No man’s land is the ground between opposing forces. This issue tells us what happens there.

Peter Pomerantsev reports from Ukraine’s Donbas region, examining the surreal nature of propaganda in the war zone; Peregrine Hodson’s lyrical text describes the post-traumatic stress that followed his experience of war in Afghanistan; Philip Ó Ceallaigh tells the devastating story of the Communist destruction of old Bucharest; and Rachel Cusk meditates on silence as a familial weapon of war.

Plus: A.M. Homes remembers her late friend, the writer David Rakoff.