[Chris Brown] There's no easy way for outsiders to see the obliterated landscape of Eastern Ukraine.
The airport in Donetsk, the largest city in the separatist held area
was destroyed and never rebuilt.
Six years of war has left this place ruined.
Our CBC crew that made it in heard a resounding desperation
for a deal to bring peace to what many here feel is a forgotten conflict.
We met a group of older women living a miserable existence
underground in a former Soviet era bunker near Donetsk.
Their lives are as emotionally shattered as the countryside above.
There’s no heat but at least there’s running water and electricity
and they’re safe from the shelling and snipers.
Everyone down here is united in survival
but they’re divided on the future of this territory.
All are aware that Ukraine suddenly became big news in the United States
because of the U.S. impeachment saga.
But it’s not changed any of the misery in their lives.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to get this area back under Ukrainian control.
He’s helped orchestrate a modest pull back of troops
but the fighting hasn’t entirely stopped.
In the village of Zaitseve, Masha and her grandmother Svetlana told our crew that
barely a night that goes by where they don’t hear shooting.
They say they’ve even found mines that were fired by artillery and landed in their garden.
Svetlana told us she feels her home is a disposable pawn in a bigger fight
between Russia and the West.
Masha let our crew come with her to school which has been hit by shells and rebuilt twice.
These 10 and 11 year olds have lived with war for as long as they can remember.
Eastern Ukraine is more than the front line of a civil war.
It’s at the epicentre of a battle for global influence between the west and Russia
with exhausted, desperate innocents feeling both sides have abandoned them.
Chris Brown, CBC News, Moscow