San Francisco Frontiers - Ukraine's Donbas refugees don't want to be sacrificed for peace

Forced to flee twice -- first when Russian-backed separatists took control of Lugansk in 2014, and then again as Moscow's army invaded her new home city of Siverskodonetsk -- she is outraged at the idea Kyiv should give the land up in any peace deal.

"I am just furious because they want to give away my home again," she told AFP.

Moscow is demanding Kyiv abandon the territory and has called for international recognition that eastern Ukraine is part of Russia.

US President Donald Trump has suggested Kyiv will have to make such concessions if the war is to end.

"Why doesn't Trump give Alaska to Russia instead?" Tereshchenko, a 24-year-old journalist, said angrily, adding that giving up the land would be an insult to the thousands killed trying to defend and reclaim it.

Holding up a huge bunch of keys to her parents' and grandmothers' apartments, an abandoned garage and country house, she lamented that they "no longer open anything".

Of the more than 10 million Ukrainians forced to flee their homes amid the Russian invasion, some 3.7 million stayed in Ukraine.

- 'Stolen territory' -

More than three and a half years after Russia invaded, with tens of thousands killed and much of the country's east and south decimated, some war-exhausted Ukrainians are prepared to lose land in exchange for peace.

The proportion of those willing to make such a deal stood at 38 percent in June, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) -- up from just 10 percent three years earlier.

But among those forced to flee the east, most oppose any concessions, KIIS director Anton Grushetskyi said.

A UN survey found 57 percent of those from the Donetsk region, which Russia claims as its own and is fighting to capture entirely, want to return.

"Those who propose agreeing that stolen territories, property, and human lives now belong to the thief are actually suggesting disregarding law and justice," Konstyantin Reutsky, also from Lugansk, told AFP.

As for many who left, Russian-installed authorities expropriated his abandoned home.

A former human rights activist, he joined the army in 2022 after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

"Those who propose (territorial concessions) are not our friends. They are accomplices of the robber," he said.

For another Donbas refugee, 58-year-old Yevgen Sosnovsky, it is the sea air and the smell of fumes pumped out by the steelworks of his native Mariupol that he misses.

He had never left until Russian forces invaded in 2022.

They destroyed almost the entire city in a weeks-long siege at the start of the war that Kyiv and independent rights groups say killed several thousand civilians.

An amateur photographer, Sosnovsky hid rolls of film from the Russian soldiers. The rest of his belongings burned, along with his home.

The photos depict how the streets of the sprawling coastal city became filled with corpses.

One picture showed a blooming garden -- the place where he buried his brother-in-law.

"You had one task every day -- just to live and survive," he said, recounting the siege with fixed eyes and a trembling face.

- Keys to their homes -

Sosnovsky has come to terms with the idea that Ukraine might accept Russian control of occupied territory.

But he said Kyiv shouldn't cede land it still controls.

Despite having been in Kyiv for more than three years, Sosnovsky still struggles over being cut-off from his native Mariupol.

"One day, I'll feel at home here," he said, "maybe."

Trying to put down new roots, Maryna bought a new dacha (country cottage) to the west of Kyiv.

But she still clutches the chain of keys to her previous life in the east.

"They remind me of home. They are what keep me going."

E.Cruz--SFF