In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

by Tim Judah

So, what about the other parts of the map? Again, he did not know. “We are part of the industrial Ukraine that includes all the southeast,” and here he mentioned Kharkiv to the north, Odessa, the regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk and the industrial city of Krivoy Rog. “We really hope that somehow we will be united with the rest of this industrial part…Moreover, we hope that in the future we will somehow be able to help those people who are now left in Ukrainian-controlled territory and who are now persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.” Clearly the most important target for the DNR is the port of Mariupol, but, “sadly,” so far it had proved impossible to take it. He pinned his hopes on Ukraine going bankrupt and it being very hard to keep Mariupol’s angry and then unpaid people “under the barrel of a large-caliber machine gun…I think in the end the people of Mariupol themselves will decide its fate.”