Those who have lived and studied the area describe it as an independent and tough industrial center that has remained suspicious of outside forces for decades. But the waves of conflict there since 2014 have reshaped and injured its cities, and it is along the line of contact that both the Ukrainian and Russian armies have dug deeper – creating a familiar but unpredictable new phase of war.
“Hardly independent”
Chimneys, factories and coal mines have adorned the Donbass landscape for decades, and since the founding of its two major cities – Donetsk by a Welsh blacksmith in 1869 and Luhansk seven decades earlier by a Scottish industrialist – soul of the area. The name Donbas is in itself a portmanteau of the Donets coal basin, and for most of the 20th century played a major role as an industrial hearth of the Soviet Union, pumping huge quantities of coal. “The Soviet Union has intensively developed the Donbas as an industrial center,” said Markian Dobczansky, a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. “It was a place that set the pace for Soviet industrialization.” It was also part of an “extremely high-risk industrial production and repression,” Dobczansky added. “Terror was present under Soviet rule. The repression took place throughout the Soviet Union, but it took place strongly in Donbas.” Suspicions, arrests and theatrical trials were intense. The rise of steel and metal construction, the construction of a railway and the development of a shipping industry in the port of Mariupol have diversified Donbas beyond its roots in coal mining. But in the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the region’s economic power has shrunk. “In the 1990s, Donbas saw the floor shrink financially,” Rory Finnin, an associate professor of Ukrainian studies at Cambridge University, told CNN. Declining living standards and rampant poverty plagued the region during its initial transition from communism, Finnin said, and Donbas is often likened to the Rust Belt areas of the United States, where once prosperous heart sites find it difficult to adapt. But a recovery in wealth followed the turn of the century. Donbass remains the industrial center of Ukraine, praising the agricultural production of the rest of the country. While the prosperity of the region has been shaken, it does not have a stable characteristic of its inhabitants. The people of Donbass have and remain “hardly independent,” Finn said. “He walks to the rhythm of his own drum.” The long-term industrial attraction of the region attracted people from all over Eastern Europe in the last century and had strong social and economic ties with neighboring Russia as well as with the rest of Ukraine. Unlike much of central and western Ukraine, which had historically changed hands between various European empires, the Donbas spent most of the previous millennium under Russian control. In the country’s only post-Soviet census in 2001, just over half of Donbass’s population were Ukrainians and a third were Russians. Russian is by far the most widely spoken language in Donbass, in contrast to western Ukraine. But the country as a whole has a tradition of multilingualism and the link between language and national identity is weak there, experts say. The cities of Donbas are “far from the metropolitan centers, (and) far from the big cities” in central and western Ukraine, Dobczansky said. “People could go to Donbass and get lost.” Western influence, pro-European policy was not formally embraced in Donbas as it was in western Ukraine. This sense of disconnection from the capital Kyiv and other metropolitan centers has created a huge collection of local movements and was the setting in which pro-Russian separatists sought to take control after the annexation of Crimea by Moscow. However, Finnin and others warn that “it is important not to believe that Donbass is pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian,” an idea that has been ruthlessly supported by the Kremlin since 2014, but rejected by experts. In an exclusive CNN poll conducted by Savanta / ComRes shortly before the Russian invasion began, people in the eastern part of Ukraine, including Donbass, largely rejected the idea that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people “and completely disagreed that the two states should become one country. Less than one in five people there felt that way, compared to about a third of Russians who did, showing a lack of desire to change national faith despite the region’s long-standing cultural ties to Russia. “(Pro-Russian) autonomy before 2014 was a clearly minority position,” and there was no organized movement, Dobczansky said. Polls – and the region’s own vote in favor of independence in Ukraine’s 1991 referendum – confirmed Donbass’s desire to leave behind Soviet-era beliefs. “People would have a very strong sense of being a miner or a metalworker or of being in the proletariat,” he added. “People (also) had the feeling that it was part of Ukrainian democracy, but the idea was that Donbass transcended national identities.”
What does Donbas mean to Putin?
Despite its independence from the rest of Ukraine in 1991, Donbass has retained a place in the soul of the Russian leadership. A famous Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 was named Donbass “the heart of Russia”, depicting the area as an instrument striking with boats spanning the entire Russian Empire. Before that, the region was part of the concept of “Novorossiya”, or New Russia, a term given to territories to the west of which the Russian Empire had expansionist ideas. Cities like Luhansk and Donetsk are historically “places where (the Russians) could see a specific version of themselves,” Finin said. And this historical picture could still remain in the worldview of Putin himself, experts suggest. Observers have often suggested that Putin’s desired end game is to rebuild the Soviet Union, in which he first rose through the ranks. Anna Makantzou, a former director for Russia at the US National Security Council, suggested last month that Putin “believes he is like the tsars”, the imperial dynasties that have ruled Russia for centuries, “potentially called by God to to control and restore the glory of the Russian Empire “. But such a project could not have been undertaken without an attempt to retake Donbass, given its emotional resonance as an industrial backbone of the Russian Empire. “It is symbolically very important; Donbass supplied the whole of the Soviet Union with raw materials,” Dobczansky said. It is in this context that Putin has refocused his tragic invasion of the region where his conflict with Ukraine began eight years ago. U.S. intelligence reports suggest Putin has re-focused his war strategy on achieving some sort of victory in the east by May 9, Russia’s “Victory Day,” which marks the Nazi surrender to World War II. “There is a good chance Putin will move now to effectively divide Ukraine; that will give him enough to declare victory at home and reassure his critics that this was a bad invasion,” said Samir Puri, a senior partner in urban. Security and Hybrid Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which worked as a ceasefire observer in Donbass between 2014 and 2015. “Conquering Donbas (would be) a consolation prize, because Kyiv is now out of Russia’s military control, but it is a good consolation prize,” Puri said.
Eight years of conflict
Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of Donbass by Russian-backed rebels in 2014 led to a sharp cessation of a period of growing prosperity in the region. War broke out in 2014 when Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings in cities and towns across eastern Ukraine. The fierce fighting left parts of Luhansk and Donetsk in the hands of Russian-backed separatists. The separatist-held areas of Donbass became known as Luhansk and the Donetsk People’s Republic. The Ukrainian government in Kyiv claims that the two regions are, in fact, temporarily under Russian occupation. The self-proclaimed democracies have not been recognized by any government except Russia and its close ally Syria, and the Ukrainian government has consistently refused to talk directly to each other’s leaders. But on the ground, living in conflict has become a way of life. “People in eastern Ukraine lived in a twilight zone – they were in the front line of a geopolitical extension and there was a sense of helplessness,” said Puri, who spent time on either side of the line of contact while observing the ceasefire. More than 14,000 people have been killed in the Donbas conflict since 2014, including 3,000 civilians involved in the conflict. Ukraine says that since 2014, nearly 1.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes, with more than half of the internally displaced people living in the Ukrainian-held Donbas region and about 160,000 relocating to the wider area. Kiev. Russia, meanwhile, has tried aggressively to incite separatist sentiment in the region, which it has since cited as an excuse for invading. Russian passports have been offered to residents since 2019, and messages to the Kremlin in both Russia and separatist-controlled areas of Donbass have greatly reinforced the idea that Russians are being targeted. “In propaganda since 2014, Donbass has become a sacrificial lamb in Russian narratives,” Dobczansky said. “It’s the place where the Russians have cultivated a cult …
