Ukraine, Italian in Donbass: ” 40 thousand militiamen ready, better to risk with weapons than without ”

These are “tense, intense days”, but “after the recognition of the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk” by Russian President Vladimir Putin “the bombings decreased. Always present, yes, but to a lesser extent ”. Even if “the escalation and the military tension of these days” reported the Donbass men with a view to being ready to fight. ” The two republics have emptied themselves ” of women, children and the elderly, but there are ” 40 thousand militiamen who had retired to civilian life and who have now taken up arms. They are ready to fight. ” Vittorio Rangeloni, 30 years old and in Donetsk, “the capital of the People’s Republic recognized by Russia”, tells it to Adnkronos. Rangeloni went on vacation to his grandparents in Kiev in the summer of 2015, and he hasn’t left since. To ” tell what the people of Donbass live, to make his voice heard. To witness the change and internal rift in the country that led to the revolution ”. Here ” men and women would like peace, not everyone is keen to take risks by taking part in the conflict. But many understand that in the case of a real war, taking up arms is a decision to be reckoned with. They would risk their lives in any case, better to do it as a military than as a civilian ”. Because in recent years ” the war was in the trenches and there was no need for it, today it is different ”. Thus ” the civilians who in 2014 had taken up their weapons and then abandoned them, are now back. ” Rangeloni, born and Barzio in the province of Lecco and a surveyor’s diploma, explains that so far ” 700 thousand people have been evacuated, are the official estimates, out of a total of 4 million people living in the two republics ”. Alongside the militiamen “there are the military, the reservists called to arms”. Author of the book ‘My war chronicles’, he explains that in the Donbass there was ” a period of relative calm and stability on the front line until the beginning of November when Biden and NATO began to talk about a possible Russian invasion ” . Now it is ” difficult to understand what will happen in the next few days. The recognition of the two republics by the Russian side marked the end of the Minsk Agreements signed in 2015 to resolve the conflict in a peaceful and diplomatic way ”. But ” Ukraine itself knew that these agreements would lead to nothing, that it was only a compromise to resolve a violent conflict, but that sooner or later we had to deal with reality. ” With a helmet and bulletproof vest, he says that yesterday , for example, ” I ended up in the middle of a shooting. I was on the highway connecting Donetsk and Luhansk, the front line doesn’t run very far. I took shelter in a safe place and everything was fine. ” Meanwhile, the population is resisting, but “it has been worn down by eight years of a silent war that has been going on for eight years”. A population that sees, says Angeloni, “the entry of the Russian army as a guarantee of stability and peace”. Because ” nobody wants a conflict like in 2014 ”. ” Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated to the Russian Federation as a preventive measure, Ukraine on its side is doing the same. Those who are left are trying to find a semblance of normality. ” Rangeloni, personally, says that ” I never thought of taking up arms. In this context, what I use is the information weapon, because a media and diplomatic war is also taking place. A war that can be more dangerous than that fought with tanks and mortars. Ukraine itself has asked CNN and the Western media to tone down so as not to create panic and alarmism ”. What the Lecco author intends to do, therefore, is to ” give these people the opportunity to tell, overcoming the vision of this conflict as an opposition between the Russian world and Europe, to build bridges overcoming stereotypes and the use of weapons ” ” The majority of the Donbass population are not simply pro-Russian, they are ethnically Russian. Thousands of people have Russian citizenship and passport, ” he says. In the Donbass ” they have much more in common with Moscow than with Kiev where the demands of the Ukrainian nationalists of the West are brought forward, which are in contrast with the historical principles of the rest of the country ”, he concludes.