https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/12/12/nytfrontpage/INYT_frontpage_global.20210319.pdf

«When Myroslava, a 36-year-old construction manager, returned to her
hometown of Sviatohirsk in eastern
Ukraine last month, she expected to find
her house destroyed by shelling.
Her house was indeed heavily damaged, but she discovered something else
even more disturbing: Her neighbors,
who had stayed behind during the Russian occupation, had stolen furniture, insulation and roof tiles from her home
and a property she oversaw in town.
These were people she had grown up
with, she lamented. Worse, the looted
tiles were visible on the neighbor’s roof.
“Friends are not friends anymore,”
she said on a cold November day, her
brown hair tucked in a beanie and her
small frame wrapped in a winter coat.
“The neighbors are not neighbors. Relatives — a part of them aren’t relatives
anymore, because no one expected us to
come back.”
Similar anxieties have been playing
out among other residents of the town,
still mostly empty of people, ever since
Ukrainian forces liberated it in September. The Russians’ arrival over the summer imposed a litmus test of sorts for
Sviatohirsk and other tight-knit communities in Ukraine’s east, where the Russian church and Russian television have
for years promoted loyalty to Moscow.
As civilians who fled Sviatohirsk rejoin neighbors who stayed, residents
say they now eye one another with suspicion. And as a cold winter sets in, the
town remains divided — not by trench
lines and artillery, but by where people’s
allegiances lie: Moscow or Kyiv.
Suspicions run so high that residents
do not even agree which side, Russia or
Ukraine, is responsible for shelling that
struck various neighborhoods in the
city, damaging houses and killing several dozen people.
“No one is even letting it out — who he
stands for and all that,” said one resident, an older man who declined to provide his name. He was sitting beside a
warm steel stove at a makeshift coffee
shop called Bouchée that serves as de
facto neutral territory: a place where
both pro-Ukrainians and pro-Russians
can get a bite to eat undisturbed, as long
as they keep to themselves.
The town’s freshly installed local government recognizes the problem and
hopes that residents with pro-Russian
sentiments will eventually embrace
Kyiv, especially as conditions improve
after they have lived without power and
basic services during the occupation.
“The cellphone connection is working, the bread factory is working, the
Ukrainian post office is working,” said
Volodymyr Rybalkin, the head of the local military administration, who acts as
a sort of interim mayor. “I think that
even the people who knowingly stayed
under occupation, waiting for the socalled ‘Russian world’ will sooner or later understand how much they were mistaken.”
But that conversion will not be easy.
Even before the war, the presence of
the Monastery of the Caves — loyal to
the Russian Orthodox Church and considered one of the church’s five holiest»