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.”
