Ukraine is under siege following a full-scale military invasion by Russia on 24 February 2022

On November 21, at 7 PM, as part of IZOLYATSIA Donbas Studies public programme, there is a lecture Missing City: War, Blockade, and the Community of Fate in Luhansk by historian and political anthropologist Yevhenii Monastyrskyi.

Spring of 2014 created a divide in everyday life in Luhansk, separating it  into before and after the eruption of hostilities. For a while, citizens had different experiences, and therefore a different perception of the bombardment and the strange people with machine guns who had seized power in the city. Normal functioning of the city spaces was disrupted. Social extremities in the  form of hostilities and total blockade changed the way that the way interpersonal relations worked inside Luhansk — something called the community of fate’ had been created. However, details of what happened to citizens during the blockade, how communities reacted to moments of extreme danger and how those moments shaped the city are still unspoken.

Yevhenii Monastyrskyi – a Luhansk native, historian of the Soviet Union and political anthropologist. Before the outbreak of the war, he was studying history at the Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National University. After fleeing his hometown in October 2014, he studied at the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv) and Yale University (New Haven). In 2018 he is a Global Dialogues Fellow at The New School for Social Research (New York) and lecturer on the Marvin Minsky Fellowship seminar at the MIT Media-Lab (Boston).

Free entry

21st November, 19:00
IZONE, 4 floor
Naberezhno-Luhova st. 8