Best and brightest flee rebel-held eastern Ukraine
Artists, professionals go en masse to capital as fighting continues
KYIV, Ukraine — Alesya Bolot worked for a contemporary arts foundation that converted an abandoned factory into a mecca for young and bright people with daring ideas. Vibrant and cosmopolitan, the 27-year-old would not look out of place in a gallery in New York.
She was at the forefront of the avant-garde arts scene in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk when a pro-Russian insurgency took over and upended her life. When a rebelcontrolled local television station portrayed creative people like her as the enemy, she decided it was time to flee.
“Everything we did ran counter to their ideology,” she says, “the fact that we worked with foreign artists, the fact that we advocated for a plurality of opinions.”
Bolot arrived in the capital Kyiv a year ago with only a backpack, not planning a long-term stay. But she decided to remain after she was told she was on the wanted list of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic for alleged subversive activity. A year on, the Izolyatsia contemporary arts centre runs a much smaller gallery in Kyiv.
More than 2.2million people have fled their homes in eastern Ukraine since the war between government forces and Russia-backed separatists began in April last year, according to the United Nations, some to neighbouring Russia, but about 1.3 million to Ukrainian regions under government control.
Educated middle-class people like Bolot, whose arts centre was turned into a rebel training camp and prison, represent a big chunk of those who opt for Ukraine-controlled areas, especially the capital — a serious brain drain for Ukraine’s east.
According to the UN, a total of 94,000 people from eastern Ukraine are now living in Kyiv and its suburbs. More than 8,000 are subscribed to a Donetsk People in Kyiv group on Facebook, set up by Vladimir Voronov, a 36-year-old who created the brand for the glittering new Donetsk airport, which was transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland by months of heavy fighting.
For people who have left their careers, homes and often extended families behind, community outreach is vital for survival, Voronov says. Along with the war trauma, he explains, people from the east have to struggle with the dire financial realities of a recession, with the government offering a paltry 400 hryvnyas ($20) a month in benefits.
“Because of the need to survive, many people here have discovered new resources in them,” Voronov says. “It’s a seasoned community that has nothing to lose, has nowhere to go back to, all bridges burnt.”
The displaced long to return home but are afraid that the war has changed their homeland beyond recognition. Some feel betrayed by those who stayed, regarding them as supporting the separatists. Bolot says she is certain that many people who stayed in Donetsk do not share the separatists’ views, but still finds reconciliation difficult.
“I don’t know how you can live and work along side people who have supported what is going on there,” she said.
The population of Donetsk, the rebel region’s largest city, is believed to have shrunk by a third from its prewar one million. A city that hosted the Euro 2012 football matches, with glittering storefronts and a vibrant restaurant scene, Donetsk is now eerily empty during what could be the rush hour.
The exodus has drained the region of countless professionals. Viktoria Sosnina, a gynecologist from Donetsk who fled to Kyiv, says roughly half the doctors at her once-prestigious hospital have left. And so have many patients.
But Sosnina also defends those who choose to remain at home. She says a professor at her hospital in Donetsk stayed “because the hospital is his child. It doesn’t mean he betrayed someone — like a child he cannot abandon it.”