I first visited the Ukrainian east, often referred to as Donbas, in the summer of 2019. I was travelling to the chemical-making city of Sievierodonetsk for a summer school that I’d helped to organise, and was taking the overnight train from Kyiv to the nearest railway station in the east in Lysychansk. On boarding the train, I found that I was sharing a cabin with two women from what was already terrorist-occupied Luhansk. The women insisted that I have a glass of the brandy they’d brought along for the journey. They’d had a couple of drinks already and talked loudly over each other for my benefit about how good life was in the occupied zone. ‘There are traffic jams everywhere,’ one told me, painting the city as a populated and thriving urban metropolis, ‘the cinemas are full every night.’ I excused myself after a while and went down the train in search of my friend Dima, whose family had been displaced from Luhansk five years earlier, when Russian military and fighting groups had invaded the region. Dima listened to my anecdote about the tipsy women in silence. Then he told me that he sometimes dreamed of his family home in the occupied city, and of the now surely overgrown basketball hoop in his backyard, where he had played as a child.
When I woke the next morning, the skyline, visible through the crack in the blind, was distinctively flat. I went out into the corridor, where Dima and a couple of others in our party were already up, to get a better view of the steppe landscape. The region’s iconic coal slag heaps, known asterykony in Ukrainian, from the Frenchterricones, whizzed regularly past the window. I asked Dima if he’d ever climbed any of these industrial pyramids. ‘Of course,’ he answered, ‘everybody who grew up here has. We can climb one together if you like.’ I would climb my firstterykon in Myrnohrad two years later in July 2021. On the outskirts of this coal-mining
