It was unusually quiet this morning. The day before yesterday, the sirens were constantly howling and explosions were heard - shelling Kramatorsk, hitting residential buildings, there were victims, and now there is silence. When you live close to the front, you only feel situational fear when the threat is imminent. Once it’s quiet, you feel relaxed, like you’re going back to the past, to a peaceful life... until the next shelling. That’s the psychology of war.
Since today is Sunday, I decided to walk the same route as a week ago - to the church «Good News». At that time, the streets were deserted, and now there are many people, whether the weather is good, or they just got used to the war. Indeed, they got used to it. As I was coming back, there was a distant single explosion from a missile strike, and no one paid attention to it. The church also had twice as many people as the last service, more than two hundred. In such moments, you want to forget the war, but in your head it knocks: «Mariupol... Mariupol...» Our tranquility here at this very moment is paid for by the death of Mariupol inhabitants.
I met Yuri Korotich in church, whom I met for the first time three years ago in Maryinka, a city directly adjacent to Donetsk. There, from the city center to the positions of the occupiers it is about twenty minutes walk. I told him that we have classes on the Internet as usual, although some students have to connect directly from the basements during the bombings. Yuri said that he has the same situation, and now he holds worship services with the community of Maryinka on the Internet. People are also staying in basements, the city is constantly bombed and attacked with armor. The capture of Maryinka would have allowed the occupiers to dismember the entire Donbas group in half, but the Ukrainian military has been there since the beginning of the war as stubborn and does not retreat.
For two weeks there is a grandiose battle on the Donbas Arc. The enemy has been pressing on several sides at once - Maryinka, Izyum, Border, Severodonetsk, Ugledar. This battle is as important as the Battle of Kursk for World War II. We have our own analogue of the blockaded Leningrad - Mariupol, which, however, is in a much more miserable situation, and is besieged by a much more ferocious opponent.
Last Sunday I asked the volunteers how it was in Izyum, on the southern shore of which the Ukrainian military has established itself. At that time, there was no certainty that it would be possible to withstand. The enemy greatly exceeded the military potential. Izyum is the last frontier, which is convenient to defend, if it breaks, there is a threat of a complete encirclement of the Donbas group. It has been desperately stormed all week. The Russian military did not pick up the bodies from the battlefield, wave after wave they went straight through the corpses like zombies. In fact, they are zombies, since they have all been sentenced to death by Putin.
I even wondered what I would do if we got street fights in Slavyansk. This Sunday I have already had hope. The enemy is running out of breath, and it is impossible to count how many he left killed. Therefore, they will not get into the official report. If in a week he did not break through the defense, it is unlikely now at all. The last few days, there have been street fights in Rubezhnoe. In the morning a message came that the city is under our Ukrainian control. It looks like we’ll stand on the Donbas arc. But Mariupol, where the enemy is systematically carrying out the genocide of the inhabitants, is now impossible to help.
It is an irrational war, with irrational brutality. Atrocities are constantly reported. In the city of Kremennaya (not far from Rubezhnoe) the tank just shot up a nursing home. 56 people were killed. A school in Mariupol where 400 people were sheltering was bombed. At the same time, Putin could not even clearly explain why he started the war and what he is trying to achieve, except for the purpose of the physical destruction of Ukraine. But this goal is too irrational to be functionally considered anywhere, for example, in negotiations. Therefore, it is not clear how negotiations are technically possible at all.
In general, it is unprecedented - a war that is unleashed without any reason or ground, just because one inadequate person, who considers himself president, wanted to do so. Just as we in Ukraine were wondering before the war whether Putin would attack or whether he still retained bits of common sense, Europe is now wondering whether he will use nuclear weapons and strike them, too? On my own, the probability of this is quite small, about as small as was the probability of a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. But that possibility came true. That is why Western countries do not transfer offensive weapons to Ukraine - they are afraid.
What is clear is that the war can end only when all the perpetrators of aggression are brought before an international tribunal. After this war, a new system of international security will have to be created, so that never again will the existence of civilization depend on the mental state of one inadequate human being.
