Donetsk and Luhansk: Badly marked by war

Eastern Ukraine is at the center of tensions with Russia. Moscow’s recognition of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk takes the conflict to a new level. What are these areas?

The Donets Basin – or Donbass for short – has been an industrial area of ​​strategic importance since the discovery and mining of rich coal deposits in the 18th century. On the Ukrainian side, the Donbass extends to the administrative districts of Luhansk and Donetsk, which are located in the south-east of Ukraine and border on the Sea of ​​Azov. The east of the Donbass geographical area extends into the Rostov-on-Don region of Russia.

Coal mining was of great importance to Ukraine’s heavy industry, but even before the conflict broke out in 2014, the facilities were poorly maintained and little invested in them. Accordingly, industrial production there was already declining before the war.

The native language of many residents of the region is Russian, especially in cities like Donetsk, but Russian is also the lingua franca for most others. The widespread use of Russian is due to the fact that many people of Russian origin immigrated there during industrialization. It is disputed to what extent Ukrainians were forced to emigrate under Stalin’s regime or died of starvation.

From political turmoil to war

Until the outbreak of war in 2014, then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian “Party of Regions” was strongest there. In general, the residents were pro-Russian, and they demanded more linguistic and economic co-determination from the central government in Kiev.

This sentiment intensified when Yanukovych fled Kiev as a result of the Maidan uprising and the pro-Western movement took the lead. In the Donbass, the political unrest quickly turned into violent clashes that escalated into heavy military fighting. It was only possible to contain them through international negotiations on the Minsk Agreement and the establishment of an international OSCE observer mission.

The “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, proclaimed in 2014, each comprise a smaller part of the Ukrainian administrative districts of Donetsk. Both areas are characterized by crime, intimidation and violence. Many people have been abducted and tortured in prisons in recent years.

Russian and Ukrainian leaders

In everything that is currently happening in the Donbass, they are the key players: Denis Pushilin as leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk “People’s Republic” and Leonid Pasetchnik, who heads the Luhansk “People’s Republic”. Both announced the evacuation of the two areas on February 19. They accuse the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev of plans for an attack and have asked for help from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose decree recognizing the two territories they also signed.

Pushilin and Pasechnik have been active in Donbass since the beginning of the conflict, but only took over leadership of their respective areas in recent years: Pushilin in 2018 after an assassination attempt on then-leader Alexander Zakharchenko. Pasechnik took power in Luhansk in 2017. Until then he was the security minister of the “People’s Republic” and previously an employee of the Ukrainian secret service SBU.

Puschilin also comes from Ukraine, before 2014 he worked as a seller of dubious financial assets. Pushilin and Pasechnik are both members of the Russian ruling party “United Russia” and Observers see them as willing accomplices of the Kremlin – unlike their predecessors, who, like Zakharchenko, were seen as men with their own minds and did not wait for orders from Moscow.

Among them was former FSB agent Igor Girkin. He organized militant groups in the Donetsk region in 2014. He was charged by Dutch prosecutors in 2019 with murder in connection with the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in 2014.

Weeks later he retired to Russia, as did the Russian Alexander Borodai. He was the “Prime Minister” of Donetsk for a short time and became a member of parliament in Russia. In 2017 he claimed that the Russian government wanted to hand over the leadership of Donetsk and Luhansk to Ukrainians “to show the West that the uprising was a grassroots phenomenon”.

Passports for more than a million residents

The war that followed the 2014 uprising was devastating for the region and its residents. The infrastructure was largely destroyed, as was the heavy and mining industry. Blocked by the Ukrainian side, supplies cross the Russian border. A corruption verdict by a court in the southern Russian city at the end of 2021 showed that units of the Russian armed forces had long been present in the Donbass and were supplied with food from Rostov-on-Don – although the Russian leadership rejected the information from the court case shortly afterwards.

In the first year after the conflict began in 2014, more than a million people fled the region to other parts of Ukraine. Once again as many people went to Russia.

In spring 2019, Putin signed a decree making it easier for people remaining in the region to become Russian citizens – contrary to the provisions of the Minsk Agreement. According to Russian information, more than a million residents have now received a Russian passport. Young people who see no prospects in their homeland often associate Russian citizenship with the hope of training and work.

Two citizenships give the people there some flexibility in a life situation characterized by a high level of insecurity. However, according to surveys by the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in the areas not controlled by the Ukrainian government, a large proportion of the population there still feel they belong to Ukraine.

Justification for military presence

Population growth from Ukraine is helping Russia in the midst of a demographic crisis – Putin pointed out the declining number of residents in Russia, for example, at his year-end press conference in December.

Residents with Russian passports in the Donbass – as in other occupied areas in Russia’s neighboring countries – also serve as a justification for Putin to use force to protect them. The “peace and cooperation agreements” now concluded with Donetsk and Luhansk provide, among other things, for the construction of military bases there.

These two agreements are largely identical to the agreements that Russia signed in 2008 with Georgia’s breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Although Putin did not recognize them until after the war, it is possible to draw conclusions about the possible development of Donetsk and Luhansk.

In any case, the Russian armed forces built up a strong presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which allows them de facto military control over the occupied territories. So far, the two areas have not been integrated into the Russian Federation, even if there are strong efforts to do so in South Ossetia.

This could be different in the case of Donetsk and Luhansk, since Putin has repeatedly postulated that Ukraine belongs to Russia. Since the two “people’s republics” are equated with the two administrative districts of Donetsk and Luhansk in the “constitutions”, from the Russian point of view there is justification for further expansion beyond the – smaller – territory that has been occupied up to now.

Should there be a military escalation, many people who have now been urged to leave by Pushilin and Pasetschnik will not return. Then the war-torn region would be a home for even fewer people.