Rift between Russia and Ukraine sees village suffer
CHERTKOVO ( Russia)/ MILOVE
( Ukraine): Valentina Boldyreva stepped out of her two-story house on an overcast and snowy afternoon to say hello to her 76-year-old sister on the other side of Friendship of People’s Street, a tall barbed-wire fence separating them.
“You see my sister is walking up to the wire,” Boldyreva said.
“How are we going to talk to each other? I’m not allowed to come close,” her sister, Raisa Yakovleva, said as she stood just 100m away on the other side of the fence.
“Our windows are facing the barbed wire day and night as if looking out at a prison,” Boldyreva said yesterday.
It’s not a prison camp but a border fence built by Russia earlier this year, marking what was once an invisible border in a symbolic shutdown of nearly all ties between the two neighbouring nations.
On a map, Milove, where Boldyreva lives, and Chertkovo, where her sister resides, are one village, crossed by the once aptly named main road, Friendship of Peoples Street.
It’s a slogan that still rings true for many residents but is sorely tested by the animosity between their two nations, Russia and Ukraine.
Like Boldyreva and Yakoleva, almost every resident of Chertkovo and Milove has close relatives on
the other side.
People speak both Russian and Ukrainian without turning language choice into a political statement, one of many issues fuelling conflict between Ukraine and Russia since Moscow annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced that all Russian men aged 16 to 60 were barred from entering the country.
It was the latest in deteriorating relations after the Russian coast guard fired on and seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in the Black Sea last weekend.
In fact, restrictions on Russians entering Ukraine already existed in Chertkovo for years.
In 2015, Ukraine adopted a decree requiring Russians who want to
cross the border to use foreign travel passports. Few Russians living in rural areas have such documents.
Four and a half years after fighting broke out between Russianbacked separatists and Ukrainian troops, only elderly women like 73-year-old Lidia Radchenko brave the crossing.
She has three sons living in Ukraine, while another son and a daughter reside in Russia.
“We used to have such great parties and gather in the middle of the road,” Rachenko said wistfully.
“That fence is like a concentration camp.”
Even passing a jar of pickles to relatives across the fence is a punishable offence.
Sitting in his hardware store in Chertkovo, 59-year-old Alexander
Petukhov said he has since cut his business ties with his supplier in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city.
“We were used to living as free people, and it all stopped when the fighting began,” he said.
The once-busy crossing between Milove and Chertkovo has just a few people walking across it now, among them 54-year-old Olga Yevgenyevna and her husband.
“I’m originally from Chertkovo, and my mum lives here,” she said, speaking in Ukrainian.
When she married a man from the Ukrainian side, moving there in the late 1980s did not seem like a dramatic decision.
Before the war, she said, “people were crossing everywhere. You went back and forth 15 times, nobody cared.” — AP