Authors

Qianrui Hu¹;  ¹ University College London, UK

Discussion

‘Donbas’, an original geological term indicating the mining areas only, has gained political meanings as Russia is using force to perpetuate the idea as if ‘Donbas’ is also a political entity. This paper proposal investigates how people from ‘Donbas’ narrate and interpret the relationship between themselves and ‘Donbas’ through their lived experience. A strong focus will be on the shifts of their narratives about their pre-war life and life since 2014. The war in ‘Donbas’ witnessed large-scale and sustained brutalities, resulting in not only a huge number of casualties and displaced people, but also the emergence of new ‘borders’ in the region with the establishment of the two quasi-states. One of the excuses of Putin to wage the full-scale war is to protect the Russian-speaking population in ‘Donbas’ from the alleged Ukrainian ‘genocide’, while the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics claimed they are fighting for Ukrainian ultranationalism to preserve the multi-ethnic nature of ‘Donbas’. How should we make sense of ‘Donbas’ identity, when there are so many actors actively creating myths, entwining, and blurring ethnonational, linguistic, and economic factors together? More crucially, how this identity is being perceived and reinterpreted by the people who are affected by the war? What can the comparison between their war experience in 2014 and 2022 respectively tell us about the very shifting meaning of Ukrainian national identity since 2014?  

To decipher the multiplicities of ‘Donbas’ identity and its shifts, this research tries not to impose common identity categories (i.e., ethnic Russian/Ukrainian; Ukrainian/Russian speaking, etc.) upon the participants, but aims to collect interviewees’ autobiographical memories before and after the outbreak of the war and see how their framing of self and belonging changes in relation to the development of the war.  

Empirical evidence will be drawn from my 9-month fieldwork in Germany and Poland, where I conducted in-depth interviews with displaced Ukrainians from ‘Donbas’. They consist of both people who were living in occupied and non-occupied territories after 2014 as well as Russia. Therefore, a comparative lens is performed throughout the analysis. Drawing from the insights of Critical Border Studies, the analysis focuses on two aspects. First, I examine whether and how their experience of living under various ‘borders’ shape their understanding and framings of the same historical events. Second, I look at how they connect their experience of the first and full-scale stages of the war to see how self-interpretation can be dramatically reshaped by displacement.