Ukraine’s frontline bakery revisited

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lucy Ash catches up with a warzone bakery comforting people in an east Ukrainian town. She visited in 2017 to tell the story of a small enterprise that was bringing hope to a trapped community living near the frontline. The town of Marinka is in the buffer zone – the ‘grey zone’ - that separates Ukraine from the Dontesk region – now claimed and occupied by Russian backed separatists. For the town’s inhabitants the low-intensity conflict had become an unavoidable part of daily life. But there was one bright spot amidst the gloom – a bakery. It was Ukraine’s first frontline workplace-generating enterprise, and a haven from the politics, propaganda, and violence that had been tearing the town apart. But now, more than four years on, with Russian troops now massing along Ukraine’s eastern border, the threat of all out conflict looms. The bakery’s owner Oleg Tkachenko tells Lucy Ash he hopes there will not be an all out conflict. He fears an invasion could destroy everything that he and his community have built up over the past five years.

(Image: Workers in the bakery in Marinka. Credit: Frederick Paxton)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:04.3	As analysts, politicians and military leaders argue about the build-up of Russian forces
0:09.9	on Ukraine's borders, what it can mean and what Vladimir Putin might do next, I can't
0:15.8	stop thinking about a town in East Ukraine, which has been living with war for the past
0:21.2	eight years.
0:22.8	When I visited back in 2017 amidst the trauma and the gloom, there was one bright spot,
0:29.3	a new bakery.
0:30.9	Now I'm returning for an update.
0:34.9	Welcome to assignment from Ukraine on the BBC World Service.
0:44.6	Crews from Russia's S-400 surface-to-air missile systems are being welcomed in neighbouring
0:50.6	Belarus.
0:52.6	They've travelled all the way from Russia's far east, some 9,000 kilometres away, and
1:01.7	they've come to join more than 100,000 Russian troops, which have already amassed along
1:06.8	Ukraine's borders with Belarus in the north and with Russia in the east.
1:14.0	And they've begun staging exercises with tanks firing and soldiers descending from
1:19.1	helicopters.
1:25.0	As the standoff intensifies, there appears of a repeat of the 2014 conflict, or something
1:31.2	much worse.
1:33.4	Back then following mass protests, which Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, Russia annexed
1:39.2	the Crimean Peninsula and then back separatists in the east, who cut off the Danetsk and Luchansk
1:45.4	regions from the rest of the country.
1:50.7	Ukraine is now mobilising a citizen militia to resist a potential Russian invasion.
	...

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