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Photo essence of Putin’s “Russian world” in the Donbas

Only goats are grazing weeds where rows of shiny new cars stood at the formerly-successful and now-robbed and abandoned Volkswagen dealership in Russian-occupied Luhansk, Ukraine. September 2016 (Image: Denys Kazansky, deniskazansky.com.ua)
Only goats are grazing weeds where rows of shiny new cars stood at the formerly-successful and now-robbed and abandoned Volkswagen dealership in Russian-occupied Luhansk, Ukraine. September 2016 (Image: Denys Kazansky, deniskazansky.com.ua)
Photo essence of Putin’s “Russian world” in the Donbas

This is [Russian-occupied] Luhansk today. Goats graze weeds growing from cracks in the pavement near the robbed and abandoned Volkswagen dealership.

The entire city is represented in one photo. I’d say – the entire “LDNR.” They say they “freed the people from fascists.” Thanks, but no thanks, damn you.

Only goats are grazing weeds at the robbed and abandoned Volkswagen dealership in Russian-occupied Luhansk, Ukraine. September 2016 (Image: Denys Kazansky, deniskazansky.com.ua)
Image: Denys Kazansky, deniskazansky.com.ua

These photographs need to be put up on roadside billboards around Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia and other cities of the South-east. [The Ukrainian cities where the 2014 Russian special operation failed to hijack control from the interim Ukrainian government after former president Yanukovych’s escape to Russia. — Ed.]  

So that every day people there were reminded what kind of fate they escaped and what kind of [Putin’s] “Novorossiya” they avoided in 2014.

The photo could be named: “Thank you, Russia.” In three years there will be absolutely Abkhazian “landscapes.” Or might be even more surreal. [See what became of Abkhazia after joining Putin’s “Russian world” in the photo gallery below — Ed.]


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