One year after the liberation of the territories in eastern Ukraine, euphoria has given way to gloom, with daily life punctuated by bombardments. Ukrainian NGO East SOS, which has been providing assistance to war-affected populations since 2014, has just returned from a mission in the liberated regions of Kherson, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv and Donetsk. It paints a bleak picture. "Many villages have been 100% destroyed," Oksana Kuiantseva, a member of the organization, told Le Monde during her visit to Paris on Wednesday, November 30. "Everything seems abandoned. And then, after a quarter of an hour, you hear dogs, and you discover that people are living here, in unimaginable conditions."
Amid the ruins, without gas, water or electricity, these villagers survive as best they can. "They make small repairs, fetch water and build fires to cook food. The smallest task takes up a lot of their time," said the volunteer. Set back a century, these Ukrainians are still paying their electricity bill. "It's very impressive, because nobody knows they live there: They're completely cut off from the rest of the world, but do everything to pretend they have a normal life."
In the villages, the biggest threat is the omnipresent mines. "The Russians systematically laid them as they withdrew, including in fields, forests, roads and houses," said the NGO in its assessment report. As of November 1, at least 264 civilians had been killed by mines, and over 830 injured throughout the country. However, between clearing mines, putting out fires after bombardments, evacuating inhabitants and transporting and distributing humanitarian aid, the State's overworked emergency services are only able to clear a small part of the polluted areas.
In the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, the forests, littered with mines, are particularly dangerous. Despite the risks, local residents venture out every day to collect wood before winter sets in – this year, the official wood distribution program is behind schedule. They also carry out demining operations on their own, using traditional methods. In Kamyanka, in the Kharkiv region, a villager specializes in "homemade" mine clearance by burning grass in gardens and fields to detonate mines. It's a dangerous method that is formally discouraged by the authorities and far from effective – many devices remain intact. In the village of Yatskivka, which has around 100 inhabitants, 12 have already been injured by mines since the beginning of the year.
In the cities, bombing remains the main threat. "The Russians' technique is to strike twice in a row, as in Syria," said Yuliia Matviichuk, also a member of East SOS. "They bomb a target, wait for help to arrive, then do it again to claim even more victims." For some time now, they have even been hitting the same target – a bus stop, a library, a school – "three or four times."
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