An acquaintance of mine who is a border police officer comes home for a few days from the place where he was transferred for a year. His new duty station is Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region. Before the war, it had almost 150,000 inhabitants. According to D.’s estimates, a few thousand locals have remained, and the city is regularly under fire. I also know a few refugees from Kramatorsk in Chernivtsi, there must be hundreds, if not thousands. The city is a few kilometers from the front line and is now populated by completely different people, says D., with whom I meet for lunch: those from the border police, the national guard, the security service. They rent the apartments that their owners have left, and the owners can use them to find somewhere else to stay. That’s how it works. You can buy almost anything, but the prices are three times higher than in Chernivtsi. But the pay is enough. The fear of shelling? You get used to everything, says D.
Then he tells a story that seems to impress him far more than the daily threat to life from Russian long-range weapons. It’s actually the story of his friend R., senior doctor in a maternity hospital in Bilovodsk, a small town with about 8,000 inhabitants in the Donetsk region, which was on the territory controlled by Ukraine after the “ceasefire” in 2014.
The new incubator for premature babies was the pride of the medical team
Thanks to donations from Germany, modern equipment was purchased for the maternity clinic where R. worked, for several tens of thousands of euros. Marieluise Beck, member of the Bundestag at the time, visited the city and was committed to the interests of the clinic. A new incubator for premature babies instead of a twenty-year-old incubator was also purchased, to the pride of the medical team and the hope of the premature babies’ parents. But shortly after the start of the war of aggression Bilovodsk was occupied, the majority of the clinic staff left, including R. However, a few colleagues stayed. From time to time, R. receives information from them and from other residents who also remained in the occupied area. In the meantime, the maternity clinic has been repurposed: where children used to be born, the mercenaries of the so-called “Wagner Group” are now being treated. The “private military company,” as Russian officials call it, is a paramilitary organization that has been recruiting more prisoners for hostilities in Ukraine since the summer of 2022. Behind her is Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s cook”. No wonder he feels connected to the “values” of the Wagner members, after all he spent almost ten years in prison himself. In addition to their wounds, the new “patients” often have tuberculosis, hepatitis or AIDS, the common diseases of inmates in Russian correctional facilities, some of whom the prominent inmate Alexei Navalny affectionately calls “friendly concentration camps”. The fate of the obstetric equipment that could not easily be repurposed to treat wounded mercenaries is unknown. As is often the case elsewhere, the bidets and washbasins are used by the sick instead of the toilet seat, perhaps due to ignorance of their primary purpose. Because anyone who thinks that hygienic sanitary facilities are standard in Russia is very wrong. As is well known, the world power is concerned with the spirit, not with the comforts of the body.
So what’s the senior physician doing now? I ask. He is by no means the only one in this area who has to start from scratch. D. says he is in Dnipro and is trying to gain a foothold there, it’s not easy.
Just a few hours later, I read the news that again mentions the “Wagner Group”. Not related to the battles for Bakhmut, this time the Russian Meduza writes about something completely outlandish: the youth club “Wagnerjonok” was founded in St. Petersburg. I have to laugh: “Wagnerjonok” means something like “Wagnerlein”, it’s a diminutive derived from the name of the “Wagner group”. And yes, a pet name, because the club recruits young people between 16 and 25 years. Above all, they should be taught the “love of their homeland”. If that isn’t a contemporary and sensible investment in the offspring of the Russian world power, I think so.
Read more episodes of this column here.