DANYLIW RESEARCH SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY UKRAINE

Ukrainian-Russian Families
Across the Ukrainian/Russian Border since 2014

This article examines how a decade of war (2014–2024) has transformed the lived experience of Ukrainian families whose close relatives reside in Russia. It asks what the war has done to kin groups whose family practices long relied on cross-border circulation and routinized exchanges.  Sharply diverging wartime experiences and information environments fractured the moral and interpretive grounds of kinship, producing selective ruptures, avoidance, or the hollowing out of ties. Where relationships endured, they did so through de-spatialized “niches of intimacy.”

Grégoire Le Gall is a PhD student at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.