As Ukraine-Russia conflict looms, Donbass residents watch and wait
“The last house in Ukraine” stands along a swampy dirt road 30 yards from a military checkpoint fortified with machine gun nests draped in camouflage netting. Less than a quarter-mile south lies a river dividing government-controlled land from territory that pro-Russian separatists occupy in this rural enclave of the Luhansk region.
The house belongs to Vladimir and Liliya Shvets, whose sardonic description of their home traces to 2014, when war ruptured southeastern Ukraine. The large swaths of Luhansk and the neighboring Donetsk region seized by Russian-backed forces that spring included Trokhizbenka, a farming village clustered beneath the gleaming golden domes of a Russian Orthodox church.
Ukrainian troops drove out enemy fighters from the town four months later. But the decision Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin to assert the independence of the breakaway territories casts the fragile status quo of residents along the 250-mile front line into deeper uncertainty.
“It’s almost like we don’t exist,” says Mr. Shvets, a retired
