A Month in Donbass You Won’t See on the BBC

After a month on the road, weaving through the battered towns and quiet frontlines of Donbass, I find myself back in Moscow—once again grateful, saddened, but inspired. What began as a mission of aid evolved into a confrontation with a decade of Western abandonment, resilience under siege, and the kind of human spirit rarely seen through filtered headlines.

This, one of my many journeys over the past three years, started where the honoured spirits of fallen heroes—Motorola, Givi, Zakharchenko—watch over the Heroic City of Donetsk in their homeland of Donbass. Their sacrifices marked not just recent years, but the beginning of this fight against Western-funded Neo-Nazis in 2014, when Kiev began its genocide of the ethnic Russian population.

Accompanied by Liane from Most Mira—who's been tirelessly assisting since the early days—I traveled through the scarred towns delivering aid. In Gorlovka, artillery holes punch through Soviet dance floors like open wounds. Life persists, even as another trolleybus is struck by a Ukrainian drone. In Yasinovataya, homes still bear the scars of NATO-backed savagery. Bookshelves share space with Western weapon remnants in local museums—fragments of Western so-called "freedom and democracy" left behind in civilian corpses and shattered neighborhoods.

We reached Komunarovka, a remote village where an elderly babushka, full of life but forgotten by her children in Moscow, shared her story. A 3,000-ruble trip just to Donetsk—a cruel tax for survival. Then came the mother and daughter, both bedridden in a dim room, tended to by kindly neighbors. And the son, tall and proud, trapped in squalor caring for his disabled mother. The smell, the heat, the lack of airflow—it was unbearable, but it is their life.

I saw dozens of abandoned houses—the result of migration and depopulation. St Petersburg may offer factory jobs and relocation programs, but in doing so, it strips these communities of youth and hope. Still, the people endure. They smile. They cook. They carry on.

The real engine behind this effort wasn’t me, my Buhanka, or the camera, but Liane—sanctioned and threatened in the West, including by what she suspects are SBU operatives in Germany. She can no longer return. Like many of us, she is effectively exiled, her only crime being compassion for the "wrong" people.

We ended the trip with a broken-down Buhanka, patched up with 1,000 rubles and Sasha’s capable hands. That Soviet-designed van, like the people of Donbass, keeps going—battered, patched, but never beaten.

The West has imposed isolation, demonization, and war. And yet, they cannot kill community, nor erase history. In the ruins of theatres, the eyes of orphans, and the gratitude of grandmothers, I found a truth no headline could twist.

So yes, I’ll keep reporting—not from studios, but from streets. Not from think tanks, but from trenches of daily life. Because somewhere between Moscow and Mariupol, I'm reminded why this fight for truth matters.

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