On March 25, the deputy chief of the Russian military declared that the main emphasis of Russia’s brutal one-month-old Ukraine invasion would now be in the east, where it would seek “the liberation” of the Donbas. To many Western observers, the aim of the statement was clear: with the Russian offensives around Kyiv, Kharkiv, and other major Ukrainian cities virtually stalled and Russian forces absorbing heavy losses, Moscow needed a way to reclaim the mission. Focusing on the Donbas—where it has long been commanding, arming, and reinforcing separatists in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk provinces—was a convenient way to do so.
But from the outset of the war, the east has held a special place of importance for Russian President Vladimir Putin. After eight years of fighting in the area, expanding the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” to the edges of each province has become an ideological imperative for the Russian leader. The Donbas has high rates of Russian language use relative to the rest of Ukraine, and when Moscow began its covert invasion of the country in 2014, residents provided significant support. In elections since then, the area has backed Russian-sympathetic parties. If there was any part of Ukraine that Moscow might have been able to swiftly bring into its fold, it would seem to be there.
