‘What about our lives?': emotions run high in frontline Ukrainian city over ceding land to Russia

The Guardian

15 hours ago

The city of Zaporizhzhia, an industrial hub in south-east Ukraine, is as good a place as any to grasp the stakes of freezing Russia's invasion of Ukraine along its current frontlines, or of implementing a 'land swap for peace' deal as envisioned by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Since Russian troops began rolling into Ukraine in February 2022, Zaporizhzhia, with its broad avenues and Stalin-era apartment blocks, has been a 30-minute drive from the frontline. It has been under near-constant attack from missiles and drones. On Sunday, a Russian guided air bomb hit a bus station, wounding 24 people – just another day of suffering in a city that has known many of them.
Plenty of people here and in other Ukrainian towns close to the frontline are so weary of the sleepless nights and disrupted lives of the past years that they are ready for Kyiv to sign a peace deal, even an imperfect one, if it means the attacks will stop.
But many others have a very different opinion because they know first-hand what it means to give Russia control over Ukrainian territory: arrests, disappearances and the erasure of anything Ukrainian. As Moscow moves swiftly to Russify occupied territory, expelling or arresting active members of society and introducing new media outlets and school curricula heavy on propaganda, a few years of Russian control may make it almost impossible for Ukraine to regain these territories at a later date.
About one in five people living in Zaporizhzhia are internally displaced, from places even closer to the frontline or from occupied parts of Ukraine. They are living in Zaporizhzhia until they are able to go home.
On a recent visit to Zaporizhzhia, in a warehouse building where a group of volunteer women were making camouflage nets for the Ukrainian army there was a loud and resolute chorus of 'No!' in response to the question of whether people would be happy to freeze the lines in exchange for peace.
'And what about our homes, our lives, all the things we are waiting to go back for?' asked one of the women, quickly becoming tearful. 'Our only hope is for Ukraine to take them back, or we can never go home again.'
Apparently on the agenda at a summit between Putin and Trump in Alaska on Friday is a proposal that goes even further: Putin has reportedly pitched the idea that Ukraine should give up the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions it still holds, possibly in exchange for small parts of Kharkiv and Sumy regions held by Russia and the promise of a ceasefire – in essence, to swap Ukrainian land for other Ukrainian land.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has ruled out the idea that the Ukrainian army would simply walk out of some territories and leave the population to Russian rule. But Trump has suggested it is a good idea, talking of land swaps as though they are an easy and fair solution.
'There'll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody. To the good, for the good of Ukraine. Good stuff, not bad stuff. Also, some bad stuff for both,' Trump said on Monday.
This idea of land swaps as a simple transaction belies the grim reality that would be likely to accompany such a move. In most of the discussions over a peace settlement in the Ukraine conflict, the fate of people has appeared to be afterthought, secondary to questions of land, military and security issues. The casual talk of land swaps has taken this even further.
Russia's blueprint for how it works in occupied areas has been constant: it uses a mix of incentive and coercion to gain cooperation from local dignitaries. A minority of people welcome Russian rule and are happy to collaborate, others do so under pressure, while those who refuse are kicked out or arrested.
In the building of a former technical institute in Zaporizhzhia, the mayors and local councils of towns in the region still under occupation work in exile, one to each room. Most of the mayors have stories of being put under pressure by Russias in the early days of the invasion, with some being arrested and threatened.
In the room for Enerhodar, the town where the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is based, its mayor, Dmytro Orlov, said more than half of the town's population had left since 2022. He had first been asked nicely, then threatened, to work with Russian occupiers. After his deputy was arrested, he went into hiding and then fled to Zaporizhzhia. 'It became obvious I had to leave,' he said.
Back then it was possible to cross the frontline but now it is sealed. On the day the Guardian visited, a man had just arrived at the office asking for help, having done a 10-day drive via Russia, Turkey and Europe to cover the short distance between Enerhodar and Zaporizhzhia. His brother had been jailed for helping the Ukrainian army; he himself had just been released from captivity. He had arrived in Zaporizhzhia with a couple of suitcases and nothing else and was appealing to the local authorities to help him start a new life.
Every day there are new, similar stories as occupation ruins lives and splits up families. Many of those who resisted in the early days are still lost in Russia's network of torture facilities and prisons for Ukrainian detainees. More recently, those considered 'difficult' elements, such as teachers who refuse to teach the Russian curriculum, have been expelled from their homes and banned from 'Russian territory' for decades.
Those who have left or been forced out of occupied regions have been replaced by new arrivals from Russia. 'The Russians have brought in a huge number of people,' said the regional governor, Ivan Fedorov. Some of them are pensioners from icy parts of Russia who are lured with the promise of a better climate; others are police, prosecutors, teachers and other functionaries who are brought in to prop up the occupation regime.
The idea is that after a decade or two of population influx and the Russian school curriculum, few in these territories will consider themselves in any way Ukrainian. 'Their main goal is to change the gene pool of our towns,' Fedorov said.
For many Ukrainians from occupied areas, ceding control to Russia in a peace deal would mean saying goodbye to their homes for ever.