2014 year. I'm 11 years old. In my school No. 21, "March 8th" is celebrated, Ukrainian songs are playing, and in the air there is a feeling that something is coming that will  take away the opportunity to sing in Ukrainian soon. You can not confuse this anxiety with anything, because it envelops your consciousness very quickly. I clearly remember how from March to May, when the separatists were already freely walking around the city with weapons, in our school at solemn events they often sang the song of the Scryabin band "Your Our Own Country". We held on to this song as if it were a meaning that should preserve our right to be Ukraine, and only one thing sounded in our heads: "You are your own country! Get your head in order!". But there was no order, neither in the head nor in the city, because the city was turning into a victim of the "russian world" experiment, where people lost touch with reality and began to absorb propaganda, which later played an evil joke on all of us. Representatives of local authorities at the time, or rather collaborators, incited people, organized paid rallies and hung russian rags on administrative buildings, in one word, they called russian hell on Ukrainian soil.
April. The SBU Administration is seized, where the separatists took possession of a large number of weapons. From there, they began to record appeals with the demand to hold a referendum on the creation of the so-called "Luhansk People's Republic". The residents of Luhansk, who watched these actions of armed masked people, did not fully understand what this process could lead to and naively hoped that life under the "people's" government would be much brighter and clearer. All this arbitrariness was observed by the law enforcement agencies, which did not react in a right way either.
Parallel to all these pro-russian sentiments, Luhansk residents, who were against secession under any conditions, went to rallies for the preservation of unity. On April 19, almost half a thousand Ukrainians came to a rally for the unity of Ukraine, who believed in preserving sovereignty to the last, even when strong clashes with a pro-russian group of people began. And according to the tradition of russian propaganda, as you can guess, "activists" with tricolors were mostly brought there by buses, because at the beginning of the rallies, their number was not very large. Actually, the focus of the propaganda was mostly directed at what some Luhansk residents wanted to hear: "The Verkhovna Rada does not hear us", "Luhansk and Donetsk feed Ukraine, but they themselves suffer from poverty", "The new Kyiv authorities are the enemy, and Russia will help us get stronger" and further down the list. russian technologies made people believe that Donbas cannot "prosper" without russia.
May. The next stage in this propaganda campaign is the сonnection of russian tv channels. I remember these feelings: you wake up in the morning, out of habit you want to turn on the Ukrainian "New channel", and instead you see "russia-24". That morning we woke up under occupation, because it is through information that Russia extends its claws. Also, a pseudo-referendum was being held in May. And then the so-called consequences of the "russian peace" begin.
June. On June 1, pro-Russian militants launched a several-day assault on the border post in Luhansk. Although the first attack on border guard units was carried out on May 7. Eyewitnesses claimed that the Luhansk border squad remained the only state institution in Luhansk over which the Ukrainian flag was still hanging at the beginning of the summer of 2014. In general, I remembered this month by the endless air raids, battles near the city, a series of explosions near the Luhansk Regional State Administration, checkpoints of militants near my house, who also set up "grads" near residential buildings. It was this month that I learned for the first time what it was like to hide in the basement, and until this moment to run towards it, covering my head with my hands. It was a difficult month. That's when I left home. I had to go to Lysychansk, and then to Bilolutsk, because near Lysychansk there was also shelling every night. And only after Bilotsk, on July 18, I went to Kyiv with my mother and a small suitcase of summer clothes.
In Kyiv, we lived with an acquaintance’s place, where, in addition to us, several people stayed in the one room. My mother and I slept on the same mattress and before going to sleep we asked ourselves what to do next in a completely foreign city. In August, we found volunteers who helped us find a room in the suburbs of Kyiv for a good price, and they also gave us 4 plates and warm clothes. By the way, we still have these plates, because I can't describe how happy I was at that time, when we didn't have anything "of our own" except a small suitcase. Already in September, I went to a new school, thinking that I would study there until October at the most, but no.
And only in 2015 I went to Luhansk for a week to visit my grandparents, again in 2016, but for the last time. The city became completely foreign and distant from me. People got used to living under a fictional flag there very quickly. The main point of this city became survival, but not prosperity.