War in Donbas

• 1. Introduction

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  The war in Donbas began on the 12th of April 2014, when a heavily armed unit of fifty Russian Armed Forces volunteers crossed the border from Russia and seized the town of Sloviansk. Their commander, former GRU colonel Igor Girkin, later told the Russian ultranationalist newspaper Zavtra: "I'm the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn't crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out, like in Kharkiv or Odesa." One man's admission. One town. A war that would kill roughly 14,000 people and displace two million before it was swallowed by something even larger eight years later.

  This is the story of that in-between phase: a conflict that was never quite acknowledged by the power that started it, fought over a region where the population had genuinely complicated loyalties, and governed by ceasefires that neither side intended to keep. What drove ordinary protests in eastern Ukraine toward armed separatism? Who was really in command of the forces that seized government buildings, shot down civilian aircraft, and dug networks of trenches across the Donbas? And why, after years of grinding stalemate, did Russia finally choose to change everything?

• 2. Revolution and Its Aftermath

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  Viktor Yanukovych's decision in November 2013 to abandon a trade and association agreement with the European Union set off what became known as the Euromaidan protests. Ukraine's parliament had overwhelmingly approved finalising that agreement earlier in the same year, and Russia had pressed hard for Yanukovych to walk away from it. When he did, crowds gathered in Kyiv and grew larger over months, drawing in protesters who opposed government corruption, police brutality, and oligarchic influence.

  The protest climax came on the 18th to the 20th of February 2014, when clashes between demonstrators and the Berkut special riot police left 108 protesters dead, most of them shot by snipers. On the 21st of February, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the opposition calling for early elections and constitutional changes, then secretly fled the city that same evening. The next day, parliament voted to remove him, with about 73% of members backing the measure including members of his own party.

  What followed immediately was swift and coordinated. Unmarked Russian troops occupied Crimea. After what was widely described as an illegal referendum, Russia annexed it. In the Donbas, the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, counter-revolutionary and pro-Russian protests began. Leaked emails and telephone calls later revealed that the Russian state had funded and organised the separatists, largely through Kremlin advisers Vladislav Surkov and Sergey Glazyev. People in the region consumed mostly Russian-based media, which portrayed Ukraine's new interim government as an illegitimate fascist junta. A national survey taken in March-April 2014 found that 58% of Donbas respondents wanted autonomy within Ukraine, and 31% wanted secession. That ambiguity mattered. It meant there was a genuine base of discontent that outside forces could accelerate.

• 3. The Takeover of Towns

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  Between the 12th and the 14th of April 2014, Russian-backed militants seized government buildings across Donetsk Oblast in a rapid, coordinated sweep. Girkin's unit hit Sloviansk first, capturing its administration building, police station, and SBU office in a single morning. The fighters wore no insignia. According to researcher Serhiy Kudelia, none of the local activists who had organised early anti-Kyiv protests in Sloviansk played any prominent role once Girkin's men arrived. The town's separatist resistance was fully subordinated to a small group of Russian citizens acting in coordination with their Moscow chiefs.

  The same day, Girkin's men attacked the police station in Kramatorsk, resulting in a shootout. Militants flying the Donetsk People's Republic flag then issued an ultimatum to the city's mayor: swear allegiance to the Republic by the following Monday or be removed. In Horlivka, militants tried and initially failed to seize the police headquarters on the 12th, but succeeded by the 14th after some local officers defected to the DPR. The local chief of police was captured and beaten. A city council deputy, Volodymyr Rybak, was kidnapped by masked men on the 17th of April and his body was found in a river in Sloviansk on the 22nd.

  Across the region, the pattern repeated: buildings seized, flags changed, police either defected or retreated, weapons caches raided. In Artemivsk, which is now called Bakhmut, separatists took the city administration building on the 12th. Insurgents affiliated with the Donbas People's Militia occupied buildings in Khartsyzk on the 13th and in Zhdanivka on the 14th. The militants detained journalists, including American journalist Simon Ostrovsky, and on the 25th of April kidnapped eight OSCE observers, claiming they were NATO spies. Girkin later took personal responsibility for summary executions carried out during this period.

• 4. Ukraine's Stumbling Counter-Offensive

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  Ukraine's first military response, announced on the 15th of April and called the Anti-Terrorist Operation, began in disarray. Girkin later noted that Ukrainian forces were extremely cautious at first because Russian troops were massed on Ukraine's border and Kyiv was unsure how Moscow would respond.

  On the 16th of April, Ukraine's 25th Airborne Brigade entered Kramatorsk in columns of BMD-2 infantry fighting vehicles. Crowds blocked them, with Russian paramilitary members embedded in the crowd. One column was surrounded and disarmed; six armoured vehicles were captured and driven to Sloviansk. That same day, a column at Pchyolkino was halted and released only after soldiers surrendered their rifle magazines. Acting President Turchynov announced he would disband the brigade, then reversed that decision.

  The Geneva agreement of the 17th of April, signed by Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the United States, called for a ceasefire, the disarming of illegal groups, and the vacating of seized buildings. Pro-Russian paramilitaries refused to leave until Ukrainian nationalist group Right Sector also disarmed. Ukraine paused its counter-offensive on the 19th of April. In Mariupol on the 17th, three members of the Donbas People's Militia were killed, eleven wounded, and 63 arrested after a failed assault on a National Guard base.

  The re-launch of Ukrainian operations began on the 22nd of April, triggered in part by the discovery of Rybak's body and those of two Maidan activists, Yuri Popravko and Yuri Diakovskyi, all kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, and killed. By late May, Ukraine had retaken Kramatorsk's SBU building, but troops then withdrew and separatists reclaimed the city. By the 6th of May, 14 Ukrainian troops had died and 66 had been wounded. The opening months exposed a military that was poorly prepared for the conflict it faced.

• 5. MH17 and the Air War

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  On the 17th of July 2014, DPR forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over the village of Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, killing all 298 people on board. Investigation of the disaster was assigned to the Dutch Safety Board and a Dutch-led joint investigation team.

  The joint investigation team concluded that the airliner was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile fired from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory. The Buk launcher traced back to the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation. The team found it had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in separatist territory, and returned to Russia afterwards. On the basis of those findings, the Netherlands and Australia formally held Russia responsible.

  The MH17 disaster was not an isolated incident of air combat. Just days before, two Ukrainian Air Force planes had been shot down. A Ukrainian Il-76 transport aircraft was shot down on the 14th of June while preparing to land at Luhansk International Airport; all 49 people on board died. Russian tanks had crossed into Donetsk Oblast on the 11th of June, confirmed by US State Department intelligence even as Moscow denied it. The tanks were later photographed moving through Makiivka and Torez flying the Russian Federation flag. Each of these incidents exposed the same pattern: Russian military hardware operating on Ukrainian soil while Russian officials denied any involvement.

• 6. Russia's Open Invasion and the Ceasefires That Failed

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  By August 2014, Ukraine had recaptured most of the territory seized in the spring. Sloviansk fell back to Ukrainian control on the 5th of July. Girkin withdrew his forces under what the DPR prime minister Alexander Borodai described as "overwhelming numerical superiority". Three-quarters of the insurgents' earlier territory had been recaptured by the Armed Forces by early August.

  Russia's response was to drop the pretense of plausible deniability. On the 14th of August, a convoy of roughly two dozen armoured personnel carriers bearing official Russian military plates crossed into Ukraine near the Izvaryne border crossing. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen confirmed the incursion. In the weeks that followed, a large armoured force equipped with roughly 250 vehicles entered the Amvrosiivka area. Government forces near Ilovaisk became encircled. The Donbas Battalion, trapped in Ilovaisk, accused Kyiv of abandoning them.

  The Minsk ceasefire agreement was signed in September 2014. Despite that ceasefire, Russian-backed forces attacked Donetsk Airport. The airport finally fell to separatists in January 2015. A second agreement, Minsk II, was signed on the 12th of February 2015. Within days, separatists launched a renewed offensive on Debaltseve and forced Ukrainian forces to withdraw. Both sides then built networks of trenches, bunkers, and tunnels, and the conflict settled into static trench warfare with dozens killed monthly. By the end of 2017, OSCE observers had counted around 30,000 people in military gear crossing from Russia at the two border checkpoints they were permitted to monitor.

  All parties agreed to a roadmap for ending the conflict in October 2019. It remained unresolved. During 2021, Russian proxies stepped up their attacks while Russian conventional forces massed near Ukraine's borders. On the 21st of February 2022, Russia recognised the DPR and LPR as independent states and deployed troops there under the label of peacekeepers. Three days later, on the 24th of February, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Donbas war was subsumed into something larger, exactly as the DPR commander Girkin had once urged when he wrote to Vladimir Putin that losing this war would threaten the Kremlin's power.

• 7. The Human Cost

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  When the last count was made before the full-scale invasion, roughly 14,000 people had been killed in the Donbas war. The breakdown recorded approximately 6,500 Russian and Russian proxy forces, around 4,400 Ukrainian forces, and about 3,400 civilians on both sides. Most civilian casualties fell in the first year of the conflict, concentrated in the intense fighting of 2014.

  In 2011, the combined population of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts was 6.1 million people. As a result of the Donbas war, two million of them fled as refugees. Cities that became bywords for the conflict emptied out. Donetsk city mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko noted in July 2014 that at least 30,000 people had already left the city since April alone. In Luhansk, the mayor described the city as on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe after the blockade and rocket attacks cut off power and water.

  The civilian toll was not simply a byproduct of military operations. Journalists were detained. Local councillors were kidnapped and killed. Grad rocket attacks hit refugee convoys. A city council deputy was drowned. Executions took place. Girkin, the man who ignited the conflict, acknowledged personal responsibility for some of those killings. The 298 passengers on MH17 were civilians with no connection to the conflict at all, killed over a field in Hrabove. The pattern across the entire phase of the Donbas war was one in which civilians bore the cost of decisions made elsewhere.