Clarissa's Blog

People living in the area around the crash site of the Malaysia Airlines flight are posting in the social networks photos of objects taken from the dead bodies: tubes of mascara and lipstick, wallets, scarves. It doesn’t even remotely occur to them that there might be anything wrong about this form of scavenging.

These are people with social network profiles, which means gadgets and Internet access. This means these are not poor, desperate people. They are just indifferent.

The South-East of Ukraine is a very peculiar region. I know it well because that’s where the Ukrainian side of the family is from. Donetsk, Lugansk, Gorlovka, Kramatorsk, Torez, Lisichansk – these are not just names of places to me. It feels like I spent my entire childhood on a bus to Lisichansk. So I know better than most why the Russian terrorists are so enormously successful in that area of Ukraine in a way they never managed to succeed in Kharkiv, Dnepropetrovsk or Odessa.

One of my aunts came over from Donetsk two weeks ago. Her young and healthy daughters had dispatched the 60-year-old mother to Canada to work and send them money. Neither the daughters not their husbands are or have ever been interested in supporting themselves. They are now pestering the miserable mother with the endless, “But how come you still haven’t made any money?” on Skype. That the mother has no work visa and speaks no English is of no interest to them.

Ukrainian South-East is an area where the population is passive, inert and infantilized to the extreme. The refugees from the region who move to Russia are reported as throwing endless tantrums that the clothes and cell phones Russians are providing to them as humanitarian aid are not of the most expensive and fashionable bands.