Donbas

• 1. Introduction

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  The Donbas sits on a steppe plateau in southeastern Ukraine, a region whose name is simply a portmanteau of "Donets Coal Basin." That compressed, functional label tells you something essential about the place: it was built around coal, shaped by industry, and fought over ever since. As of October 2025, roughly 90% of the Donbas is under Russian military occupation, a figure that would have seemed impossible to the workers who voted 83.9% in favor of Ukrainian independence in 1991. How did a region so embedded in Ukraine become the centre of a war that reshaped European history? The answer lies in the deep seams of coal that drew millions of migrants, the Soviet policies that reshaped who those migrants were, and the political forces that turned regional grievance into armed conflict. To understand the Donbas today, you have to go back to 1676, when the very first town in the region was founded not for politics, not for empire, but for salt.

• 2. Coal, Salt, and Foundation

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  The first permanent settlement in the region was founded in 1676, a town called Solanoye, now known as Soledar, built to exploit newly discovered rock-salt reserves. Salt drew the first settlers; coal would define everything that followed. The vast coal resources of the Donbas were discovered in 1721, but serious exploitation did not begin until the mid-to-late 19th century, when the Industrial Revolution created demand that the region's geology was perfectly positioned to meet. The coal layers in the central area, known as Old Donbas, emerge directly at the earth's surface. In the surrounding New Donbas, they sit 500-600 meters down and were not developed until after World War II. The total territory of Old and New Donbas together covers roughly 50,000 square kilometers.

  Donetsk, now the largest city in the region, was founded in 1869 by a Welsh businessman named John Hughes on the site of an old Zaporozhian Cossack town called Oleksandrivka. Hughes built a steel mill and established collieries, and the city was named after him: Yuzivka, a Ukrainian rendering of his surname. The logic of industry followed quickly. The Catherine Railway, completed in 1884, connected the area to Kryvbas iron ore deposits, and foreign capital from France, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom began pouring in. Steel mills opened in rapid succession across the region through the 1890s, and between 1880 and 1900, coal production grew from 1.4 million to 11 million tons. By 1900, the number of coal miners had reached 68,000, and the Donbas had overtaken the Urals as the leading producer of pig iron in the Russian Empire.

  The coal was not easily won. Anthracite and bituminous coal, the most valuable grades, are mined at depths of around 1,800 meters. The seams themselves range from a few centimeters to two meters thick. Even today, Donbas coal is characterized by high shares of cinder and sulphur, making it less suitable for coking. The geology imposed costs, and those costs were paid largely by workers who came from far outside the region.

• 3. Who Came and Who Stayed

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  According to the Russian Imperial Census of 1897, Ukrainians accounted for 52.4% of the population of the Donbas region, while ethnic Russians made up 28.7%. Ethnic Greeks, Germans, Jews, and Tatars also had a significant presence, particularly in the district of Mariupol, where they made up 36.7% of the population. That census captures a moment of transition. Russians dominated the industrial workforce in the cities, while Ukrainians dominated the rural areas. Those Ukrainians who did move to cities for work were quickly absorbed into the Russian-speaking working class. As a result, historian Hiroaki Kuromiya's phrase "the most Russified region of Ukraine" describes a process that was already well underway by the turn of the 20th century.

  The population balance shifted further under Soviet rule. In 1926, 639,000 ethnic Russians resided in the Donbas, and Ukrainians made up 60% of the population. After World War II, large numbers of Russian workers arrived to repopulate a region devastated by occupation and fighting. By the Soviet Census of 1989-45% of the population reported their ethnicity as Russian. Linguist George Shevelov noted that even in the early 1920s, when the Soviet Union ordered all schools in the Ukrainian SSR to teach in Ukrainian, the proportion of secondary schools teaching in Ukrainian in the Donbas was already lower than the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in the region. The 1958-59 Soviet educational reforms then led to the near elimination of Ukrainian-language schooling entirely.

  The 2001 census, the last one conducted before the war, found ethnic Ukrainians forming 58% of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9% of Donetsk Oblast. But language and ethnicity told different stories: Russian was the main language of 74.9% of Donetsk Oblast residents and 68.8% in Luhansk Oblast. Roman Horbyk of Sodertorn University wrote that as peasants from surrounding regions flooded the region's mines and plants, incomplete institutions prevented residents from acquiring a strong modern national identity. Surveys taken across the 1990s and 2000s showed strong support for remaining within Ukraine alongside high rates of what respondents described as a "Soviet identity," with around 40% of Donbas residents claiming that self-description.

• 4. Revolution, War, and Famine

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  Poor living and working conditions produced regular strike actions throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the Russian police and gendarmerie responding by suppression. A major workers' uprising took place in Horlivka in December 1905, resulting in a bloody crackdown. During the February Revolution of 1917, Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks all established significant influence among the Donbas working class. Local Bolsheviks, led by Fyodor Sergeyev (known as Artyom), Kliment Voroshilov, and Alexander Parkhomenko, used forces dispatched from Moscow to establish Soviet power in parts of the region. In December 1917, Donbas Bolsheviks supported the creation of a puppet Soviet government in Kharkiv.

  The region changed hands repeatedly during the Russian Civil War. In April 1918, troops loyal to the Ukrainian People's Republic took control of large parts of the Donbas. In May 1918, the Ukrainian State, with German and Austro-Hungarian support, extended its control across the region, including Taganrog uezd. A treaty signed on the 8th of August 1918 established the border between Ukraine and the Don Host along the eastern border of Yekaterinoslav Governorate. By early 1919 Bolshevik forces had returned, only to be displaced by the Volunteer Army. During that entire turbulent period, Nestor Makhno, commanding the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, was described as the most popular leader in the Donbas.

  December 1919 brought lasting Bolshevik control. The revolution and years of war left most of the region's industry destroyed: between 1913 and 1920, coal production dropped from 25.3 to 4.6 million tons, and iron production fell to 0.5% of its pre-war level, with only one factory, in Yenakiieve, still operating. Recovery was substantial; by 1928-1929 pre-war production levels had been restored. But the 1932-33 Holodomor famine struck with particular force in the Donbas, where most ethnic Ukrainians were rural peasant farmers. They bore the brunt of a famine that resulted from early Soviet industrialization policies combined with two years of drought across southern Ukraine and the Volga region. By 1940, annual coal production had reached 83.7 million tons, but by then the human composition of the region had been permanently altered by famine, migration, and policy.

• 5. Occupation, Destruction, Reconstruction

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  Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler viewed the resources of the Donbas as critical to Operation Barbarossa. The region suffered under Nazi occupation during 1941 and 1942. Thousands of industrial workers were deported to Germany for factory labor. In what was then called Stalino Oblast, now Donetsk Oblast, 279,000 civilians were killed over the course of the occupation. In Voroshilovgrad Oblast, now Luhansk Oblast, the death toll was 45,649. The 1943 Donbas strategic offensive by the Red Army returned the region to Soviet control, but left it both destroyed and depopulated. Coal and metal production levels from 1940 were only restored in 1949.

  One peculiar legacy of the Soviet reconstruction period was hidden from workers for decades. On the 16th of September 1979, at the Yunkom coal mine in Yenakiieve, a 300-kiloton nuclear test explosion was conducted at a depth of 900 meters. The aim was to free methane gas and degasify coal seams into a sandstone structure known as the Klivazh, or Rift, Site. Before the era of glasnost, no miners were informed of the radioactivity present at the mine. That experiment represents one strand of the environmental legacy the region carries: the Donbas coal industry also produced water-supply disruption, flooding from mine water, visible air pollution around coke and steel mills, and contamination threats from chemical waste-disposal sites that have not been maintained.

  Despite those hazards, the Donbas remained the biggest industrial area in Ukraine and in Eastern Europe. Estimated coal reserves stand at 60 billion tonnes. The carbon layer reaches 2-4 kilometers in thickness. Before the start of the war in April 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts together produced about 30% of Ukraine's total exports. In 2013, the GDP of the Donbas was 220 billion hryvnias, equivalent to roughly 20 billion euros.

• 6. Independence and Grievance

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  In the 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence, 83.9% of voters in Donetsk Oblast and 83.6% in Luhansk Oblast supported independence from the Soviet Union. The vote was emphatic. Yet within two years, the region was in open economic crisis. By 1993, industrial production had collapsed and average wages had fallen by 80% since 1990. Donbas coal miners went on strike in 1993, in a conflict that historian Lewis Siegelbaum described as "a struggle between the Donbas region and the rest of the country." One strike leader stated explicitly that Donbas people had voted for independence because they wanted power given to localities and enterprises, not because they wanted centralized authority moved from Moscow to Kyiv.

  The 1994 consultative referendum in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts asked voters whether Russian should become an official language, whether Ukraine should federalize, and whether Ukraine should deepen ties with the Commonwealth of Independent States. Close to 90% of voters supported these propositions. None were adopted; Ukraine remained a unitary state with Ukrainian as its sole official language. The Donbas strikers did win economic concessions from Kyiv, and subsidies helped ease the immediate crisis. But many mines were closed through the 1990s as the World Bank pushed for liberalizing reforms.

  Power in the Donbas in the early 2000s concentrated among a regional oligarchic elite that historian Hiroaki Kuromiya called the "Donbas clan." Prominent members included Viktor Yanukovych and Rinat Akhmetov. During the Orange Revolution of 2004, pro-Yanukovych politicians attempted to establish a so-called South-East Ukrainian Autonomous Republic. A congress in Sievierodonetsk on the 28th of November 2004 drew 3,576 delegates from 16 oblasts, claiming to represent over 35 million citizens. Moscow Mayor Yurii Luzhkov and an advisor from the Russian Embassy were present in the presidium. The project collapsed the following month. Despite the international attention that episode attracted, surveys throughout the 1990s and 2000s showed strong support for remaining within Ukraine and insignificant support for armed separatism.

• 7. War and Partition

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  From the beginning of March 2014, demonstrations by pro-Russian and anti-government groups spread across the Donbas, following the annexation of Crimea and the Revolution of Dignity. By April 2014, the protests had escalated into armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and the Ukrainian government. Referendums held on the 11th of May 2014 in the separatist-controlled areas showed about 90% voting for independence; Ukraine and the international community viewed these votes as illegal and undemocratic.

  Historian Hiroaki Kuromiya described the conflict as "secretly engineered and cleverly camouflaged by outsiders." The initial protests were largely native expressions of discontent. Russian involvement at the early stage was limited to vocal support. The separatist movement began as a small fringe group, independent of direct Russian control. What converted a marginal protest faction into an armed force controlling significant territory was Russian military backing. By August 2014, the Ukrainian Anti-Terrorist Operation had shrunk the separatist-held territory substantially and was close to regaining the Russian-Ukrainian border. Russia then abandoned what analysts called its hybrid war approach and launched a conventional military intervention, reversing the Ukrainian gains.

  The Minsk Protocol, signed on the 5th of September 2014, attempted to stop the fighting. When that failed, Minsk II was signed on the 12th of February 2015. Over the following years, there were 29 ceasefires, each intended to hold indefinitely; none stopped the violence. A UN OHCHR report released on the 3rd of March 2016 recorded 1.6 million internally displaced people who had fled the Donbas to other parts of Ukraine, with over 1 million more having fled elsewhere, mostly to Russia. At the time of the report, 2.7 million people continued to live in DPR and LPR-controlled areas. A 2018 survey of residents in Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donbas found that 82% believed there was no discrimination against Russian-speaking people in Ukraine, and 71% did not support Russia's military intervention.

  On the 21st of February 2022, Russia officially recognized the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, ending the Minsk framework. Three days later, on the 24th of February, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On the 18th of April 2022, the Battle of Donbas began as a focused Russian offensive within the larger eastern Ukraine campaign. On the 30th of September 2022, Russia unilaterally declared its annexation of the Donbas alongside Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. As of October 2025, Russian Armed Forces control roughly 90% of the region, leaving a land where 83% once voted for Ukrainian independence almost entirely under foreign military occupation.