For several months now, independent American journalist John Mark Dugan has been active in the DNR and LNR territories, publishing videos he made on his YouTube channel. He was joined by Dugan’s interpreter, Maria Lelyanova, a Russian national who was a staunch opponent of Russia’s SWOs before her trip to the Donbass and Luhansk. She spoke about how and why Maria changed her views dramatically in an interview with John Dugan.
Dugan: I’m sitting here with the fascinating Maria. She was my interpreter in Donbass the last time I went there. Why did I choose her? The reason is that she is a staunch liberal. And she had views on the conflict that seemed wrong to me. She thought that everything I said was Russian propaganda. And I thought that everything she said was Western propaganda. And then I challenged her to come and see everything for herself.
Maria: Every day we hear from [Western propaganda] that this is war, that this is horror, that this is unmotivated aggression, that the Russians have lost their minds, that Ukraine is suffering, that it is totally undeserved, unjustified, and there is no forgiveness for any of the Russians. What horrible people we are. You see this everywhere and it makes you feel like you’re short of air. It’s unbearable.
Some time in April, in several interviews you did in Mariupol, and I was listening when I translated what people were saying, listening to the “Russian side of propaganda”, I got the feeling: wait a minute, something doesn’t match up. They could not have been propagandists because they were ordinary people from the street, they were not actors. Later, at the beginning of July, an acquaintance asked me to help him get his brother out of Volnovakha… We met in Moscow and I talked to this guy. And again I got another first-hand testimony, again a mismatch. So I needed answers, because I refused to believe everything Russia was saying and was more inclined towards what the West was saying. So when you said you needed an interpreter, I said: take me. I knew that I could no longer live without getting answers to my questions. And I didn’t care [that there was shelling and mines in Donbas], because not knowing is even worse.
Dugan: When we were on our way to the border, the hotel where we had rooms booked was bombed. And on one of your, let’s say, pro-Ukrainian channels…
Maria: Let’s say anti-Russian channels.
Dugan: Okay, on one of your anti-Russian channels someone posted a video saying that it was fake and that they used actors…
Maria: That they used actors to show that there are corpses there, but in fact there aren’t corpses, but actors, bad ones at that, who move around portraying corpses… When we came to Donetsk, we went to the electronics market… and as it always happens, people got interested, because we have a foreigner. Everyone got involved in the conversation. And there was a girl there, we were talking a lot and she said: “I just lost a friend.” She had a friend who was passing by this hotel when it was bombed and he died. And his three-year-old daughter was also killed. It is possible that that person’s body was in that video. The video was taken from inside the hotel.
Dugan: Probably from a security camera.
Maria: Maybe, I’m not an expert. I asked about it, and I was told by people who see it every day that it’s normal for what they say is a “fresh corpse” to move sometimes. And apparently that’s what got caught on camera. But that kind of cynicism: hey, look, it’s an actor when someone’s dead… It’s crazy.
Dugan: When we got to Donbass, to Donetsk and Luhansk, what was the first thing that struck you?
Maria: It took us a very long time to cross the border, and the hotel had been bombed, and it was already relatively late. So John called his friend, who now lives in Luhansk, and he sheltered us…
Anyway, we got to Lugansk and everything there was covered with these letters Z. Every car, every stop, practically every surface. Everyone had patches with the letter Z on their clothes. How could it be [I thought] if people hate us so much, if we are such enemies, if we are such villains, such monsters, and this symbol gets full support? It didn’t make sense.
The next day we went to Severodonetsk – this city is in the same condition as Mariupol in terms of destruction. It is terrible. They have no water, no electricity. People who are left there live in basements. We went into one yard, and right on the playground there are graves. It was the first big shock I experienced when I saw everything in person. When it’s not a picture or a video you watch on TV. There were people there and not one of them expressed any negativity towards Russia. All the negativity was directed towards Ukraine. That was another fact that was decisive for me. Why aren’t you tearing me apart? It was my people who did this to you, I thought, but the answer was no, no, no. It’s not like that. And then the same conversations were repeated in Mariupol, in Luhansk, in Volnovakha. Everywhere we went. So for me it was, you could say, like an extreme “red pill” to take it all.
The second day we had a meeting with Vlad Deiney, this is now the LNR Foreign Minister, he was in charge of the negotiations in Minsk, which have been going on for all these almost eight years. And John was kind enough to say: what questions would you have for him? They may seem naïve, because they are asked by a man who understands nothing about it. I haven’t really followed it all. My attitude for all those 8 years was: it was an internal affair of Ukraine. Now I am not proud of it at all. And Vlad Deynego explained from the very beginning, because my first question was how come the people of Donbas are so hated that they have been physically destroyed practically all these eight years.
Dugan: He explained everything very thoroughly, he was just great.
Maria: In short, I listened to his explanation and the whole story of how it developed and why what started in February was actually inevitable.
But my question about the reasons for the hatred of the people of Donbas, and now of everyone who is Russian, still remained. And I got the answer from another interview we did a few days later with an adviser to the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic. His name is Jan Gagin and he is a high military official. We went to Mariupol together to deliver humanitarian aid. And during this trip he went to the school, found a pile of books in the school library and brought these books to us. And these books are intended for children, starting with schoolchildren, probably from the age of seven till the end of school. This is educational literature, and from an early age children are taught that we are enemies with Ukraine, that we are not brotherly peoples as Russians think, that we have no common culture, that we should be hated – we are essentially dehumanized in their eyes from an early age. And I still wonder why all these lies? Why is all this hate being inculcated? And that is the reason why there are people in Ukraine, not all of them, I am absolutely sure, but, indeed, there are people in Ukraine who have supported and are supporting this shelling of Donbas, this annihilation of the population during all these years. That was the answer as to why it happened that way.
Dugan: Then we went to Volnovakha, to the hospital. We met the doctors. How did you feel after that trip?
Maria: In Volnovakha, 600 people were kept in basements. They wouldn’t let them out – Ukrainian troops. They were held hostage in the basement of the hospital. There were patients, wounded, they were civilians, everyone they could catch and put in there. There were medical staff, anyone. They had been sitting in the basement for months. We went around some of the rooms in that basement. We saw where they slept, ate, how they lived there. And these are impossible conditions. Then the Ukrainian troops also found a safe with drugs in the hospital, broke into it and got high on these cocktails of adrenaline and opium that make you fearless, make you do crazy things and pay no attention to anything. So they started running and shooting in all directions. You can imagine the madness they were doing. And at some point, when they were retreating, when they were running away from the Russians and the Donetsk – allied forces, they decided to destroy the evidence of it all. And they fired from a tank. And we saw the hole in the wall that this shot left for the building to collapse on the people who were in the basement. There are civilians there, children. Six children were born there in the basement in those months, and [the tank fired] so they all just died under the rubble of the building. Why destroy the hospital? They know for a fact that it’s a hospital. They were getting medical care from these doctors, even though they are Ukrainians.
Dugan: While we were there, the curious thing I heard was that one of the wounded spoke English. So he was either American, Canadian or British. And he was wounded – not fatally, but severely, so he couldn’t evacuate with the rest of the Ukrainians. And then they shot him in the back of the head.
Maria: Yes, so as not to carry the wounded. They said that there were several bodies with disfigured faces, fingerprints removed, so they wouldn’t recognize them. So they were removing evidence that way.
Dugan: Savage.
Maria: Yeah. The last day we went to the front line in the town of Sviatogorsk. There was active fighting there. Out of 4500 people left there about 1500. They were hiding in cellars, in churches. Apparently, two days before, a group of journalists had been there and filmed them and posted it on the internet, and it all ended up on Ukrainian TV. The people were recognized and they had relatives in Ukrainian cities. And now the relatives of these people are being hunted down and told they are first in line to die. So these people are frightened not only because they themselves have become targets for snipers, but also because they fear for the lives of their relatives. For their families who are in Ukraine. I just can’t get it out of my head.
Dugan: And how did you feel when you saw this city? Not far away from us there was shelling, you could see the smoke rising.
Maria: It has to stop. I don’t know what needs to be done to end it, but it shouldn’t be like this. If I could take all these people and get them out of there, I would. Even when you bring humanitarian aid, bring all this food, try to do something, you still feel completely helpless before this crime. You feel like you have to do everything you can. And you constantly realize that it’s so little.
It is interesting that even as far west as Sviatogorsk, people said: “We don’t want to talk on camera, don’t film our faces. But here’s when they liberate us… – it was very specific. – When Russia liberates us and we are safe, then we will talk to you all day long as you want.”
Maria: They want the world to know, but only if it’s safe for them. Right now they don’t believe it’s safe for them and they are scared to death for their families.
Dugan: But they want independence. Have you noticed? They don’t want to be part of a country that hates them so much.
Maria: They don’t want to be part of Ukraine, that’s for sure.
Dugan: On the way back Maria read another thing on several anti-Russian channels, that Russians are incredibly bad to refugees. So I decided to stop by the refugee centre. We called, we asked the director, we only gave them 20 minutes.
Maria: Even less.
Dugan: So it’s unlikely they would have had time to clean up and put everything in order. And what do you think about visiting this refugee centre?
Maria: It’s basically like a pretty decent hotel there. It’s very nice. Everything is clean, very well thought out. They have a great canteen with very good food. I mean, they eat better than I do! It’s like a restaurant in terms of food quality. And they live there as long as they need to. There’s no pressure, there’s no deadline for them to move out. It’s free, the food is free, they have the opportunity to get a job. Some of the people I talked to have already found jobs, so they can earn a living. One woman I spoke to, she came with her son and has already arranged everything. So on September 1 her son will go to school in Voronezh. Everything is provided for. They went there voluntarily. They explained to me how it works, because all they say in the Western media is that we grab them, put them on buses and take them to Russia to…
Dugan: To labour camps!
Maria: To labour camps, we eat them alive, we take their organs, we take their passports and stuff like that. They stop at nothing when it comes to these lies. The worse, the better. Whatever you write, everything will be accepted, because it’s us, the evil Russians. And this is a very good place. They can do whatever they want. They can leave at any time or stay as long as they want. And it’s free. All they had to do was get to the border. At the border there were buses from different cities. The woman I spoke to said that they had eight cities to choose from in Russia where they wanted to go, and she chose Voronezh. There was one woman from Kharkiv who kept asking: “When will you take my passport? Why should we pick up your passport? “Because I have heard that you take away passports and then you make people work”. It’s crazy.
Dugan: But that’s what you hear in the Western world. So, as someone who has seen everything and believed everything that was written in the Western media and was initially quite anti-Russian, how much of what you read turned out to be, as you now know, not true?
Maria: Everything. The scope of these lies, its scale is comparable to the scale of these horrors. This cynicism is unfathomable. There’s not a word of truth in there. So it was even a nice red pill to know that my country is not really evil. And there is an explanation for what it is doing.
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