There are a few things you’ll probably never shake if you find yourself in the Donbas in wartime. Apart from the haunting wails of starving, abandoned pets and elderly and disabled civilians left behind, the stains on the ground are a big one.
They all get washed away eventually. But not before they’re burned into the back of your eyelids, and the eyelids of all those who used to call that stretch of land in Eastern Ukraine home. Not before they become an eternal marker of death.
And that’s the most soul-crushing tragedy of what is happening in the Donbas right now, buried deep down beneath all the suffering that ordinary people have endured in this long-simmering catastrophe. Thousands of Ukrainians gave their lives so that what is happening in the Donbas today wouldn’t happen. Their blood literally stains the ground.
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And now it will have been for nothing.
I’m not just talking about soldiers. I’m talking about the ordinary people killed by landmines as they rode buses to visit relatives, those struck by sniper fire as they walked down the road, cut down by mortar shells as they passed through checkpoints—all those whose lives were deemed insignificant in Putin’s sick geopolitical game.
Fourteen thousand and counting.
As I write this now from the safety and comfort of a suburban American home, it’s hard not to remember their faces from my time in the Donbas in 2015 and feel an overwhelming sense of guilt. Guilt that they’re no better off now than they were back then, guilt that we failed them in the first place by ever allowing Moscow to hoodwink the West with claims of plausible deniability.
Guilt that words never made a difference.
There was Sartana, in the Donetsk region, where a young mother was struck down by mortar fire as she held hands and walked with her 10-year-old daughter. They were on their way to pick up groceries at the corner store.
I don’t know the woman’s name. But I will never forget staring at the glistening spot on the ground where she had bled out.
And I will never forget the absolutely justified rage of a local woman as she passed by, screaming, “All we have is blood here. That is our life now, blood in the streets.”
There were so many more—and not all of them died. The others left in that hellish landscape were just as haunting.
Sasha, the 11-year-old boy in Shyrokyne forced to navigate his bike around unexploded munitions primed to detonate at the slightest vibration in the road.
Nina, the 80-something-year-old woman who survived two world wars only to be left for dead in her bombed out home in Maryinka.
“Will you help me?” is all I remember her asking.
The real horror is that she and others like her will not be remembered.
Eight years after the Kremlin first sank its hooks into Ukraine and refused to let go, and thousands of deaths later, we’ve largely forgotten—or never knew in the first place—the names of all those whose blood stained the ground of the Donbas to keep Russia at bay. But we see Putin’s botoxed face every goddamn day.
And now, frustratingly, devastatingly, there will be more Ukrainian lives erased, replaced by that same dictator’s face.
Will the world remember any of them?
