War, Displacement and the Shifting Meaning of ‘Donbas’: Initial Findings from the Field

By Qianrui Hu

Although Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine shocked the whole world, Russia’s war against Ukraine started already in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the military interventions in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Eastern Ukraine. This blog post tries to unpack the dialectical relationship between war, migration, and memory, the central research theme at Prisma Ukraїna, from the perspective of the people who have been experiencing this war since 2014. It is born out of my ongoing PhD fieldwork and in-depth interviews with people who are originally from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions but were displaced due to the war, in which I examine the shifting senses of self and belonging to ‘Donbas’ as the result of Russia’s invasion since 2014. From the stage of fierce military confrontation between 2014 and 2015 to a relatively calmer stage of “frozen war” between 2015 and 2022, and then again since the stage of full-scale war, this blog post looks at two specific aspects: 1. how do the experiences of 2014 help people understand and navigate the stage of full-scale war? 2. how do the new experiences gained since 2022 change people’s perceptions and memories of the war between 2014 and 2022?

The theoretical tool used in this blog post is borrowed from Viktoriya Sereda’s recent book (2023), in which she uses ‘belonging’ as an analytical category to examine the interactions between individuals and society, their surrounding spaces and cultures, and the agency of individuals within society. In particular, she notes ‘belonging’ can be an individual’s own choice or something imposed by others. Through the tracking down of various forms of practices and discursive frameworks of belonging among internally displaced persons (IDPs) from Crimea and ‘Donbas’ prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion, she eloquently reveals the transformative role of war and displacement in (re)interpreting one’s sense of being and belonging in relation to their “memories of the past, new places of residency and hierarchies of belonging”, in which certain social groups and identity markers are rendered more salient over others.  

This blog post serves as an attempt to expand Sereda’s findings and place them in the current context of Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion. The methodology I opt for is what Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro (2020) terms “autobiographical memory,” meaning the collection of participants’ oral narratives of their life stories before and after the outbreak of the war in 2014 and after the escalation of the war in 2022. Autobiographical memory comes from a sociological theoretical premise, differentiating itself from historians conducting oral history, where sociologists take memory as “an act of recalling”, which can be triggered, changed, influenced, and validated by social actors (ibid.). Furthermore, psychologists affirm that autobiographical memory “concerns the extent to which the self (the I) sees itself (the Me) as the same thing across different situations and continuous over time,” where narrators strive to find “some semblance of psychological unity and purpose” (McAdams, 2013: 284). Therefore, by collecting participants’ narratives of their lives before and after the outbreak of the war, we can trace back and forward different life situations in which their ideological affiliations crystallized or shifted, and investigate the role of the social actors in that particular situation.

After initial analysis, two prominent features have emerged from the narratives, namely temporality and the role of socialisation. Interlocutors often construct their understandings of the war and their positionality within the war around these two aspects. For them, the different stages of the war are an interwoven process, but the perception of time and people’s reactions to the war vary greatly in different stages.

A Negation of Linear Logic in Temporality

Based on the theoretical and methodological foundations outlined above, the most noticeable feature of the interlocutors’ narratives is the negation of a linear logic in their rhetorical constructions of time. For many participants in my project, the starting point of their narratives is not the point when violence actually broke out, but when the Maidan protests began in their cities, signifying a discontinuity from their usual everyday life. Then, there was a “shocking moment” when they realized that what was happening was more complicated and dangerous than they had expected based on their memories of the 2004 Orange Revolution. For some, the “shocking moment” came after they witnessed the arrival of heavy military equipment. For others, it was when they saw people start to appeal for killing ‘Ukrainians’ in revenge for the Odesa May 2nd incidents on social media[1]. Many people were therefore thinking of leaving in the face of increasing instabilities. However, the situation at the very beginning of the war was extremely unclear. The trickiest consideration was that people did not know how long the war was going to last. The decision to migrate in this period mostly happened hastily without many considerations. Most of my participants who left the war zones in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014 reported to me that they had the anticipation that they would be able to go home soon. They went either to other Ukrainian cities or to Russia, based on their familial connections and capacities rather than ideological reasons. Due to the prolonged war, their initial temporary decision to migrate was thus forced to become long-term.

The subsequent years until the escalation of the war in 2022 are usually characterized as the years of waiting. A woman who moved from occupied Horlivka to Mariupol in 2014 said to me that she did not intend to stay long in Mariupol at first. She waited and waited for the liberation of Horlivka but eventually lost hope and reluctantly applied for an IDP status. A man who decided to move to Germany in 2014 construed the years between 2014 and 2022 as a “mentally draining process”. He attempted to bring his fiancé over to Germany but failed to go through the cumbersome bureaucracies for applying for an identity document. For people who chose to stay in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, depending on which side of the ‘border’ they found themselves on, their perceptions of temporal frameworks between 2014 and 2022 significantly vary. A resident from Mariupol said the city had never developed so rapidly before 2014 as international NGOs were coming in and the infrastructure and city landscape was renewed, while a Donetsk resident who stayed behind until 2021 complained about the lack of progress in the city, as if “time stays still” there.

For people who suffered from the initial stage of the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion was somewhat less shocking, recalling their experience and memories of 2014. A woman who moved to Kyiv in 2014 said she did not believe what was happening in ‘Donbas’ was a war. The full-scale war thus served as a refresher for her and helped her understand that what she had suffered in Donetsk all those years was already a consequence of the war. Additionally, their experience from 2014 helped them orientate themselves in the initial chaos amid the full-scale invasion. Bearing the fear that the full-scale war may be even more dangerous and lasting longer, they quickly responded to the threat by moving to a safer zone. The woman from Horlivka who moved to Mariupol in 2014 moved to Lviv the second day after the full-scale invasion, and subsequently moved to Germany when she heard from others that her house in suburb Mariupol had been occupied. She sums up her feelings towards time succinctly: “I was waiting and longing to go home to Horlivka in 2014. Now I am waiting again and do not know how long this is going to last. I am not even thinking of going home now, as my home is physically not there anymore. For me, it seems a cycle has completed”.

To summarize, there is a huge difference between the pace that displaced Ukrainians hope their lives to go and the pace that is actually being achieved. During displacement, people wish everything would go faster, but the reality is always slower than they would like, especially considering bureaucracy.

War as a Social Process

When tackling the entangled relationship between war, migration, and memory, a central question is the role that socialisation during the war plays in (re)shaping individuals’ sense of belonging.

Even though the very term ‘Donbas’ is originally a geological term, indicating the mining-areas in the area, it has gained political meaning since the beginning of the war in 2014. The establishment of the pseudo-states LPR and DPR[2], and Russia’s imperial ideology of ‘the Russian World’ obscured its meaning, as if it was also a political entity.  

As my respondents are mainly younger and middl-aged, they often associated the term ‘Donbas’ with the industrial legacies in the region rather than anything political when asked about it. Meanwhile, the long-gone heavy industries imply that few of my participants had any direct experience working in the relevant fields, and therefore their emotional attachments to ‘Donbas’ are better explained as the sentiments towards ‘home’ rather than any specific political or economic preferences. It was the war in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions that contributed to the emergence of ‘Donbas’ as a social category. A noticeable size of my participants who moved to other Ukrainian cities in 2014 encountered discriminations in one form or another. A woman from Donetsk, who drove her car to Kyiv one day, found her car (with a number plate indicating the origin of the car) with a graffiti that told her to go back to ‘Donbas’. A woman from a small city near Luhansk moved to a student dormitory in Kyiv and temporarily stayed there, where she met roommates from all over Ukraine. She frequently came across people who blamed her for what was happening back in her home region. “It is your war, and our soldiers died because of you,” she was told. To avoid potential hostilities aroused by disclosing their origins, some informants told me they would conceal this fact if it was not necessary. A woman from Luhansk who moved to Kyiv recalled she was ashamed to say where she was from. Even though everyone around her spoke Russian, whenever asked, she would still reply she was from Kharkiv. This also applies to the people I interviewed who initially went to Russia but moved to the West at a later stage. When recalling the days spent in Russia, a man from Donetsk said he often felt an uncomfortable sense of pity (zhalost’) in other people’s tone when they learned about where he was from.

The discrimination faded away over the years. However, when asked about the comparisons between 2014 and 2022, participants still repeatedly mentioned they felt more nervous and depressed back in 2014, even if the scale of the war dramatically escalated in 2022. A woman from Donetsk who resettled in Irpin told me thatshe felt this way, even though her new house in Irpin, where she had made a ‘home’ for herself at great expense, was destroyed during the initial occupation. For them, there are two reasons for this. First, as “experienced people” they somehow had a stronger belief that the full-scale invasion could happen when everyone else had doubts and suspected the intent of the Russian military build-up along the border. They explained to me that what they witnessed back in 2014 made them more ‘war experienced’. Second, this feeling also comes from the fact that after the full-scale invasion, people from all Ukrainian regions now have corporeal experiences of the war, so the experience and emotions of the people from the Donetsk and Luhansk can finally be better understood now. Solidarities have been cultivated across Ukrainian regions. As a man from Donetsk says, “it was very hard for me to talk to my friends from Kyiv why I ended up being in Russia, but now our friendships are strengthened because they perfectly understand my predicament”.

Another common topic in their stories is the experience of displacement (‘pereselency’). Perhaps, the narrative of a woman from Mariupol captures the shifting perception towards displacement. The occupation back in 2014 was relatively brief but Mariupol suffered significantly during the full-scale war. She mentioned there were many IDPs flooding into Mariupol from the occupied territories in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, to a point that she got tired of seeing so many people coming. “There was a huge competition in the labour market in Mariupol, as IDPs also needed a job. Now being a refugee myself in Germany, I understand how hard it was for them by comparing our experience”. In the meantime, she also mentioned that, here in Germany, she could only socialise with other displaced Ukrainians who are from the occupied territories, because common suffering and experience bond them together.

Short Summary

Looking back at the ‘belonging’ manifested in my participants’ stories and narratives, it is clear that if we take ‘belonging’ as an emotional affiliation, although it is always constructed in relation to a specific time period and a place, it may defy a linear temporal logic. The experiences of the first and full-scale stages of the war are often mixed up in their accounts, glued by the identical emotions felt at different times. Furthermore, when we view the war as a process of socialisation in extreme political conditions, we can see from the narratives that war-time socialisation has a profound influence on the individual choices and identities, which then may lead to a (re)formation of new group-based ‘belonging’. Therefore, as the war goes on, we need to continuously pay attention to the micropolitics of ‘belonging’ existing in the everyday social practices among displaced Ukrainians.

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References

Domingos Cordeiro, V. (2021) To which past do we belong? Self and narrative in a Brazilian mnemonic community of former institutionalized children. Memory studies. 14 (5), 987–1001.

McAdams, D. P. (2013) The Psychological Self as Actor, Agent, and Author. Perspectives on psychological science. 8 (3), 272–295.

Sereda, V. (2023) Displacement in war-torn Ukraine : state, displacement and belonging / Viktoriya Sereda. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

[1] Following the Revolution of Dignity, a group of pro-Russian separatists attacked a rally “for the unity of Ukraine” in Odesa, resulting in fatal clashes with 48 people dead.

[2] Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics”.

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About the Author

Qianrui Hu is a PhD student at School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His academic interests mainly include sociology of border, war, migration, ethnicity. Having started his PhD in 2021 before Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine, he initially planned his fieldtrip to ‘Donbas’ to write about the everyday social dynamics happening in the background of the war there. Since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion, he focuses on people’s reinterpretations of their war experience between 2014 and 2022 in ‘Donbas’ in relation to the full-scale war. Besides his academic work, he has also volunteered for organisations aiming at refugee relief, such as KHARPP and Ukrainian House in Warsaw.

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Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series War, Migration and Memory:

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Lidia Kuzemska, Politics of Distorted Numbers: How Russia is Counting Displaced Ukrainians and Why?, 2 November 2023

Denys Brylov and Tetiana Kalenychenko, Identity Migration of Orthodox Churches During the War in Ukraine (Since 2014), 31 August 2023

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Citation: Qianrui Hu, War, Displacement and the Shifting Meaning of ‘Donbas’: Initial Findings from the Field, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 06.08.2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/12538

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