When You No Longer Recognize Your Home Country

Yevhenii Monastyrskyi was an undergraduate at the University of Luhansk, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, when war broke out in 2014. One day, on his way home from a coffee shop with friends, he says, they were approached by Russian soldiers in an SUV. Without much explanation, Monastyrskyi told me, he and his friends were detained in the basement of a local government building. They were all released days later; Monastyrskyi had convinced his captors that he was no threat as a student, even though he had collaborated with Ukrainian authorities. A few months later, he left for western Ukraine, to begin his graduate studies at a different university.

Monastyrskyi hasn’t returned home ever since. Later that year, Ukraine granted limited self-rule to Russian-backed separatists in Luhansk, and Monastyrskyi’s activist history protesting the occupation made any return to the city he grew up in feel too, Luhansk was one of two separatist territories whose independence was recognized by Vladimir Putin. Monastyrskyi’s sorrow has morphed into anger.