Now There's 'Little Donetsk' In Kyiv

Forced to flee from Donetsk, bar owner Zhenya rebuilt an exact model of his Donetsk bar in Kyiv's university district, called "Splenti", 'gossip' in Russian. Realizing that his bar won't be able to survive in the war-torn separatist capital, Zhenya gathered up what belongings he could fit in his truck and left.

He explained; "We clearly understand that we are here for a long time... We are trying to make Kyiv our home city."

The bar is a mirror image of his old bar back in Donetsk, with staff even made up of IDP's from the region - the atmosphere is that of friendly camaraderie that Zhenya made successful back in Donetsk.

"We tried to buy as many things as possible that are handmade... the interior intermingles with what we had back there," he explained.

"So a person entering this place tends to feel at home, with an atmosphere that is familiar. Especially for IDPs."

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.