despite two and a half decades of capitalist wreckage.

The leaders of the Donetsk republic have worked hard to rebuild and establish a sense of normalcy for the city’s people despite the war and economic blockade. But just a few minutes’ drive from the city center and you are back on the front line of the war.

I rode with Janus Putkonen, director of Donbass International News Agency, to the outskirts of Donetsk. He showed me the highway and railroad that used to connect Donetsk and Lugansk, now cut off by the Ukrainian occupation forces. The sound of gunfire rattled nearby.

We drove to the village of Oktoberski, a Donetsk suburb. Markets, apartments, a theater, burned out and demolished. Row upon row of small houses and businesses destroyed by Ukrainian shelling – roofs collapsed, whole sides of buildings torn off, a cemetery shelled.

And in the distance, the gutted remains of the Donetsk airport.

For those who continue to live here, mostly in larger apartment buildings, shattered windows are boarded up rather than replaced, because everyone understands the destruction will come again.

At night, the sound of shelling continues. While I was there in the first week of May, things were relatively quiet – an informal ceasefire over the spring holiday week. But this past week, the shelling of Donetsk and other cities and villages resumed and intensified.

The war isn’t over and there’s no end in sight. Why? The residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics are certainly tired of war and blockade. But they are unwilling to surrender to Kiev, and they know that if they did, the result would be genocide – the program of the fascist battalions that hold up the neoliberal junta, and of neo-Nazis in the government like the new head of parliament, Andriy Parubiy.

The Ukrainian military has more weapons, more soldiers, more vehicles. But the rank and file drafted soldiers are demoralized. Only the neo-Nazi battalions, who receive training from the U.S. military, are motivated to fight.

The people’s army in Donetsk and Lugansk, made up mostly of local residents, is very motivated to defend their homeland and families. Although many of the soldiers have been demobilized, tens of thousands can be brought under arms within 72 hours if necessary.

The only way for Ukraine to win the war, says Putkonen, is through NATO airstrikes of the kind used against Yugoslavia. But this would mean air war on the very border of the Russian Federation.

Neither side can back down, Putkonen says. If Russia’s government withdrew its promise to aid the Donbass republics, they know that they would be next on Washington’s hit list. If the U.S. and NATO back down, it would start a domino effect of resistance throughout the region.

There is only one acceptable solution, in which we have an important part to play.

That is: the overturn of the neoliberal / neo-Nazi / oligarch regime in Kiev, aided by the creation of a powerful anti-war movement in the United States to prevent the Pentagon and NATO from intervening.