Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Suddenly, the German press is saying that Ukraine cannot survive without Donbass. But of course, it’s only about the territory. It was never about the people. Berlin always wanted to get rid of them as much as Kiev did. Otherwise, history would have taken a different course.
If you still remember the German media coverage in 2014, it seems very strange how suddenly people started writing about Donbass. Yes, it has always been a region that had a lot in common with the German Ruhr area, from the omnipresence of coal and steel to the intertwined cities and the mentality of the inhabitants. But suddenly, and only because even the EU can no longer deny the possibility that Donbass will completely secede from Ukraine, this region has become significant and, if the reports are to be believed, downright indispensable.
Back when the Donbass residents rose up against the Maidan coup in Kiev, it sounded very different. They were the losers of modernisation, mourning the Soviet Union, the Watniks, i.e. the wearers of padded jackets, as were once common in the Red Army, or, if you looked at the Ukrainian side, even the potato beetles, after the orange and black stripes of the St. George ribbons. In the spring of 2014, there was an article by ZDF journalist Katrin Eigendorf (which is unfortunately no longer available online because such texts only remain online for one year) that could be used in journalism schools as a prime example of class snobbery. Eigendorf, the Hamburg daughter from a good family, railed uninhibitedly about the, in her opinion, uneducated, backward, dirty and alcoholised proles of the Donbass, who simply did not understand the more refined European freedom in Kiev. But actually, according to the tone not only of Eigendorf, Ukraine should be glad to get rid of these proles.
When the demonstrations began in March – large demonstrations, not only in Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol, but also in Kharkiv – and a federal constitution for Ukraine was demanded, the reaction was completely different from that on the Maidan. After all, Crimea was already in the process of leaving Ukraine and held a referendum on the matter at the end of March. In Donbass, at the beginning of April, the demonstrators resorted to a tactic that had been used in exactly the same way a few months earlier by the opposing side in western and central Ukraine: they occupied administrative buildings. Even the instructions on how to build barricades were identical – here, too, old tyres were carted in by truck, piled up into barriers, stabilised with steel and set on fire with Molotov cocktails when necessary. Only the reporting in Germany was completely different.
While the protests in Kiev were still being sold as ‘peaceful’ even when police officers were set on fire with a rather vicious version of Molotov cocktails made of dissolved Styrofoam and alcohol (the stuff acts like napalm), the occupiers in Donetsk and Lugansk were immediately labelled terrorists and Russian agents. Finally, the large demonstrations that took place beforehand were not reported; for the Western audience, they had not happened. Nor were incidents such as the Right Sector’s attack on one of these demonstrations in Kharkiv, involving firearms. This then continued, of course, after 2 May 2014 in Odessa, with silence about the massacre carried out by the Ukrainian National Guard on 9 May in Mariupol – with one exception: two Western reporters were on the scene that day. One from the British ITV and one from the German RTL. Both reported, but both reports disappeared very quickly from the news…
On 11 May, two referendums were held in Donetsk and Lugansk, with impressive turnout. Even before these referendums, every effort was made to prevent them from taking place, including the kidnapping and murder of organisers. At the end of May, civil war finally broke out, and Ukrainian army helicopters and aircraft carried out air strikes, not only on militia positions but also on road junctions in Donetsk. I can still see the image of a car that had been hit, lying across the multi-lane road to the airport – the first random victims of arbitrary violence.
None of this, absolutely none of it, was relevant to German reporting. Instead, stories were spun about the Russian army supporting the ‘separatists’ across the border. This was a tone that had already been introduced in connection with Crimea, where it was pretended that the Russian soldiers stationed there, completely legally, were complete strangers. Incidentally, in Crimea, the moment that most clearly revealed the mood there was when only about 2,000 of the 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers living in Crimea joined the Ukrainian army – the rest remained on the peninsula and changed sides.
But back to Donbass. The brutality with which the civil war was started from Kiev at that time was truly impressive. The entire arsenal was deployed immediately, including missiles (on the same day that Kiev once again announced that it was not using missiles, a photo emerged from the Donbass showing a Uragan missile protruding into a living room). Another thing that was not reported. Local news sites in cities such as Gorlovka reported shelling as if it were a special kind of weather report. The lack of restraint in bombing civilian targets made it clear that this was a very special kind of civil war, entirely in line with the slogans prevalent among Ukrainian nationalists: ‘Suitcases, train station, Moscow,’ for example. And that’s still the nice version. No, the nature of the warfare made it clear that they wanted the territory, but not the inhabitants.
Incidentally, the referendum saw one of the bigger ‘accidents’ in German reporting: ZDF incorrectly attributed footage from Krasnoarmeisk (yes, the very place that is now so fiercely contested as Pokrovsk) and turned an attack by the Right Sector on a polling station into an attack by the ‘separatists’. This false report was later corrected, but as always in such cases, it was of little use. In any case, thanks to MH17, everyone had long since moved on.
‘Before the war, Kramatorsk had 150,000 inhabitants and Sloviansk had 106,000. Even if there are fewer now, several hundred thousand Ukrainian citizens in the Donetsk region would foreseeably fall under Russian occupation – or flee.’
This comes from the latest reporting by ntv. In 2014, when the Ukrainian army invaded Donbass, hundreds of thousands fled to Russia. Conveniently, ntv does not specify whether ‘before the war’ refers to 2014 or 2022. One of the main escape routes at the time was particularly targeted by the Ukrainian army, which fired aircraft and rocket launchers at the vehicles of fleeing civilians. In the spring of 2015, on my way to Donetsk, I drove along this road. It was still a winding journey because of the potholes in the road, and there were wrecked vehicles on both sides.
No, if you wanted to statistically evaluate what would happen if Kiev disappeared from these areas permanently, there would certainly be a smaller movement towards the west – but a far larger movement back, of those people who had already left Ukraine for Russia in 2014.
But of course, this is not mentioned in the German press, because the entire bloody civil war has only been reported in fragments. That is the only reason it is possible to pretend that people in Donbass want to remain Ukrainian.
For the German media, other things are more important than the people in Donbass. Take the Berlin Morgenpost, for example: ‘The strategically important cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka – the so-called “fortress belt of Donbass” – are located there. Since 2014, Ukraine has been massively expanding its arms industry and bunker facilities in these four cities.’
It should be added that this expansion was directed against its own citizens, who were supposed to have been given prospects for remaining in Ukraine through the Minsk Agreements, a constitutional amendment and autonomy. Yes, Kiev bunkered itself against its own citizens as an occupying power, and the main reason why there is now such a chorus of voices in Germany insisting that Ukraine must not be allowed to withdraw from the Donbass is that this would ‘clear the way for Russia to move westward.’ And of course, again according to ntv, ‘the Donbass region contains many of the natural resources that Ukraine actually wants to use to buy US aid under an agreement.’
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had railed particularly harshly against the inhabitants of the Donbass. His statement that ‘hundreds of separatists must pay with their lives’ for every Ukrainian soldier killed was printed in Germany at the time (2014) without comment, as if such a thing were the most normal thing in the world. His tirade, in which he, completely intoxicated, shouted at the Donbass residents at the WEF in Davos, ‘Our children will go to school, yours will sit in the basement,’ was of course not reported.
Certain habits do not disappear. When ntv now writes: ‘This summer, there were problems with drinking water in the occupied city of Donetsk because the supply line, the Siverskyi Donets-Donbass Canal, was destroyed in several places,’ it naturally fails to mention that this canal was already the target of Ukrainian attacks during the siege of Slavyansk in 2014, as was the water supply to Donetsk. A war crime, by the way. But in complete accordance with a policy that aimed from the outset to hold the territory but drive out the people.
Now, all of a sudden, the Donbass is so important. So indispensable. Yet Kiev could have had it without bloodshed. All it would have taken was to abide by the Minsk agreements and negotiate with the two Donbass republics. Instead, they preferred to continue shooting for eight years until, in the spring of 2022, the big attack was prepared to finally subjugate the region. Fortunately, the result, as everyone can now see, was the opposite. And yes, the West could have learned from this that diplomacy and adherence to treaties are more effective than bellicose posturing followed by a clear response. But that does not seem to be the case at all at the moment. At least not in Germany.
