Donbas

Based on Wikipedia: Donbas

The Land That Keeps Changing Hands

Picture a stretch of rolling steppe in eastern Europe, sitting atop one of the world's richest coal deposits. For centuries, it was empty grassland where nomads passed through but nobody stayed. Then industry arrived, and within a few generations, this "wild field" became one of the most densely industrialized regions on the planet. Today, it's the epicenter of Europe's largest war since 1945.

This is the Donbas.

The name itself tells you what mattered most about this place: it's a shortened form of "Donets Coal Basin," referring to the Donets River that winds through the region and the black rock beneath it. That coal would shape everything—who came here, who fought over it, and why it matters so much today.

Before the Coal: Wild Fields and Wandering Peoples

Long before anyone dreamed of mining coal, the Donbas was part of what Ukrainians called the dyke pole—the "wild fields." This wasn't a place where civilizations put down roots. It was a corridor, a highway of grass that various peoples rode through over the centuries.

The Scythians came first, those horse-riding warriors the ancient Greeks wrote about with a mixture of fascination and terror. Then came the Alans, the Huns, the Bulgars. Wave after wave of Turkic and Mongol peoples swept across these steppes. The Pechenegs. The Kipchaks. The Tatars. The Nogais. Each left traces, but none truly settled.

The region sat on a kind of civilizational fault line. To the south and west lay the Zaporizhian Sich, the semi-autonomous homeland of the Ukrainian Cossacks—those fierce warrior-farmers who answered to no tsar or king. To the east stretched the territory of the Don Cossacks, a similar but distinct group oriented toward Russia. And hovering over everything was the Crimean Khanate, a Turkic Muslim state that made its living from slave raids and tribute.

The first permanent town didn't appear until 1676. It was called Solanoye—now known as Soledar, a name that translates roughly as "salt gift." The settlers came not for coal, which hadn't been discovered yet, but for rock salt, that ancient and precious preservative.

The Russian Empire Arrives

Everything changed in the eighteenth century. The Russian Empire, expanding relentlessly under rulers like Catherine the Great, swallowed up both the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate and the Crimean Khanate. Suddenly, the wild fields weren't so wild anymore. They had new masters in St. Petersburg who called their conquest "Novorossiya"—New Russia.

Settlers began trickling in. Ukrainians came from the lands to the north and west. Russians came from the imperial heartland. The tsarist government also brought in Serbs and Greeks, hoping to populate these empty territories with loyal subjects. The Nogai nomads who had grazed their flocks here were pushed aside or absorbed.

But the real transformation began in 1721, when someone discovered coal. Not that anyone cared much at first. Coal was just another rock until the Industrial Revolution turned it into black gold.

A Welsh Businessman Builds a City

By the mid-nineteenth century, Europe's factories were hungry for coal and steel, and the Donbas had both. The region's modern history really begins with an unlikely figure: a Welsh businessman named John Hughes.

In 1869, Hughes arrived at a sleepy Cossack settlement called Oleksandrivka. He built a steel mill. He sank coal mines. He imported Welsh workers to show the locals how it was done. Within years, a grimy industrial city had sprouted around his enterprises. The locals called it Yuzivka or Yuzovka—a Slavic rendering of "Hughes-town." Today we know it as Donetsk, and it remains the unofficial capital of the Donbas.

Hughes died in 1889, but the boom he sparked was just getting started. Landless peasants from across the Russian Empire flooded into the region, looking for work in the mines and mills. Cities sprang up seemingly overnight: Mariupol, Luhansk, Makiivka, Horlivka. The population exploded.

But here's where things get complicated—and where the seeds of future conflict were planted.

Two Languages, Two Worlds

According to the 1897 Russian Imperial Census, Ukrainians made up about 52 percent of the Donbas population, while ethnic Russians accounted for roughly 29 percent. There were also significant communities of Greeks, Germans, Jews, and Tatars, especially around Mariupol, where these minorities made up over a third of the local population.

But the raw numbers tell only part of the story. The countryside remained overwhelmingly Ukrainian—peasant farmers speaking their own language, following their own customs. The cities, though, were different. The factories and mines were Russian-speaking domains. Russian workers had come seeking industrial jobs. Ukrainian peasants who migrated to the cities for work tended to assimilate into this Russian-speaking working class. It was the language of advancement, of modernity, of the boss.

This pattern—Ukrainian countryside, Russian-speaking cities—would persist for over a century. It created a region that was neither fully Ukrainian nor fully Russian, but something in between. A place where identity was complicated, where language didn't always match ethnicity, where people could feel pulled in multiple directions at once.

Revolution and Civil War

The Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, and the Donbas became a battlefield. Ukrainian nationalists tried to claim it for a newly declared Ukrainian state. Russian Bolsheviks wanted it for their revolution. Various warlords and anarchists carved out their own fiefdoms.

The most colorful figure of this chaotic period was Nestor Makhno, an anarchist commander who led the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine. Makhno was wildly popular in the Donbas, fighting against Whites, Reds, and Ukrainian nationalists alike. His forces held territory, redistributed land, and terrorized anyone who claimed to be an authority. Eventually, the Bolsheviks—who had initially allied with Makhno against their common enemies—turned on him and destroyed his movement.

When the dust settled, the Donbas ended up inside the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This wasn't because Moscow felt particularly generous toward Ukrainian nationalists. It was a practical decision: Ukraine was granted significant territory to make it a viable Soviet republic, one that could anchor the western borderlands of the new communist state.

Famine and Russification

The early Soviet years brought two catastrophes that would reshape the Donbas forever.

The first was the Holodomor of 1932-33, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. Joseph Stalin's government was forcibly collectivizing agriculture, seizing grain from peasants to feed the cities and export abroad. The rural Ukrainian-speaking population of the Donbas—already a minority in the cities—was hit hardest. Entire villages starved while grain rotted in government warehouses or was shipped to foreign buyers for hard currency.

The second catastrophe was systematic and slower, but no less transformative: Russification. This was a deliberate policy of suppressing Ukrainian language and culture in favor of Russian. In the Donbas, it accelerated a trend that had already begun during the imperial era.

In 1926, ethnic Ukrainians still made up about 60 percent of the Donbas population, with roughly 639,000 ethnic Russians living in the region. Over the following decades, those numbers would flip. Russian workers poured in. Ukrainian-language schools were closed. By 1959, the ethnic Russian population had grown to 2.55 million. Educational reforms in 1958-59 essentially eliminated Ukrainian-language schooling in the Donbas entirely.

By the late Soviet period, speaking Ukrainian in the Donbas had become unusual, even suspect. It marked you as a villager, a peasant, someone who hadn't modernized. Russian was the language of industry, of science, of culture. The cities were thoroughly Russified.

The Nazi Occupation

Adolf Hitler understood the strategic importance of the Donbas. When he launched Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941—seizing the region's coal and industry was a key objective. The German war machine needed fuel.

The occupation was brutal. In what was then called Stalino Oblast (now Donetsk Oblast), the Nazis killed 279,000 civilians. In Voroshilovgrad Oblast (now Luhansk Oblast), they killed another 45,649. Thousands of industrial workers were deported to Germany as forced labor.

When the Red Army retook the region in 1943, they found a wasteland. The factories had been destroyed. The mines were flooded. The population was decimated. What followed was a massive reconstruction effort—and another wave of Russian immigration to fill the gaps left by the dead and displaced.

Soviet Industrial Heartland

Despite everything, the Donbas rebuilt and flourished under Soviet rule. By the later Soviet period, it had become one of the most industrialized regions in the entire communist bloc. The coal kept flowing. Steel mills operated around the clock. The smokestacks and slag heaps became symbols of Soviet industrial might.

But there was a cost. The air was poisoned. The water was polluted. Life expectancy was lower than the Soviet average. The region's prosperity was bought with human health and environmental destruction.

And there was a political cost too. By the time of the 1989 Soviet Census, 45 percent of the Donbas population identified as ethnically Russian. A movement called the Interfront of the Donbass was founded in 1990 specifically to oppose Ukrainian independence. When Ukraine did vote for independence in 1991, the Donbas voted in favor—but with less enthusiasm than the rest of the country. In Donetsk Oblast, 83.9 percent supported independence. In Luhansk Oblast, 83.6 percent. These were solid majorities, but they were the lowest in Ukraine. Everywhere else, the margins were even more overwhelming.

The Painful 1990s

Independence brought economic collapse. The Soviet command economy had kept the Donbas running, funneling resources and orders to its factories and mines. Now the orders stopped coming. Markets that had been guaranteed vanished. Industrial production imploded. Average wages fell by 80 percent between 1990 and 1993.

The coal miners went on strike. These weren't ordinary labor disputes—they were existential struggles for survival. Historian Lewis Siegelbaum described the 1993 strikes as "a struggle between the Donbas region and the rest of the country."

One strike leader articulated a grievance that would echo for decades: people in the Donbas had voted for Ukrainian independence because they wanted power devolved to the localities, to the enterprises, to the cities. They didn't vote to have power simply transferred from Moscow to Kyiv. They wanted autonomy, a voice, a stake in their own governance.

In 1994, a consultative referendum was held in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts alongside the first parliamentary elections of independent Ukraine. The questions were pointed: Should Russian be an official language? Should the region have administrative autonomy? Should Ukraine federalize? Should it maintain closer ties with Russia and other former Soviet states?

Close to 90 percent voted yes to all these propositions.

None of it was implemented. The vote was only consultative, not binding. Ukraine remained a unitary state. Ukrainian remained the sole official language. The Donbas got no special status, no autonomy. The miners did win some economic concessions, enough to take the edge off the crisis, but the underlying grievances festered.

The Oligarchs Take Over

As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, power in the Donbas consolidated in the hands of a regional elite. These were the oligarchs—men who had gotten fabulously wealthy through privatization deals and political connections. Regional historian Hiroaki Kuromiya called them the "Donbas clan."

Two names stood out above all others: Viktor Yanukovych and Rinat Akhmetov.

Yanukovych had a colorful past. As a young man, he'd been convicted of robbery and assault. He'd risen through the ranks of regional politics, becoming governor of Donetsk Oblast and eventually prime minister of Ukraine. His base was the Donbas, and the Donbas was his to deliver politically.

Akhmetov was different. He was a businessman, one of the richest men in Ukraine, with interests in steel, mining, energy, banking, and media. Where Yanukovych was the political face of the clan, Akhmetov was its economic engine.

Under President Leonid Kuchma, who held power from 1994 to 2005, the Donbas received significant development funds. It was a straightforward exchange: economic aid for political support. The region delivered votes, and Kyiv delivered money.

The Orange Revolution and Its Aftermath

The system worked until 2004. That year, Yanukovych ran for president with the backing of the outgoing Kuchma and—crucially—the Kremlin. His opponent was Viktor Yushchenko, a reformer who looked westward toward Europe.

The election was blatantly rigged. Yanukovych was declared the winner despite obvious fraud. Mass protests erupted in Kyiv—the Orange Revolution, named for Yushchenko's campaign color. For weeks, demonstrators filled the streets demanding a fair vote.

In the Donbas, there was a counter-mobilization. On November 28, 2004, a congress of regional politicians met in Sievierodonetsk. They talked about declaring martial law, creating self-defense forces, even establishing a "South-Eastern Autonomous Republic" with its capital in Kharkiv. Moscow's mayor attended. A Russian embassy advisor sat in the presidium.

The threats fizzled. The Supreme Court ordered a new vote. Yushchenko won. Some of the Sievierodonetsk organizers were charged with crimes against Ukraine's territorial integrity, but no one was convicted. The whole episode was written off as political theater, a bluff that hadn't worked.

But was it really just a bluff? Or was it a dress rehearsal?

The View from Kyiv

It's worth pausing to consider how the rest of Ukraine viewed the Donbas during this period. The stereotypes were harsh.

The Donbas was seen as backward, a "Soviet cesspool" that hadn't moved on from the communist era. It was home to "thug culture," to organized crime, to corruption. Some commentators warned that the region harbored "fifth columns" loyal to Russia. One writer in 2005 claimed that speaking Ukrainian in the Donbas "was not safe for one's health and life."

There was a kernel of truth in some of these perceptions. The Donbas did have more statues of Lenin, more streets named after Soviet heroes, than anywhere else in Ukraine. The Russian language dominated daily life. The economy was still tied to heavy industry and mining, sectors that were declining everywhere in the post-industrial world.

But the separatism charge didn't hold up to scrutiny. Survey after survey through the 1990s and 2000s showed that most people in the Donbas wanted to remain part of Ukraine. They might have wanted more autonomy, more respect for the Russian language, closer economic ties with Russia—but actual separatism was a fringe position.

At least, it was until 2014.

Revolution and War

In late 2013, protests erupted in Kyiv again. This time they were called the Euromaidan, triggered by President Yanukovych's decision to reject an association agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. Through a brutal winter, demonstrators occupied the central square of the capital. When security forces killed dozens of protesters in February 2014, Yanukovych fled to Russia. The Euromaidan had won. Ukrainians called it the Revolution of Dignity.

In the Donbas, it looked different. Yanukovych was their man, their president. The protesters who had driven him out were, in this view, ultranationalists, fascists, people who hated Russian-speakers. Within weeks of his fall, pro-Russian demonstrations swept through the region.

What happened next remains controversial. Were the armed men who began seizing government buildings local activists or Russian agents? The answer is probably both. There's strong evidence that Russian intelligence operatives helped organize and arm the uprising. But there's equally strong evidence that they found willing local collaborators, people who genuinely believed they were protecting their region from a hostile new government in Kyiv.

By April 2014, separatist forces had declared two new "People's Republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Ukrainian military moved to retake them. A war began that would claim over 14,000 lives in its first eight years.

The front lines stabilized roughly along a line that left about two-thirds of the Donbas under Ukrainian control and one-third under the separatists. Neither side could break through. International mediators brokered ceasefires that never quite held. The conflict was called "frozen," though people kept dying.

Full-Scale Invasion

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Donbas was a primary target from the beginning. Russian forces, reinforced by the separatist militias they had armed and trained for eight years, pushed to seize the entire region.

The fighting has been among the most intense of the war. Cities like Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk, and Bakhmut have been reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled or been killed. As of late 2025, Russian forces control approximately 90 percent of the Donbas.

On September 30, 2022, Russia declared that it was annexing the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, along with two other Ukrainian regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. No country except Russia recognizes these annexations. Ukraine insists all this territory remains rightfully part of Ukraine and has vowed to liberate it.

The Deepest Roots

There's one more layer to this story, one that stretches back not centuries but millennia.

The Pontic steppes—the grasslands that include the Donbas—may be the ancestral homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. This is the Kurgan hypothesis, named after the burial mounds (kurgans) that dot the landscape. According to this theory, the ancestors of most European and many Asian peoples originated right here, somewhere between the Dnieper and Don rivers, around five thousand years ago.

The Yamnaya culture, which archaeologists associate with these Proto-Indo-Europeans, was a society of pastoralists who domesticated the horse and invented the wheeled vehicle. From these steppes, they spread outward in all directions, carrying their language with them. Their linguistic descendants include not only Ukrainian and Russian, but also English, Hindi, Persian, Greek, and dozens of other languages spoken by billions of people today.

There's something poignant about this. The very land where humanity's largest language family may have originated has become a battleground between two nations that speak its descendant tongues. The Donbas, which couldn't hold onto any of the peoples who passed through it for millennia, is now being torn apart by peoples fighting over who truly belongs there.

What the Donbas Reveals

The story of the Donbas is a story about identity—how it's formed, how it's contested, how it can be weaponized. For over a century, this region has been caught between Russian and Ukrainian worlds, never quite belonging to either.

The Russian Empire brought settlers and industry. The Soviet Union brought famine and Russification. Independent Ukraine brought economic collapse and cultural estrangement. Each regime left its mark, each created new grievances, each set the stage for what came next.

Today, the Donbas is being physically destroyed. The cities that John Hughes and his successors built are being reduced to ruins. The coal mines are flooding. The steel mills are silent. Whatever emerges from this war will be something new, built on the rubble of everything that came before.

But one thing seems certain: this will not be the last chapter. The Donbas has been changing hands for centuries. The contest over its future—and over what it means to be Donbas—is far from over.