(Rostov region) In the Tchébouretchnaïa café, a few dozen kilometers from the border between Russia and the breakaway lands of eastern Ukraine, a Russian soldier takes a nap, amid the surrounding smell of frying.
Posted yesterday at 11:58
“Thank you, we’ll be back!” He fires another soldier, revealing his counter ninety years later after he swallowed a 65-ruble ($1 Canadian) fried cheborik slipper, along with three comrades.
Suddenly, a soldier knocks at the door of the small room where the AFP team is working, the only civilian agents in the place: “Do you want to buy a dry military quota? “.
Suddenly, soldiers run through the mud on the screen and show videos. But it’s not the West’s feared Russian invasion of Ukraine, just the video for the song. I was in the army now, A hit from the eighties.
In the village, soldiers everywhere wore camouflage berets or gray military berets. They hang out in the parking lot, smoke, drink coffee, drive around the majestic military vehicles, stand along the train tracks for several hundred meters.
Rocket launchers, self-propelled guns and military vehicles loaded with fuel are parked. On the road near the border, unloaded tank carriers pass a convoy of other dark green vehicles.
The Rostov region, bordering the republics of eastern Ukraine, shrouded in fog and silence on Wednesday, February 23, a public holiday in Russia as we celebrate the “defenders of the Fatherland”, the Soviet army.
After the turmoil in the region in the past few days, when thousands of displaced people, transported by the Russians from the separatist areas and by military convoys to the border, crossed the area, the atmosphere became a factor of expectation.
On a soccer field a few hundred meters away, ten men in their fifties, many of them veterans, exchange a ball, mismatched overalls splayed on their plump stomachs.
Worried
Valery Bilyk, a 52-year-old retired policeman, wears a “No Fear” hat and works as a goalkeeper.
“Of course, we are all worried about the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republic. It is a pity for the people who suffer from terrorism, from the war waged by the Ukrainian authorities ”, he accuses, espousing the line of the Kremlin, which claims to have recognized the independence of the separatist lands to protect them from Ukrainian aggression. Denied by Kiev.
On the road towards the border, there is a parked bus looking for a missing passenger. On the ship, they are not residents of Donbass who have sought refuge in Russia.
“I went to get my Russian passport,” says Gregory, a 35-year-old mechanic who lives in Chakhtarsk, Donbass, before boarding the bus back home.
“I am a little afraid to go back, we hear shots and explosions, but my family is there. I will not leave, my job, my whole life is there,” he said, his feet in the mud, the earth plowed by tank tracks clearly visible.
As one advances towards the border, the streets are empty. In the last village before the border, Valentina Drognenko, a retired 75-year-old housekeeper, in a pink jacket, sits on a bench with her neighbor.
When asked about Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the separatist lands, this Ukrainian of married Russian origin is paradoxical: “I understand the consequences, they will be horrific, and our grandchildren will not be able to manage them. But if Vladimir Putin does this, it is necessary. I respect and adore him.”
His neighbor, Maria Ijnok, was born in 1941 and recounts that she lived under German occupation. “How not to be afraid? Who is not afraid? I was born myself in the middle of the war,” she says in Ukrainian. “We don’t even watch the news anymore, it’s very scary.”
