Thread by @bmilakovsky

The town of #StanytsiaLuhanska in the #Donbas is in the news because of the brutal shelling it is undergoing from #Russia /separatist forces. This is one of most important communities in the development work I've been involved in since 2015. Here's a bit about Stanytsia. 1/

It is basically a rural suburb of Luhansk that functioned as the city's market garden. Most backyards are lined with plastic greenhouses for raising tomatoes and cucumbers. This so central to local identity that town seal is 🍅 hovering over a Cossack fortress. 2/

Stanytsia is across the Siversky Donets River from Luhansk. In 2014 became clear during brutal fighting that the river would become the stable front. Stanytsia would be severed from its market in the industrial and coal cities in the south of the region. 3/

The separation came in form of sustained, hellish fighting. Both sides pointed away on Stanytsia w/all calibers as changed hands between UA, the "Luhansk Peoples Republic", back. Greenhouse farmers kept at their work, digging bombshelter ditches nearby to throw themselves into.4/

Meanwhile they struggled to maintain their markets. Vegetables flowed across the frontline but that flow was cut off as both sides formalized and sealed the "border". Eventually regulated trade was allowed in absurd hand-carried format up and down a blown-up bridge. 5/

Here that process was captured for the OSCE by phitographer Evheniy Maloletka. 6/

This trade went up and down, sometimes booming such that it attracted refugees from the fighting to return to Stanytsia and restart their greenhouses. But the separatist authorities eventually threw up roadblocks to the trade, perhaps to protect their market for RU producers. 7/

The strongest greenhouse farmers banded together to start a cooperative, and expand into new markets like Ukrainian supermarket chains. Lots of well deserved foreign assistance for this. Worth every cent. No greenhouses, no Stanytsia. 8/

The Ukrainian journalist Lesia Hanzha wrote movingly about these farmers feeding their neighbors and relatives across the front and all the trauma and pride of this community. 9/ life.pravda.com.ua/society/2017/0…

There are a lot of other stories of Stanytsia (ill do another thread about the foresters) but the trials of these greenhouse farmers really captures it for me. Ideologically they are all over the place. Many wish they had never been separated from Luhansk. 10/

Many experienced things in 2014-2015 that forever changed their relationship to Ukraine and Russia, the countries they lived on the border of literally and figuratively. Livelihoods that depend on the national economy help stitch them back into Ukraine, but they need peace...11/

...to process their trauma, get it acknowledged and their voices heard in big, plural and complicated #Ukraine. They just really need peace. END