Let's call her Anya. She asked not to give her real name. We met Anya in the spring of 2014 in Donetsk. She took me around a European city where cars washed the asphalt in the morning.
In 2017, in the center of Donetsk, Anya taught me how to distinguish the sounds of different gun shots and what kind of craters leave different shells.
< p>In 2019, she explained how to behave in order not to get “to the basement.”
— Anh, are you still scared to walk the streets?
— Somewhere after 2017, there were fewer attacks. Since the beginning of 2018, there are some isolated things that we can see and check. Someone drunk slammed from a small arms gun, this is recorded in the summary. In 2020, covid began — and everything around it started spinning.
— I'm not just talking about shooting.
— “To the basement”? They can do this even now if your behavior seems suspicious.
You shouldn't have anything extra on your phone. I took a picture of something, sent it to a Google drive — immediately erase it in the tube. Delete all correspondence on Facebook, WhatsApp immediately. No photographs of buildings, no beautifully flying planes. A completely clean phone will also arouse suspicion. Therefore, I have 4 photos of a dog, 20 photos of children, flowers and screenshots with recipes. The rest is erased and forgotten. No one knows how to «catch» them. Everyone is just afraid to discuss it. And we get “to the basement”, for example, for the “Ukrainian” flag.
— Does anyone else hang Ukrainian flags?
— Each owner and tenant of the building is obliged to hang out the flag of the «DPR». But here we have the sun all the time. The flag of the «DPR» is black-blue-red. The black stripe merges with the building, and the red color, fading in the sun, becomes yellow.
Everyone hung up the darkness of the «DNR» flags, and one day we went out — the whole of Donetsk became yellow-blaky.
Now we still need to make sure that the strip does not fade, change the flag in time. But in general, we live normally.
— Only with Ukraine there are checkpoints, and now you can’t enter from Russia either.
— From Russia they let us in, but only with a residence permit in the “DPR”. So we can leave and come back. Many of you probably think that we are completely in a blockade here? No, no, that never happened. Around the end of 2014, there was a period when a lot of manufactured goods disappeared. I remember I was looking for hair dye.
— In 2017, cars full of diapers and toilet paper stood on the border with Russia. I saw drivers opening their trunks and showing these treasures to the border guards.
But then everyone who needed it learned how much it costs to smuggle a truckload of sugar or something else through checkpoints from Ukraine. Then the same prices appeared from Russia.
I'll tell you more:
Ukrainian medicines are in pharmacies, and they are trying to buy them from us. Previously, they were mostly Russian, but they showed themselves poorly for fakes.
Now there are just a lot of Ukrainian ones, as if they are almost officially imported. And most importantly, the dates are fresh. No one talks about it out loud, they pretend that it does not exist. There is a problem with some specific medicines, people somehow get them.
There was a problem with paying for goods with Russia, we don’t have normal banks. Then came the «International Settlement Bank of South Ossetia» — a spacer through which all payments are made. There was an appearance of legitimate trading operations. Customs, again, aroused. And off we go.
Donetsk, 2022. Photo: Nikolay Trishin/TASS
— And what, you can now even pay with a card? And withdraw money from an ATM?
— Not to that extent. This South Ossetian bank is purely for trading operations: let's go and buy chicken in Russia. In Donetsk, you can pay with the card of the local central district hospital.
— CRH is our Central District Hospital.
— And we have the Central Republican Bank. But payment terminals periodically break down. And cards are not given to everyone, they receive salaries to state employees, pensions, social programs. And they give them only for the “DPR” passport, and not everyone has it. Well, there are queues at ATMs to withdraw money. And so that, as before, when I had cards of the Ukrainian Privatbank, Oschadbank, I paid a communal apartment from them and all that — no, there is no such thing.
— And now how do you pay a communal apartment?< /strong>
— You take a book with receipts and a pen, write a thirteen-digit number there and everything else. You go to the bank with this book. You stand in line at the cashier. The queue is usually outside. Banks can be identified by the queues on the streets. It takes a hell of a lot of time. Do you hear me cough? I stood in line.
— Covid?
— Thank God, no.
— Have you been vaccinated? can you do it?
— Of course. But we only have Sputnik-Light. The first part of your Sputnik.
—The second component is not brought to you?
—No. Like, they'll get overwhelmed. I got vaccinated because of the QR code. We have issued a decree that the entrance to different places is only with pieces of paper with a code.
— How do you get this QR code? Do you have an analogue of «Gosuslug»?
Yeah. It's called a phone photo. They give you a piece of paper, if you want, take a picture of it on your phone. But they will still ask for paper. Many therefore carry a piece of paper with them, try not to overwrite it.