Russian occupiers have almost completely destroyed the economy of the industrialized Donbas. This fact was admitted by Russian saboteur and mercenary Igor Girkin (Strelkov) on the air of one of the television channels.
The Russian bureaucratic and oligarchic apparatus with the participation of high-ranking security officers has gobbled up the economically developed Donbas, - he stated.
"They gobbled the Donbas up, just gobbled the Donbas up with its working industrial economy… They destroyed it, destroyed the working industrial economy almost completely… I know quite high-ranking security officers who were in charge of this region. Now, being retired, they continue to "supervise" along the line of other, now commercial structures", - the Russian occupier was outraged.
As OstroV reported, Igor Girkin (Strelkov), largely unknown at that time, had entered Sloviansk with a detachment of Russian saboteurs from the territory of Russia on April 12, 2014. His sabotage-reconnaissence group captured the city police departments and the SBU, and Girkin declared himself "acting commander of the DNR militia". Later, he confessed that a bloody war in Ukraine would not have begun without his detachment. "I still pressed the trigger of the war. If our detachment had not crossed the border, everything eventually would have ended, like in Kharkiv or Odesa. There would have been several dozen killed, burned and arrested. That would be the end. In fact, the flywheel of the war, which is still ongoing, was launched by our detachment", - the saboteur stated in an interview with the far right Zavtra newspaper. Girkin fell out of graces with Russian curators in August 2014 and was "fired" from the post of the "DNR Minister of Defense".