Life in the Grey Zones – Reports from Europe’s breakaway republics

'Grey zones' now litter the map of Eastern Europe. With the Russian annexation of Crimea and military intervention in Donetsk and Luhansk, Europe has added in 2015 three new unrecognised entities to an already crowded field. With these latest additions, there are in 2016 seven unrecognised entities in the eastern neighbourhood, the other four being Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh.

The ECFR asked resident journalists to write about life in their region, recounting how people have coped with war, isolation, and often corruption. Authors share personal stories from their communities about how people live and work and what their hopes and fears are for the future. In this way, the ECFR hope to give an idea of what life is like in these isolated places and at the same time provide an insight into the likely future of the three newest unrecognised entities in Ukraine.

This is the first collection of a series dealing with unrecognised entities in the eastern neighbourhood. The next collection will look at policy aspects relating to the entities.