Why is Ukraine's Donbas So Important to the Russians

A residential neighborhood that was heavily damaged by Russian strikes on April 30 in Dobropillya, a town in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region. (Heidi Levine for The Washington Post)

 

Russia is planning to formally claim wide new sections of Ukrainian territory in the southern and eastern parts of the country, a senior U.S. official said Monday.

The portions would include the city of Kherson in the south, as well as the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Michael Carpenter, told reporters at the State Department. He said the United States had “highly credible” intelligence indicating Moscow would attempt to stage fraudulent, pro-Russian referendums there in the coming weeks — after which it would install friendly local leaders. 

Russia last month launched a ground offensive in eastern Ukraine to “liberate” the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, parts of which are already ruled by separatists loyal to Moscow. The area, known collectively as Donbas, has long been a flash point for conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

Just days before Moscow invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally recognized the independence of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. He has accused Ukraine’s government of persecuting the mostly Russian-speaking residents of the area.

But U.S. officials say Russian forces have not made much progress militarily in Donbas. Speaking to reporters Monday, a U.S. defense official said Russian troops were making “minimal progress at best” and described the operation as “anemic.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under Biden administration rules.

For Moscow, a victory in eastern Ukraine would be a welcome diversion from its failed offensive in the north. It would also give Russia a critical piece of Ukrainian territory, depriving Kyiv of its industrial heartland.

Here’s what is happening in Ukraine’s Donbas region and why it matters.

 

Historical links between Russia and Ukraine date back as far as the 9th century — a legacy Putin has invoked as a justification for his invasion of Ukraine.

The Donbas region — which shares a border with Russia — has a long industrial heritage, with heavy mining and steel-producing capacity, as well as large coal reserves.

In early 2014, after mass protests in Ukraine toppled a pro-Moscow president, Russia invaded and annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula — a move Europe and the United States saw as illegal. Moscow-backed separatists also took over the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk on Russia’s border. There, the rebels seized government buildings and proclaimed new “people’s republics.”

The crisis escalated, and pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk held a referendum to declare independence from Ukraine. Kyiv and the West have accused Russia of supporting the rebels with troops and weapons, but Russia says the fighters are volunteers. Clashes between the separatists and Kyiv-backed forces continued.

In 2015, Russia and Ukraine agreed on the Minsk peace deal, a plan brokered by France and Germany to end the conflict between Kyiv and the Russian-backed separatists in the contested region. Under the agreement, Ukraine would give the two regions a special status and significant autonomy in return for regaining control of its border with Russia.

But negotiations stalled.

Putin said Ukraine has no intention of implementing the agreement’s terms. Ukraine said an agreement on Russian terms would give Moscow power to influence Ukraine’s foreign policy and undermine its sovereignty.

Putin’s formal recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s Republics on Feb. 21, days before he launched his invasion, signaled an end to a seven-year-old peace deal.

The failure of the Minsk agreement dampens hopes of a lasting peace deal to end the current fighting, analysts say. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of killing civilians in places like the suburb of Bucha, where Ukraine has said mass graves and bodies on the street point to increasing evidence of massacres that will make reaching a peace agreement more difficult.

Even before the Russian invasion, Moscow had issued 800,000 Russian passports in the separatist regions.

Why are Donetsk and Luhansk important to Russia?

Putin has described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people,” writing in an essay shared on the Kremlin’s website in July that “true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia.”

“Ukraine has never had its own authentic statehood,” Putin said during a seething speech in February that delved into Soviet history to undermine the idea of Ukraine as an independent nation.

The most recent official census in 2001 found that more than half of the population in Crimea and Donetsk identified Russian as their native language. But pinning eastern Ukraine as all largely Russian-speaking, and the West dominated by Ukrainian, can be seen as an oversimplification. Many in the eastern countryside speak Ukrainian or a Russian-Ukrainian mix called Surzhyk. The war has prompted a growing number of Russian speakers in Ukraine to abandon the language as part of a rejection of Putin’s concept of “Russky Mir,” or a “Russian World,” that includes Ukraine.

Still, Putin has repeatedly invoked the idea of Donbas’s distinctive regional identity as a basis to “defend” its Russian-speaking people from a supposedly intolerant Ukraine. Separatists have also capitalized on this identity to fuel support and rebellion against Kyiv.

In Kyiv-controlled Donbas, a majority wants the separatist regions to return to Ukraine. In the separatist-controlled area, over half want to join Russia, either with or without some autonomous status, per a survey published in 2021.

Mariupol — home to the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works plant, where the city’s Ukrainian resistance is holding out — is one of the last urban areas of Donetsk not fully under Russian control. Capturing it would give Russian forces a land bridge between Russia and the Crimean Peninsula.

Moscow also sees Ukraine as a buffer zone to NATO, which was founded in 1949 to protect against Soviet aggression. Putin has long said NATO’s eastward expansion was a red line for him.

What has happened in Donbas since the war started?

Ukraine’s Donbas has been divided into separate government- and separatist-controlled regions since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Back then, Russia seized and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, then lent its support to a wave of pro-Moscow protests in Donbas that quickly morphed into a separatist struggle.

The region’s simmering conflict had claimed about 14,000 lives, even before the current war. According to some estimates, about 4 million people were living in the separatist parts of Donetsk and Luhansk ahead of Russia’s February invasion.

More than 2 million people had fled before Russia launched its latest invasion in February.

Still, the separatists claim the entire region as theirs, including the crucial port city of Mariupol, which Russian forces have besieged for weeks. They now occupy most of the city, save for a sprawling steelworks complex where Ukrainian fighters have made a last stand. The operation has come at a devastating price, with potentially tens of thousands killed and more stranded without basic necessities, according to aid agencies.

Russia has redeployed weapons and troops and stepped up attacks in the east after its forces failed to capture Kyiv.

But Moscow’s forces may already be struggling in Donbas, despite the presence of friendly separatists and the region’s proximity to Russian territory. They remain plagued by logistics problems and low morale, experts say.

In the cities of Izyum and Popasna, both in Luhansk, “they’ve had some minor gains,” said the U.S. defense official who spoke to reporters Monday. “But what we saw there in Popasna is not unlike what we’ve seen in other hamlets in the Donbas. They’ll move in and then declare victory, and then withdraw their troops, only to let the Ukrainians take it back.”

“So very, very cautious, very tepid, very uneven work by them on the ground,” the official said.

Robyn Dixon, Isabelle Khurshudyan, David L. Stern, Karoun Demirjian, John Hudson, Dan Lamothe, and Ruby Mellen contributed to this report. Washington Post