The photograph to the left is of miners who work in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine, the part of that country that is suffering most from the Russian invasion. That photograph is included in a group of photographs taken by a young woman, Valeriya Myronenko.
Business Insider has the rest of them and the story behind them. It starts: “If you told Ukrainian photographer Valeriya Myronenko six months ago that Donbass, the region in eastern Ukraine where she grew up, would erupt in a war, she wouldn’t believe you. Now, with conflict raging between Ukraine and multiple separatist movements, it has become apparent that the unthinkable has come true for Myronenko.
Myronenko, who now lives in Toronto, stayed with her family in Donbass for four months this past spring and summer and witnessed the region deteriorating firsthand, she tells Business Insider.”
Ms Myronenko says: “All the conflict unraveled before my eyes. It was incredible to watch how fast things can go from civilization to something crazy and burned down.”
I suggest anyone with an interest in taking a close in the living conditions of the people of that region and understanding their feelings would be wise to read the article and look at the other photographs which are not of war but are of how the people live, or better put survive.
In America we tend to forget places like this exists; we fail to remember what it was like living in the detritus of the Soviet Union, we cannot understand what it takes to survive in those places, nor how the fears of the elderly drive away the youth with dreams.
The article notes: “While there are plenty of young people in Donbass, most try to leave as soon as they are able because the only career prospects are in a mine or a factory. The result has been a rapidly greying population.”
Reflect on how different other parts of the world are. Think also how wars sweep across areas of the globe either not affecting the lives of people now living in miserable conditions or only making them worse. It surely does not make them better.
It’s reminiscent of Ireland in the nineteenth century under cruel British rule. Poverty, famine, dreadful and dire living conditions, hard times and flight (emigration). Ireland then lost one third of its population to famine, attendant diseases and mass emigration from 1846 to 1851. By about 1880 Ireland’s population had decreased from its pre-Famine level of 8.5 million people to less than 5 million: 3.5 million persons lost in 30 to 40 years; from 1847-51 Ireland suffered one million deaths to famine and related diseases, another 1 million were malnourished, starving or wasted to the bone, and a third one million migrated. Holy Horrors and the Twentieth Century with all its wars which took 100 million excess lives had not even begun to unfold.
I meant 100 million excess deaths due to the Twentieth Century’s Wars. US lost about 610,000 in the nineteenth century’s Civil War, and another 600,000-plus in all its Twentieth Century Wars: say 100,000 deaths WWI, 400,000 WWII, 50,000 Korea, 58,000 Vietnam, etc. The new century has seen fewer American combat deaths and casualties. So far, I don’t really know how many excess deaths worldwide there have been in the first fourteen years of the 21st Century.