Moscow has officially begun a "new phase" of its war in Ukraine, shifting its attention to the largely Russian-speaking Donbas. Prior to the February invasion, Russian proxies, who created pro-Moscow statelets, controlled around a third of the Donbas region. With striking prescience, novelist Andrey Kurkov explored the conflict from the perspective of a Ukrainian beekeeper who moves from the "grey zone" – the no-man’s-land between loyalist and separatist forces – to Crimea in his 2018 novel, "Grey Bees". He joined us for Perspective.
