ReportageSince 2014, the inhabitants of Zaïtsevo have suffered from war on a daily basis. They live with Ukrainian soldiers, a few hundred meters from the pro-Russian separatists.
In the village, no one ever talks about the war. What’s the point ? She’s right there in front of their eyes. For seven years the front line has cut Zaïtsevo in two, in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine. Seven years that the inhabitants cross each day the soldiers in the street, at the grocery store or in front of the iron barrier which delimits the “red zone”, prohibited of access. The pro-Russian separatists, secretly supported by Moscow, are only a few hundred meters away, on the other side of the village bordered by trenches. The shootings often occur in the evening, after 6 p.m., without knowing which camp started.
Before the war 4,000 people lived there. Today, Zaïtsevo has only 800 inhabitants in the part controlled by the Ukrainian government, and 200 on the separatist side. Everyone who could have fled. All that remains is the elderly – often nostalgic for the USSR – and a few families who have nowhere to go. That of Katia Schuman, 31, is one of them. On this Sunday in June, the young woman, blond curls and Perfecto, talks with two friends at the grocery store, while her three children are having fun in the back room. They know that they are not allowed to go and play in the fields, which are littered with mines. “They have already found an anti-personnel mine and an unexploded rocket in our garden, tells their mother. They’re used to it, they don’t touch them. “
Families torn apart
When she bought her house seven years ago “There was everything here, she remembers. A bus every thirty minutes, work, nature… It was very good ”. War broke out a month later. His house was ravaged twice and then rebuilt with humanitarian aid. The young woman sighs, looking resigned: “Everything is destroyed here. I would like to go, but where to go? “
In the village, the bus only passes once a week, economic life has stopped, and an ambulance now takes nearly an hour to arrive. There is no longer a school either: the establishment, which remained on the separatist side, was destroyed by the fighting and then transformed into a military position. The situation has worsened further since the closure, in March 2020, of the nearby Mayorsk checkpoint, which allowed residents to go to work opposite and see their relatives. The pro-Russian insurgents refuse to reopen it, officially to stop the Covid epidemic.
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