The meandering river
On natural and unnatural obstacles
Seversky Donets is never a wide river, but it is long and meandering. Its banks, overgrown with forests and surrounded by hills are picturesque. I used to walk there with my father and a spinning, in search of a random pike. Not many fish to speak of but it was beautiful. The valley of the Seversky Donets has a pronounced asymmetry: the right bank is predominantly steep, mountainous, overgrown with shrubs and floodplain forests, while the left bank is low and mottled by water meadows, oxbow lakes and swamps. The asymmetry is emphasized by the fact that the right bank is Ukraine and the left one is occupied by Russians. One can study the geography of this war just by following the Donets downstream. Izyum, Sviatohirsk, Rubizhne, Lysichansk, Severodonetsk, the river mischievously meanders around to cross out as many names from the recent news reports as it can find. Why cannot Russians cross a 50 meters wide river? Why do they want to?
The battle for Severodonetsk, an unremarkable town of 100 thousand people known primarily for its huge chemical plant has been in the crosshairs of the world media for weeks. It is on the left side of the river, what is the point? But administratively it is part of Luhansk region, the last Ukrainian town there not occupied by Russians. And they want to take it only for Putin to announce that the entire Luhansk region has been “liberated”. Thousands have died and will die before this could happen. This is the trademark of pure evil - its purposes are not worth the means it puts to achieve them. Often it doesn’t even have a purpose. It just wants to make a point –just like Putin. And I can see him stooping over the map of the river of my childhood, squinting his dead duck face and planning the next blast of his old Soviet rockets. The small, picturesque river as the last defense against the evil -- isn’t it the loudest cry for the world to rush to its defense? Even Bilbo Baggins knew that the Shire was not safe when the evil was brewing in the East.
But not all is bad. Severskiy Donets is narrow but quick and the bodies of Russian soldiers who came there without spinning fishing rods will be taken to Don, the same one that quietly flows, and washed up somewhere in Kuban’.
Oh, I forgot to mention one other town on the banks of Severskiy Donets - Schast’e (Happiness in English). Before the war it had mere 10,000 people, now it is mostly abandoned and destroyed. No more Happiness. The evil has made it’s point but the game is not over yet. Just like that river, the history is meandering.
