Donbas residents’ growing numbness to war

Donbas residents’ growing numbness to war describes how fear and awareness of possible death give way to apathy as conflict becomes part of ordinary life. Through Sergey Sergeyich, a beekeeper who remains in Little Starhorodivka, the novel shows this adjustment not as peace but as a reordering of attention: military sounds settle into silence, responsibility contracts around his bees, and even travel through a divided landscape becomes a familiar sequence of checks and waiting.

From Fear to Habit

The novel’s account draws on a progression from fear toward apathy. Sergey Sergeyich’s response to war is not chiefly a heightened fear for his own life; after the village is reduced to its last two residents, he is described as confused and indifferent to much around him. One concern remains intense: responsibility for his bees. In winter, their hives are lined with felt and covered in metal sheets, yet the possibility of a shell reaching the shed remains part of the ordinary calculation of keeping them alive.

This narrowing of concern belongs to a wider change in perception. Sergey Sergeyich has learned to live with war as though it were a rowdy, drunken neighbour: present and disruptive, but increasingly treated as part of the surroundings. The novel’s focus on people who do not leave their homes keeps the emphasis on this slow accommodation rather than on military operations or heroic action. Apathy is presented as a condition formed over time, not a claim that the danger has passed.

War Enters the Sound of Silence

A snowfall makes the change in perception especially clear. As Sergey Sergeyich prepares for bed, he pinches out a church candle and expects the quiet to carry him into sleep. But the falling snow masks the distant bombardment that has become familiar, making the silence feel incomplete. The interruption is paradoxical: the peaceful sound of snowfall unsettles him because it has displaced the sound around which his wartime quiet has formed.

The narration distinguishes this wartime silence from peacetime silence. In the earlier quiet, ordinary sounds such as an aeroplane or a cricket eventually faded into the background. During the war, military sounds first suppress peaceful and natural ones, then themselves recede from attention and become part of what Sergey Sergeyich accepts as silence. His unease when snow temporarily blocks the bombardment reveals how thoroughly perception has adapted: the abnormal has become the expected background, while a change in that background feels strange.

The same habitual accommodation shapes his thoughts about a dead man in a field. He imagines the snow covering the body until spring and anticipates that spring birdsong will drown out the cannon fire, which will remain far away except for occasional shells falling on places where no one lives. The passage does not make this imagined future safe; it shows Sergey Sergeyich arranging death and bombardment within a familiar cycle of seasons and rare interruptions.

Routine at the Checkpoints

The numbness also appears in practical encounters with the borders and authorities that structure wartime movement. At a checkpoint, soldiers examine Sergey Sergeyich’s passport and question why he is entering through a particular route. They take his mobile phone and documents for inspection, direct him to pull over, and later return them. His anxiety rises while he waits, but the process is handled through concrete, repeated procedures: present documents, answer questions, wait, and continue when permitted.

Crossing toward Russia likewise means passing through an explicitly marked border and a buffer zone. Sergey Sergeyich drives past people travelling on foot with carts, suitcases, bags, and backpacks; later, while driving through the buffer zone, he looks among the pedestrians for Aisha. These scenes make the divided territory more than a political abstraction: documents, checkpoints, roads, and instructions shape who can move and how. The familiar logistics do not erase risk; they show how people keep acting within it.

Competing Stories and the Limits of Indifference

Television and media encounters show that habitual adaptation does not produce a shared account of the war. At his hostess’s home, Sergey Sergeyich watches television commentators blame Western financial support for holding Ukraine together and predict that Americans and Europeans will eventually start their own Maidans. When the channel changes, a green-faced politician appears, and he recognizes her as someone from the region. Public argument enters domestic life as another broadcast, but recognition remains local and personal.

At the border, a reporter asks why Sergey Sergeyich has come from Donbas. He begins to explain that he is from the grey zone and that people are shooting on both sides, naming Ukrainians on one side and Russians on the other. A young crew member stops him and instructs him to repeat the account without the word Russians, substituting separatists. When asked about the damage to his car, Sergey Sergeyich says that one shell-shocked man, drunk at a wake for a soldier killed by the Russians, attacked him. The crew then ends the live interview and asks instead for footage of the bees and the axe mark on a hive. The exchange exposes how a person’s account can be edited to fit a preferred framing even as his practical life remains organized around the bees and the journey.

The novel therefore connects numbness to both sensory habit and public language. Bombardment can become part of silence; checkpoints can become a sequence of routine actions; and an eyewitness account can be interrupted and revised. Yet the bees, the dead, and the consequences of crossing remain concrete. Sergey Sergeyich’s adaptation is a way of continuing to live in war, not evidence that war has ceased to matter.