For years, we believed we could live as both Ukrainians and Russians. Not any more | Artem Mazhulin

Growing up near the border there was no physical barrier. Now war has forced citizens of both sides to choose their identities

Where do you call home? I've travelled and lived in so many places that the question sometimes confused me. Being eastern Ukrainian doesn't make it easy to look for your roots, either.

Two world wars, the Holodomor, Stalin's red terror, the collapse of the USSR, decades of isolation from the outside world. But I know from tracing my family tree - as best I could - back to the 18th century that the place I was born into is my ancestral home. A small town called Dvorichna and the villages around it in Kharkiv Oblast, only 19 miles from the Russian border. Since the war, that home has become a frontline, my parents' house has become a lair for the occupiers, my school has become a shooting range and my entire village has become a battlefield.

Artem Mazhulin is a Ukrainian journalist based in Kyiv

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