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Two Celebrations: A Graduation Party and Russia’s Arrival in Luhansk

I went to Kyiv to interview local residents. One of them, Serhiy, told me his story, and how life has been since he was forced to flee after the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2015.
Image: Kai Iliev
Image: Kai Iliev

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“I had just graduated from school, in summer 2014. We had the graduation party, with two days of celebration. I came back home at 4AM and went to sleep.”
Serhiy* had his graduation party. However, what followed wasn’t the typical post-graduation summer break.

“I heard the first strikes at 6AM.”

Serhiy was in his late teens when Russian forces invaded Luhansk, a city located in Eastern Ukraine. The danger of war had already cast a shadow over his final school year. “We had some discussions about a possible invasion in school. The other schools cancelled their graduation party because of it, ours was the only one to stage it.”

Born and raised in Luhansk, Serhiy straddled both worlds. He had relatives across Russia and Ukraine, and like many in Eastern Ukraine, Russian was his mother tongue. While his family wasn’t the poorest, sacrifices were made for his education. In pre-invasion Luhansk, the main industry was coal mining, and Serhiy worked as a kindergarten guard while seeking better opportunities.

The region’s proximity to the Russian border made it vulnerable to criminal enterprises. Some of Serhiy’s classmates had already chosen dangerous paths. “Baldan, a classmate of mine… I was looking at my phone when he came to me and said ‘give me your phone and your money.’ I knew what voice it was, but it was dark. He let me go when he recognized me.”

Violence became increasingly common. One night at a local club would cement Serhiy’s decision to leave. “We were in a disco, the mayor of our city was there. He stumbled on my shoulder and yelled at me – I was just 17. My friend Oleksandr Varov protected me. I stayed outside to smoke. They were shot in the disco with an automatic weapon.”

The economic situation deteriorated rapidly. “I wasn’t paid for six months, only received humanitarian aid,” Serhiy recalls. His father, who worked as director of a technical college preparing coal miners, faced the same situation. The uncertainty pushed many toward desperate measures. “Some friends offered me to smuggle goods. 25 euros for 10 minutes at the border. You run through a field to the Russian village, bring back a box. You don’t know what’s inside, but it weighs 10 kilos. I first agreed, then refused. I was scared of being caught.”

By October 2014, the situation had become untenable. A double currency system was implemented, accepting both Ukrainian Hryvnia and Russian rubles. “Bread cost 20 rubles,” Serhiy remembers, highlighting how Russian influence was creeping into daily life.

When Serhiy finally decided to leave, he first moved to Chernihiv, a city close to the Belarusian border. He tried university there but left within weeks. The choice ahead wasn’t easy: go to Russia, where wealthy relatives awaited, or remain in Ukraine. “I wasn’t sure whether to stay in Russia where I have relatives who were well-off, in Saratov. Or to be in Ukraine.”

In September 2015, Serhiy chose Kyiv, enrolling at the National University as a Food Technologist. His mother, who had been director of a kindergarten, moved with him, taking work as a babysitter to fund his education. “She was absolutely pro-Ukrainian, she realized something bad was happening,” Serhiy explains. His father stayed behind. “He thought it could be a good tool for our economic development.He didn’t want to move anywhere, and his father was sick.”

The division in Serhiy’s family reflected broader tensions in Luhansk society. Russian propaganda had been laying groundwork years before the invasion. “Already in 2013, I heard ‘Donbas is feeding the whole Ukraine,'” Serhiy recalls. “The mines were not profitable, but it was preparation. They said we gave money to Kyiv and felt it was unjust.”

The creation of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in 2015 wasn’t a genuine cultural movement. Instead, it capitalized on local frustrations. The Ukrainian government’s support for displaced families – about 20 pounds per month – inadvertently fueled pro-Russian narratives about Kyiv’s neglect of the region.

“At the beginning I tried to remain neutral, because my relatives were split,” Serhiy says. “I was reading both Ukrainian and Russian media, I wasn’t sure who was right. The first year, I was trying to make sense of the situation.” But as Russian influence became more apparent, particularly in Crimea and Donbas, Serhiy’s perspective began to shift.

Over the next seven years, Serhiy would return home only three times, making the journey through Russia due to the difficulty of legal crossings. Each visit revealed how his homeland was changing, as Russian influence deepened and connections with Ukraine weakened.

Then, in February 2022, Serhiy would face another invasion – this time in Kyiv, the city he had chosen as his new home.

[*Name has been changed for privacy]

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[…] Kai reporting from Kyiv again. My trip is coming to an end tonight, but my stories have not. In my last piece, I introduced Serhyi from Luhansk, and I detailed his life as a war refugee when Russia invaded his […]