\n<\/p>\n
Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> A Russian officer in the Moscow-occupied part of the Donetsk region in southeastern Ukraine has reportedly become unusually lenient towards one new soldier.<\/p>\n As the tale goes, the officer lets him spend several days in the administrative capital, also named Donetsk, and \u2013 knowing that the serviceman is single and childless \u2013 gives him the phone number of a \u201cnice woman\u201d. Overwhelmed by the war, the serviceman craves intimacy, and within days, the woman persuades him to get married.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Elated after a short honeymoon, he gets back to his military unit, but instead of congratulating him, the officer sends him on a mission he never returns from.<\/p>\n The nascent widow promptly cashes \u201cthe coffin money\u201d, between 5 and 10 million rubles ($64,000-127,000) \u2013 and splits it with the officer, who has already found her another \u201cfiance\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a real business,\u201d a Donetsk resident told Al Jazeera, explaining an alleged scheme that has also been reported by Ukrainian and exiled Russian media last year.<\/p>\n The resident spoke on condition of anonymity because anyone interviewed by foreign media risks reprisal.<\/p>\n But this is just one of the ways fast money can be made in the Russia-occupied part of Donetsk \u2013 about four-fifths of the rustbelt region the size of Albania, dotted with dozens of mines and factories.<\/p>\n The presence of tens of thousands of Russian soldiers creates a bonanza for some locals.<\/p>\n Undersupplied Russian servicemen spend part of their monthly pay of several thousand dollars on flak jackets, tactical boots and other gear.<\/p>\n Restaurants, shops selling alcohol, underground brothels and casinos are booming, according to Ukrainian officials and media reports \u2013 along with a black market for drugs, especially amphetamines and crystal meth that help soldiers stay awake and overcome fear and boredom.<\/p>\n There is another black market \u2013 of stolen weaponry, from pistols and assault rifles to explosives and even grenade launchers, according to dozens of Russian court records that often name Chechen servicemen as mastermind contrabandists.<\/p>\n The market dates back to 2014, when Moscow-backed separatists carved out two \u201cPeople\u2019s Republics\u201d in Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk.<\/p>\n In 2022, Moscow declared their annexation along with two more Ukrainian regions, even though none of them are 100 percent occupied.<\/p>\n But Donetsk and Luhansk \u2013 known collectively as Donbas \u2013 still keep the vestiges of \u201cindependence\u201d such as a \u201chead of state\u201d, a \u201cparliament\u201d, border checkpoints and customs offices.<\/p>\n Moscow\u2019s reasons are simple, according to the head of the Strategic Research and Security Institute, a Kyiv-based think tank.<\/p>\n \u201cThey need to create a militarised springboard that is not on Russian territory,\u201d Pavel Lisyanskiy told Al Jazeera. \u201cThey militarise the economy, there\u2019s fewer and fewer people, it will be a huge military base to frighten Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n However, Moscow \u201cis no longer ashamed to just dispatch its appointees\u201d who control the economy despite occasional objections from separatists, Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n Moscow is not ceremonious with them, jailing and assassinating the most disobedient ones, Fesenko said.<\/p>\n Ukrainian officials and media reports have claimed that Moscow had several separatist strongmen killed, and several more have been forced out and jailed in Russia.<\/p>\n Moscow has poured billions of dollars into construction projects in the Donbas, where entire cities such as Avdiivka or Bakhmut have nearly been razed to the ground, and dozens of plants and factories cannot possibly be restored.<\/p>\n \u201cUnfeasible\u201d was the word Donetsk\u2019s \u201chead\u201d Denis Pushilin used in September when describing the rebuilding of the colossal Azovstal and Ilych steel plants in the southern city of Mariupol.<\/p>\n The plants once churned out two-fifths of Ukraine\u2019s steel that contributed 0.6 percent to the nation\u2019s gross domestic product.<\/p>\n Instead, Pushilin said, new resorts will be built in their stead near the Sea of Azov, which is favoured by tourists with little children because of its shallow waters with next to no waves.<\/p>\n But the construction boom goes hand in hand with corruption.<\/p>\n Under Ukraine, it was \u201ccontrollable\u201d, analyst Fesenko said. \u201cBut after 2014, a big redistribution began, and criminal wars added to the corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n In November, Donetsk\u2019s \u201cdeputy construction minister\u201d, Yulia Mervaezova, was charged with embezzling 9 billion rubles ($115m), and the amount \u201cwill probably go up\u201d, prosecutors reportedly said.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Donetsk residents use rainwater and melted snow for drinking because of catastrophic water shortages caused by the destruction of a sophisticated water supply system.<\/p>\n A pipeline drawing water from southwestern Russia cannot provide nearly enough, but no construction company wants to build a second pipeline because of corruption risks, a top official admitted.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody wants to approach [the second pipeline], because everyone who built the first one is in jail,\u201d Russia\u2019s Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin said in November.<\/p>\n The unveiling of construction projects \u201chas become a tool of political theatre and elite enrichment rather than genuine efforts at recovery\u201d, according to analysis by the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC, published in December. \u201cThis approach prioritises political visibility and control over genuine reconstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n Russia\u2019s federal budget can no longer foot the bills \u2013 and Moscow forced some 40 Russian regions to \u201csponsor\u201d the construction of apartment buildings, schools, hospitals and roads in occupied Ukrainian cities, towns and districts.<\/p>\n \u201cSponsor regions play the key role in the region\u2019s restoration and development,\u201d Donetsk\u2019s \u201cconstruction minister\u201d Vladimir Dubovka said in January 2025.<\/p>\n The regions also dispatch thousands of teachers, health professionals and construction workers to the Donbas.<\/p>\n The city of Moscow \u201csponsors\u201d the regional centres of Donetsk and Luhansk, St Petersburg \u2013 Mariupol, while the town of Shakhtarsk is \u201csupervised\u201d by the resource-rich Pacific island of Sakhalin.<\/p>\n The \u201csponsors\u201d often find the money by ignoring their own needs.<\/p>\n As the northwestern Arkhangelsk region paid for the rebuilding of occupied Melitopol, its administration reportedly turned a blind eye to the plight and pleas of residents of several apartment buildings that stood on concrete stilts nailed in permafrost, which thawed because of global warming.<\/p>\n Donbas has some of the world\u2019s richest coal mines, including ones with coking coal necessary for steel making.<\/p>\n It also boasts deposits of iron ore, lithium, graphite, manganese, nickel, titanium, rare earths and noble gas neon used in chip-making.<\/p>\n But the renewed and so far limited extraction of minerals is \u201cbarbaric\u201d, analyst Lisyanskiy said.<\/p>\n Last year, half a dozen small water bodies disappeared because of tectonic fissures caused by irresponsible mining, he said.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the remaining rivulets, lakes and groundwater in Donbas are contaminated by chemical waste as safety standards are routinely snubbed.<\/p>\n \u201cThe consequences are irreversible, it\u2019s not even a hundred years, believe me,\u201d said Lisyanskiy, who spent years working as a mine engineer in the Donbas region.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 A Russian officer in the Moscow-occupied part of the Donetsk region in southeastern Ukraine has reportedly become unusually lenient towards one new soldier. As the tale goes, the officer lets him spend several days in the administrative capital, also named Donetsk, and \u2013 knowing that the serviceman is single and childless \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8580,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"