Abstract
In March 2022, President Zelensky awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine” posthumously to Major Ștepan Choban, a Suhoi-27 pilot killed in action during the first week of Russia’s war against Ukraine. His gallantry in combat and sacrifice became international news as printed and electronic media in the neighbouring countries of Romania and Moldova published tributes, highlighting the fact that he was a member of Ukraine’s Romanian or Moldovan minority respectively. Major Stepan Choban (Ștefan Ciobanu in Romanian) was born in Dolynske (Anadol in Romanian), a village in the Odesa oblast located at the intersection of the Ukrainian, Romanian, and Moldovan borders. Most of its inhabitants self-identified as Moldovans when Ukraine held its last census more than 20 years ago. However, dry statistics do not convey the whole picture, the much more complex realities of the Ukrainian-Romanian-Moldovan borderlands, and their shifting map of spaces and identities resulting from the crosscutting of political borders and conceptual boundaries based on ethnicity, language, and shared history.