Christopher Helali | American Communist Party (Former International Secretary of the Party of Communists USA)
Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to you all today. Dan Kovalik and I recently returned from a fact-finding mission to the Lugansk People’s Republic hosted by the Union of Political Emigrants and Political Prisoners of Ukraine. After months of arduous planning and organizing, we felt this delegation was essential for us to see the situation on the ground for ourselves including interviewing locals and officials who have been party to this conflict since it started in 2014. That is a critical point. This war did not begin in 2022 with Russia’s Special Military Operation. Rather, it began in 2014. I want to emphasize this point. The people of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics in the Donbass have endured a decade of bombardment, terrorism, and brutality, all of which have been severely underreported or even misreported in the West. We visited mass graves containing hundreds of dead civilians, some of whom remain unidentified to this day. They are a small fraction of the tens of thousands of civilians killed or injured during this siege on the Donbass. We saw shelled civilian infrastructure and other physical instances of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian military. What we discovered provided a completely different understanding that went beyond the myopic narratives proffered by the mainstream media here in the United States. On our delegation we were joined by two Georgians, a journalist and activist. The similarity between Georgia and Ukraine vis-à-vis Western involvement and NATO expansion is striking. Georgians fear that the next front for the United States and NATO will be in the Caucuses.
First and foremost, the narrative that Russia “invaded” the Donbass in 2014 is completely false. It not only strips the local population of their agency but it further promotes an understanding of a population which is occupied against their will. The reality is that the people of the Donbass were citizens of Ukraine in 2014. Many still are. Some served in the Ukrainian government, in its military, and its police forces. However, the Maidan uprising in 2014 and the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych sent shockwaves throughout the country. The rise of extremist groups including prominent neo-Nazi militias and forces as well as the rampant historical revisionism and denial of the Russian language and identity were critical components of the eventual internal civil strife that quickly morphed into what can aptly be described as a Civil War. As Human Rights Ombudsman and former Deputy Foreign Minister of the Lugansk People’s Republic Anna Soroka put it to me, “I was a Ukrainian officer―we were told to love our motherland and to be patriotic―I feel personally betrayed.” It was Ukrainian police that provided security in the regions that voted in their referendums for independence. It was Ukrainian police and military personnel who felt that the new government in Kiev was not in the best interest of their people and decided to provide protection and support to the people in the Donbass. They simply changed their uniforms but they were still Ukrainian. Thus, it was Ukrainians who were struggling with one another over their past, present, and future.
We witnessed firsthand the crumbling infrastructure, closed factories, unpaved roads, and dilapidated tenements. Here it is critical to note that we heard from people throughout the Lugansk region that from 1991 to 2014, there was very little investment in Eastern Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine was left destitute with no program of reconstruction, rehabilitation, investment, and development. On the contrary, the bulk of the money was concentrated in Kiev and Western Ukraine. This led to Eastern Ukraine being considered by many as a backwards, uneducated, and primitive territory with “homeless, drunk, dirty, and anti-social people.” This division between Western and Eastern Ukraine has historical legacies that are important to analyze and understand. The demographic crisis in post-Soviet Ukraine reveals a deeper, terminal crisis, as millions left in search of better lives. However, since 2022 and the region’s incorporation into the Russian Federation, there has been a tremendous amount of investment and improvements in infrastructure in the Donbass. We witnessed the paving of new roads throughout the region as well as the construction of new apartment buildings, university housing, playgrounds, schools, as well as the rehabilitation of older facilities and factories. As one local resident put it, “when Russia intervenes it leaves roads, libraries, and schools; when NATO invades a country, all it leaves is rubble.” We had the opportunity to visit the Alchevsk Iron and Steel Works plant, a metallurgical complex that dates back to the 19th century. During the Soviet Union, the factory employed upwards of 60,000 people, one of the largest plants of its kind in Europe. Under the Ukrainian government, the factory was privatized, outsourcing its management and operations. By 2010, the plant had only 7,000 workers. This economic upheaval, we were told by local residents, led to the murder of two directors of the plant as a result of the privatization efforts and the resistance to them by the local population. Since 2014, the plant has expanded its work and now employs around 14,000 workers. The siege on the region by Ukrainian forces led to the plant being shelled as well as the neighboring technical university which saw its dormitories attacked with precision munitions. We saw the scars on the buildings from missiles, mortars, artillery, and drone attacks which were being rehabilitated and repaired by local authorities.
The Donbass is a land of many wounds. Near historic landmarks from the Great Patriotic War where thousands of Jews, Communists, Soviet civilians of Russian ethnic origin, and other undesirables were massacred, locals recounted the brutal massacre of children during the Great Patriotic War. Plucked from the arms of their mothers, these children were executed by Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist collaborators who put cyanide under the noses of children because bullets were too precious to be wasted on children. It was near this site where a nursing home for the elderly was commandeered in the early days of the war in 2014 by Ukrainian forces who used the elderly as human shields. In the coming days, an accident led to a catastrophic fire that killed many of the elderly nursing home residents, many who could not ambulate and thus were burned alive on the second floor. We were told of Ukrainian paramilitary forces, many of them ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi, who in one instance beat an old man with the butts of their rifles and then shot him to death in front of his neighbors. In our discussions with locals and officials, we were made aware of a plethora of war crimes committed by Kiev backed forces since 2014. In the summer of 2014, Lugansk was under a full military, social, economic, and humanitarian blockade. Ukraine used water as a weapon of war, cutting off water supplies to numerous villages in Lugansk. Children were forced to travel via foot or public transit through active fire zones up to 20-30km to attend school. We visited the site of a days old attack on a residential building by a precision US supplied HIMARS missile that killed four civilians in the city of Lugansk. The foul smell of the sulfur from the rocket’s propellant was still prominent on the site. We visited other sites of destruction throughout the city and region. One apartment complex that had been targeted with US supplied munitions led to the shattering of over 1,600 windows. All around us, on every face of the buildings, we could see no windows, plastic sheets, or new windows being installed. This is terrorism.
Locals recounted the case of the Stanitsa Luhanska bridge which was destroyed by Ukrainian forces in 2015. The bridge, a critical piece of infrastructure in the region and the sole crossing point, had collapsed down into the river bank. A Ukrainian car we were told had also come onto the ruined bridge and exploded, leading to further destruction of the bridge. People were forced to navigate the extremely dangerous and treacherous rubble to cross back and forth to see family or for other needs. Pensioners were forced to go back and forth to the Ukrainian side to receive their state pensions. However, they could only do so with a bank card and needed to present themselves personally to the bank to collect their pensions. For elderly pensioners, this was a gross violation of their rights, especially for those who were not ambulatory. Thus, people were forced to climb this broken bridge for over four years. Traffic was usually around 12,000 people per day. The government in Kiev refused a temporary bridge proposed by the ICRC and later Germany sent millions of euros for the bridge’s reconstruction which was done in a poor and haphazard way.
We had the opportunity for extensive talks with Vladislav Nikolaievich Deinego, former Foreign Minister of the Lugansk People’s Republic. Minister Deinego provided us with extensive insider knowledge of the diplomatic and peace negotiations from 2014 through 2022. He even allowed us to look at original signed protocol agreements that were part of the Minsk Accords. In our discussions, it became abundantly clear that the chaotic situation within the Ukrainian government post-2014 led to the further erosion of trust and cooperation between the people of the Donbass and the Kiev regime. Many agreements that were reached were not enacted, enforced, or positions were changed overnight. We were told of the United Nations involvement in the Lugansk People’s Republic, which requested UN support by then Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who dispatched Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordination to help with the situation in Lugansk. O’Brien came to Lugansk and helped with the repairs to civilian infrastructure and equipment. While a letter of thanks was received from Stephen O’Brien, there was no recognition of the referendum of independence overwhelmingly passed by the people of Lugansk. In fact, the United Nations itself continued to refer to the Lugansk People’s Republic as “terrorists” until around 2016-2017 when the use of “terrorist” ceased. It is clear for everyone to see that the people of Lugansk are not terrorists.
The people of the Donbass have been at war for 10 years. 10 years of trauma. An entire generation has lived through this war. Yet, the resilience and tenacity of the people is remarkable. Under these dire conditions, life continues and people seek to enjoy their lives. Yet, the danger of an all-out war between the United States and its NATO allies and Russia remains. Many locals we met were resentful of Russia for not recognizing the LPR and DPR for eight years, leaving them in a state of limbo. The slogans of “Russia, Russia, Russia” in 2014 were not chanted with the aim of being part of Russia at that time but calling to be protected by Russia. To protect the civilians from a Western backed-regime that was outlawing their culture and traditions inherited from the USSR and trying to change them by imposing historical revisionism and foreign cultural values. This war is one of survival for the people of the Donbass, not of separatism, expansion, nor Russian “imperialism.” Since early 2014, the people of the Donbass have called on the Ukrainian government to agree to protect, as one local put it, “our rights, our language, our history, and our heroes.” Our friend Alexei Albu, a Ukrainian activist from Odessa who was severely injured in the Trade Union building massacre in Odessa in 2014, revealed many crimes committed against friends, family, and comrades by the Ukrainian regime and the various fascist forces and militias. He showed one video where Ukrainian armored personnel carriers were running over unarmed people in the streets. These crimes must be answered for. The people of the Donbass knew a war was coming in 2014. Locals recounted their fear of a war that would split the society. People were disoriented. One thing they are not is separatists. They never indicated such a thing. The people of the Donbass want to live in peace and to have their rights respected. When asked if they would ever want to be part of Ukraine again, every single person I spoke to emphatically said “no.” It is clear that the people of Lugansk have spoken. Any future peace agreement must begin from that point. Thank you.