The stigmatisation of people from the Donbas often happens precisely on the everyday level, with everyday people, in everyday life. People take the example set by politicians, who have never said publicly: “We are all residents of one country and we are all needed here, every person who has a Ukrainian passport is worth the attention and care of our state, whichever part of the world they might be in.” [...]
But it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call this protest “pro-Ukrainian”. For the people on Lenin Square, the most important motivating factor wasn’t the Ukrainian national idea (although that was also present), but resisting the spontaneous violence that had begun to spread not only through the city’s streets, but its institutions too, thus alienating the city’s residents. It was precisely opposition to violence that became an important element for people trying to assert humanist ideals and democratic principles in April 2014. All of this helped reinvigorate Donetsk’s local community for a time, its importance and faith in the idea that city residents could defend their city. [...]
The subject of internally displaced people is one of the most divisive in the western and Ukrainian press. At the beginning of the conflict, displaced people encountered constant discrimination. In conditions of war, the power of stereotypes has only grown stronger. Despite the fact that many articles on tolerance appeared in the Ukrainian press, people displaced from the Donbas were still represented negatively in mass consciousness — poor, uneducated, politically naive and so on. On a personal level, I have encountered similar claims: “You’re an exception. But there are others, the majority. After all, it was your region that chose [Viktor] Yanukovych, and now we’re going through all of this.” [...]
The emergence of a negative image of the Donbas is connected to the fact that no one outside the region knew much about it, its character, its life, or the people who lived there. People only remember the fact that the Donbas was the heart of Soviet industrialisation, and that people from across the Soviet Union (including some with a criminal past) traveled there to build and restore it after the Second World War. The myth about the down-at-heel Donbas was fed further by gang wars in the early 1990s, as well as the background of its political elite — the majority of them (for example, Rinat Akhmetov or Viktor Yanukovych) had criminal backgrounds. The fact that the region remained conservative and nostalgic for the Soviet past didn’t help either.
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