June 6, 2025

Report by BEARR Trustee Sam Thorne – 24 May 2025

Talk topic: Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East

Speaker: Professor Victoria Donovan

In conversation with: Ross Gill, BEARR Chair

The BEARR Trust marked the launch of the new Ukraine Community Resilience Fund with a special online event on 8 May with Victoria Donovan, Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies at the University of St Andrews and author of Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East.

In conversation with BEARR Chair Ross Gill, Professor Donovan discussed the diverse cultural history of eastern Ukraine, the work of archivists and activists to preserve and share this history, and the vital role played by local organisations to support their communities in the face of war that has been going on in the region since 2014.

Around 40 people attended the event online, with all proceeds contributing to the Ukraine Community Resilience Fund. A recording is available to watch on BEARR’s YouTube channel here.

Ross Gill opened the event by explaining the purposes of the Ukraine Community Resilience Fund, which aims to support community-based organisations in Ukraine which have been the backbones of their communities before and during the war, and will continue to be so in the future. The new fund replaces the Emergency Appeal for Ukraine and Moldova, which BEARR launched in 2022 and closed in April 2025, as we shift our focus from emergency relief to long-term support. In total, the Emergency Appeal raised £572,000, all of which has been disbursed to 74 organisations in Ukraine and Moldova.

The Ukraine Community Resilience Fund will continue to provide small grants to local organisations that offer mental health support, integration initiatives, and practical recovery projects – helping communities not only survive but rebuild stronger. Ross announced that the new fund had already raised around £50,000 since launching in April. BEARR funds are needed more than ever by our partners, as agencies such as USAID reduce their support to Ukraine. Donations can be made to the fund via the BEARR website here.

Ross then introduced Professor Donovan, who is Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global Postsocialisms at the University of St Andrews. Her current research investigates entangled colonialisms and extractivist politics with a focus on Ukraine’s east. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia (2019) and a co-author of Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas (2022). Her latest book Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East was published by Daunt Books Publishing in April 2025.

Professor Donovan described how Life in Spite of Everything originated from her discovery of historical links between her home region of South Wales and Eastern Ukraine, where Welsh miners played an integral role in the development of Donbas industry between the 1860s and the Russian Revolution in 1917. In the book, she expands on the diverse ‘colonial entanglements’ that have shaped the region and explores their legacy on the people and landscapes, with the help of local cultural historians and activists. You can read more about Life in Spite of Everything in a separate book review on the BEARR website here.

As well as discussing the book, Professor Donovan talked about the strength of the civil society organisations she came across during her research in Eastern Ukraine. She described a ‘feeling of existential necessity’ to self-organise, particularly after the Russian occupation of parts of the Donbas region in 2014: a need to create social spaces where people could articulate a different kind of Ukrainian identity and resist the powerful cultural forces coming from the direction of Russia. At the same time, local organisations had to learn how to work with international aid agencies, as capital flowed into the region post-2014 from USAID, the European Union and other major funders.

Professor Donovan noted that while local organisations had become fluent in the language of international aid – for example, in making funding applications – they were also successful in preserving their own agency, ensuring that funding was directed into projects that were most needed and meaningful to their communities. She was therefore supportive of the BEARR approach of funding grassroots organisations to design and deliver initiatives that meet local needs. One of the organisations she had worked with – Freefilmers in Mariupol – had themselves benefited from BEARR funding, a project described in a recent Substack article by Anna Bowles.

Ross ended the talk by thanking Professor Donovan for her insights into the complex history and layered identities of the Donbas region – and her thoughts on reinforcing the agency of local community-based organisations. He also thanked donors for their support to communities in Ukraine via their donations to BEARR. We will continue to report on the impacts of the Ukraine Community Resilience Fund as we start to disburse funds from it to our local partners over the coming weeks and months.