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East   Donbas My relatives were miners I did not quite grasp exactly what that meant, or what daily hazard the work implied All I remember is that everyone, like our family, had large miners’ lanterns at home They must have been given as gifts    The village where my grandparents lived smelled in summers of apples and coal, and in winters of coal alone, nothing else Most houses were a greyish-white, and most fences green Every shape and colour in this universe came dusted with a shade of grey    When the Russians invaded these territories in 2014 and propped up the so-called ‘People’s Republics’, we stopped talking to one of our relatives, my mother’s brother, who welcomed the new regime in Luhansk, siding with the people we called separs and vatniks The vast majority of our relatives, however (not that there were many), remained committed to their Ukrainian identity, despite the upheaval of their towns and villages being taken over by who knows whom    Take, for example, another uncle of mine, Uncle Vitya A retired but still robust man, he had come back to Donbas from Russian Novosibirsk several years before the war, in 2012 He finished building his own house and was full of joyful plans The war and the emergence of the separatist republics did not change his plans He remained in his village in the occupied territory At first, he used to fly the Ukrainian flag, argue with his neighbours, and try to change their minds Eventually, someone warned him that his flag was a black mark and was about to land him on ‘the list’ He took the flag down He put it inside, where its blue and yellow coloured the space all the more intensely    We would speak on Skype, and start every conversation with the latest astrological forecast Venus ascending Mars entering Capricorn in the middle of the summer, which means all unfinished business will be completed Poroshenko Zelensky Things are glum… but it will pass We’ll be Ukraine again    When I thought of the residents who had stayed in the occupied territories, Uncle Vitya