Authors

Discussion

The borders separating the post-USSR States are former administrative boundaries that did not in themselves constitute barriers to the movement of people. Under the Soviet Union, mobility was not determined by internal borders but were state-controlled, in response to planned objectives such as the recruitment of labor or forced population movements. Soviet Ukraine, for instance, saw regular population inflows and outflows with Soviet Russia. In 1991, Russian or Ukrainian citizenship was assigned based on residency, forming transnational kinship networks that survived the USSR’s dissolution. These networks preserved a shared “territory of us,” where cross-border family ties transcended national lines and continued established practices. The introduction of the concept of “remnant-network” is a way of approaching such configurations.

On the one hand, the Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-) has caused significant breaks in these networks. First of all, it brought an end to the connectedness between these territories, and then led to numerous interpersonal ruptures due to a radically opposed lived experience of the conflicts, fed, on the Russian side, by the confinement in a parallel sphere of information. In a word, the war put an end to the regime of normality maintained in these “in-between” kinships. On the other hand, it also paradoxically updated these Russian-Ukrainian geographical distributions, notably during the first wave of displacement of the Donbass inhabitants, which involved 1 million individuals, followed by deportations, evacuation and displacements during the second phase of the war. Also, through the unilateral and unrecognized annexation of four oblasti by the Russian Federation in September 2022, which led to the automatic naturalization of the remaining residents (3 million individuals) for whom obtaining Russian citizenship had become vital for access to basic services waiting for the resolution of the conflict. In both cases, these new distributions, broken off or renewed, have led to a change in the regime of normality of relations with kins who find themselves “on the other side”, namely that of rupture.

Actors' interpretations of these phenomena of rupture enable us to approach the way in which the geocultural long term is constructed, and thus to better understand how Ukrainians perceive themselves in time and space. We approach it through the prism of the concept of liminality, which allows us to question the phenomena of reversal through the prism of lived experience and the passage from one regime of normality to another. These kinships still exist: it's the way they're interpreted by the actors, and their practice, that has changed according to the context.

This work is supported by a year's ethnographic work with displaced persons whose families are in Russia, have traveled to Russia during the war or are still in occupied and then annexed territory.