Donbas is a word now heard everywhere. Everyone is discussing how Ukrainians are defending one or another part of Donbas, the pace at which the Russian army has or has not managed to advance, and whether Ukraine should abandon the Donbas for the sake of a supposed (arguably mythical) “peace.”
So, what is the history and character of the Donbas, and how did it become such a focal point in Russia’s bloody and brutal campaign of war in Ukraine?
I first arrived in the Donbas in 2010. At the time I was 21 years old and writing my thesis about the Donbas Greeks and Germans in the 1920s. The Russian-speaking city of Donetsk in the center of Donetsk region seemed to me, after Kyiv, something incredible. Smooth roads without potholes, luxurious hotels, comfortable public transport running without delays, and the best stadium in Ukraine (and one of the largest in Europe). Not to mention what was then the most modern airport in Ukraine.
You may be wondering where the Greeks came from, along with tens of thousands of Germans. And what is the connection between the Donbas and Donetsk?
Geography of the Donbas
The name Donbas is an abbreviation of the words “Donets Basin.” It refers to the geological and industrial term “Donets Coal Basin” – a territory in eastern Ukraine, part of a great steppe near the Sea of Azov, where enormous coal deposits were discovered at the beginning of the 18th century.
But in general, this term is used to refer to central Donbas, around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine, where massive coal extraction took place in the 20th century. This created a highly urbanized agglomeration with a population of over eight million people before Russia began its invasion in 2014.
Donetsk itself was named after the largest local river – the Siverskyi Donets, which in turn is a tributary of the Don. A steppe territory where the eye reaches the horizon, the land is practically devoid of forests, but has numerous hills and ravines – the so-called “balka.”
Early history
Dating back 1,000 years, nomadic and Turkish peoples came here along the route shown in the above image – the Pechenegs, the Cumans (whom Russian President Vladimir Putin likes so much), the Torks, the Black Hats, and later the Tatars, who founded a powerful state in the south – the Crimean Khanate – and created the Crimean Tatar nation.
Until the 1600s, this territory was dangerous for Ukrainians – constant raids by nomads reached Kyiv and western Ukrainian lands. As a result, for centuries the territories south of Kyiv were sparsely populated due to a constant threat of the settlement being destroyed by nomads, with families taken captive. On the maps of that time, the entire vast territory of central, southern, and eastern Ukraine was always marked as “Loca Deserta,” and known as “Wild fields.”
Everything changed in the second half of the 16th century with the emergence of the Cossacks – the Ukrainian aristocracy and prosperous townspeople and peasants who armed themselves to defend against the nomads. They formed regiments and began settling in the steppe. The nomads’ sphere of influence shrank, and Ukrainians gradually colonized the territories on the left bank (eastern side) of the Dnipro, as well as the south.
Over time, the Cossacks formed their own territorial system, and in the struggle with the Polish government won independence. The gradual movement east and south became literally a historical mission of the Ukrainian people, ultimately becoming the land of Cossacks.
It was then, in the 16th-17th centuries, that many Cossack cities and towns sprung up in the south and east, which Russia would later claim as its own – alleging to have founded them. It was also then that the development of Donbas began. Ukrainian nobleman Mykyta Vepreysky discovered coal deposits in the area of modern Bakhmut – which would later become the center of the Donbas for a long time.
However, the young Cossack Ukrainian state almost immediately fell into the sphere of influence of another great power – Muscovy – yet there too the Cossack elite realized itself and formed the backbone of the nobility of the Russian Empire. With Russia’s help, Ukrainian Cossacks finally secured themselves in the south and ensured the security of the Black Sea region.
Russia would long construct a myth that only with its arrival in southern Ukraine did real development begin – cities such as Odesa, Kherson, and Mykolaiv would be built, and mass settlement and development of the region would take place.
The fact that Odesa had been a Turkish stronghold even before Russia’s expansion southward under Catherine I, and that Kherson had actually been founded by the Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas in the 15th century and was called Vytivka, would be forcibly forgotten. As would the discovery of coal by Vepreysky. The founder of Donbas would instead be faced with a competitor – the Russian Grigory Kapustin – and already in Soviet times the Donbas became filled with monuments to this figure.
Industrial revolution and mass settlement
Further development of the region proceeded exponentially. The fertile black soils and large coal deposits were developed on such a scale that there were simply not enough Ukrainians to manage the labor-intensive manual work of the 18th-19th centuries. As such, the territories saw mass settlement of Russians from adjacent regions, as well as invitations for Germans, Serbs, Poles, and many other nations to settle. From Crimea, Greeks who had lived there for thousands of years since the ancient Greek colonization were forcibly resettled to develop the Donbas by order of the Russian authorities in the late 18th century. All these peoples formed the unique multinational face of the Donbas.
Over time, Western capital arrived, bringing the achievements of the Industrial Revolution to the Donbas. In the 1870s, the Welshman John Hughes built a metallurgical plant, around which the settlement of Yuzivka arose – now Donetsk.
Scotsman Charles Gascoigne likewise founded Luhansk.
At that time, mines were growing and expanding, as were the artificial mountains known as terricones – spoil heaps and waste rock dumps.
These artificial mountains remain a symbol of the Donbas to this day. In the modern drone war, spoil heaps are extremely important: in the bare steppe they allow for placing antennae to amplify drone signals, adjusting artillery strikes, and positioning electronic warfare systems.
The development of these territories occurred by a “cluster” method – first a mine or a plant, then a city growing around it. The image below shows the appearance the Donbas in the mid-20th century during Soviet times – made up of a large number of industrial mono-cities.
“Soviet” Donbas
At the turn of the 20th century, despite the large influx of Russians and other nationalities, Ukrainians still constituted just over half of the region’s population.
After the revolutions in the Russian Empire in 1917, the Donbas was fought over by forces supporting an independent Ukraine and the Bolsheviks controlled from Moscow. The “Reds” won and subsequently conquered not only the Donbas but also the rest of eastern and central Ukraine. Within the Soviet Union, in 1924, the capital of Donbas was renamed “Stalino.”
Donbas acquired even greater significance from the late 1920s onwards as it became the base for Joseph Stalin’s industrialization drive. After the Holodomor (Great Famine) of 1932-33 targeting the Ukrainian peasantry and the decimation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, the region was subjected to intensified Russification.
Soviet influence following the mining collapse of the 1980s-1990s
Fast forward to the 1980s-1990s which saw the collapse of this raw-material economy and the Soviet model in general. When the only large enterprise in a city or region closes, the result is mass unemployment of highly qualified personnel. Cities and towns become ghosts, and those that remain become vulnerable to anti-government and anti-market propaganda.
The center of pro-Russian views in the Donbas and the epicenter of support for Russia’s hybrid war since 2014 are centered heavily on the depressed mining towns of central Donbas where, by the 1990s, coal had already run out and Ukraine was forced to close many mines.
And, of course, there is ideology. The key problem stemming from the massive influx of people to the Donbas – many of whom were resettled to the area forcibly and many who came for good wages in the mines – was denationalization.
In the harsh steppe climate in a time of hard labor, survival and decent working conditions came first, and issues of national identity receded into the background in an international environment. That is why, as an industrial region, leftist ideas were always popular in the Donbas, and Soviet propaganda fueled the myth of the Donbas as the “industrial center of the Soviet Union” and the “All-Union stoker,” portraying miners as the elite of the proletariat.
But it should be noted that despite the Russification and harsh political regimentation, some of Ukraine’s leading dissidents, or rather, national rights defenders, emerged precisely from Donbas region. They included Ivan Dziuba, Ivan Svitlychny, Vasyl Stus, Mykola Rudenko, and Oleksa Tykhiy.
From the economic and social angle, the worst was yet to come in the last days of the Soviet Union.
Coal, which had been harshly exploited since the 1930s, began to run out. Miners dug deeper in search of new seams – and the depth of many mines in the Donbas reached or exceeded 1,000 meters. This led to higher electricity costs, and every accident claimed more and more lives.
In the early 1980s, the Soviet government decided to begin developing the Kuznetsk coal basin in the Urals, thereby signing the Donbas’ death sentence. In the Kuznetsk basin, coal lies near the surface and is easily extracted by excavator – cheaper and without excessive casualties or colossal construction costs.
The Donbas quickly declined. In the late 1980s, workers in the region went on mass strikes against mine closures and demanded improved working conditions.
Miner strikes became harbingers of Ukrainian independence. In the 1991 referendum, Donbas miners overwhelmingly supported Ukraine’s independence, expecting that their own state would cope with the crisis of the coal industry.
But Ukraine, a young state facing many difficulties in transitioning its economy from the command-administrative system of the USSR to a market system, as well as a surge in crime following the collapse of the Soviet Union, could not find the means to manage more than 500 mines in Donbas and the large complex of enterprises servicing them.
There was also a political aspect – no Ukrainian government of the 1990s dared to undertake mass closure of inefficient mines and reorganization of the industry in the style of then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, fearing a social explosion in a region where almost 20 percent of Ukraine’s population lived.
Meanwhile, mines reduced output, wages fell, many related enterprises closed, and mass unemployment and banditry engulfed the region.
A vacuum where propaganda flourished
Russian propaganda flourished, telling the unemployed that they were unemployed not because the development of the Donbas had initially proceeded through an inefficient mono-city method, and not because the Soviet Union had predatorily pumped all the coal out of the region and then abandoned it by switching to Kuznetsk, but because Ukraine as a state had failed and did not respect the miners, including for not speaking Ukrainian enough.
Gradually, propaganda shifted completely from socio-economic issues to national ones, inciting hatred in the depressed part of the local population toward everything Ukrainian – language, culture and history – planting myths about “fascists” and “Banderites.”
Despite this, the Donbas did not become massively pro-Russian. Only a small part of the population openly expressed support for Russia after Moscow began its invasion in the region in 2014 following the Euromaidan. The Russians immediately mobilized the local population and threw them into battle first.
Most people in the Donbas became hostages of the situation they found themselves in. Gradually they left the Donbas, receiving the status of “internally displaced persons” in Ukraine. Millions of people with trauma and longing for their native home are now watching as the international community – instead of clearly demanding that Russia leave the territories it has seized – seeks to persuade Ukraine, which is defending itself with all its strength, to give Russia even more land.
Merciless destruction from 2022
The second wave of Russian mobilization took place in 2022, tied to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine which began that same year. Russians sent miners who had been laid off in 2014-22 to storm Ukrainian positions. While speaking of “help” to Donbas residents, Russia in 2014-24 closed all mines in the Luhansk region that it occupied, and almost all in the occupied part of Donetsk region by 2024, not least because these enterprises were competitors of the Kuznetsk coal basin. Most miners in the occupied territories were mobilized by Russia – many of them died in frontal assaults on Ukrainian positions.
After the miners, it was the turn of tram drivers (whose trams were dismantled due to lack of need) and municipal workers. As a result of heavy losses among men, residents of Donetsk (where currently barely half of its one million residents from Ukrainian times remained) began calling their region the “Donetsk Women’s Republic.”
Russia mercilessly destroys most of the cities and villages of the Donbas, which is very hard to call “help.” Cities destroyed and completely devastated include Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Vuhledar, Kurakhove, Spartak, Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Chasiv Yar, Kostiantynivka, Volnovakha and Popasna. These are cities whose total pre-war population reached a million people. Not to mention dozens of smaller mining towns and hundreds of villages. For example, the “liberated” (according to Russian propagandists) Bakhmut three years after its capture by Russia has not changed at all. Not a single building has been restored, and of more than 100,000 people, just over 400 remain – living among ruins. Russia does not seek to rebuild this city, like dozens of others. Instead, Russian officials cynically declare that no one will live there now, so the cities are not subject to restoration.
This is one of the reasons why Ukraine has no right to abandon the part of Donbas that remains under its control, and which it has successfully defended for four years. The second reason is that this urbanized region, oversaturated with old industrial enterprises and railways, is an ideal place for defense. Beyond the Donbas begins the steppe, where Ukraine’s forces would have nowhere to hold – and therefore Russia would seize even more territory
Most importantly, why should Ukraine give its lands to an aggressor who simply destroys them? And why should Ukraine give up what Russia in four years of a full-scale war has not managed to seize by force, even after sacrificing hundreds of thousands of its soldiers for it?