For a frontline village on the demarcation line in Donbas, Pavlopil stands out.

The former and current leadership of the OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine, not to mention the German and French ambassadors, are well known to village head Sergey Shapkin. Conflict negotiators come to study local experience. It is here, close to Mariupol, the largest city in the Ukraine-controlled part of Donbas, that the Ukrainian military can pull back without facing protests by local residents.

In 2014, when the war in eastern Ukraine began, Pavlopil found itself caught between two opposing checkpoints. “We were only visited by military patrols then, but we managed to come to an agreement and set up a timetable, to avoid gunfire in residential areas,” Shapkin tells me. “The Ukrainian forces did their shopping in our shop in the morning, and the ‘other lot’ did theirs after lunch.”

Pavlopil lived in this state until December 2015. That year, Shapkin managed to negotiate Pavlopil’s move out of the “neutral territory” - the land which divides territory controlled by Ukraine and the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic”. Ukrainian forces moved slowly over the river into the steppe, crossing just over two kilometres into the other side.

Today, ambulances and repairmen still don’t travel to Pavlopil - home to 420 people, 45 of whom are children - the surrounding fields are mostly mined. But while this hard everyday reality passes most residents by nowadays, they’re also finding ways to make life work.

Mines in the allotment

“To get to work by seven am, everyone had to be on the bus by six,” Pavlopil resident Leonid Krainyuk explains. “A checkpoint was set up at the start of the war. There was always congestion there in the mornings and it became really difficult to get to work – sometimes impossible. Some younger people started trying to move from their villages and rent accommodation in Mariupol, while the rest looked for work locally.”

On the other side of Krainyuk’s fence, immediately across the road is an allotment area, and beyond - Ukrainian army positions and minefields. Leonid’s neighbours have left, and the village head has given him permission to farm two plots. He doesn’t have much livestock now, just goats and chickens: he slaughtered his turkeys before New Year.