Michael Gentile is Professor of human geography at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo. He has conducted research in different countries of the former Soviet Union and has published extensively on various aspects of these countries’ urban social geographies. His recent work has touched upon residential segregation, gentrification, geopolitical identities, labour migration, and socialist-era housing allocation practice, with his latest publications figuring in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Post-Soviet Affairs, Urban Geography and in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Until very recently, his research field base was in the Ukrainian city of Luhansk, which is one of the epicentres of the ongoing Donbas conflict.