says entrepreneur Vladimir Veseolkin. “When I turned 18, I got a job at the mine in Horlivka in the Donetsk region. Then in 1998, I started businesses: a small distribution center, shop, bakery and a company producing concrete products. I employed 100 people, they were mid-sized enterprises, but ok for the town of Horlivka.
“But now they are completely ruined.”
Veseolkin is among numerous business-owners whose livelihoods have been devastated by the ongoing civil war in Ukraine.
The worst of the fighting took place in the Donbass region of Luhansk and Donetsk. Here Russian-backed rebels claimed locals supporting Kyiv were the enemy, providing justification to raid companies and commandeer homes.
“I was a member of [now-Prime Minister] Yatsenyuk’s ‘Fatherland’ party and in 2013 I became the head of a village, Zaitsevo,” Veseolkin says. "I bought a tractor and a truck for the village and started cleaning it up. When the demonstrations in Kyiv started, I went to the Maidan square at weekends."
After President Victor Yanukovich fled Ukraine in February 2014, pro-Russian protests sparked up in the Donbass and rebels began to take over Government buildings. Horlivka was seized by the separatists, but Veseolkin stayed, found some guns and began moving from place to place, never sleeping at home.
“The separatists sent guys to me to convince me to fight for them," he says. "I told them we had different views.”
In April 2014, the body of Horlivka city councillor Volodymyr Rybak was found tortured and dumped in a river in the nearby town of Sloviansk, then controlled by the rebels.
“When they killed Rybak, my wife came home for two days. That night, somebody smashed our apartment window. I fired a gun at the front door, opened the window on the other side of our flat, and we escaped."
“I had some informers and learned there was a hit out on me. That’s when my family and I left for good."
Veseolkin has since started up a bakery business in his new home of Kyiv.
He explains how pro-Russian fighters had a convenient way to steal from the locals.
"Either you are with the separatists or you are a fascist," he says, "and because I was a 'fascist', it was easy for the rebels to take my companies."
“By and large this is a useless rust belt,”
Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Coal dealing across 'terrorist' republic
“I know people are saying we finance terrorists, but Ukraine would need a lot more money to rebuild the entire energy system,”
says Vitaliy Kropachov, ex-owner of a coal mine in Torez, Donetsk.
June 3, 2014, Town of Torez, occupied Ukraine
June 3, 2014, Town of Torez, occupied Ukraine
Photos copyright: Irina Gorbasyova
Other photos credit: Mstyslav Chernov (Donetsk Airport with caption: 'You can't own anything without rebel approval'), Anastasiya Fedorenko (Akhmetov/Shakhtar Donetsk), SCM (Akhmetov/Yanukovich, power station with caption 'Energy:collaborating with Kyiv'), ATB (Wikimedia, ATB, ATB, Imgur), Michael Bird (all portraits)
Video: Smelting: Andrii Shramko, Donetsk Metallurgical Works. Raid on Torez [source/torezinfo].
Editing (text): Craig Shaw
Editing (video): Val Ciobanu
Translation: Ilie Cazac, Corina Mica