Where There Are Fish in the Tap Water and Women’s Uteruses Fall Out

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/opinion/eastern-ukraine-russia-conflict-.html

Version 0 of 1.

MARINKA, Ukraine — The last time Marina Korneeva heard about her home in Marinka, a small town in eastern Ukraine, it had been requisitioned by the army and was being used as an improvised morgue. Corpses were stored in it without refrigeration. Marinka, an unkempt town of about 5,000 residents that mixes rustic homes and gray apartment blocks, was once renowned in the region for its milk plant. Not anymore, because it is at the front lines of a five-year conflict in eastern Ukraine opposing Ukrainian government forces and separatists backed by Russia.

Ms. Korneeva is considered relatively well-off. She is 37, married and employed as a pharmacist, and her family of three is able to rent an apartment in another town, Kurakhovo, about 10 miles away. People who are old and have no family support cannot afford to do so.

One of her former neighbors in Marinka, Aleksandra Belotserkovets, is 86. Ms. Belotserkovets’s son was killed inside his apartment by a direct artillery hit when the war began in 2014. Two weeks later, her house was destroyed. She ended up in a facility for displaced people, an abandoned kindergarten building, also in Kurakhovo. Conditions there are barely basic: Forty residents share one shower and one toilet. Ms. Belotserkovets lives in a 25-square-feet room, a former broom closet, that she has decorated with Orthodox icons and pictures of her family.

Along the government-controlled side of the front line in the Donetsk region, where about two million people live, more than 1,000 apartment buildings and 12,000 private houses were damaged or destroyed during the war. Half of them still remain unrepaired, according to documents that the region’s governor showed me. Getting compensation from the state for ruined housing is nearly impossible: Ukraine’s official position, also set in law, is that since Russia is to blame for the war, all complaints should be addressed across the border.

I traveled throughout eastern Ukraine this summer to get a sense of what, if anything, had changed there, especially after the election this spring of the new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who promised to restore peace to the region. I met people who very much longed for this peace and at first embraced Mr. Zelensky as an agent of long-awaited change. But several months after his election, having seen no improvements on the ground, they had become distrustful of the authorities in Kiev, the capital, once again.

Last week, Ukraine and Russia completed a long-delayed swap of prisoners, and there is now talk that peace negotiations between the two countries, brokered by France and Germany — known as the Normandy format — may resume late this month. So far, Mr. Zelensky has been rather outspoken and witty in his dealings with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. But if his unconventional diplomatic style is news-grabbing and refreshingly playful compared to his predecessor’s stiffness, it has yet to deliver any relief to the communities that deal with the effects of war every day.

The conflict erupted in 2014, soon after a popular uprising in Kiev that forced President Viktor Yanukovych out of office. But those turbulent events didn’t find much support out here (not to mention in Russia). The Kremlin used the disruption, as well as infighting among Ukrainian power holders, to annex the Crimean Peninsula in the south and fuel separatist sentiments in the east. In the region of Donbas, the two breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were proclaimed, with Russia’s support. Ukraine’s attempt to restore its sovereignty and control over the provinces turned into a war between government forces and separatist militias. The United Nations estimates that the conflict killed 13,000 people between mid-April 2014 and mid-February of this year.

During its first year, the war was active; locals were forced to flee or hide from intense artillery shelling in basements. Then came one and another hasty peace deals that did little to solve the conflict itself but halted the worst of the violence by implementing cease-fires and the withdrawal of heavy artillery.

As the conflict’s intensity abated, however, so did interest in the fate of the people who continue to endure it. Yet some six million people still reside in the war-affected areas: about two million in areas run by the government and about four million in areas controlled by the separatists. (These are my estimates, based on various government statistics.) Actual hostilities, shelling or fighting are now rare. But residents’ lives have been upended by the indirect consequences of the war: damaged infrastructure, authorities’ neglect of the forsaken territories, communities arbitrarily divided by the front line.

Marinka, for example, is an immediate suburb of Donetsk city, and several of its streets lead directly into it. But the nominal battlefront cuts across them: Whereas Donetsk is under the control of separatists, Marinka is under the government’s. There has been no cooking or heating gas in Marinka since 2014 partly because of damage to pipelines, partly because the distribution station is stranded in a no man’s land between enemy positions. It would be possible to build a new station in a safe place and reroute supplies, but the authorities haven’t bothered: Who wants to invest money in a locality that may be shelled or occupied again?

Marinka also used to share water pipes with Donetsk, but hostilities made it impossible to keep supplies going through the front line. So the town was reconnected to another source — only that one doesn’t include filtration. Residents report that the water from the tap is green, smells like a river and sometimes carries algae and little fish.

Obtaining medical services is an ordeal. Avdiivka, another suburb of Donetsk city, has a population of about 34,000, according to local authorities. Today, it is cut off from the main road that used to connect it to the outside world. Residents have to travel in and out via a makeshift mud road; an experience that some compare to riding a washboard. That is also the way used to transport women in labor to a hospital 50 miles away. The maternity ward in Avdiivka was closed after a mother and her baby died during childbirth in March. Hospital employees faulted overworked employees and the lack of specialists.

Avdiivka doesn’t have specialized medical infrastructure because it didn’t need it before — because it was so close to Donetsk city. Patients would just go to Donetsk, a 15-minute drive away. Now, they are cut off from access to anything beyond basic medical services. “Every day, people come and ask where is the cardiologist, the endocrinologist, the ophthalmologist, the pulmonologist, the gastroenterologist,” Vitalii Sytnik, the head of Avdiivka’s policlinic, told me in July. “What am I supposed to tell them?”

Mr. Sytnik sees the war’s toll on the townspeople firsthand: more and more alcoholism, heart attacks, strokes and suicides. Not to mention more health conditions that seem shameful and are rarely discussed in public.

Several women reported suffering from uterine prolapse — when the uterus slips down the vagina, sometimes falling out entirely. The last remaining gynecologist in town, Vladimir Simak, confirmed that he’d been encountering more and more patients with the condition. He blamed two factors: stress and the lifting of heavy objects. Since 2014, Avdiivka has had multiple disruptions in water supplies, and everyone, including women, has had to carry buckets of water up the stairs of apartment buildings.

Uterine prolapse cannot be treated in Avdiivka. And most people who suffer from it cannot afford the surgery to fix it, or even the cost of traveling to a qualified surgeon. Liudmila — she wouldn’t give her last name — 53, said that she couldn’t get treatment because she spent all her time and money on repairing her house, which was damaged by shelling.

“The winter is coming, and I am going to stay either without a roof over my head or with my uterus falling out,” she told me. “I choose the second option.”

The regions of Donetsk and Luhansk were among those that cast the most votes for Mr. Zelensky during the presidential election in April. But then, in the elections for Parliament in July, they voted mostly for the party representing former Yanukovych elites, a traditional choice for this part of the country.

The new president had made vague pledges to bring peace to eastern Ukraine but no concrete plans to restore public services there. Ignore the everyday hardships of people stranded in the war zone, and they will turn their back on the promise of politics.

Alisa Sopova is an independent journalist from Ukraine.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.