At the Trudovskoi bus station in Donetsk, the gossip these days focuses on whose house has been hit by shelling and where you can get food handouts.
Day and night, mortars and rockets rain down on the rebel stronghold in eastern Ukraine — mainly in the city’s outlying districts, where the poorest people live.
“One shell fell, then another, and then yet another. One hit the Azerbaijani family’s house, remember?” 64-year-old Nikolai Skripko told his 38-year-old neighbor, Sveta Banina, counting the damaged houses on his fingers.
Death bulletins have become almost daily fare since last spring, when Russian-backed rebels took up arms, trying to break two eastern regions away from Ukraine. The United Nations estimates that more than 5,300 people have been killed and nearly a million forced from their homes by the fighting.
The economic ruin caused by the violence has yet to be calculated — but it’s vast. Joblessness is rife in the rebellious regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Businesses have closed, entrepreneurs have fled and cash is running dry. Able-bodied people have no work and retirees have no pensions, since the government in Kiev has stopped paying pensions in rebel-held areas.
A flurry of European diplomacy this week aims to halt the hostilities. But hope for the future is faint in Trudovskoi, a neighborhood where livelihoods revolve around a coal mine forced to shut down by the war.
Ending the fighting will be only the beginning of a long, hard slog back to normal life.
