DONETSK, Ukraine — The 28-year-old accountant with a bob of chestnut hair would dash from work to meet her wide circle of friends at bars, restaurants and dinner parties. “It’s not how you spend your time, but who you spend it with,” Irina Filatova, the accountant, said of her humming social life.

That now seems a long time ago, before Ms. Filatova and about three million other people in eastern Ukraine were plunged into the strange vortex of former Soviet politics known as a frozen zone.

Governed by Russian-backed separatists, the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk have no patron, neither the Western-leaning government in Kiev nor Moscow. Instead, they exist in a state of limbo that for Ms. Filatova, her friends and many others, has proved both spiritually and economically debilitating.

And as hard as life has become for Ms. Filatova, others are afflicted far more by Ukraine’s civil war and its aftermath, the subject of a New York Times virtual reality film about children, resilience and survival. Many live in the charred ruins of houses hit by rockets and artillery. Others are homeless, with the sharp winter winds of the steppes beginning to bite.