Zaitsevo, a front-line village north of Gorlovka, in the north of the Donetsk People’s Republic, has been extremely hard-hit by Ukrainian shelling, since 2014. What was once a village of 3,500, with a school & kindergarten, is now a shell of a village, with at most 1,000 residents, most of whom don’t stay in the village, but come for brief visits & retreat to relative safety in Gorlovka,a city likewise heavily shelled, including with HIMARs on November 12.

Not far away, in Golmovsky, I spoke with some of the residents who remain. One told me he’d fled his own town, Dolomoti, NE of Golmovsky, which he said was destroyed by Ukrainian shelling, and has lost three homes, burned down after Ukrainian shelling. He said they were evicted from Dolomoti in 2019, and in 2020, Ukraine completely destroyed the village, “every single house”.

He collected money to rent an apartment in Golmovsky, “but three days ago it was hit. I just bought it, and it was already hit. They don’t consider us humans. They say it on tv, that we are not human. In 2019, 2020, they told us they don’t consider us human and if they enter this place there would be nobody left, they’d annihilate us.”

These are but glimpses of the horror Donbass civilians have been living since Ukraine began shelling them in 2014. Complicit media, with blood on their hands, claim this isn’t happening. The people being bombed beg to differ.