it just shows: when the nyt put their minds to it, they can turn out really first class journalism

Enmity and Civilian Toll Rise in Ukraine While Attention Is Diverted
Sabrina Tavernise, Noah Sneider, David Herszenhorn, NYT, Jul 28 2014

DONETSK/KIEV — One was a retired cook. Another installed alarms in cars. Another was a cleaner in a grocery store who had gone out to buy ground beef to make her son meatball soup. With international attention focused on the tragedy of MH17, the deaths of these three civilians, some of the roughly 800 who have been killed in the battle over eastern Ukraine, have gone virtually unnoticed by the outside world. The Ukrainian military’s advances to reclaim territory from rebel control have come at a steep human cost. According to a UNHCR count released on Monday, 799 civilians have been killed since mid-April, when Ukraine began to battle insurgents here, and at least 2,155 have been wounded. The killings have left the population in eastern Ukraine embittered toward Ukraine’s pro-Western government, and are helping to spur recruitment for the pro-Russian militias. In time, even if the Ukrainian military routs the rebels and retakes the east, the civilian deaths are likely to leave deep resentments here, and could complicate reconciliation efforts for decades. The rising toll of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the first open hostilities in Europe in 15 years, is a direct consequence of the nature of the war here. Much of the fighting takes the form of low-tech airstrikes and artillery fired at a distance from ageing weaponry, tactics that can inflict significant harm on civilians. In comparison, 330 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, the UNHCR said. There are no estimates for rebels. In a report released on Thursday, HRW documented four instances of the use of unguided Grad rockets, which killed at least 16 civilians in and around Donetsk in nine days. While both rebels and Ukrainian forces use the rockets, descendants of WW2-era weapons, the investigation “strongly indicates that Ukrainian government forces were responsible” for the four attacks. Ole Solvang, senior emergencies researcher at HRW, said:

Using these kinds of weapons in populated areas is a violation of the laws of war. International allies of the Ukrainian government, Usaia, Euia, should condemn this use and urge the government to stop.

Ukraine’s military strongly denies responsibility for any attacks that have caused civilian deaths. Vladislav Seleznyov, a military spokesman, did not comment on the report itself, but he said that soldiers were under orders not to harm civilians. He said:

We are prohibited from using artillery in residential areas. Yes, we have these weapons, but we never use them in civilian areas. No way.

But the military’s campaign against the rebels has increased the likelihood of civilian casualties given how deeply the rebels have embedded into the civilian population. (In most cases, the rebels come directly from the ‘civilian population’ – RB). As Ukrainian troops inched toward Donetsk and Lugansk in recent weeks, two regional capitals with a combined population of 1.5 million, residents feared the worst, looking to what happened in Slovyansk, a small city to the north that the military took by pounding rebel positions and flattening the neighborhoods where the rebels were. (Actually, no, they took it by poundung the civilian population as such; ‘rebel positions’ were not targeted at all – RB). Those fears were soon realized. One of the main rebel bases in Lugansk is in a military recruitment office next to the main bus station (no, a recruitment office is just a recruitment office, not a ‘rebel base’ – RB), and it drew intense shelling, leaving power lines scattered like string over the shrapnel-torn pavement. And in Donetsk, where Ukrainian troops have pressed forward from the north and west for weeks, the Marinka, Petrovsky and Kuibyshevsky neighborhoods have come under heavy rocket fire. The barrages against all three areas, according to HRW, originated from positions held by the Ukrainian military. Seleznyov said he could not comment on specific events. On Jul 21 in Kuibyshevsky, in a leafy area near a dental office and a library, Sergei Yakshin, the man with the alarm business, was walking to his car. He never made it. A rocket exploded nearby, killing him and another man instantly. A short walk away, a different rocket hit Valentina Surmai, a pensioner who worked at a local grocery store to support her blind husband. The cook, Alla Vasyutina, bled to death in her kitchen after a piece of shrapnel penetrated the wall of her house. Surmai’s son Sergei, standing in his underwear, his eyes red, said:

She wanted to make us soup. I told her, “Mom, don’t go out.”

He barely recognized her body in the morgue. Half her face and her left side were gone. Her death enraged him. He said:

If they give me a gun, I’m ready to go fight. After this, it’s either us or them. There’s no choice now. We have to go to the end.

A friend of Valentina Surmai, Alexandra Rud, said she, like her friend, hated the rebels (this is an oblique claim that her friend Valentina would have blamed the rebels for her own death, and as such, unprovable – RB), but she blamed the government for Surmai’s death. As artillery boomed in the distance, she said, her voice shrill:

I want to shout to the whole world, “Stop it! Get out! Leave us alone!”

The violence has rearranged habits and daily routines. Konstantin, a morgue worker in Lugansk, said he and his wife now sleep on a mattress stuffed into a small underground space in a garage used for repairing cars. Teatime chatter was about what survival supplies to put in their cellars, which now double as bomb shelters. Anatoli Leonidovich, the head doctor at the Lugansk morgue, said that after a particularly vicious battle two weeks ago, he received 15 bodies, all but one twisted and torn, consistent with artillery wounds. The next day, he was still getting calls. Speaking into a Soviet-era telephone (? – RB), he said:

Who are you looking for? Is he civilian or a rebel? Ah yes, I have him. Sklyarov Vladimir, year of birth 1973.

Rebels collect the bodies of their comrades and do their own paperwork, he said. Establishing responsibility for civilian deaths has been difficult. The shelling in Lugansk, for example, touched off ferocious arguments. Supporters of the government in Kiev accuse the rebels, while those who favor Russia blame the Ukrainian forces. Boris Besarab, a bespectacled security guard in a Lugansk neighborhood called Peaceful that was hit on Jul 14, had been explaining why he believed that the angle of impact meant that rebels had fired the shell. A stout woman with fiery red lipstick glared at him before stalking away, fuming:

Idiot! Take your glasses off! This is why Ukraine is going to hell!

The local disputes mirror those on a larger scale, with Russia and Ukraine blaming one another for attacks that kill civilians. Civilian deaths have been at the heart of Russia’s narrative against Kiev, though rarely mentioned is the fact that rebels cause them too. In one case, Ukraine claimed that Russia carried out an airstrike on an apartment block in the city of Snizhne, suggesting that a plane traveled from across the border, more than 12 miles to the south. But the angle of the 10 holes punched by the bombs and the direction of the damage indicated that the bomber was flying from west to east. Some residents suggested that the target might have been a rebel base just a quarter of a mile away. War is as much about perception as reality, and in some ways truth is powerless against what people want to believe. Most people interviewed at attack sites accused the Ukrainian forces, a pattern that bodes ill for Ukraine’s government as it tries to put the country back together again. Pointing to 14 Lenin Street in Snizhne, where at least 11 civilians were killed, Viktoria Iotova yelled before starting to cry:

Look, there’s your Poroshenko! Who will answer for these human lives?

Piles of personal items were strewn through the streets around her. A sewing machine lay between a teacup and an old Samsung laptop. One wall of a corner apartment remained intact, shielded from the blast wave. It told of life before the bombs: potted plants on a shelf, a red teakettle atop the cupboard and a neatly ordered spice rack with two rows of six jars apiece. There, amid the debris, a 4-year-old boy, Bogdan Yasterbov, was trapped. As a yellow crane lifted concrete blocks from the wreckage, local residents sat in shock, and the blue-eyed Bogdan screamed. It took hours before anyone heard him. Then, as a cellphone video shows, red-faced rescue workers noticed him and yelled: “Children! Be quiet!” Men began digging. Bogdan came into view, face down in a pocket of space under the rubble. He was carried out and laid on a stretcher, limbs limp. His bright blond hair was darkened by the dust. Bogdan survived, but his mother, Daria, did not.