“I am back in Ukraine to see the humanitarian women I first met here in 2014. I wanted more hugs before they are all dead like the others I miss so much,” explained Grace Edwards of The RINJ Foundation.
“I am regularly in Afghanistan now, but I first went to Ukraine at the request of our local chapter in 2014. I had wanted to be assigned to Gaziantep, Turkey with our Monique Deslauriers, who had been training me, but our organizer in Ukraine, Alona, said there was a civil war started in Ukraine by the Americans and now there was Civil War fighting every day in the spring of 2014,” Grace continued.
“Women were losing their male family members and losing their homes, all the way back to April 2014, and now it is the same in 2023. Soon it will be ten years of bloody civil war with the Americans and Russians meddling on either side. They are idiots in my opinion. Why would anyone get involved in a civil war? It’s like the breakup of a marriage! Interfere and you get pulverized,” she said.
Following meetings in Moscow to discuss the shelling of civilians in Donetsk, DPR Leader Mr. Denis Pushilin was back in Donetsk on the 7th for the 9th anniversary of the founding of the DPR where he delivered a commemorative speech that was well received by a cheering throng of Donetskites, explained several humanitarian workers who attended. Photograph courtesy Donetsk People’s Republic, office of the leader. Photo is cropped. Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine
RINJ humanitarians were reluctant to enter another area of civil war after lessons learned in Syria but the women of Donbass are treated by the Nazi brigades just as badly as were the women on the ISIS rampage path.
“When Dr. Buni picked me to go to Ukraine for “fact finding”, I figured she was being protective of me as the youngest, getting me out of the Syrian hell-hole. A Russian officer had asked her and an American officer from Manbij had also asked her what she thought of Ukraine. Well. The Daesh had kicked us out of Aleppo; kicked us out of ar Raqqah; and this was before the Daesh scumbags came to Mosul, Iraq, where we had our training and warehouse centers. Those RINJ Women humanitarian workers who did not move into Turkey went across Syria to Raqqah and then to Mosul after being kicked out of Syria pretty much. Monique’s crew stayed close to the border on the Gaziantep Province side,” Grace explained as she chuckled, “am I going too fast?”
“So I met our boss then, Micheal, with “B”, in Tal Afar not far from Mosul. He said “B” was correct and that being a Syrian, I should get the heck out of the area until we figure out what is next. So, I thought he was treating me like a kid too, as was everyone else. My parents agreed very much at that time and likely put him up to that decision. Actually, I know that now. I went to Ukraine and met Alona Adamovich and about twenty other women from the local RINJ Women Chapters,” Grace answered in response to a question.
“The outcome was that I recommended to the Board that Alona be made a director and run the Ukraine situation. We needed shelters, rape clinics, birthing clinics and humanitarian support with everything that a woman or girl needs. Alona said she had arranged donors. Already they had orphaned kids, so I hooked her up with the institutions of Europe who worked with us. We did a lot of coordinating of everything, sharing our resources, and still do that,” said Grace Edwards.
“It was freaky. Just like in Iraq and Syria, Americans and Canadians were bombing the areas we were working in—in this case the Donbass regions. It was totally not a coincidence—it was another surrogate war. This one was to prevent the ordinary people of Donbass from breaking away from Ukraine and forming their own country. In the Middle East it was a mess of many sides. The Russians were there too,” explained Ms. Edwards.
“One Russian guy I knew from the coast in Syria told me last week he would rather be in Ukraine than Syria because it is closer to home, and he could get leave to go home for a while. There wasn’t much leave for him in Syria, he told me.
“Ukrainians don’t like me. It is the only place in the world where somebody tried to rape me. Somebody? Every day! They hate Muslims here. I am not freakishly observant, but I am white as a ghost like Mediterranean Syrians, and I look Islamic. I don’t speak Ukrainian. I left after the summer and came back to Dier Ezzor with “B” as soon as I could. I then went to Idlib for a couple years and now I am up there in Kandahar, as soon as I get back from my leave after departing here,” said the indefatigable defender of women’s rights.
“Years ago, I viewed Ukraine operations like the rest of the organization. Civil war: stand back. Help Ukraine humanitarians get started—teach the people here; support them; let them be how they want to be; and see how they do. Then the big war came between NATO, America and the EU against Russia in Ukraine and so also came over a thousand women humanitarian volunteers. We were swamped the world over. Terrified, even.
“We are stretched from the Russian border to the other side of Lviv. Along that trip path with a small bus of women seeking exit, try and find one store selling sanitary napkins? We must carry everything that we need here,” explained Grace as two of her sisters stood by leaning into the Zoom camera, nodding with a grimace on their faces.
“We support the volunteers in every manner we are able,” continued Grace.
“Mostly helping get the widowed women out of the country to anywhere they want to go in Canada, Europe, America, Africa. I have volunteers in Kandahar from Ukraine, women who are former Afghani medical students in south Donbass, whom we now shelter and protect in Kandahar. That allows them to be with their family or ‘BF’s. There is no other way they could get medical internships anywhere else in Afghanistan, and the Taliban look the other way from our birthing clinics. They don’t want to deliver babies or have anything to do with ‘down there’,” explained Grace with another laugh at the Taliban whom she seems to fervently hate, judging her vitriolic spiels left out of this interview.
Author’s note: After spending almost a year in Ukraine, and now back in North America, I get the impression that the Americans want us humanitarian workers in Donbass and the rest of the country, dead, and all the civilian women and girls from Donbass, dead.
We see things they don’t want us to say. But generally, we stay out of it. Nevertheless, the hatred is explained by the sins we have seen. Everywhere I have been in Donbass, the civilian carnage is caused by obviously-American weapons used by Ukrainians and also obvious, by American and European soldiers. But it is residential houses, stores and apartment buildings they are destroying. When challenged, the Americans in Ukraine say that the Russians do that too, so that is why they kill civilians also. Two wrongs do not make a right. This is a dirty, bloody, hate-filled civil war and none of the countries are going to walk away unscathed, if indeed anyone walks away. “This is an incipient nuclear war. The hatred is that strong,” Grace told me. She is one who instinctively knows how to read a situation, succinctly. That’s why the powers-that-be send her to read the situation. Now I am scared, hearing what Grace knows.
On 6 April 2023, Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin held a working meeting with the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Mr. Denis Pushilin. Mr. Pushilin was back in Donetsk on the 7th for the 9th anniversary of the founding of the DPR where he delivered a commemorative speech that was well received by a cheering throng of Donetskites. Photograph courtesy Donetsk People’s Republic, office of the leader. Photo is cropped. Art/Cropping/Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine
Happy 9th Birthday, DPR
Translated Text of Mr. Pushilin’s address to the World on the occasion of the 9th Anniversary of the nationhood of Donetsk PR.
07.04.2023
Dear fellow countrymen! I congratulate you on the ninth anniversary of the proclamation of the Donetsk People’s Republic!
In April 2014, we laid the foundation for the long-awaited return home to Russia. It was then that we felt the full power and steadfastness of our Russian unity, we believed in ourselves and firmly indicated our will. Our Republic was born on the barricades of just and sacred opposition to the lies, lawlessness and aggression of the criminal Kiev regime.
Our struggle is not over. But we have already achieved our main goal: we are an integral part of the Big Country. Forever. This is our inspiration, inexhaustible strength and guarantee of our victory.
I sincerely thank every resident of the Republic for the fact that then, in the Russian spring of 2014, we all together took the very first, important and decisive step. Your courage, loyalty and dedication have been and remain the main treasure of Donbass, the key to its freedom and happy future.
[ Denis Pushilin, Acting Head of the Donetsk People’s Republic]