The Fight of Our Lives by Iuliia Mendel

Author:Iuliia Mendel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2022-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

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A tiny shop in a village not far from Marinka in Donbas was never empty. A mere forty-three square feet in size, it used to sell ice cream, canned food, vegetables, fruit, and alcohol. And somewhat unusually for a store like this, there was air-conditioning.

The shopkeeper, a young brunette, said that after a bomb hit the roof, they had to make minor repairs. But they were going to move out soon in order to make more extensive renovations.

“And what will Zelenskyy be doing?” she asked me when I came in to buy an ice cream.

I said that the president was traveling around Donbas for two days, visiting the front lines and speaking with the troops.

“If only this would bring peace,” said the young woman.

The word we had heard most often from civilians and military in Donbas before the large-scale invasion in 2022 was “peace.” Wherever you looked, whomever you asked, everyone was tired of living close to war, which brought sadness, pain, and poverty. It was the duty of every politician, everyone who cared about Ukraine, to do everything possible to return people, territories, and peace to our land. Exactly twenty days after this conversation, on July 27, 2020, a new agreement on a comprehensive and extensive cease-fire came into effect in Donbas. This was the longest and most disputed cease-fire in the six and a half years of the war. In any military conflict, “cease-fire” and “truce” are fragile rather than stable concepts. It was difficult to imagine that a territory crammed with weapons and explosives, where Russian-backed separatist mercenaries were fighting, would fall silent all at once. The demarcation line extended for more than 250 miles. There, from each side of it, contradictory worldviews, fears, anger, impotence, poverty, and dashed hopes converged.

On our side of the demarcation line, the headquarters of the Joint Forces Operation never tired of repeating every second that they were ready for real military operations, to protect territory and people. No one would accuse the Ukrainian army of cowardice. Strength and resilience were what characterized our warriors.

And yet, however unstable this cease-fire, we lived weeks and months during which the war did not claim a single one of our soldiers….

According to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, more than eighteen thousand violations were recorded in the five weeks before the cease-fire began and more than a thousand in the seven weeks after. At the end of the year, there were forty-nine combat casualties in the Joint Forces Operation zone: forty-five people who died before the start of the truce and only four after. About twenty were wounded. According to the General Staff, during the same period in 2019, thirty-six people were killed and 129 injured. In 2018, fifty-one were killed and 304 were injured. In 2017, sixty were killed and 308 were wounded. These figures speak of one thing: no matter what provocations occurred, the cease-fire agreements had borne some fruit. And even if the situation was far from perfect,

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