Elena Zaslavskaya – poet and author of children's stories – has changed her passport many times. He was born in the USSR, grew up in independent Ukraine, supported the struggle for the separation of Luhansk with the help of Moscow and already has a Russian passport, the country with which he identifies.. She is the poet of Luhansk and regularly goes to the front with other artists to harangue the troops fighting against kyiv. “We are a brigade of agitation, of traveling propaganda, through cities like Mariupol, Volnovaja or Donetsk,” he explains in a Moscow cafe during a short visit to the capital of his new (and old) country.

For Zaslavskaya, rhyming alongside the front is “a bittersweet experience”. Remember “the exhausted faces of the doctors, the pain of the wounded”. But “songs and poems lift people's spirits.”. “They are war poems, but not only: also love poems.”. His work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, English, Lithuanian and Bulgarian.

“My first poetry are Russian and Ukrainian lullabies”. Instead, his last 10 years of life have been an earthquake of blood and flags. It was in 2014 when he encountered the opposite of poetry: war. According to her point of view, Ukraine adopted a series of laws that she considers “discriminatory against the Russian language and population” and launched “a punitive operation against Donbas.”. In Luhansk, some did not support kyiv's policy, and the war hit almost every family.

Zaslavskaya supported the self-proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk with her art. Each of your trips is an adventure. “Sometimes there are no supports for the microphone and they screw it directly to the handle of a shovel, other times we run out of gas in the field and we have to ask the military for help; in the middle of the night we get lost on the road and then we go to at full speed in our car through a field where they are shooting,” he explains.

His poems were read for the first time in Spanish in 2015, with the conflict already underway: “In our wild fields / gray with ashes. / The prince's feather stalks turned black. / Together with us our enemies will fall. / To our plains, to the land of Donbas.”

“My work as a poet changed with the war. Before I never wrote about the conflict, because I couldn't imagine it. “Now I write about war and love.”. Her next project is Thirteen Secrets by Elena Zaslavskaya, illustrated by artist Olga Volkova and translated by Spanish students.

Elena is “sure” that if Russia had not launched its Special Military Operation, kyiv would have taken Donbas. “We had no alternative.”

He traveled to Mariupol in May. He admits that, although “a lot has been rebuilt, in the area where the Azov [fighters] were, there is still a lot to do.”. Some days the sky thunders; Others, you can only hear the Lugán River passing by. And Elena continues making poetry. “You sleep, my dear… / My soul flies towards you / In a dandelion / And it is distant and white / This subtle vision / The night is around / Longing steals the heart / On a parachute / I fly through the skies / To kiss your eyes / And say: 'I love you.'”