The hipster bar of Donetsk moves lock, stock and cocktails to Kiev

KIEV, Ukraine — A year ago, the Spletni bar in Donetsk’s city center was a trendy lounge popular with students, young professionals and the hip IT crowd of eastern Ukraine’s most affluent city.

It was a place where the owner, Yevgeny Vasili, mixed cocktails behind the bar and addressed his regular clients — of which there were dozens — by their first name. The bar’s laid-back and familiar atmosphere was a stark contrast to the more formal, expensive establishments that made up the bulk of Donetsk’s bars and restaurants.

In many ways, Spletni (Russian for “gossip”) exemplified Donetsk’s growing young middle class, which at the time was slowing making its mark in the economy of a region of Ukraine better known historically for its coal mines and steel mills than for its startups and software designers.

“By Wednesday night, all our tables were booked for the weekend. It was standing room only at the bar after that,” said Vasili, 34. “I wanted the bar to be like the bars I had visited in Europe and elsewhere, where people felt like everyone was their friend, including the staff.”

Things changed drastically in April 2014, however. Russian-backed separatists seized local government buildings across the region and declared the Donetsk People’s Republic independent from Ukraine.

Conversations inside the loungelike basement bar intensified as the rebel hold over Donetsk strengthened. The politics of the conflict started to divide friendships formed over hookah pipes and whiskeys. Those who favored Kiev’s choice of a European tilt left the rebel-held city out of fear of reprisal from the pro-Russian armed groups.

“One day in June 2014, not a single customer came in, and that’s when I decided to close for good,” Vasili said.

Fast-forward nine months, and he is sitting in an exact replica of his former Donetsk bar, relocated and reassembled in a similar underground space down the street from the Taras Shevchenko National University in central Kiev. He is surrounded by former customers from Donetsk, who slouch into the same black and purple leather sofas they once knew and eat burgers off the bar’s funky plates made of shellacked slices of wood.

Vasili’s resilience is typical of a generation of young former Donetsk residents whose flexibility and resolve to restart and rebuild themselves in another city has pitted them against an older generation of Ukrainians, whose nostalgia for the Soviet Union made them receptive to the Kremlin-sponsored propaganda blamed, in part, for the separatist uprising.

Success stories like Vasili’s are in stark contrast to those of hundreds of thousands of other eastern Ukrainians whose evacuation from the rebel-held territories has been forced by a military conflict that has destroyed the regional economy and killed more than 6,000 people. Officially, there are more than 1 million internally displaced Ukrainians, many of them living in cramped temporary housing such as summer tourist hotels.

Hundreds of thousands of Donetsk transplants never officially registered with the Ukrainian government because the do not consider themselves refugees. In their words, they simply moved from one city to another under unfortunate circumstances.

Alesya Bolot, a communications director at Izolyatsiya, a cultural center that, like Spletni, was a popular venue for Donetsk’s creative community. The center occupied space in a Soviet-era factory’s sprawling campus, where it held master classes in the arts, hosted artists in residence and organized lectures and seminars on topics such as media arts and hacking.

In June of last year, armed rebels seized the center. They kicked out the remaining employees and destroyed much of the center’s art collection. The former center is now being used as a prison and storage facility for rebel battalions.

Bolot, 27, like Vasili, packed up her things from her Donetsk apartment and moved to Kiev. She and other employees of Izolyatsiya are re-establishing the arts center in a former shipbuilding factory on the bank of the Dniepr River in Kiev.

“For our generation, it’s been easy to find something for ourselves in Kiev, but of course, it’s harder for our parents,” said Bolot, whose parents still live in a small city on the border of rebel-held territory. “We weren’t as afraid to take risks as they were. It’s not as scary for us.”

Like Spletni, Izolyatsiya is a common denominator among the young Donetsk transplants, a position the center’s staff is trying to use to reconnect Kiev’s exiled eastern Ukrainian community. Last month they hosted an event with dozens of other former Donetsk and Luhansk residents and announced the opening of a Donbass studies center at Izolyatsiya. (The Donbass is the industrial eastern region comprising Donetsk and Luhansk.)