In their meeting in Alaska on Monday,Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, are reported to have agreed that Ukraine should cede Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin wants Ukraine’s armed forces to withdraw completely from the areas. In exchange, he would freeze the fighting along the rest of the front line — particularly in the southern Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which are currently largely occupied by Russian forces.
In recent years, Putin has repeatedly emphasized the importance of Donetsk and Luhansk, which together make up the Donbas. He says the region is historically linked to Russia and part of the legacy of the Soviet Union. In terms of constitutional law, however, the region belongs to Ukraine — a fact that was already undisputed in the Soviet era.
Though the Crimean Peninsula was only transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev — a source of dispute in Russia to this day — the Donetsk and Luhansk regions have been part of Ukraine since the founding of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1919. And, for a long time, this was undisputed.
The Donbas has long had a strong Russian character. As early as the 19th century, and in Soviet times later, it was an industrial heartland, rich in natural resources. As the coal-mining, steel and chemical sectors were developed in the 20th century, people from all over the Soviet Union, above all from Russia, moved here in search of work.
Even before 2014, a clear majority of the population spoke Russian; while many people in the more western parts of Ukraine wanted closer ties to the European Union than to the Kremlin, this part of eastern Ukraine maintained close ties with Moscow. The former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was supported by the Kremlin, was born in Donetsk, and it was in this region that most of his base lived.
It was when he was overthrown during the Maidan revolution of 2014 and fled to Russia that the Donbas became a bone of contention between Moscow and Kyiv.
Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, and unrest spread in eastern Ukraine. Armed groups, supported by Russian weapons and paramilitaries, announced the establishment of self-proclaimed “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk.
‘Special military operation’
If the Kremlin was hoping for wide support from Russian-speaking Ukrainians, it was soon to be proved wrong. In fact, the separatist war in eastern Ukraine fueled resentment of the Kremlin. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who grew up speaking Russian, won a landslide victory in the 2019 presidential election, winning in the areas of eastern Ukraine still held by Kyiv. His approach to end the conflict without giving up Ukrainian sovereignty met with broad approval.
The Donbas was a leitmotif for Putin when he launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In a televised speech, he justified his “special military operation” by saying that the self-proclaimed people’s republics had asked Russia for help. He even claimed that the Russian-speaking residents in the areas of eastern Ukraine that were controlled by Kyiv faced “genocide.”
Today, all of the Luhansk region and about 70% of Donetsk are under the Kremlin’s control. Thus, about 88% of the Donbas is occupied by Russia. More than 4 million people are estimated to live in the two regions, which boast not only rich deposits of coal and iron ore, but also lithium, cobalt, titanium and other rare earths that are key for high-tech goods.
Donbas is crucial
The two regions are also vital for the Kremlin to maintain a land connection to the Crimean Peninsula, which can only be reached from Russian territory via the Kerch bridge.
Should the Kremlin be granted control of the Donbas and the front line in the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions be frozen, it effectively would mean that Russia’s occupation of these areas would continue, Crimea would be accessible via land. And Ukraine would have no access to the Sea of Azov, an inlet connected to the Black Sea that is currently bordered by Ukraine and Russia.
For Ukraine, too, the significance of the Donbas goes beyond economics. The government has established a “fortress belt” in the areas that it still holds. It is the military’s most important line of defense, and it has made it so far impossible for Russia to advance further into central Ukraine. The fortress belt comprises several key cities and fortified positions, including Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and Kostyantynivka, which Ukraine has held onto doggedly despite heavy losses. Behind this belt lie the open plains of central Ukraine, which would be extremely vulnerable to a Russian offensive without a line of defense.
Thus, Zelenskyy will do his best to not give up the remaining areas of Donbas without far-reaching and reliable security guarantees.
This would in any case be hard for him to do from a domestic point of view. The constitution does not allow the president to make such a concession, which would be extremely unpopular in Ukraine. According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, about 75% of Ukrainians are against territorial concessions to Russia.
This article was originally written in German.
