«Luhansk Informator» journalists made a video about civilians’ life in the war zone. The piece shows Donbass frontline cities in various periods of time.
«More than 200 settlements, with about 1,5 million people living there before the war, are now on the so-called «contact line», which has decreased since June, 2014, from 500 to 350 kilometers approximately. Front line territories population became 3 times less because of the military operations, streams of people left the crossfire zone settlements. Life of those, who couldn’t or didn’t want to leave, was very hard».
«Dozens, sometimes hundreds of mines, shells or missiles fell on those cities and villages every night. They destroyed residential houses and infrastructure. Some damaged communications could not be restored under running fire and thousands of people had no electricity, water or gas supply for months. Somewhere there is no water or gas supply even now, even after a month and a half of reconciliation», — the piece notes.
Every day people were wounded and killed under artillery fire. According to the UN more than 8 thousand people died and 17 thousand civilians were wounded in the military conflict.
«Hundreds of thousands of people had to hide in the basements with no comforts of home. Local self-administration and state administration in the most parts of those cities were paralyzed and couldn’t cover even basic needs: during military confrontation many settlements were not supplied with food, meds; public transportation did not work, as well as ambulance, fire fighters, police and utility services. Wounded and dead people were not counted, dead people were buried by their neighbors and relatives in the backyards.
Dozens of settlements couldn’t recover from the war consequences and after the ceasefire. Infrastructure objects are not restored there, just as residential houses and enterprises. Administrations don’t function, residents don’t return there as well. According to some calculations, restorations could take about 2 billion US dollars and several years. Ukraine doesn’t have enough resources to resolve this problem on its own», — the video summarizes.
«Luhansk Informator» for «Hromadske Radio«