By the summer of 2015, the war in eastern Ukraine had entered its second year. Stalemate, trench warfare, and nightly artillery barrages increasingly defined the conflict. While the faltering Minsk II ceasefire prevented a return to large-scale offensives, soldiers and civilians on both sides continued to die, with the UN estimating the death toll at nearly 7,000. Civilian neighborhoods on the outskirts of Donetsk and Horlivka bore the brunt of the shelling. Families spent their days queuing for humanitarian aid and their nights huddled in bomb shelters.

In contrast, Donetsk’s city center, largely insulated from frontline combat, retained a semblance of daily life, punctuated by the occasional echo of machine-gun fire across its streets. Behind a less-reported stretch of the front line, the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) faced internal fragmentation, with rival factions and local commanders competing for control of pockets of territory in the industrial rust belt.

Foreign fighters continued to bolster the conflict, arriving from the Balkans, the Caucasus, Western Europe, and various regions of Russia. Among them, Cossack groups—descendants of the historic frontier militias of Imperial Russia—were formally initiated into the Don Cossack Army in towns like Pervomaisk before returning to the trenches. Russia-backed authorities systematically erased Ukrainian cultural and national symbols in the occupied territories. Soviet-era flags and iconography were common, and propaganda campaigns were pervasive. The information war was fought as fiercely as the battles on the ground.

In Luhansk, a destroyed Ukrainian tank displayed in a public park was emblazoned with the Russian forces’ slogan: #savedonbasspeople. July 17 marked the first anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, in which 298 people were killed over territory held by Russian-backed forces. In the region now under Russian occupation, local ceremonies honored the victims, though the event was highly politicized, with flag-waving and rhetoric blaming the Ukrainian military, despite mounting evidence implicating Russian-backed fighters in the attack.