Russian forces are bombing towns and cities in eastern Ukraine, with the stated aim of being the old industrial stronghold known as Donbas.
After abandoning his campaign to capture the capital Kyiv and another city, Kharkiv, Vladimir Putin is now seeking military victory in the largely Russian-speaking east, where he falsely accused Ukraine of committing genocide.
Achieving his goals in the past is the minimum he needs before ending the operation and claiming it to be successful.
The Russian army already controls large areas of the south. Ukraine says the Battle of Donbas is the biggest battle on European soil since World War II, but its president has promised that the military will “fight for every centimetre of our land”.
What is the Donbas of Ukraine?
When Russian leaders talk about Donbas, they are not only referring to Ukraine’s coal and steel-producing region. He is highlighting two large eastern regions, Luhansk and Donetsk, which run from outside Mariupol in the south to the northern border with Russia.
The Donbas is predominantly Russian-speaking and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, its proxy forces occupied more than a third of Ukraine’s east in a war that never ended.
So-called people’s republics were created behind Russian proxies that no one recognized, and Russia is now planning to capture the rest of the East.
Luhansk and Donetsk may be largely Russian-speaking, but they are no longer pro-Russian. A Ukrainian opinion poll in May 2022 suggested that 82% of Ukrainians held a negative attitude towards Moscow in the territory seized by Russia since the February 24 invasion.
A month after the invasion, Russia reduced its ambitions to capture the capital Kyiv and instead focused its attention on the Donbas. By the end of March, it claimed to have controlled 93% of Luhansk and 54% of Donetsk, although this was certainly an exaggeration.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky announced in April that Russian forces had begun fighting for the Donbas and that Ukrainian forces had long prepared for it. Russia is far from subduing the entire region, although if it captures the two large twin cities of Severodnetsk and Lysychansk, all of Luhansk will be under control.