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DONETSK, Ukraine — The director of Donetsk Boarding School No. 1, Olga Volkova, is stuck in a waiting game that has become a nightmare.
On the one hand, there is the threat that Ukraine’s war against the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic will arrive at her doorstep at any moment. Just two days ago, nine civilians were killed in heavy mortar fire in the nearby city of Petrovka, just 12 miles from the center of Donetsk.
On the other, there is the even more immediate issue of the pro-Moscow rebels, who yesterday ordered the director to prepare the more than 120 orphans in her charge for immediate evacuation to Russia.
The rebels said they would arrive at the school with enough buses to take the orphans across the border. By order of the Donetsk’s People Republic, she must have the children, ranging in age from 7 to 18, packed and ready to go when the buses arrive — or else.
Volkova shook her head as she described how helpless she felt in the situation. Though she had been arguing back and forth with the rebels’ minister of social politics for several weeks, she had made no headway in getting them to back down from their demands.
“What can I do if they show up here with Kalashnikovs and buses?” she said as she peered through her office window at the children’s rooms across a grassy courtyard. “It’s just us here. How can we fight back? I will be forced to make a quick decision based on what is best and safest for the kids.”
The situation at the orphanage is an example of the state of confusion and fear felt by those living in rebel-held Donetsk as the population waits out the Ukrainian government's next moves against the separatists. Tens of thousands of eastern Ukrainians with the means to do so have left this city of 1 million, after nearly three months of violent conflict, which has claimed nearly 500 lives.
But for those who are left, there is the anxiety of what comes next. Many say the war in eastern Ukraine has become so confusing for the remaining residents that it’s often difficult to figure out who’s firing on whom and who’s on which side. Some say they feel the rest of Ukraine is ready to forget about them.
Locals here say there is little information coming out of Kiev about the government forces’ tactics, even as signs of war can be heard loud and clear across the rest of the country. Public transportation is plastered with posters calling for volunteers for the National Guard and donations to support the Ukrainian army. Ukrainian television news channels have long, nightly reports about the fighting in the east, with a heavy emphasis on gains by Ukrainian forces.
Many people in Donetsk say they feel that war is just around the corner and worry that there’s little they can do to protect themselves. Over the weekend, two outlying districts of the city were bombed, killing more a dozen. The rebels and most locals blamed the Ukrainian army, while the Ukrainian government insisted that the rebels were bombing the cities with Russian-supplied heavy artillery to make the population think it was an order from Kiev to kill them.
On July 11 in Mariinka, on the outskirts of Donetsk, heavy shelling from what some claim were Ukrainian forces landed on the concrete apartment blocks of this quiet, working-class city. Six people were killed, and four were wounded. The mortar rounds fell without warning, ripping huge holes into apartments and shattering windows of nearby buildings.
“Kiev has no more use for us. That’s why they have attacked peaceful people,” said Sergei Koreyenko, 45, as he surveyed the damaged buildings. “People here might have been indifferent to the separatists before, but after this, I heard 500 went and signed up as rebel fighters.”
A day before the shelling, Mariinka’s boarding school for orphans also received a visit from a group of armed rebels from the Donetsk People’s Republic. The gunmen told the school’s director, Nikolai Mysura, they would shoot him if he didn’t allow them to evacuate his 54 orphans to Russia. That night, Mysura piled the children into a bus and took them to Volkova’s school.
Together, Mysura and Volkova now have 128 children housed in the Donetsk facility, a brightly painted yellow campus built in 1959 and recently given a cheery remodel. “We can’t let the militiamen take the kids,” Mysura said, as his eyes filled with tears. “Maybe this is just a PR move for them to show the Russian media that they are ‘saving’ Donbass children. We don’t know.”
Mysura and Volkova’s greatest fear was that the rebels would use the children as human shields in its war with Ukrainian government forces.
The rebels visited the orphanage school once before, taking the younger students into a closed room and asking them how the director and her staff treated them. The students later said they were asked, Don’t you want to go to Russia, where it will be safer?
“We don’t feel in danger here. We are morally and physically prepared to go to the bomb shelter,” said Maria Sigonkova, 17, a student at the school. “We are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.”
The conflict in the region has already ruined Sigonkova and her classmates’ summer, their last one together before going off to college, she said. For the past several years, the group of teenagers had spent a least a week at the nearby Sviatohirsk tourist camps, where they spent lazy days lying in the sun and hanging out with friends from other regional schools at the resort town, renowned for its mineral baths and historic monastery.
But the rebels told the director that they would block the students from going on this year’s scheduled June 18 trip. So for the time being, they are stuck together on campus, making the best of it, Sigonkova said.
“We stood up to those rebels the first time they came here and told them that we weren’t going with them to Russia,” said Sveta Surchilova, 18. She said none of the orphans would be getting on a bus to Russia. In the end, however, the director will likely decide what the students will do if the rebels show up again.
“We think the rebels want to show that only Russia cares for us and not Ukraine,” said Nastya Kasumova, 18, the school’s student-body president. “But actually, they don’t care for us at all. They are just using us as a political tool. We’re big kids, you know. We understand a lot about what’s going on here.”
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