..
'The money is gone': Evacuated Ukrainians forced to return
By CARA ANNA
July 25, 2022
POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — The missile’s impact flung the young woman against the fence so hard it splintered. Her mother found her dying on the bench beneath the pear tree where she’d enjoyed the afternoon. By the time her father arrived, she was gone.
Anna Protsenko was killed two days after returning home. The 35-year-old had done what authorities wanted: She evacuated eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region as Russian forces move closer. But starting a new life elsewhere had been uncomfortable and expensive.
Like Protsenko, tens of thousands of people have returned to rural or industrial communities close to the region’s front line at considerable risk because they can’t afford to live in safer places.
Protsenko had tried it for two months, then came home to take a job in the small city of Pokrovsk. On Monday, friends and family caressed her face and wept before her casket was hammered shut beside her grave.
Men carry the lifeless body of 35-year-old Anna Protsenko, who was killed in a Russian rocket attack, during her funeral procession, on the outskirts of Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine, Monday, July 18, 2022. Protsenko was killed two days after coming home. She had done what authorities wanted, evacuating eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region as Russian forces move closer, but starting a new life elsewhere was uncomfortable and expensive. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
A man walks away from a crater in the aftermath of a Russian rocket attack, that killed 35-year-old Anna Protsenko, on the outskirts of Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine, Saturday, July 16, 2022. Protsenko was killed two days after coming home. She had done what authorities wanted, evacuating eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region as Russian forces move closer, but starting a new life elsewhere was uncomfortable and expensive. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
“We cannot win. They don’t hire us elsewhere and you still have to pay rent,” said a friend and neighbor, Anastasia Rusanova. There’s nowhere to go, she said, but here in Donetsk, “everything is ours.”
The Pokrovsk mayor’s office estimated that 70% of those who evacuated have come home. In the larger city of Kramatorsk, an hour’s drive closer to the front line, officials said the population had dropped to about 50,000 from the normal 220,000 in the weeks following Russia’s invasion but has since risen to 68,000.
Tens of thousands of evacuees from Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region are returning to homes close to the front line, as they can't afford to live in safer places.
It’s frustrating for Ukrainian authorities as some civilians remain in the path of war, but residents of the Donetsk region are frustrated, too. Some described feeling unwelcome as Russian speakers among Ukrainian speakers in some parts of the country.
But more often, lack of money was the problem. In Kramatorsk, some people in line waiting for boxes of humanitarian aid said they were too poor to evacuate at all. Donetsk and its economy have been dragged down by conflict since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists began fighting Ukraine’s government.
“Who will take care of us?” asked Karina Smulska, who returned to Pokrovsk a month after evacuating. Now, at age 18, she is her family’s main money-earner as a waitress.
Eighteen-year-old waitress, Karina Smulska, who returned to her home town after fleeing, prints a receipt for Ukrainian servicemen, at a restaurant, in Pokrovsk, eastern Ukraine, Wednesday, July 20, 2022. Tens of thousands of people from Donetsk region are returning to their rural or industrial communities close to the front line at considerable risk because they can't afford to live in safer places. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Volunteers have been driving around the Donetsk region for months since Russia’s invasion helping vulnerable people evacuate, but such efforts can end quietly in failure.
Damages from shelling on a house in Malotaranivka village, where Tamara Markova, 82-year-old resident and her son Mykola Riaskov, suffering from a disability, both returned back to after fleeing, in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, Monday, July 18, 2022. Markova and Riaskov said they spent only five days as evacuees in the central city of Dnipro this month before deciding to take their chances back home. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
Tamara Markova, 82-year-old resident, sits with her son Mykola Riaskov, suffering from a disability, who both returned back to their home after fleeing, sit in their home in Malotaranivka village, in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, Monday, July 18, 2022. Markova and Riaskov said they spent only five days as evacuees in the central city of Dnipro this month before deciding to take their chances back home. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
In a dank home in the village of Malotaranivka on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, speckled twists of flypaper hung from the living room ceiling. Pieces of cloth were stuffed into window cracks to keep out the draft.
Tamara Markova, 82, and her son Mykola Riaskov said they spent only five days as evacuees in the central city of Dnipro this month before deciding to take their chances back home.
“We would have been separated,” Markova said.
The temporary shelter where they stayed said she would be moved to a nursing home and her son, his left side immobilized after a stroke, would go to a home for the disabled. They found that unacceptable. In their hurry to leave, they left his wheelchair behind. It was too big to take on the bus.
Now they make do. If the air raid siren sounds, Markova goes to shelter with neighbors “until the bombing stops.” Humanitarian aid is delivered once a month. Markova calls it good enough. When winter comes, the neighbors will cover their windows with plastic film for basic insulation and clean the fireplace of soot. Maybe they’ll have gas for heat, maybe not.
“It was much easier under the Soviet Union,” she said of their lack of support from the state, but she was even unhappier with Russian President Vladimir Putin and what his soldiers are doing to the communities around her.
“He’s old,” she said of Putin. “He has to be retired.”
Homesickness and uncertainty also drive returns to Donetsk. A daily evacuation train leaves Pokrovsk for relatively safer western Ukraine, but another train also arrives daily with people who have decided to come home. While the evacuation train is free, the return one is not.
Oksana Tserkovnyi took the train home with her 10-year-old daughter two days after the deadly attack on July 15 in Dnipro, where they had stayed for more than two months. While the attack was the spark to return, Tserkovnyi had found it difficult to find work. Now she plans to return to her previous job in a coal mine.
Costs in Dnipro, already full of evacuees, were another concern. “We stayed with relatives, but if we needed to rent it would have been a lot more,” Tserkovnyi said. “It starts at 6,000 hryvnia ($200) a month for a studio, and you won’t be able to find it.”
Taxi drivers who wait in Pokrovsk for the arriving train said many people give up on trying to resettle elsewhere.
“Half my work for sure is taking these people,” said one driver, Vitalii Anikieiev. “Because the money is gone.”
In mid-July, he said, he picked up a woman who was coming home from Poland after feeling out of place there. When they reached her village near the front line, there was a crater where her house had been.
“She cried,” Anikieiev said. “But she decided to stay.”
Putin chokes gas supply to Latvia as Europe faces winter energy crisis
that could see cities in darkness & hot water cut
Jacob Bentley-York
20:21, 30 Jul 2022, Updated: 0:35, 31 Jul 2022
VLADIMIR Putin has choked off Latvia's gas supply "indefinitely".
The country is the latest European nation to be cut off as Russia continues to weaponize its energy supplies in revenge at the West's sanctions.
Russia has cut the gas supply of Latvia amid growing fears of a winter energy crisis. Credit: Reuters
Gazprom announced the decision after country refused to pay for supplies in roubles. Credit: Reuters
This week, towns and cities in Germany were plunged into darkness after Russian-state energy giant Gazprom strangled supplies by 20 per cent.
Hanover's mayor Belit Onay said the "imminent gas shortage" meant energy consumption had to immediately drop by 15 per cent.
Residents have already started taking cold showers to conserve their energy.
German breweries have also been told to stop the production of beer amid fears Oktoberfest will be cancelled.
OMG! Oktoberfest cancelled? There will be riots in the streets!
Elsewhere, Spanish residents have been urged take off unnecessary clothing like ties at work to cool down.
And Belgium will reverse its phase-out of nuclear energy, while the Netherlands and Austria are switching to coal-fired power plants.
Because it is far more important for NATO and America to move the weapons inventory than to save the planet from destruction.
Putin has lashed out after European leaders banded together in fury at the war in Ukraine.
Experts say the tyrant believes the policies may act as leverage in negotiations given the huge reliance Europe has on Russian gas and energy.
Gas giant Gazprom announced today that Latvia’s supplies would be cut off after the country refused to pay for supplies in roubles.
In a statement, the company said it was halting its gas deliveries to the country because it broke “terms for extraction of gas.”
Edijs Saicans, deputy state secretary on energy policy at the Latvian Economy Ministry, said Russian gas imports will be banned from January 1, 2023.
“We do not see any major impacts from such a move,” he said defiantly.
Defiantly, and, would you believe, stupidly?
Gazprom has already cut off gas supplies to Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland and Bulgaria because the countries would not pay in their local currency as required by the supplier.
On Tuesday, EU countries reportedly agreed on emergency regulation to curb their gas use this winter as Putin continues to slash supplies.
The European Commission had previously warned that complying with Putin's order could breach EU sanctions on Moscow.
It has urged companies to keep paying in the currency agreed in their contracts with Gazprom despite the ongoing restrictions.
The news comes amid fresh reports that Putin’s men could be on the ropes after President Volodymyr Zelensky’s brave troops wiped out two Russian ammunition depots.
The Directorate for Strategic Communications of the Ukrainian army confirmed Ukraine hit two ammunition depots in Ilovaisk (Donetsk Oblast) and Brylivka belonging to Russia in the early hours of Friday morning.
Footage shared on social media show enormous flames erupting and thick, dark plumes of smoke filling the Ukrainian night sky.
