During its first year, the war was active; locals were forced to flee or hide from intense artillery shelling in basements. Then came one and another hasty peace deals that did little to solve the conflict itself but halted the worst of the violence by implementing cease-fires and the withdrawal of heavy artillery.

As the conflict’s intensity abated, however, so did interest in the fate of the people who continue to endure it. Yet some six million people still reside in the war-affected areas: about two million in areas run by the government and about four million in areas controlled by the separatists. (These are my estimates, based on various government statistics.) Actual hostilities, shelling or fighting are now rare. But residents’ lives have been upended by the indirect consequences of the war: damaged infrastructure, authorities’ neglect of the forsaken territories, communities arbitrarily divided by the front line.

Marinka, for example, is an immediate suburb of Donetsk city, and several of its streets lead directly into it. But the nominal battlefront cuts across them: Whereas Donetsk is under the control of separatists, Marinka is under the government’s. There has been no cooking or heating gas in Marinka since 2014 partly because of damage to pipelines, partly because the distribution station is stranded in a no man’s land between enemy positions. It would be possible to build a new station in a safe place and reroute supplies, but the authorities haven’t bothered: Who wants to invest money in a locality that may be shelled or occupied again?

Marinka also used to share water pipes with Donetsk, but hostilities made it impossible to keep supplies going through the front line. So the town was reconnected to another source — only that one doesn’t include filtration. Residents report that the water from the tap is green, smells like a river and sometimes carries algae and little fish.