(CNN) – Donbas, a sprawling and beleaguered heartland region that blankets much of eastern Ukraine, has been the front line of the country’s conflict with Russia since 2014.
But now its people, already scarred by eight years of fighting, are bracing for an assault even more intense. An impending battle for control of the territory is expected to define Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, after his forces suffered costly failures in Kyiv, and across central and northern Ukraine.
Satellite images have shown Russian military convoys and resupplied units moving towards Donbas for a large-scale offensive, and Ukraine’s foreign minister has warned the world of an impending battle there that will “remind you of the Second World War.”
A Russian victory in the region would appall the West but could salvage Putin’s war aims, while a defeat could cement his invasion as a historic failure. Either way, it is almost certain to devastate yet more of the Donbas region, a historically and culturally significant place whose proximity to Russia has dictated much of its turbulent existence.
Those who have lived in and studied the region describe it as an independent and gritty center of industry that has remained suspicious of outside forces for decades.
But the waves of conflict there since 2014 have reshaped and wounded its cities, and it is along its line of contact that both the Ukrainian and Russian military are most dug in — making for a familiar but unpredictable new phase of war.
‘Fiercely independent’
Chimneys, factories and coal fields have dotted the landscape of Donbas for decades, and since its two major cities were founded — Donetsk by a Welsh ironmaster in 1869, and Luhansk seven decades earlier by a Scottish industrialist — industry has been the lifeblood of the region.
The name Donbas is itself a portmanteau of the Donets Coal Basin, and throughout most of the 20th century it served an outsized role as the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, pumping out coal in vast quantities.
“The Soviet Union intensively developed the Donbas as an industrial center,” said Markian Dobczansky, an associate at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “It was a place that set the tempo of Soviet industrialization.”
It was a place, too, of “extremely high-stakes industrial production, and repression,” Dobczansky adds. “Terror was present under Soviet rule. Repression happened all over the Soviet Union, but it happened intensely in the Donbas.” Suspicion, arrests and show trials were rife.
A rise in steel and metal manufacturing, the creation of a railroad and the development of a shipping industry in the port city of Mariupol diversified Donbas beyond its coal mining roots.
But in the three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, the region’s economic might has shriveled. “In the 1990s, the Donbas saw the floor drop out economically,” Rory Finnin, associate professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Cambridge, told CNN.
A decline in living standards and rampant poverty plagued the region during its initial transition from communism, Finnin said, and Donbas is now often likened to the Rust Belt regions of the United States, where once-thriving heartland locations have struggled to adapt. But an upturn in fortunes followed the turn of the century; Donbas remains Ukraine’s industrial epicenter, complimenting the agricultural production of the rest of the country.
While prosperity in the region has wavered, one steadfast characteristic of its inhabitants has not. The people of Donbas have and remain “fiercely independent,” Finnin said. “It marches to the beat of its own drum.”
The region’s long-standing industrial pull has attracted people from across Eastern Europe over the past century, and it has had strong social and economic ties to neighboring Russia as well as to the rest of Ukraine. Unlike much of central and western Ukraine, which had historically changed hands between various European empires, Donbas spent most of the past millennium under the control of Russia.
“(Pro-Russian) separatism prior to 2014 was a distinctly minority position,” and no organized movement existed, Dobczansky said. Opinion polls — and the region’s own vote for independence in Ukraine’s 1991 referendum — affirmed Donbas’ desire to leave Soviet-era allegiances behind.
“People would have a very strong sense of being a coal miner, or a metal worker, or being in the proletariat,” he added. “People (also) had a sense of being a part of the Ukrainian republic, but the idea was that the Donbas transcended national identities.”
What Donbas means to Putin
Despite its move into independence along with the rest of Ukraine in 1991, Donbas has maintained a place in the psyche of Russian leadership.
A famous Soviet propaganda poster from 1921 dubbed Donbas “the heart of Russia,” depicting the region as a beating organ with vessels stretching across the Russian empire. Before then, the region was part of the concept of “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, a term given to territories towards the west of which the Russian empire had expansionist ideas.
Cities like Luhansk and Donetsk are historically “places that (Russians) could see a certain version of themselves,” Finnin said.
And that historical image could still persist inside Putin’s own worldview, experts suggest.
Observers have often suggested that Putin’s desired endgame is to rebuild the Soviet Union in which he first rose up the ranks. Anna Makanju, former director for Russia at the US National Security Council, last month suggested that Putin “believes he is like the czars,” the imperial dynasties that ruled Russia for centuries, “potentially called by God in order to control and restore the glory of the Russian empire.”
But such a project could not be attempted without an effort to recapture Donbas, given its emotional resonance as the Russian empire’s industrial backbone. “It’s symbolically very important; the Donbas supplied the entire Soviet Union with raw materials,” Dobczansky said.
It is in that context that Putin has refocused his stuttering invasion on the region where his conflict with Ukraine began eight years ago. US intelligence intercepts suggest Putin has refocused his war strategy on achieving some kind of victory in the east by May 9, Russia’s “Victory Day” that marks the Nazi surrender in World War II.
“There’s every possibility that Putin will move now to effectively bisect Ukraine; that will give him enough to be able to declare a victory domestically, and allay his critics that this has been a botched invasion,” said Samir Puri, a senior fellow in urban security and hybrid warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), who worked as a ceasefire observer in Donbas between 2014 and 2015.
“Taking the Donbas (would be) a consolation prize, because Kyiv is now out of Russia’s military grasp, but it’s a good consolation prize,” Puri said.
Eight years of conflict
Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of Donbas by Russian-backed rebels in 2014 brought to a crashing halt a period of increasing prosperity in the region.
War broke out in 2014 after Russian-backed rebels seized government buildings in towns and cities across eastern Ukraine. Intense fighting left portions of Luhansk and Donetsk in the hands of Russian-backed separatists.
The separatist-controlled areas in Donbas became known as the Luhansk and the Donetsk People’s Republics. The Ukrainian government in Kyiv asserts the two regions are, in effect, temporarily Russian-occupied. The self-declared republics have not recognized by any governments, other than Russia and its close ally Syria, and the Ukrainian government has steadfastly refused to talk directly with the leaders of either.
But on the ground, living amid conflict became a way of life. “Eastern Ukraine residents were living in a twilight zone — they were in the front line of a geopolitical despite, and there was a sense of powerlessness,” said Puri, who spent time on each side of the line of contact while observing the ceasefire.
More than 14,000 people have died in the conflict in Donbas since 2014, including 3,000 civilians caught up in the conflict. Ukraine says that since 2014, almost 1.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes, with over half of the registered internally displaced persons staying in the areas of Donbas that remained under Ukrainian control and about 160,000 resettling in the wider Kyiv region.
Russia has meanwhile aggressively attempted to stir up separatist feeling in the region, which it has then pointed to as a justification for invading. Russian passports were offered to residents from 2019, and Kremlin messaging both in Russia and in separatist-held parts of Donbas has heavily played up notions of ethnic Russians being targeted.
“In propaganda since 2014, the Donbas has become a sacrificial lamb in Russian narratives,” Dobczansky said.
“It’s the place where the Russians have cultivated a cult of victimhood. They’ve managed to turn their own fomenting of a war into a narrative of victimhood at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists,” he added. “They hammer this point home.”
That pretext ultimately led to Putin, two days before he launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, declaring the Donetsk and Luhansk regions independent in an opening salvo to his war on the country.
A new Russian assault
Whether the battle for Donbas will be the final chapter of Russia’s war, or merely its next phase, remains to be seen.
But by zeroing in on the region, Putin has brought his assault on Ukraine full circle.
“The Donbas was the frontline for eight years, so the military positions on both sides are extraordinarily well-fortified,” Dobczansky said.
The secessionist conflict in Donbas has been costly but stagnant since the initial surges of pro-Russian forces in 2014; the lines of the conflict have barely moved in several years, with trenches running along the point of contact from the southern coast to the Ukrainian-Russian border north of Luhansk.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said earlier this month that “the battle for Donbas will remind you of the Second World War, with large operations, maneuvers, involvement of thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, planes, (and) artillery.”
“This will not be a local operation based on what we see in Russia’s preparations,” Kuleba said at a news conference in Brussels.
The terrain and climate of the region does not contrast dramatically with the rest of Ukraine, but conflict there contains its own unique features.
“It’s going to be very different to what people have been seeing in Kyiv and Mariupol,” Puri said. “The Ukrainian frontline mixes urban and rural territory … some of the urban territories that Ukraine (will be defending) were already devastated in eight years of shell fire.”
Already, populous cities like Mariupol have been decimated by Russian bombardments. A similar fate is likely for other urban centers in Donbas, and evacuations have been urged from those in the path of expected Russian advances.
Now Russia will likely attempt to encircle Ukrainian troops in the east and can attack from northern cities where they have amassed troops, like Izium, as well as from the south and east. A battle for control of Sloviansk has been anticipated, given its strategically significant position in the path of a potential Russian land corridor.
Being closer to Russia and Crimea may also ease some of the supply issues that blighted Russia’s doomed assaults on central Ukraine.
As Russian columns head towards Donbas, they will no doubt encounter Ukrainian forces that have intimate knowledge of the towns and cities they have been defending for nearly a decade. Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, and much of the army’s top guard have on-the-ground experience fighting in the region after 2014, and several Ukrainian officials have described the battle for Donbas as the pivotal next phase of the war.
“It’s more comfortable, militarily, for the Russians to fight a war in the Donbas than it was in Kyiv, Sumy, or Kharkiv,” said Dobczansky. “But it’s also the place where the Ukrainian army’s most experienced and fortified units are located … so they’ll face the most severe resistance.”
