Humanitarian crisis in Southern Ukraine: food riot in the Makhnovshchina homeland

 All the shops where there was something are devastated

There is more and more evidence of the use by some people of the devastation and chaos around for the spontaneous redistribution of material goods previously inaccessible to them. About similar events previously taken place in Melitopol you can read here. To donate online media group from Kharkiv covering this war from the social struggle positions you are welcome to this page. A couple of cups of coffee in your country even before the war could be equivalent in price to the daily wage of a worker in Ukraine!

Submitted by Thunderbird on April 1, 2022

The town of Pologi in the Zaporozhye region, 25 km from the historical heart of anarchism Huliaipole, has been in the zone of active hostilities since March 3. As a result of shelling by the Russian invaders, many residential and administrative buildings, including the town hall, were destroyed. Since at least March 19, evidence of mass looting started to appear repeatedly: residents began to take food from supermarkets and warehouses, as well as clothes, shoes, whole boxes of alcohol, rummaging through safes and store documents. They leave behind destroyed trading floors, while justifying themselves: “Here, before that, they were taken out by whole cars, and we just went in and there was nothing left.”

As mayor Yuri Konovalenko said in his statement yesterday, caring people and entrepreneurs have managed to organize the delivery of humanitarian aid to Pologi and its suburbs: "We are able to resume the supply of bread thanks to the people who helped with flour, yeast, salt. There are flour reserves in almost all areas of the district". To date, more than 7,000 food packages have already been distributed among the residents. This will help provide families with food for about a week.

SEE ALSO. In memory by name. Five stories of people killed providing humanitarian aid under the bombing of Kharkov.

SEE ALSO. Pecunia non olet. How large companies profit on the warring Ukrainian people.

“I'm talking to men. The police, unfortunately, do not work. Looters are our problem. In some neighborhoods, entrepreneurs and those who are not indifferent guard their property during daylight hours. Come. Under the auspices of the city council, we will create the once forgotten popular militias and will walk together during daylight hours and make sure that the marauders do not finish off, do not pull out the last. The surviving stores are working, and entrepreneurs are delivering products.”

During the war, the Ukrainian parliament increased responsibility for looting, theft, robbery, etc. From now on, crimes committed under martial law are punishable by imprisonment. For example, for theft, you can get from 5 to 8 years in prison. At the same time, Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Minister of Internal Affairs, publicly justifies people's expropriations in the occupied territories: "There are Ukrainians who are left without medicine, without food, they really go to looting and robbing stores, realizing that food can not to be".

Is it the result of hunger or, on the contrary, an extreme manifestation of greed and consumerism? Or maybe both at the same time? Even within anarchist circles there may be different opinions about this. In any case, the affected businessmen were unlikely to be very responsive to the grief of others in peacetime. So we also shouldn't worry too much about their problems.

Peace to the huts! War on the palace!

In addition, our historical narrative how Makhno peasants in 1920 took back their products forcibly seized by the authorities.

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