Across the board all the people I met said the same thing; no one gets paid for defending Donbass. The volunteers are volunteers in the strictest sense. Later that afternoon I was offered the opportunity to document different areas and people around Donetsk and Lugansk I would not ordinarily have access to.
Why They Are Fighting
Ukraine is wide open farm land. It reminds me of the American mid-west. Donbass is both coal and agricultural country. As we drove toward Donetsk we passed through thousands of acres covered in unharvested crops due to Kiev mining the grain fields. No matter where I went this sad fact was apparent. The grain needed for bread or hay to feed the farm animals would not be there in the winter. Kiev had created a famine with land mines.
The first town they took me to showed the aftermath of a cleansing operation. We stopped at the school pictured here that was shelled by the now burnt out Ukrainian army tank shown below.
I looked across the street into the neighborhoods and it was clear; house after house was shot with large caliber heavy weapons.
Looking at the houses pictured here and then the homes as far as you can see in any direction you can see the results of a cleansing operation on a residential area. All have been destroyed systematically by heavy weapons. Picture this in your own neighborhoods; a slow motion drive-by shooting at military scale. Below is a photo of a bullet casing.
As I walked down the cross streets, it was the same. On both sides the homes were virtually demolished by the same method. In between, where you could see a house on the next street, it was shot from the same side.
People were in these houses when it started otherwise there is no point to it. The punisher battalions start around 4 am as people are waking. Going on to the next parallel street it is the same.
That's when it hit me- there was no sign of war here. The street and trees where you would expect to see heavy scarring or explosive damage from fighting were barely touched. Fences in front of the homes exhibit the results of a long line of continuous heavy machine gun fire that shows the extent of the cleansing exercise. The bullet pattern is continuous along the length of the fence.
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