Between Russia and Ukraine, a city cut in two and nostalgic inhabitants

On Peoples’ Friendship Street, hundreds of people in traditional Slavic clothes wave flags facing each other under a beautiful sky. On the one hand, the women wear the kokoshnik, a traditional Russian headdress decorated with beads; on the other hand, Ukrainian women wear vyshyvanka, embroidered shirts. The Ukrainians sing the Russian anthem in chorus, then Russians sing the Ukrainian anthem.

We are in the spring of 2012 in the Luhansk region, in the far east of the country. In these good old days, the street is delimited by a simple white marking on the ground, materializing the border. On one side: Milové, a Ukrainian town of 5,000 inhabitants. On the other: the Russian city of Chertkovo and its 11,000 residents. Everyone can cross the white line as they wish. “This street is unique in Ukraine. It does not divide us, but unites us, because we are part of the same family”, launches the mayor of Milové, Oleh Savtchenko, surrounded by Ukrainian and Russian officials.

Today, the city councilor, still in office, watches with a smile full of nostalgia the video of the defunct annual festival of the Friendship of peoples. But his drawn features, barred by a long beard, light up when he talks about life before 2014. border”, assures the 44-year-old man who speaks in the present of a reality that is no longer. On the other side of the border, even the Russian elected head of the Chertkovo district, with whom the mayor once cut red ribbons, is a Ukrainian from Milové. “No one could imagine that we would come to this today,” breathes the mayor, as comfortable in the language of Andrei Kurkov as in that of Pushkin.

Because since 2014, the street of the Friendship of the peoples is no longer a symbol of unity: it has become that of the division between Putin and Ukraine – and the rest of Europe. With the annexation of Crimea, then the war against the Donbass separatists supported by Moscow, the festival came to a halt. But, at the time, the inhabitants of Milové and Tchertkovo did not change anything in their habits. They continue to freely cross the border posts reserved for them and to walk on both sides of the street.

But in September 2018, a fence appeared, erected by Russian border guards. On the three kilometers of asphalt that Oleh Savtchenko observes today from his office, a separation of three meters high has since been erected. “At the beginning, he says, people were going to talk to each other or exchange small packages through the fence. But as time passed, they stopped doing it.” A wall has settled in people’s minds.

“We lived as one city”

Since last fall, the Russian-Ukrainian crisis experienced a spectacular resurgence with the accumulation, by Moscow, of troops and military equipment a few tens of kilometers from Milové, the inhabitants of the municipality have remained calm. At the beginning of January, the tension went up a notch. But even when Washington, followed by other capitals, asked its nationals to leave Ukraine, border residents remained unfazed.

In Milové, nothing indicates that a potential conflict could break out because of a simple clash between the two countries. No panic, exodus or shortage of stocks – only a few red inscriptions on the walls of the city indicate the location of the bomb shelters. Residents brush off speculation of a possible invasion with near-British phlegm. “Here, it’s calm, nobody shoots anyone,” says Inna, a saleswoman on People’s Friendship Street, whose children live in Russia. Because of family, cultural, social and economic ties, it seems hard to imagine that the “other side” will start attacking Milové.

In and around the village, there is no military movement. The only novelty since the beginning of January: the handful of Ukrainian border guards present in Milové patrol more often along the street. In Milové, most residents refuse to talk about the war in Donbass, 120 kilometers further south. To tell the truth, the economic situation worries them more than the presence of the Russian army, on the other side. The visits to Kiev and Moscow by French President Emmanuel Macron or German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the alarmist declarations of the American Joe Biden: all this diplomatic ballet is neither hot nor cold for the inhabitants of the commune. “It doesn’t depend on us, so we ignore them. We already suffer enough from the situation as it is,” said one of them.

The clock of Chertkovo station, the former nerve center of the two municipalities, can be seen on the other side of the large fence, a little further down the street. One more hour: Moscow time. In Soviet times, this station was the junction between the Caucasus, Ukraine and northern Russia. Moscow, Vladikavkaz, Kiev, Sochi, St. Petersburg: every ten minutes, trains left for the other side of the country. “We were the center of the world here and today it’s deserted,” regrets Halina (the first name has been changed), a shopkeeper with blue eyes wearing a chapka, who shows us the station from her window.

In his tiny wooden-walled butcher’s shop, pieces of bacon hang from the ceiling, waiting for customers who don’t arrive. During the golden age of the 1970s and 1980s, the street between two countries hosted a huge market. The inhabitants of Milové and Tchertkovo did not experience shortages as elsewhere in the USSR: consumer products came to them. “We lived as one city, people came to mass at our house, on the other side we went to the maternity ward or took the train,” recalls Halina. Like many, she is nostalgic for the Soviet Union, when people could move around freely. Today, the septuagenarian cannot even go see her daughter on the other side of the fence.

Separated families

Further down the street, in the mythical Ukraina café, with its walls decorated with Soviet frescoes, we ask who still has family on the other side and… almost everyone raises their hand. “I grew up in Chertkovo, my brother stayed there because he married a Russian,” says Ukrainian Evhen, 21, with resignation. “He lives just across the fence, but I can’t visit him.” In March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, the pedestrian bridge over the tracks, where one passed from one country to another on presentation of an identity card, was closed for a mutual agreement between the Russian and Ukrainian authorities. It never reopened.

You now have to go through the international border, at the other end of the street, where the queues drag on for sometimes an entire day. For two years, Moscow has established strict rules: impossible to enter the Russian Federation if there is not a grandparent, a parent or a child who resides in this country. Thus, Evhen has not seen his brother, a Ukrainian citizen, for three years. “Love knows no borders, families have been founded on both sides,” recalls Oleh Savtchenko, whose wife is Russian. Since the death of her father, the latter no longer has any close family in Chertkovo. “So she can’t go and put flowers on her grave,” laments the chosen one.

Without prospects, the young people leave, often for Poland at the other end of the country, 1000 kilometers further west. In recent years, Ukraine (40 million souls) has lost nearly 4 million inhabitants. Whereas before the restrictions, workers in the east of the country chose to go to Russia, they are now opting for Europe and its higher wages, which has been accessible without a visa for three months since 2017. Russia, at a few meters from Milové, is now inaccessible. And some wonder if the rue de l’Amitié des peuple will not soon know the fate of the avenues of Berlin in the past. First cut by wire mesh and barbed wire, these had finally been separated by a concrete wall. Impassable.