The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) are self-proclaimed entities that emerged in spring 2014 in eastern Ukraine thanks to massive Russian support. Ukraine’s attempts to retake them in spring and summer 2014 were stopped by a full-scale Russian military offensive that August. This more or less fixed the demarcation line between Ukrainian government-controlled territory and the pro-Russian separatist-controlled area under the Minsk agreements. Since then, the so-called DPR and LPR have had their own political institutions and economies dependent on Russian supplies and currency.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
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Oleksandr Nykonorov, Volodymyr Yermolenko: Who’s up and who’s down in Donbas
Servicemen walk next to the flag-draped coffin of a Kremlin-backed separatist commander Mikhail Tolstykh, whose nom de guerre was "Givi", during his funeral ceremony in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk on Feb. 10, 2017.
