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Former Donetsk resident Nadia Zaslavska spoke to Dmitry Volchek from RFE/RL's Russian Service about why the conflict in eastern Ukraine drove her from the city even though she had spent many happy years living there.
'I Will Never Return To Donetsk' -- Conflict Reduces One Woman's Life To Rubble
I was born in the Dnipropetrovsk region but I spent more than 30 years in Donetsk. I built my house there with my own hands. It was a spacious house, with two stories and big French windows. It was a dream house. The war reduced it to a pile of rubble.
When the Euromaidan [pro-democracy protests] began in late 2013, I traveled to Kyiv to witness it. I was happy this was finally happening in our country. I know who Viktor Yanukovych, our ousted president, is because I'm from the Donetsk region, too. I was against his election, I never voted for him. I always knew it would end badly.
Unfortunately, I was the only person on my street with this opinion. People started walking around the city brandishing Russian flags and shouting "Russia!" Then Ukrainian television was shut off. The only channel we had access to was run by the DNR [Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine's Donetsk region].
There were numerous drug addicts in our city before the war. Many of them joined the DNR army. A friend of mine once bumped into a former schoolmate, a junkie who had enrolled with the separatists. This drug addict told my friend: "Now I feel like someone, because I know that I have power."
All my life I spoke Ukrainian with my parents. I've always loved my native language. But at some point my mother and I became afraid of speaking in Ukrainian, we started whispering to each other. All our neighbors supported the separatists, they believed that Russia would come and rescue them.
We had a wonderful airport, it was close to my house. When the war [between Kyiv's forces and the separatists] began, I initially thought that it was just a bluff, that it wasn't real. At first the city of Slovyansk was captured, and we thought it would end with that. Then Ilovaisk, a town near Donetsk, was taken. Then Peski, which is also close by. Soon enough, we found ourselves at the heart of events – terrible, bloody events.
Read the entire article here