Beginning with this August 3, on Mondays, portal Delfi (in the Latvian language) and Latvian public media portal (in the Russian language) will publish the blog series “Letters from Donetsk”. Their author’s – Donetsk resident’s – name will be Veronica (the name is changed because of security considerations). Veronica will describe her own and the other Donetsk citizens’ everyday life, their feelings, state of mind and observations of the present life and the events ongoing in their City. The idea on necessity to present description of the situation in Ukraine from the view of local residents was generated in the Centre for East European Policy Studies (CEEPS).

The CEEPS Communications Coordinator Ieva Dzelme-Romanovska says, “While communicating with various people in Latvia, including our friends and acquaintances, we often have an impression that most of them are obviously trying to distance themselves from the topic of the conflict in Ukraine under the pretext that it is not clear what is really going on there, and which side is right. At the same time, while maintaining contacts with our cooperation partners in Ukraine, we see how great their expectations are regarding our understanding and assistance. In case at some time in the future Latvia faces aggression on the part of its neighbouring country, we would surely also need understanding and support from the other states. So far we have tried to explain the Ukrainian events by preparing and publicizing the research works, however, we are aware that they not always reach the maximum possible audience. Therefore, we hope that the humane stories on life in the war zone will fill the gaps of information for those who still have some doubts about the real nature of Ukrainian events”.

Some time has passed between the appearance of the idea on the blog series and the implementation of the intention, for, having started to look for eventual author, we realized that it was nearly impossible to find one. The CEEPS cooperation partners told us that most of the citizens had left the conflict zones, but those who were staying there, were very afraid of taking serious risk by sharing any information. This can be illustrated by the first Veronica’s story where she tells us that even taking photographs of a flowerbed in the centre of Donetsk City may result in arrest of the photographer.

It is difficult to predict what will be the number of stories in this series of letters. That will depend on Veronica’s possibilities to write some more of them.