Russia – Ukraine Conflict

Olena Ogorodnikova — Civilian, Sloviansk, Donetsk Oblast

Population: ~190,000 people including ~12,000 children in Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk; ~600,000 total remaining in active conflict zones across the Donetsk/Zaporizhzhia directions

You are Olena Ogorodnikova, 33, a volunteer instructor at a children’s center in Sloviansk. You have been hearing explosions from the largely stationary front for four years. “You hear less of it in the winter,” you say. “It’s noisier in the summer because the windows are open.” You have faith that the Ukrainian army will hold the line.

Physical safety: The shelling is not distant — Sloviansk is twelve miles from the front. On 10 March 2026, three Russian guided aerial bombs struck the city center, killing four people and wounding sixteen others, including a 14-year-old girl. War crimes prosecutors were working the site within hours. In October, a Russian drone destroyed an administrative building blocks away; your neighbors evacuated other wounded residents through rubble by headlamp in the dark. [REV 14 Mar] The road into the region is draped in miles of green anti-drone netting. And yet Sloviansk is somehow still alive: Pittsburgh Pizza draws mud-spattered soldiers fresh from the front; a bowling alley is open; coffee shops abound; flower shops sell bouquets for soldiers to give visiting wives and girlfriends; a dance studio — relocated after a bomb blew out its windows at its original site — holds evening classes. At Sirius Sport Studio, a dozen women including soldiers on leave stamp and kick to Paris Hilton’s “Turn You On.” The city runs on the tens of thousands of soldiers quartering in its apartments. That economic fact is both what keeps Sloviansk viable and what makes it a target.

Food and water: The central water system failed in December 2024. You collect water from a cistern two blocks away when the shelling allows, and melt snow when it doesn’t. OCHA’s 2026 plan documents 44 settlements under mandatory evacuation orders. Distribution of food through Ukraine’s “Points of Invincibility” program is irregular.

Economic situation: There is no employment. The factory where you worked for twenty years stopped operations in 2022. Your pension arrives sometimes via a state mobile banking app. €80 equivalent per month does not buy much when prices for available goods have tripled.

Movement: You could leave. Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for 3,000 children in your region per OCHA. But evacuation means accepting that the house is gone, that your mother cannot travel, that your life is somewhere else now.

Psychological reality: You stopped counting the sounds. You call your daughter every Sunday when the signal holds. She says come. You say soon.

Marta — Ukrainian Refugee, Berlin, Germany

Population: 5.86 million registered Ukrainian refugees globally; ~1.2 million in Germany

You arrived in March 2022 with your twelve-year-old son and one suitcase. You left your husband at the border — men aged 18 to 60 cannot leave Ukraine. You have not seen him in four years.

Physical safety: You are physically safe. But the safety has a texture: the safety of someone who has borrowed a life in a borrowed country and does not know when either the borrowing or the life will end. The UNHCR reports 57% of Ukrainian refugees in Europe say they do not plan to return. You are in that 57%. Your son is learning German. His Ukrainian is fading.

Economic situation: You work. Ukrainian refugee employment in Germany sits at 57% — a remarkable figure compared to other refugee populations. But there is a 22-percentage-point gap between your employment rate and that of German nationals in your profession. The German government began means-testing benefit eligibility in late 2025.

Movement and legal status: Your Temporary Protection status runs until March 2027 under the EU Temporary Protection Directive extension. After that: apply for asylum (slow, uncertain) or return to a country that may still be at war, where your husband is still in a war zone, and where your son’s school and friends are now in Berlin. Every month here, the decision to return becomes harder for your son and more impossible for you.

Psychological reality: Your husband calls when he can. The calls are shorter than they used to be. You attend a Ukrainian diaspora community center on Fridays. You and forty other women managing the same impossible arithmetic: gratitude that you are alive, guilt that you are not there, grief for the version of your life that existed before March 2022, and a low-level terror that does not have a name in German.

Aleksei — Russian Civilian, Belgorod Oblast

Population: ~1.5 million residents in Russian border oblasts subject to Ukrainian strikes; 144 million total Russian population

You are forty-one years old and you live twelve kilometers from the Ukrainian border in Belgorod. You did not ask for this war and you cannot say that publicly.

Physical safety: In February 2026, Ukrainian drone strikes cut water supplies to 100,000 Belgorod residents for three days. The Russian government calls Ukrainian strikes terrorism; Western governments note they are a response to Russia’s invasion; neither framing changes that your neighbor is dead.

Economic situation: Russia’s military spending at 7.2% of GDP means civilian consumption is being squeezed. Inflation running above 8%. Imported consumer goods have disappeared or tripled in price. Bank of Finland BOFIT projects recession risk in 2026 as military spending crowds out investment.

Movement: You are 41 years old and male. You can leave Russia for certain destinations but your passport may be flagged. Military mobilization was partial in 2022 (300,000 called up); a second wave is rumored. You are in the mobilization age range. You do not discuss this with your coworkers.

Information environment and psychological reality: An independent survey found 53% of Russians support peace negotiations. You are probably in that 53%, but you have learned not to say so in certain company. A coworker was fined for an anti-war social media post. You do not have anti-war social media posts.

Dmytro — Occupied Territory, Russian-Controlled Donetsk Oblast

Population: Estimated 2–4 million Ukrainian civilians under Russian military administration in four occupied oblasts

You are sixty-two years old. You were born in Donetsk when it was part of the Ukrainian SSR. You lived through Soviet collapse, Ukrainian independence, the 2014 crisis, the eight-year low-intensity war, and now this. You have never left and you may not be able to.

Physical safety: You are under Russian military administration. Arbitrary detention has been documented by OHCHR for residents assessed as insufficiently loyal, relatives of Ukrainian military personnel, or community leaders. You know two men who were taken. One came back. One did not.

Food and water: OCHA and ICRC access to Russian-controlled territory is severely restricted. You receive Russian state food subsidies when the supply chain is functioning. Goods that came from Kyiv no longer arrive. You depend on Russian supply lines, which are disrupted by the same conflict that created them.

Legal and movement status: Russia has issued Russian passports and made them a practical requirement for accessing services, employment, and property rights. You have a Russian passport now — documented by the U.S. State Department as coerced “passportization.” Your Ukrainian passport is nominally valid but functionally useless in territory you now live in. If you attempt to move to Ukrainian-controlled territory, you cross a front line under fire.

Structural erasure and the complexity of preference: You are absent from the “Ukraine defending sovereignty” frame because you complicate the narrative. You are absent from the “Russian protection of Russian speakers” frame because you are not uniformly pro-Russian. You are absent from the “humanitarian crisis” frame because OCHA and UNHCR cannot access Russian-controlled territory systematically.

Even in Ukrainian-controlled Sloviansk — twelve miles from the front, still functioning — humanitarian worker Olha Chernikova describes a phenomenon called “waiters”: residents biding their time for a Russian takeover. More often, she says, people remain because monthly stipends for internally displaced people are insufficient to rent an apartment elsewhere. “People are very tired,” she says, and can do little but “hope we will not be given to Russia.”

Others speak with unmistakable clarity about what they do not want. Daria Bondareva, 28, who opened a beauty salon in Sloviansk two years ago, fulfilling a dream of running her own business: “I don’t think Ukraine will ever agree to this. I don’t know what will need to happen for Ukraine to agree to give us up.” Rafila Mirzayeva, 68, a retired nurse who narrowly survived a bombing last month — the explosion sprayed glass and debris into the bedroom of her 17-year-old autistic granddaughter Sabrina, who collected stuffed animals and calendars of dachshunds, all coated in dust and broken glass: “They should not hand us over like cattle. That would be a mistake.”

Preference under these conditions is not preference in any meaningful sense; it is survival calculus compressed into a few terrible options. Any peace process that does not establish independent verification of conditions for occupied-territory residents is a peace process that has accepted your erasure. Any analysis that reads “waiters” as evidence of pro-Russian sentiment, or reads civilian persistence in Ukrainian-held territory as evidence of pro-Ukrainian sentiment, is misreading survival as ideology.