Wartime conditions in the grey zone village of Small Starohorodivka

Wartime conditions in the grey zone village of Small Starohorodivka are not a pause between battles but a daily state shaped by isolation, fragile infrastructure, and distant violence. The village lies between armed horizons: mail and roads may briefly connect it to the outside, yet services disappear again, and even descriptions of who is fighting are subject to correction.

Setting and isolation

The road between Karuselino and Small Starohorodivka is only two kilometres as the crow flies, or three and a half by road, but its channels and poor condition demand slow, careful driving. A Ukrainian-flag-colored Ukrposhta van approaching from the direction of the Donetsk People's Republic seems at first almost like a sign of peace. The arrival of mail makes the village briefly visible to the country beyond the front, but the route proves temporary: the van leaves for Svitle and does not return.

Sergey Sergeyich thinks of the territory outside the grey zone as the “mainland,” an idea borrowed from an old film about Soviet polar explorers. The image captures the village’s separation: the mainland seems close, just beyond a ridge and horizon, yet the armed lines on either side shoot across the grey zone at one another. In his reflection, the zone itself is nearly deserted and does not attack anyone; it is nevertheless caught between forces that treat it as a passage for their fire.

Infrastructure and everyday time

The interruption of postal service turns an ordinary greeting into a logistical problem. Sergeyich has prepared a photo-card for Vitalina, but the sealed envelope cannot be sent without a stamp or a functioning post office. He had not initially thought of mailing greetings; Vitalina’s three postcards prompt him to try. With the village service gone, he considers asking Petro to carry the envelope to a place where post offices still work. A personal connection must substitute for the missing public route.

Even the weather and the household’s supply of coal register the strain of daily life. In early March, Sergeyich cooks eggs over a stove fed with half a bucket of coal. The house retains warmth more effectively as spring approaches, but the yard remains cold and damp. This measured attention to fuel, heat, and the threshold makes survival appear as a series of small calculations rather than a single dramatic crisis.

The household’s clock becomes another measure of isolation. As Sergeyich travels away from home, he worries that the wound-up alarm clock will stop and leave the house without “living time” until someone returns to wind it. He dismisses asking Pashka to do it every day, then reflects that time matters when someone remains to keep track of it. The thought links the village’s emptiness to the fragile routines that once made a home feel inhabited.

Communication, media, and competing accounts

The first post van’s appearance is a rare encounter with a functioning national service, and the word Ukrposhta on its cab overwhelms Sergeyich with joyful surprise. Its promise is short-lived, however: the van does not make a reliable return journey. The contrast between the clearly marked vehicle and the broken route shows how connection can be announced without being sustained.

Communication with family is equally precarious. Sergeyich finds a familiar number on his mobile and presses the call button almost by accident. When a dear voice answers and asks who is calling, he cannot speak; he ends the call in tears. The phone works, but the possibility of contact does not readily become conversation. Elsewhere, at a military checkpoint, soldiers take his passport and mobile while checking his account of a soldier who had helped him. Waiting among a long line of cars, he listens at a hive, then receives his documents and an instruction to show a paper at the next checkpoint. Movement depends on both devices and permission.

Television brings another kind of connection, carrying political claims into the village. Three suited commentators argue that America and Europe support Ukraine and predict that their own citizens may stage Maidans. The channel then shows a green-dyed woman identified by Sergeyich as a local Verkhovna Rada deputy, protesting that she is entitled to her opinion. These broadcasts make national political conflict part of the village’s domestic viewing, while offering sharply framed explanations rather than a neutral account.

Shelling and the language of war

The village’s apparent quiet is repeatedly qualified by distant bombardment. Walking home, Sergeyich distinguishes the outer silence from the silence in his head: the wartime quiet is audible without effort, marked by distant impacts beyond Svitle. Pashka later jokes that there is power at home, then immediately clarifies that nothing has changed except that shelling has increased. The shells are aimed at each other, he says, sometimes passing low enough to be seen before they explode on the other side.

The war also presses on Sergeyich’s account of events beyond the village. During a border interview, he begins by describing Ukrainians on one side and Russians on the other. A young crew member interrupts and tells him to repeat the statement without naming Russians, prompting him to substitute separatists from Karuselino. When asked about his damaged car, Sergeyich says that one shell-shocked man attacked it after drinking at a wake for a soldier killed by Russians. The interview is then stopped; the crew opts for footage of the bees and a close-up of an axe mark on a hive. His testimony is thus edited at the level of both the words allowed on camera and the images chosen to represent his experience.

Together, these scenes show a village whose wartime reality is made not only by shelling but by the limits placed on movement, communication, public services, and speech. A van can arrive without establishing a postal route; a phone can ring without producing a conversation; an interview can solicit testimony and then reshape its terms. The grey zone’s defining condition is this unstable closeness to the wider world: it is near enough to receive its mail, broadcasts, and military controls, but not secure enough to rely on any of them.