A Russian victory in the region would terrify the West, but it could save Putin’s military goals, while a defeat could solidify his invasion as a historic failure. In any case, it is almost certain that it will further devastate Donbass, a historically and culturally significant place whose proximity to Russia dictates much of its turbulent existence.
Those who have lived and studied the region describe it as an independent and crude center of industry that has remained suspicious of outside forces for decades.
But the waves of conflict there since 2014 have changed and hurt its cities, and it is on the line of contact that the Ukrainian and Russian military are at their deepest – creating a familiar but unpredictable new phase of the war.
“Fiercely independent”
Chimneys, factories and coal deposits have littered the Donbass landscape for decades, and since its two major cities were founded – Donetsk by a Welsh ironworker in 1869 and Luhansk seven decades earlier by a Scottish industrialist – industry is the lifeblood. of the region.
The name Donbass is in itself a portmanteau of the Donetsk coal basin, and for most of the 20th century it played a huge role as the industrial center of the Soviet Union, pumping huge quantities of coal.
“The Soviet Union is intensively developing Donbass as an industrial center,” said Markian Dobchanski, a fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. “It was a place that set the pace of Soviet industrialization.
It was also a place of “extremely high stakes in industrial production and repression,” Dobchanski added. “Terror was under Soviet rule. Repression took place throughout the Soviet Union, but it was intense in Donbass.” There were many suspicions, arrests and demonstrations.
The rise of steel and metal production, the creation of a railway line and the development of the shipping industry in the port city of Mariupol have diversified Donbass beyond the roots of coal mining.
But in the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the region’s economic power has shrunk. “In the 1990s, Donbass dropped out economically,” Rory Finin, an associate professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Cambridge, told CNN.
Declining living standards and growing poverty have hit the region during its initial transition from communism, Finin said, and Donbass now often resembles the United States’ Rust Belt regions, where once thriving central cities struggled to adapt. But the rise of wealth followed the beginning of the century; Donbass remains the industrial epicenter of Ukraine, complementing the agricultural production of the rest of the country.
While prosperity in the region fluctuates, a sustainable feature of its inhabitants does not. The people of Donbass have and remain “fiercely independent,” Finin said. “He marches to the beat of his own drum.”
The region’s long-standing industrial attraction has attracted people from all over Eastern Europe over the last century and has strong social and economic ties with neighboring Russia as well as the rest of Ukraine. Unlike much of central and western Ukraine, which has historically swapped hands between different European empires, Donbass has spent most of the last millennium under Russian control.
In the country’s only post-Soviet census in 2001, just over half of Donbass’s population consisted of ethnic Ukrainians and a third of ethnic Russians. Russian is, by some distance, the most widely spoken language in Donbass, unlike in western Ukraine. But the country as a whole has a tradition of multilingualism, and the link between language and national identity there is weak, experts say.
The cities of Donbass are “far from the city centers, (and) far from the big cities” in central and western Ukraine, Dobchansky said. “People could flee to Donbass and get lost.” Western-influenced pro-European policies are not generally accepted in Donbass, as in western Ukraine.
This sense of secession from the capital, Kyiv, and other metropolitan centers has spawned a huge collection of local movements and was the backdrop against which pro-Russian separatists sought to take control after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
But Finin and others warn that “it is important not to succumb to the notion that Donbass is pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian,” a concept that the Kremlin has been tirelessly promoting since 2014, but has been debunked by experts.
In an exclusive CNN survey conducted by Savanta / ComRes shortly before the Russian invasion, people in Ukraine’s easternmost region, which includes Donbass, largely rejected the idea that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people” and disagreed that the two countries must become one state.
Less than one in five people there felt that way, compared to about a third of Russians who did so, demonstrating a reluctance to change national allegiance despite the region’s long-standing cultural ties to Russia.
“(Pro-Russian) separatism before 2014 was clearly a minority position,” and there was no organized movement, Dobchanski said. Opinion polls – and the region’s own vote on Ukraine’s independence in the 1991 referendum – confirmed Donbass’s desire to abandon Soviet-era allegiance.
“People would have a very strong feeling of being a miner, or a metalworker, or being in the proletariat,” he added. “People (also) felt that they were part of the Ukrainian republic, but the idea was that Donbass transcends national identities.
What does Donbass mean for Putin?
Despite its transition to independence along with the rest of Ukraine in 1991, Donbass retained its place in the psyche of the Russian leadership.
A famous Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 called Donbass “the heart of Russia,” depicting the region as a beating organ with vessels stretching across the Russian Empire. Previously, the region was part of the concept of “New Russia” or New Russia, a term given to territories to the west from which the Russian Empire had expansionist ideas.
Cities like Luhansk and Donetsk have historically been “places that (Russians) can see a certain version of themselves,” Finin said.
And this historical image can still be preserved in Putin’s own worldview, experts suggest.
Observers often speculate that Putin’s desired end is to restore the Soviet Union in which he rose for the first time. Anna Makanju, a former director of Russia’s National Security Council, suggested last month that Putin “believes he’s like kings,” the imperial dynasties that have ruled Russia for centuries, “potentially called by God to control and restore glory.” of the Russian Empire. “
But such a project could not be carried out without efforts to regain Donbass, given its emotional resonance as the industrial backbone of the Russian Empire. “This is symbolically very important; “Donbass has supplied the entire Soviet Union with raw materials,” Dobchanski said.
It is in this context that Putin has redirected his stuttering invasion to the region where his conflict with Ukraine began eight years ago. U.S. intelligence interceptions suggest Putin has shifted his military strategy toward a victory in the East by May 9, Russia’s Victory Day, which marks the capitulation of the Nazis during World War II.
“There is every opportunity for Putin to move now to effectively divide Ukraine; that will give him enough to declare victory in the internal market and reassure his critics that this is a failed invasion, “said Samir Puri, a senior fellow in urban areas. Security and Hybrid Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), which served as a truce observer in Donbass between 2014 and 2015.
“Taking Donbass (would be) a consolation prize, because Kyiv is already out of Russia’s reach, but it’s 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 catastrophic halt to a period of growing prosperity in the region.
The war broke out in 2014 after Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings in cities and towns in eastern Ukraine. Intense fighting left parts of Luhansk and Donetsk in the hands of Russian-backed separatists.
The separatist-controlled regions of Donbass became known as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. The Ukrainian government in Kyiv claims that the two regions are virtually temporarily occupied by Russia. The self-proclaimed republics are not recognized by any government except Russia and its close ally Syria, and the Ukrainian government flatly refuses to speak directly to the leaders of the two.
But on the ground, a life of conflict has become a way of life. “The people of eastern Ukraine lived in a twilight zone – they were at the forefront of geopolitical independence and there was a sense of helplessness,” said Puri, who spent some time on each side of the line of contact while observing the ceasefire.
More than 14,000 people have died in the Donbas conflict since 2014, including 3,000 civilians captured in the conflict. Ukraine says nearly 1.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes since 2014, with more than half of the IDPs registered remaining in Ukrainian-controlled areas of Donbass and some 160,000 settling. in the wider region of Kyiv.
Russia, meanwhile, has aggressively tried to incite separatist sentiment in the region, which it later cited as an excuse for the invasion. Russian passports have been offered to residents since 2019, and Kremlin reports in both Russia and separatist-controlled parts of Donbass have severely dispelled the notion that ethnic Russians are under attack.
“In the 2014 propaganda, Donbass became a scapegoat in Russian stories,” Dobchanski said.
“This is the place where the Russians cultivated a cult of …
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