This is really important article from the Atlantic
I Am a Governor of People, Not of Tombstones'
In the weeks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the leaders of the Donbas have had no easy choices.
Soon after russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.
“This was before the phrase ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself,’” Kyrylenko told me, sitting in the basement of a Donetsk regional-government building while an air-raid siren rang. “I didn’t have such an eloquent way to answer, so I blocked the number.”
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Now, for leaders such as Kyrylenko and Gaidai as well as their people, there are no easy choices, only impossible ones.
For many western politicians and analysts, the Donbas is less an inviolable part of Ukraine and more an asset to be negotiated, to let Putin save face and end this war. When I spent time with them, both Gaidai and Kyrylenko stuck to the Ukrainian government’s line, that victory for Ukraine amounted to Russian troops returning to the positions they held before this latest invasion was launched. Yet they related that policy with a certain bitterness, noting that part of their homeland would thus remain in Russian hands.
(For Kyrylenko, the cleavage is personal. His parents and elder brother are widely known to live in separatist parts of the Donbas and support Russia. “I do not have any family there,” he told me. “Those people are not my family. Those who stay with me here now, they’re my family. Those people need to answer to the law. They have tried to contact me since then. I have nothing to say to them.”)
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The pair are young—Kyrylenko is 35; Gaidai, 46. (Zelensky is 44.) It typically goes unnoticed that Ukraine is run by people in their 30s and 40s, mirroring the country’s own youthfulness, having gained independence in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the generation that must now grapple with the dire consequences of Putin’s invasion.
When I was with him, Gaidai, wearing a military uniform and holding a gun, recalled how, recently, he had been trying to organize evacuations from parts of Luhansk that had fallen to the Russian military, but many of the buses required were sitting in newly occupied towns. “Yes, we coordinate with the army,” he told me, “but we cannot predict everything and be sure which towns will be taken first.” Every decision, he said, could result in a devastating mistake.
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Gaidai told me that in the early stages of the war, Ukrainian troops withdrew from parts of the Luhansk region to avoid encirclement, concentrating instead on areas that they could capably defend and that held strategic significance. The decision initially appeared to have spared civilians unnecessary suffering—villages from which they fell back were not shelled. But then news emerged of alleged Russian atrocities in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, as well as other formerly Russian-occupied areas where local authorities were abducted and tortured, hundreds of civilians were executed, or killed while trying to escape, and cases of rape were recorded.
But if withdrawing from heavily settled areas doesn’t necessarily protect civilians, neither does staying and fighting. Mariupol offers clear evidence of the Russian military’s willingness to decimate an entire city holding out against an onslaught. Kyrylenko said he now worried that Russia would seek to subject the entirety of Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk to a “greater Mariupol” strategy, to “target all possible routes for the supply of food and ammunition, encircle the region, and don’t let people out.”
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Gaidai and Kyrylenko have made repeated calls—in interviews, on Facebook, in person—for the 2.5 million residents of the Ukraine-controlled part of the Donbas to leave, yet I met many who either did not know where to go or felt unsafe leaving their homes for the unknown. The risks of evacuation, safer though it may be than staying, were underlined by a Russian strike on a train station in Kramatorsk, in Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk, where evacuees were congregating; 57 died, and more than 100 were wounded. Just days earlier, Kyrylenko and Gaidai had asked me not to specify the sites from which civilians were departing, afraid that they would be targeted.
Not everyone stays out of fear. Some stay out of duty. Among those I spoke with in the Donbas was Roman Vodyanyk, the head of the biggest—and, at present, only—hospital in Severodonetsk, who has argued that he and his staff must be the last to evacuate. There will always be people who do not want to leave, he reasons with the soldiers who have asked him to move to safety, and medics such as him will have to remain to help them.
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So on this trip, while talking with people—Ukrainian officials among them—boundaries broke down, and in the end, we sought to support each other. From time to time, particularly after atrocities in Bucha or Mariupol were reported, I would ask how they were holding up. Kyrylenko was matter-of-fact when I checked in on him, focusing on the task at hand. “The war is not a place for heroism,” he told me, “but doing what you are supposed to. Concentrate on tasks you can accomplish.” Despite his military background, his mind was not on the battle, but on the people of the Donbas. “Make decisions thinking that only people who are alive matter. It’s about defending the region, but not ’til the last man,” he said. “In the end, I am a governor of people, not of tombstones.”
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Why must we have to give up all that we have built over these past years—not just the physical places and infrastructure, but the sense of identity, of being Ukrainian—because a neighboring state has violently assaulted us? It feels as though the Kremlin is exacting punishment on an entire country simply because of who we are, and who we choose to be. To ask us to surrender and be subjugated because we have been threatened with death—that, too, presents an impossible choice.