The fury of the Russians in Ukraine

Russian troops continue to advance in the Donetsk and Kharkiv provinces.

The war continues in Ukraine, although it seems increasingly distant and strange.

It will be two years since Vladimir Putin's forces tried to reach Kiev to place a puppet government there that would obey their designs, and that war that with its comings and goings was still alive since 2014 in the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk has moved almost 10 years later, in February 2022, to the rest of Ukraine.

It was something that could have been seen coming if the boasts of some of the protagonists of what was happening in Donbas, in the east of the country, had been taken seriously.

“Give me two years and in Ukraine no one will say that they are Ukrainian,” the Prime Minister of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), Aleksandr Zajárchenko, told Pilar Bonet in March 2017 during a long conversation that the journalist, who was during years correspondent in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation of this newspaper - in which he continues to collaborate -, he collects in

Castaways of the Empire

(Galaxia Gutenberg).

Zajárchenko, who spoke of himself as a hero with “burning and furious eyes”, and who was murdered with a bomb in an attack on August 31, 2018, explained to Pilar Bonet that Russians have much more in common with the Mongols than with the Swedes, and told him: “Russia is a country of victors who have learned to survive.

We survive everywhere;

We can go hungry for a whole week, be wounded and covered in mud, but, crawling with teeth, we will defend our land.”

“War is already a reality,” she also told him.

“All Ukraine must be transformed into the DPR.

When we achieve this, a flood of hundreds of thousands of armed Ukrainians will rush into Europe, and they will not be refugees like those in Libya or Syria, but people with combat experience, well trained and equipped.”

Shipwrecked of the Empire

is full of stories of people who suffer the horror of the Russian invasion, and is built from the workbooks, travel diaries and materials that Pilar Bonet accumulated since then and never published.

“Those who want to go to Sakhalin, to the right.

Those who want to go to Vladivostok, to the left,” shouted in August 2014 the employees of the civil protection service in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, in front of the avalanche of refugees arriving from Donbas.

They had to decide in an instant between two places to start over.

Lives broken, massacred, forcibly pushed into exile.

With Putin's invasion in 2022, things got even worse.

Zajárchenko still acknowledged to Pilar Bonet in their first meeting in 2014 that he was “proud to feel Ukrainian.”

Three years later he had become a Russian enthusiastic about Putin's project.

Pilar Bonet looks back at the fall of the Soviet Union, when it went “brutally from a planned and centralized economy to a capitalist economy.”

Privatizations were an opportunity for the old order to modernize, but they were “merciless”: “Solidly established industries became rubble and scrap metal, workers who believed they had a stable job were left on the streets, and highly qualified specialists had to be retrained.” as merchants or taxi drivers.”

The fury left by that fall is still intact, Putin exploits it, and hopes to prolong the war in Ukraine until he can win it.

That's where we are.

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