As a pro-Ukrainian in the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, journalist Stanislav Aseyev is not so much a rare beast as an endangered species. When separatist militias seized control of the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk and its surrounding territory in 2014, he found himself rapidly losing friends and making enemies.
Countless pals he had grown up with were killed while fighting on behalf of the “DPR”, as it is known. Countless others vowed never to speak to him again after learning that he is a “Remainer” – one of the dwindling minority who would rather remain part of Ukraine than become part of Russia.
Like Brexit Britain, this issue divided not just the nation but families, including Aseyev’s own. Unlike Brexit, however, Remainers in Donetsk risked much more than rows over the dinner table. As Aseyev reveals in this fascinating account of life in the DPR – Aseyev’s collected journalism from 2015 to 2017, newly translated into English – anyone who publicly challenged the pro-Kremlin line could end up “buried in plastic bags in the local woods”. And contrary to what we in the West might think, the law was not just laid down by the thuggish Kremlin stoolies in the DPR’s leadership. Equally fanatical, he says, were “the People” themselves, who, after generations of peaceful co-existence, seemed all too happy to kill their fellow Ukrainians.
Interspersed with handy timelines and glossaries, Aseyev’s book is a kind of Lonely Planet guide to a republic that doesn’t officially exist, except in the minds of its fervent believers. Anti-Kyiv sentiment is everywhere: on street signs describing Ukrainians as Nazis, in lurid myths about Ukrainian forces crucifying children, and even in how folk decorate their drinks cabinets.
“The father of a good friend who is a DPR ‘Cossack’ keeps two grenades in the liquor bar in his apartment,” Aseyev writes. They weren’t just there as war souvenirs. The father vowed that if Ukrainian forces ever invaded, he would “go out into the street and blow myself up in the middle of them”.
