You're reading: Russian-controlled Donbas splits further from Ukraine

The parts of the Donbas where Russian-backed forces have seized control are splitting further from Ukraine and drawing closer to Russia.

Ukraine cut off the electrical supply of the Kremlin-backed separatists of Luhansk Oblast on April 25, and Russia immediately said it would step in to supply power, continuing in this way its gradual economic absorption of Ukraine’s territory.
Along with economic conflict, hostilities intensified, with yet more soldiers joining the toll of more than 10,000 deaths from Russia’s war on Ukraine.

And the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the only intergovernmental body successfully operating on the both sides of the front line, suffered its first fatality in the three years of its work in Ukraine. One OSCE monitor was killed and two were wounded after their patrol car hit a mine in the Russian-occupied part of Luhansk Oblast.

The continued drift of the occupied territories away from Ukraine puts the entire peace process into the question, and with it the fate of up to 3 million Ukrainians in the Russian-occupied areas.

“Unfortunately, they are being cut off,” George Tuka, the deputy head of the ministry for the temporarily occupied territories, told the Kyiv Post.

Russia’s hand

At midnight on April 25, the Russian-occupied city of Luhansk experienced a blackout after Ukraine’s national energy company Ukrenergo cut electricity to the breakaway region due to its having racked up debts worth billions of hryvnias over three years.

But in less than an hour the lights were back on in the city. The pseudo authorities in Luhansk claimed they had organized electricity supplies from Russia and the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast.

“The more and better we rebuild internal (infrastructure) the less dependent we will be on Ukraine,” said Igor Plotnitsky, leader of the Russian-backed forces in Luhansk.

Russian media estimated that the “humanitarian” energy supplies to occupied Luhansk will cost Russia some $53 million per year.

Ukraine’s authorities may also cut off electricity to the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk Oblast, but can’t do so until the frontline industrial city of Avdiyivka, which is supplied with electricity from Donetsk, is connected to the government-controlled electricity grid.

Tuka said that the electricity debt of Russian-occupied Donetsk is up to $18 million, while the debt of Russian-occupied Luhansk is almost $89 million.

Meanwhile, a group of Russian lawmakers from the Spravedlivaya Rossiya party submitted a draft law to Russia’s parliament on April 25 that would facilitate the granting of Russian citizenship to the residents of Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine.
In February, Russia recognized as legitimate passports issued to the public by the pseudo authorities in the Donbas.

Stolen businesses

Following the seizure by the Russian-backed forces in the Donbas of Ukrainian state- and privately owned businesses on their territory in a so-called “nationalization,” some enterprises, like Alchevsk Metallurgical Complex, stopped working. Others, like the Donetsk-based Zasiadko coal mine, placed their employees on unpaid leave.

Meanwhile, the Donbas pseudo authorities and their Russian patrons have managed to keep industry working, although at a lower capacity. A Kyiv Post source in the occupied territory said that in Makiyivka city most of the plants are still operating.
In March, the DTEK energy company and Metinvest group of steel and mining companies, both belonging to Ukraine’s richest oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, offered to re-employ their workers if they agree to move to government-controlled areas.

The proposal was not met with enthusiasm: Only 400 out of 20,000 former Metinvest workers agreed to move, the Delo newspaper reported.

Tuka said that these businesses are now “either storing their products, or exporting to Russia”.

Oleksandr Parashchiy, the head of research at Kyiv-based Concorde Capital investment bank, said Russia doesn’t need the anthracite coal produced in the occupied parts of the Donbas.

But he added that “this coal could be legalized by some Russian intermediary… or some close Russian state enterprise,” Parashchiy said.

The Donbas pseudo authorities gave the most lucrative of the expropriated companies to a firm reportedly linked to Sergiy Kurchenko, a close ally of the ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Kurchenko, like Yanukovych, is now living in Russia.

Aleksandr Khodakovsky, a former influential Donetsk separatist warlord, claimed in his blog that Kurchenko’s firm, Vneshtorgservise, is registered in South Ossetia, a region of Georgia with some 50,000 residents that Russia carved away from Georgia after their 2008 war.

Being officially recognized by Russia, South Ossetia might become the intermediary in a trade with the Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas. On April 21, the leaders of the Russian-backed forces in Donetsk and Luhansk visited Tskhinvali, the “capital” of South Ossetia, for the inauguration of its new president, Anatoly Bibilov.

Fighting intensifies

The scope of fighting this year has considerably intensified in comparison to 2016, with both sides started to use heavy artillery again.

On April 25 alone, the OSCE recorded about 600 ceasefire violations, and noted civilian casualties. Ukraine’s military reported four soldiers killed and 11 wounded on April 25-26.

Relative peace was important for those Ukrainian businesses that kept on transporting material and products across the front line, both openly and in a clandestine way.

After these businesses ceased on working on Russian-occupied side, there were no vested interests interested in maintaining peace.

Increased fighting is also becoming more likely as the weather warms, when new leaves cover the trees, helping to hide preparations for attacks.

In early April the pseudo authorities in Donetsk organized military exercises for more than 27,000 local men near the Horlivka and Shakhtarsk cities, preparing reserve forces in case of the resumption of full-scale hostilities. A Youtube video shows how the leader of the Russian-backed forces in Donetsk, Oleksandr Zakharchenko, addressing a crowd of men in civilian clothes who are holding flags of the self-declared “republic” in the Russian-occupied areas.

On April 26, the Russian-backed pseudo authorities in Luhansk issued a video of military exercises, in which tanks and armored vehicles are training to cross rivers. Along much of the front line, the Siversky Donets River separates the Russian-occupied areas of Luhansk from the government-controlled part.