Displaced People Break Myths About Russian Language In Ukraine

While it is important that many displaced by the war in Ukraine have started new businesses and lives after leaving the occupied territories - but it is also more important to feel welcomed and at home in the new environments.

For beauty salon owners Zhenya and Ruslan, from Sevastopol, life has turned out unexpectedly pleasant. With absolutely none of the frightful stories portrayed in Russian media being accurate about Russian speakers in Lviv.

"Things are not as scary as they show on TV," Zhenya explained. "We speak Russian everywhere and that is OK. No one beats us up. For the year I have lived in Lviv... no one has ever reprimanded me for speaking Russian. Nothing of the sort."

As at the 23 March 2015 the UN estimated that there are 1,178,000 IDPs in Ukraine. For several months a team of Hromadske journalists traveled around Ukraine, from Sloviansk to Lviv, in search of stories of those who were left without their homes because of the war and the annexation. This the third story of part 2 in the Displaced series, a project about the lives of internally displaced persons in Ukraine from the Donbas region and Crimea.

// Hromadske with the support of the Thomson Foundation.