Bureaucracy and Death Stalk Ukraine’s ‘Contact Line’
The militarized border between government-controlled territory and Russia-backed separatists has created its own grim reality for those forced to cross.
International aid groups call it the “contact line,” but the divide between government-controlled Ukraine and the separatist east is actually a 300-mile-long militarized border that regularly transforms into a battlefield—replete with gunfire, shelling and casualties.
What was originally a temporary solution, one that allows for the flow of people and goods amid simmering hostilities, has become a fixture of this five-year war. The majority of fighting takes place near the line, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and even its five official crossings can be dangerous.
On Sunday, Ukrainians head to the polls to choose between President Petro Poroshenko and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. But civilians here said they don’t expect their lives to change, at least not soon. They will return to this borderland again and again, watched over by snipers and surrounded by minefields as they wait to cross to the other side.
▲ A Ukrainian border guard at Stanytsia Luhanska directs civilians from the west waiting to cross into separatist-controlled territory.
Civilians close to the contact line have suffered the brunt of the war, with more than 3,000 killed and almost 9,000 injured, according to the United Nations. Over 13,000 have died in the conflict, while 2 million have been displaced. For many of them, crossing has become a necessity of everyday life.
At the checkpoints, the wait can stretch to eight hours. There are few bathrooms, and water is scarce. With almost 1 million crossings every month—many by the elderly—aid groups have urged both sides to provide more services, particularly medical assistance.
On Feb. 14, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said about 50 mostly elderly people were stranded for four hours in the middle of a storm. Since December, at least 16 civilians have been injured or died at the checkpoints, the OSCE said, most of them old.
▲ At Stanytsia Luhanska, pedestrians must climb stairs over a destroyed bridge. People in wheelchairs sometimes pay to be carried across.
But even with the risks, there’s business, trade, family and medical appointments on the other side of the line. In separatist-controlled territories, cheap quality produce is scarce, so residents head west to stock up. Pensioners must travel to the government side to claim their benefits. Sometimes, the destination is reversed, as it was one cold February day when a few elderly Ukrainians headed over the contact line to Luhansk to visit their doctors.
The checkpoints are open from 7 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Simple shacks and shipping containers draped with tarps, they are manned by various armed contingents who search, question and process the perpetual flow of travelers.
On the government side, civilians must deal with four layers of security—fiscal officers, police, border guards and the army. Each has their own role: Police for crowd control, border guards check documents and bags, fiscal officers confiscate what they consider to be illegal goods and the army serves as the last line before a no man’s land separating both sides.
Each time a civilian crosses over, a different guard with a different rule can spell a different outcome, said Larisa Balich, a pensioner from separatist-controlled Donetsk. This is especially the case if you carry something—which almost everyone does.
Balich was on her way to the west to visit her daughter, get her benefits and pick up prescriptions. “I empty all the pills from their wrappings and stuff them all into one small paper box, so it looks like I’ve got only one,” she said of her strategy for the return trip. “Otherwise, someone at the border might decide I have too much medicine for one person and confiscate it.”
The elderly approach the crossings unsteadily, most leaning on canes and many in wheelchairs. At the Maiorsk checkpoint, hundreds of pensioners lined up in just one hour.
At Stanytsia Luhanska, the busiest of all five crossings, hundreds more gathered, patiently waiting to make the precarious trip. All must navigate two wooden ramps laid on a collapsed bridge that spanned the Seversky Donets River. Those in wheelchairs often must pay to be carried across.
While civilians struggle to get by in the shadow of the contact line, local industries continue to function, and in some cases thrive.
Metinvest, a group of steel and mining companies controlled by billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, relied on mines now under separatist control. They produced coal for its Avdiyivka Coke and Chemical Plant, just over the contact line in the government-controlled west. The plant now gets its coal from elsewhere, producing coke for steel made at Metinvest’s Illich Iron & Steel Works in Mariupol.
▲ Metinvest’s Illich Iron & Steel Works in Mariupol.
Products from Crimea, invaded and annexed by Russia in 2014, cannot cross directly into government-controlled Ukraine. So instead, a small amount is sent to the separatist regions and then smuggled into the west. Before the war, Crimean fish was a cheap, plentiful staple throughout Ukraine. Now it must be shipped to Russia, trucked to Donetsk and then moved across the line.
For individuals, shortages in the east often dictate what they will bring across the border. Cheap food and household items predominate.
High unemployment in the separatist-controlled regions has created a cottage industry of border-crossers, or “cart-people.” One of them, Oksana Guselnikova, said she earns about $11 per day carrying bags of apples from government-controlled areas to the east. Other popular foods for shipment to the separatist regions include salami, butter and cheese.
“I’m otherwise unemployed,” Guselnikova said. “Apples are a good business, they cost more than double on that side.”
This movement of goods, however, depends on what fiscal officers deem legal and what they choose to confiscate. The rules can change daily.
In an effort to combat what it calls illicit “border business,” Ukraine introduced limits of no more than 75 kilograms (165 pounds) of goods worth 10,000 Ukrainian hryvnia ($375) or less. For Guselnikova, a flood of competitors, along with the new rules, has taken a toll on her earnings.
“I was doing this trip daily,” she said. “But now there are so many of us that I do this only every three days.”
While Kiev tries to enforce some sort of commercial structure at the contact line, there seems to be much less on the other side. Natalia, who asked that only her first name be used, said she smuggles antiretroviral drugs into Donetsk for pregnant women with HIV. On some days, it’s considered legal; on others, the separatists say it’s not. She said that one of her loads was confiscated by guards who just days before had let her bring them through.
▲ Hundreds of carts used to transport goods are locked up near the contact line.
Government border guards said they regularly confiscate cigarettes and alcohol made in the east. Other products are subject to restrictions as well, including such disparate items as auto parts and seasonal berries. Attempts to hide contraband range from the ingenious to the mundane, the guards said. They recently seized cans of beluga caviar that had been hidden in a sack of potatoes.
A senior border guard who requested anonymity said a deep sense of frustration is common among the armed personnel assigned to the contact line.
The increasing sense of normalcy at the checkpoints—that this is what life is supposed to be like, he said, makes the war’s end harder to see.