Because the fighting is so ritualized, predictable and low-profile, civilian life is returning near the front lines, where war and peace coexist bizarrely and uneasily. I’ve seen a school that operates 500 feet from the front. Children are bused there along a narrow road through minefields. I’ve heard that another school was shelled earlier this month. The windows were blown out while 370 children were inside. Four days later, the glass was fixed and the classes resumed. War is war, but you’ve got to go to school.

I’ve seen people fishing and picnicking close to the front line, taking short breaks if shelling starts — if it “becomes loud,” as they say.

One man I met lives in his bathroom because it’s the only part of his house that has survived the shelling, which was most intense early in the war, in 2014 and 2015. Another man is rebuilding his house a mile from the Donetsk airport, where fighting reignites now and then. His house has taken five hits, but the foundation is O.K. and the owner is optimistic. “Why are you doing it?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I am an old man, and I have two daughters. I want to leave the house for them in good condition, but if I wait for the war to end I might not live that long.”

When I tell these stories, people ask if I still have family there. Yes, my family remains in Donetsk. What’s life like? It’s hard to explain. But I try:

When you think of war, you imagine terror, action and panicked people enduring bombings and shootings. There, it’s different. In downtown Donetsk, life looks pretty normal: hipster coffee shops, mothers pushing strollers, and in spring blossoming lilacs and roses.

But life is hard for other reasons.

Ukraine’s breakaway territory is the size of New York State, with about four million inhabitants facing impossible choices. Held hostage by opportunistic separatist authorities, they are simultaneously cast as outlaws by the Ukrainian government — as separatist sympathizers and disloyal citizens, whose sin was having been taken hostage. Even when they leave, as I did, accusations of treason and collaboration follow them.