Donbas residents are facing the choice of which country they want to live in as Ukraine goes through the tenth month of war that Vladimir Putin-led Russia started in February. Some prefer Ukraine, others lean towards Russia.
Yelyzaveta Zaspa, a 23-year-old student of the master program in psychology at Luhansk Taras Shevchenko Univeristy, says she wants Luhansk, a city of some 420,000 residents that she grew up at, to stay with Ukraine.
After the pro-Kremlin separatists took over the city in May, Zaspa has lived in a dormitory in Kryvy Rig in central Ukraine as an internally displaced person and then moved to Kyiv where she rented a hostel with her own money. After three months of such a life, she finally settled at Starobilsk, a major city in Luhansk Oblast that became a temporary home to her Taras Shevchenko University.
In a phone interview, Zaspa says she just wants peace.
Anna, 22, a graduate student in social work at Eastern Ukrainian Volodymyr Dal University, another Luhansk school, says she wants nothing but peace too, though prefers Luhansk, her home city, to get separated from Ukraine. She refused to be mentioned by her last name when the Kyiv Post approached her through Vkontakte, a social network popular with Ukraine’s Russian-speaking community.
Even though the Dal University officially moved to Severodonetsk, another city in Luhansk Oblast, Anna stayed in Luhansk to continue her studies in what now claims to be the Dal University too, but is not officially recognized and is ruled by so called “Luhansk People’s Republic,” a pseudo-state controlled by the Kremlin.
A seeker of master’s degree in social work doesn’t know whether her diploma will ever be accepted anywhere.
Anna says she doesn’t have any money or relatives outside the rebel-held territory and plans to stay in Luhansk as long as possible. She thinks Ukraine doesn’t help the Donbas, while she has received aid from the Russian humanitarian convoys.
Oleksiy Antypovych, head of Rating, a sociology center in Kyiv, says 18 percent of Ukrainians think Ukraine should let the Donbas join Russia or live its own life. “And these views get more popular,” he adds. “Western Ukraine doesn’t want to fight and central Ukraine is overcrowded with the displaced people from the east.”
United Nations Refugee Agency reported there were more than 450,000 internally displaced persons from the war-torn Donbas as of Nov. 21. Many also leave for Russia, looking for jobs in Russia’s western region that is neighboring with Ukraine’s eastern oblasts.
Kyiv Post website editor Oksana Torhan can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter at @OksanaTorhan
