The Russo–Ukrainian War and the “Enigma” of the Donbas
The Russo–Ukrainian War and the “Enigma” of the Donbas

Summary/Abstract: In 2014, in the wake of “Euromaidan” (the Revolution of Dignity) in Kyiv and the ensuing chaos, Russia (the Russian Federation) secretly sent its military forces to Crimea, occupied, and quickly annexed it following a sham referendum. Russia’s ambitions were not confined to Crimea. It sought to capture a very large chunk of eastern-southern Ukrainian territory, calling it “New Russia [Новороссия],” but only succeeded in militarily occupying large sections of the Donbas (Donets’k and Luhans’k oblasts). Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was merely a continuation of the war Russia had covertly unleashed against Ukraine in 2014. In the West, and to some extent in Ukraine as well, there was a general understanding (though not approval) of Russia’s Crimean annexation. In the Crimean peninsula, ethnic Russians accounted for a majority of the population (more than 60 percent in 2014, though the exact figure is disputed). Crimea only became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. Although Crimea played an important role in the history of Rus’ (Kyiv-Rus’), it was incorporated by force into the Russian Empire only in the eighteenth century (followed by the expulsion of indigenous Turkic people, “Crimean Tatars,” the massive in-migration of Russians). Stalin’s punitive, wholesale deportation of Crimean Tatars from Crimea in 1944 artificially created a Russian majority on the peninsula. The Russian majority notwithstanding, 54 percent of the Crimean population voted for the independence of Ukraine in the December 1991 referendum. Following Ukraine’s independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia reacted by fostering separatist movements in Crimea with a degree of popular support. When Russia militarily occupied and annexed Crimea in 2014, it met little open resistance from the Crimean population. Although non-violent resistance did take place, no armed fighting ensued. By contrast, armed fighting erupted in the Donbas in 2014 and continues to this day. Clearly the Donbas, an industrial region of collieries and steel plants in eastern Ukraine bordering Russia, played a cardinal role in the outbreak of the Russo–Ukrainian war. Nevertheless, the Donbas, with its complicated history and contemporary political mood, is poorly understood in the West. Even in Ukraine itself, it remains a sort of political enigma and is even more poorly understood than is Crimea. Russia takes advantage of the seemingly inscrutable political life of the Donbas to spread disinformation.

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