Ukraine: Donetsk bridges blown up to halt access to rebel-held city

[Igel]

39. In some cases it's a good thing for the seccessionist cause.

Having a train on the bridge from Slov'yansk to Donets'k at the time it was demolished, for instance. Hard enough to get past a downed trestle; it's worse when there's still a train on it.

On the other hand, one of the bridges was the supply line for a power plant. Without it, the power plant will be running on reserves. It has reserves--it's an open question as to how long they'll last. At that point either somebody will have to repair the line (the Ukr railway's been kind enough to do this in many cases--even in DPR and LPR territory, they fix the tracks at Kiev's expense) or the power will fail.


The Russian-language press that the seccessionists follow, however, don't show what many at DU show. No supplies are arriving in Slov'yansk or Artemivsk. Instead, there are purges and sweeps in which all men are being arrested, relatives of "insurgents" are being gunned down on the streets. It's like what happened when the Nazis went into points that the Red Army pulled out. Or so says Lesya reporting from Druzhovka about what a friend in Artemivsk said he heard from his buddy in Slov'yansk. (That press is a real hoot. Some of it is so openly false as to be funny. Other articles read like Brezhnev-era Pravda and Izvestiya articles. Some sound like WWII-era news stories. Their "Heroes of the Donetsk People's Republic" newsreels are also worth a snort. Preferably with a couple of strong drinks. So much war-time propaganda squished into a small bit of "newsreel" that it self-satirizes.)

The seccessionist and rossiisky (Russian, as in Rossiya; not Russian as in the ethnicity or language) press also didn't hear about the tractor driver outside of Krasnopartisansk that was killed by a landmine. (The LPR is busy using landmines.) The villagers said it was rather surprising: The same people that they watched lay mines last night tried to say it was a a National-Guard/Right Sector diversionist group that apparently showed up during the night to engage in mine-laying and left without a trace. Or the 13-year-old girl killed at a checkpoint when her parents didn't stop in the dark for the armed men with dark masks and in camo.