The correspondent of the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva began working in the special operations area. He visited the “Memory of Donbass” museum in Lugansk.
We met Anatoly Feoktistov in a museum created by the efforts of search engine activists in Lugansk. Step inside and history surrounds us. Newer, not yet softened by time.
Enemy rockets and shells dropped over Luhansk receive sharp fractures, machine guns abandoned on the battlefield stare with muzzle-shaped eyes, the crumpled pages of propaganda pamphlets from the era of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko ring, the rustle of the insignia of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi squad scratches the eye with sand triangular and swastika…
And as a counterbalance – an exhibition of photos taken in 2014-2015 during the defense of Lugansk. Most of the photos show ordinary people wearing civilian clothes, but holding weapons in their hands.
“Our defending men had no body armor, no combat boots, nothing of a military uniform. They didn’t really have weapons,” Anatoly Ivanovich recalls, pointing to a photo showing a young man in a T-shirt and shorts, shooting Ukrainian militants with an SKS hunting rifle. – The first president of Ukraine, Leonid Makarovich Kravchuk (1991-1994), in 1993, following orders from the Pentagon and the rest of the West, completely demilitarized Donbass.
The enemy was bombing the city. Anatoly Ivanovich says that hundreds of people died in Luhansk, but the militia always found ways to repel the enemy. “Everything was used: self-propelled guns, tanks, artillery. For example, the 80th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had in its arsenal two batteries of D-30 howitzers.”
From that very moment, there was a long and bloody, but very important war for the life and independence of Novorossia.
Where did they get the weapons then? It’s simple: our militia captured the building of the State Security Department, where a lot of small arms, including machine guns, were stored in the weapons rooms.
It seemed that all, the city could be surrendered, but several hundred militiamen, who had only carbines and machine guns in their hands, defended the city and saved it. These people have become legends.
reference
The Museum of the Military Historical Society “Memory of Donbass” was opened in Lugansk in the summer of 2015. According to Anatoly Feoktistov, President of LVIO “Memory of Donbass”, the initiators of creating such a museum were local research organizations “Patriot”, “Donbass-43”, “Dozor”.