Fighting in Ukraine has been rounded off in the Donbas, a vast and besieged central region that has suffered years of conflict and now serves as a bloody scene where Russia’s war could be decided.
Donbas covers much of eastern Ukraine and has been at the forefront of the country’s conflict with Moscow since 2014.
But now his people, already marked by eight years of struggle, are enduring an even more intense assault. Russian forces are approaching the city of Severodonetsk and are making gradual progress in some parts of the region. Some attacks have been repelled by stubborn Ukrainian counter-offensives.
The failure of the capture of Kyiv and the central regions of Ukraine during the first months of the invasion meant that Donbas became the centerpiece of the military ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A Russian victory in the region would shock the West, but it could save Putin’s war goals, while a defeat could consolidate his invasion as a historic failure. In any case, it is almost certain that it will further devastate the Donbas region, a historically and culturally significant place, the proximity of which to Russia has dictated much of its turbulent existence.
Those who have lived and studied the region describe it as an independent and hard industrial center that has remained distrustful of external forces for decades.
But the waves of conflict since 2014 have reshaped and wounded their cities, and it is in their line of contact that the Ukrainian and Russian military are most focused, leading to a new but unpredictable phase of family warfare. .
What Donbas means to Putin: Despite his move to independence along with the rest of Ukraine in 1991, Donbas has maintained a place in the psyche of Russian leadership.
A famous 1921 Soviet propaganda poster dubbed Donbas “the heart of Russia,” depicting the region as a throbbing organ with ships spanning the entire Russian Empire. Before that, the region was part of the concept of “Novorossiya”, or New Russia, a term given to the territories to the west of which the Russian empire had expansionist ideas.
Cities like Luhansk and Donetsk are historically “places that (the Russians) could see a certain version of themselves,” Finnin said.
And that historical image could still linger within Putin’s worldview, experts suggest.
Observers have often suggested that Putin’s desired end is to rebuild the Soviet Union in which he first ascended. Anna Makanju, a former director of the US National Security Council for Russia, suggested that Putin “believes that he is like the tsars,” the imperial dynasties that ruled Russia for centuries, “potentially called by God to control and restore the glory of the Russian empires “.
A new Russian assault: it remains to be seen whether the furious battle for Donbas will be the final chapter of the Russian war, or simply its current phase. But by focusing on the region, Putin has completed his assault on Ukraine.
The so-called “liberation” of the Donbas region of Ukraine was described as an “absolute priority” for Russia by its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in an interview with the French channel TFI in late May.
The secessionist conflict in the Donbas had been costly but stalled since the initial increase in pro-Russian forces in 2014; the lines of the conflict barely moved in several years, with trenches along the point of contact from the south coast to the Russian-Ukrainian border north of Luhansk.
But Russia has made a number of advances in parts of the Donbas in the weeks since the battle began.
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