War in Donbas

Based on Wikipedia: War in Donbas

One man pulled the trigger.

That's what Igor Girkin said, anyway. A former colonel in Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, Girkin led fifty armed men across the border from Crimea into eastern Ukraine in April 2014. They seized a small city called Sloviansk, and Girkin later told a Russian nationalist newspaper: "I'm the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out."

He wasn't being modest. He was being accurate. The war in Donbas—the eastern Ukrainian region comprising Donetsk and Luhansk provinces—lasted eight years, killed roughly 14,000 people, displaced two million more, and set the stage for Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. But it didn't begin as some inevitable clash of civilizations between East and West. It began with a small group of Russian operatives who manufactured a conflict out of genuine but manageable local grievances.

Understanding how this happened matters enormously, because the story Russia told about Donbas—that Russian-speaking Ukrainians spontaneously rose up against a "fascist junta" in Kyiv—became the justification for nearly a decade of bloodshed and eventually a war that has reshaped the entire global order.

The Kindling: Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity

To understand Donbas, you need to understand what happened in Kyiv first.

In November 2013, Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovych, made a sudden decision that surprised almost everyone. For years, his government had been negotiating an association agreement with the European Union—a deal that would bring closer economic ties and, eventually, the possibility of EU membership. Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved moving forward with it. But at the last moment, under heavy pressure from Moscow, Yanukovych walked away.

Ukrainians poured into the streets. What started as protests about the EU deal—the demonstrations were called "Euromaidan," after Kyiv's central square—quickly became something larger. People were angry about corruption, about police brutality, about a government that seemed to serve oligarchs rather than citizens. Through a bitter winter, hundreds of thousands occupied the Maidan.

The situation exploded in February 2014. Over three days, clashes between protesters and the Berkut riot police left 108 demonstrators dead. Most were shot by snipers. On February 21st, Yanukovych signed a deal with opposition leaders for an interim government and early elections. That night, he secretly fled Kyiv. The next day, parliament voted to remove him from office—not along partisan lines, but with support from 73 percent of the body, including members of Yanukovych's own party.

Russia called it a coup. Much of the West called it a revolution. Ukrainians called it the Revolution of Dignity.

Whatever you called it, what happened next happened fast. Within days, soldiers in unmarked uniforms appeared throughout Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula that juts into the Black Sea. They surrounded Ukrainian military bases. They controlled the roads. They were Russian troops, though Moscow initially denied it. After a hasty referendum held under military occupation—a vote the international community refused to recognize—Russia annexed Crimea outright.

It was the first time since World War Two that a European country had seized territory from a neighbor by force.

Donbas: The Vulnerable Target

If Crimea was Russia's dramatic opening move, Donbas was supposed to be the follow-up that proved the whole of southeastern Ukraine wanted out.

The region had some genuine vulnerabilities. The Donbas was Ukraine's industrial heartland, built up during Soviet times around coal mines and steel mills. Its population was roughly 38 percent ethnic Russian, the highest proportion outside Crimea. Russian was the dominant language of daily life. And the region had been the political base of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions—people there had voted heavily for him, and some genuinely felt that Kyiv's new government didn't represent them.

But here's what's crucial: wanting more autonomy is not the same as wanting war. A survey conducted in March and April 2014 found that 58 percent of Donbas residents wanted autonomy within Ukraine. Only 31 percent wanted secession.

That's not nothing. Nearly a third of people wanting to leave is a serious problem for any country. But it's not a mandate for armed rebellion, and it's certainly not evidence that locals were champing at the bit for Russian soldiers to cross the border.

What actually happened was something much more deliberate.

Manufacturing an Uprising

In the weeks after Ukraine's revolution, pro-Russian protests did spring up in Donetsk and Luhansk. Some of this was organic. People occupied government buildings, proclaimed "people's governors," demanded referendums. The playbook looked similar to what had happened in Crimea.

But the scale was smaller, the energy was different, and Ukrainian authorities were able to handle it. When protesters occupied the Donetsk Regional State Administration Building in early March, the SBU—Ukraine's security service—cleared them out within a week. When local separatist leaders were arrested, everything seemed to be calming down.

Then, on April 12th, Girkin crossed the border.

His unit of fifty fighters had been training in occupied Crimea. They drove through Russia and entered Ukraine near Sloviansk, a city of about 100,000 people. They attacked the local administration building, the police station, and the SBU building. They seized weapons. They set up roadblocks. Within hours, they controlled the city.

The same day, Girkin's men attacked the neighboring city of Kramatorsk. Within 48 hours, armed groups had seized government buildings in Horlivka, Mariupol, Druzhkivka, and half a dozen other towns.

These were not spontaneous local uprisings. As political scientist Serhiy Kudelia documented, the local activists who had organized earlier protests "played no prominent role once Girkin seized the town." Some joined up with the paramilitaries, but they took orders from outsiders. The separatist resistance in Sloviansk, Kudelia concluded, "was fully subordinated to the interests of a small group of Russian citizens acting in coordination with their Moscow chiefs."

Girkin himself was blunt about this. When asked why locals hadn't taken up arms before he arrived, he said simply: "Nobody there wanted to fight."

What "Hybrid War" Actually Looked Like

The term "hybrid warfare" gets thrown around a lot in discussions of Donbas, often in ways that make it sound sophisticated or mysterious. In practice, it meant something quite simple: Russia combined multiple tools to destabilize Ukraine while maintaining the pretense of deniability.

There was the information war. Russian television, which most Donbas residents watched, portrayed Ukraine's new government as a "fascist junta" that threatened ethnic Russians with imminent violence. This was fiction—there were no pogroms, no mass arrests of Russian speakers—but repetition made it feel real to audiences primed to believe it.

There were the "volunteers." Russia insisted that any Russian citizens fighting in Donbas were there on their own initiative, private individuals moved by conscience to help their fellow Russians. This was also fiction. Leaked communications showed that Kremlin advisers Vladislav Surkov and Sergey Glazyev were funding and organizing separatist operations. By mid-2015, according to separatist leader Alexander Borodai, some 50,000 Russian citizens had fought in Donbas—and that figure didn't even include the regular Russian army units that had crossed the border.

And then there was the actual Russian military. Moscow admitted to sending "military specialists," a phrase designed to sound limited and advisory. In reality, entire tank battalions and artillery units crossed into Ukraine, fought major engagements, and then returned to Russia. The international investigative group Bellingcat later documented these movements in meticulous detail, using social media posts from Russian soldiers who hadn't realized they shouldn't geotag their selfies from a foreign war zone.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, known as the OSCE, is an international body that monitored the border. By the end of 2017, it had counted around 30,000 people in military gear crossing from Russia at the two checkpoints it was allowed to observe. The real number, including crossings at unmonitored points, was certainly higher.

Ukraine's Response: The Anti-Terrorist Operation

Ukraine called its military response the "Anti-Terrorist Operation," or ATO. The name was revealing. Calling it a war would have meant acknowledging that Russia was invading, which would have complicated international diplomacy. Calling it anti-terrorism framed the separatists as criminals rather than legitimate combatants with legitimate grievances.

The ATO began on April 15th, 2014, three days after Girkin seized Sloviansk. It was, initially, a disaster.

Ukraine's military had been neglected for decades. Equipment was outdated or non-functional. Training was inadequate. Corruption had hollowed out command structures. In the first weeks of fighting, Ukrainian units suffered embarrassing defeats. Armored personnel carriers were captured. Soldiers surrendered. At one point, an entire Ukrainian paratrooper unit was surrounded and had to be evacuated through Russian territory.

But Ukraine adapted. Volunteer battalions formed, drawing on the same reservoir of civic energy that had powered the Maidan protests. Western countries began providing non-lethal aid—things like body armor, night vision equipment, and secure communications. Ukrainian soldiers learned from their mistakes. By summer, the tide was turning.

In July, Ukraine recaptured Sloviansk. Girkin had to flee, withdrawing his fighters to Donetsk city. Through August, Ukrainian forces pushed forward, retaking town after town. The separatists were on the verge of collapse.

Russia's Open Intervention

And then Russia intervened openly.

Not openly in the sense of announcing it—Moscow still denied everything—but openly in the sense that entire columns of Russian tanks and artillery crossed the border in late August 2014. Ukrainian units that had been advancing suddenly found themselves facing vastly superior firepower. At the Battle of Ilovaisk, Ukrainian forces were encircled and slaughtered while attempting to retreat through what they had been promised was a safe corridor.

The separatists—or rather, the Russian military units fighting alongside them—pushed back, regaining much of the territory Ukraine had liberated over the summer. The front lines stabilized roughly along the positions we would see for the next eight years.

A ceasefire agreement was signed in Minsk, Belarus, in September 2014. Like most ceasefires in this war, it was honored more in the breach than the observance.

The Airports and the Railheads

Even with a ceasefire technically in place, the fighting continued at various flashpoints. Two stand out.

The battle for Donetsk Airport became symbolic far beyond its strategic importance. Ukrainian defenders, nicknamed "cyborgs" for their seemingly superhuman endurance, held the airport for 242 days against constant assault. The terminal building was reduced to rubble, but the defenders kept fighting from the wreckage. When they finally withdrew in January 2015, the airport was a moonscape—but the defense had become a founding myth for Ukraine's military renaissance.

Less celebrated but more strategically significant was the battle for Debaltseve, a railway junction that controlled transportation links between Donetsk and Luhansk. A new ceasefire, known as Minsk II, was signed on February 12th, 2015. Almost immediately, separatist forces—backed by Russian regulars—launched an assault on Debaltseve, arguing that the town hadn't been covered by the ceasefire. Ukrainian forces were forced to withdraw under fire, suffering heavy casualties.

The Debaltseve operation demonstrated something important about how Russia approached negotiations. Ceasefires were not endpoints but pauses, opportunities to regroup and prepare the next offensive. Agreements were signed in bad faith. The goal was never peace; the goal was conquest by increments.

The Frozen War

After Debaltseve, the war settled into something like stasis. Both sides dug in—literally. The front lines became networks of trenches, bunkers, and tunnels, eerily reminiscent of the First World War. Soldiers lived underground, emerging to take shots at enemies a few hundred meters away. Artillery duels killed people every week, though the world had largely stopped paying attention.

The Donbas became what analysts call a "frozen conflict"—not actually frozen, since people kept dying, but frozen in the sense that neither side could or would make major moves to change the situation. Russia had achieved its minimum objective: a chunk of Ukrainian territory under separatist control, which could be used to destabilize Ukraine and prevent it from ever joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, or the European Union. Ukraine lacked the military capability to retake the territory against Russian opposition, and its Western backers weren't willing to provide the heavy weapons that might change that equation.

The human cost was staggering. About 14,000 people died over eight years. Of those, roughly 6,500 were Russian and Russian-backed forces, 4,400 were Ukrainian military, and 3,400 were civilians—most of them in the first year of the war. Two million people fled the region as refugees, out of a pre-war population of about six million.

The separatist territories themselves became grim places. The Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic functioned as Russian puppet states, their leaders appointed and removed at Moscow's pleasure. The economy collapsed without Ukraine's markets. Young people left if they could. Those who remained lived under authoritarian rule, their territory used primarily as a staging ground for Russian military pressure on Ukraine.

What the War Was Actually About

To Russia, Ukraine was never really an independent country. Yes, it had become legally independent when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Yes, Russia had signed treaties recognizing its borders. But in the worldview of Vladimir Putin and those around him, Ukraine was historically, culturally, and strategically part of Russia's sphere—a buffer zone that must never be allowed to drift toward the West.

This wasn't hidden. Russian analysts had been writing about it for years. In 2002, scholar Taras Kuzio observed that while Putin accepted Ukrainian independence in theory, he sought to "draw Ukraine into a closer relationship" in practice. The tools were straightforward: control over gas supplies, trade restrictions, television propaganda, and support for political movements that aligned with Russian interests.

The Revolution of Dignity threatened all of this. If Ukraine could orient toward Europe, if it could build functioning democratic institutions, if it could escape Russia's economic leverage, then it would be lost to Moscow's sphere forever. And worse, it might serve as an example to Russians themselves that another path was possible.

The war in Donbas was, at its core, about preventing that. The frozen conflict made Ukraine ungovernable and unreformable. NATO and the EU don't accept members with active territorial disputes. As long as Donbas burned, Ukraine could never fully join the West.

The Road to 2022

The war might have continued indefinitely in its frozen state if Russia had been satisfied with the status quo. But by 2021, it was clear that the strategy wasn't working as intended.

Ukraine hadn't collapsed. Its military, rebuilt with Western assistance, was now far more capable than it had been in 2014. Its democracy, despite ongoing problems with corruption, continued to function. In 2019, Ukrainians elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian with no political experience, as president—the kind of peaceful transfer of power that seemed impossible in Russia itself. The country was slowly, painfully, orienting toward Europe anyway.

Russian forces began massing near Ukraine's borders. The separatists stepped up their attacks. In February 2022, Putin recognized the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics as independent states and sent "peacekeeping" troops to defend them.

Three days later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine from multiple directions. The war in Donbas, which had begun with one man leading fifty fighters across a border, was subsumed into the largest ground war in Europe since 1945.

The Lesson of Sloviansk

There's a temptation, in hindsight, to see the war as inevitable—a natural consequence of geopolitical forces, of civilizational divides, of NATO expansion or Russian imperialism, depending on your preferred framework. The story Russia told, about Russian speakers rising up against oppression, has a satisfying simplicity to it.

But the evidence points in a different direction. The war in Donbas was manufactured. It was created by a small group of Russian operatives who exploited real but manageable local grievances, who sparked violence where there had been only protest, who transformed political disagreement into armed conflict.

This matters because it suggests the war didn't have to happen. Different decisions in Moscow could have led to different outcomes. Ukraine's legitimate problems—including real tensions over language and regional identity—could have been addressed through politics rather than artillery.

And it matters because the pattern keeps repeating. In conflict after conflict, we see the same playbook: external actors identifying vulnerable regions, amplifying grievances, providing weapons and fighters, then claiming they're merely supporting an indigenous movement. Understanding how this works is the first step toward preventing it.

Igor Girkin pulled the trigger. That doesn't mean the rest of us have to keep the war going.