Donetsk and Luhansk: What you should know about the ‘republics’

T. Belman. The following two articles published on Feb 22, 2022. add some much needed background. Donetsk and Luhansk both voted to secede in 2014. Putin waited until Feb 21, 2022 to recognize their independence. Two days later the Russian military operation commenced. So from Putin’s point of view Russia was not invading Ukraine. The West refused to recognize their independence and so considered that Russia invaded Ukraine. According to the following article, these provinces had the right to secede and their secession did not depend on how many nations recognized it.

Ukraine: The right of self-determination supersedes sovereign inviolability

This would not have happened but for the CIA sponsored Maidan Coup in 2014. Russia annexed Crimea in Mar 2022 and the other provinces in Sept 2022.

Who has followed Russia in recognising the controversial, Moscow-backed statelets in Ukraine? And what is life like there?

By Mansur Mirovalev, ALJEZEERA    22 Feb 20, 2222 

Kyiv, Ukraine – Moscow-backed separatists have controlled the southeastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known collectively as Donbas, for almost eight years.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised them only on Monday, paving the way for the official presence of Russian troops in the rebel-controlled areas that occupy about a third of Donetsk and Luhansk.

So far, only Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Syria have joined Putin in recognising Donetsk and Luhansk – along with breakaway Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. They all did so also on Monday.

The central question is whether Russia would recognise them in their current borders. Should it decide to help the rebels “restore” their statelets to the original borders, it may spell a large-scale war between Moscow and Kyiv.

At the moment, Russia will recognise “the borders, where the leadership of the DNR and the LNR are executing their authority,” Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko told the Interfax News Agency on Tuesday.

But the foreign ministry also said on Tuesday that the issue of the borders is yet to be resolved.

While Ukraine and the West try to avoid war, other questions loom.

What are the roots of the region’s separatism? What has kept these areas alive since 2014? And what is their future?

Neo-Stalinism

A 13.5 metre-tall statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin still dominates the main square in Donetsk, the capital of the eponymous breakaway region in southeastern Ukraine.

And the constitution adopted by Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, has been restored by the Moscow-backed separatist leaders of Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk after they broke away from the central government in 2014.

This constitution prescribes the death penalty for a number of crimes, making the separatist “People’s Republics” – and authoritarian Belarus nearby – Europe’s only homes to capital punishment.

After almost eight years of existence, the “republics” are understood to have evolved into totalitarian, North Korea-like statelets.

It is near impossible for foreigners to enter the areas. Ukrainians can only visit if they have relatives in Donetsk and Luhansk, and would have to cross into Russia first, which takes about 30 hours and costs $100 – a journey that also involves bribing officials at times. Residents need a Soviet-era residency registration.

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In the statelets, secret police and “loyal” residents monitor every word, phone call and text message.

Dissidents or businessmen who refuse to “donate” their assets to the “needs of the People’s Republic” have been thrown in “cellars”, or dozens of makeshift concentration camps, without trial.

“It looks like the 1930s in the Soviet Union, a classic gulag,” Stanislav Aseyev, a publicist who was kidnapped in 2017 in Donetsk and was sentenced by a separatist “court” to 15 years in jail for “espionage”, told Al Jazeera.

For almost two years, he was incarcerated and tortured in these “cellars” until separatists swapped him and dozens of other prisoners in 2017.

Thousands of others were tortured and abused in the “cellars”, according to rights groups and witnesses. The grave human rights abuses make Donetsk and Luhansk far worse than today’s Russia, an international human rights advocate said.

“The cellars where prisoners are held in Donetsk, and the widespread use of torture, are among the most obvious human rights issues,” said Ivar Dale, a senior policy adviser with the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a human rights watchdog group.

But there are much wider problems such as civil and political rights, he said.

“You could say that the political repression in Russia is doubly felt in Donetsk and Luhansk and other areas effectively under control of the Putin regime,” Dale told Al Jazeera.

Rust-belt ruins

These tendencies have gone hand in hand with economic degradation.

The living standards are “many times, if not dozens of times worse than in pre-war 2013”, said Aseyev, 32, who now lives in Kyiv and has published a novel about the events in Donetsk.

This regress looks even more staggering considering Donetsk’s and Luhansk’s not-so-ancient history. The cities were founded by two Brits.

Englishman Charles Gascoigne built a metal factory in what is now Luhansk in 1795, shortly after czarist Russia annexed Crimea and eastern Ukraine from the Crimean Khanate, a mostly-Muslim vassal of Ottoman Turkey.

Decades later, in 1869, Welshman John Hughes started a steel plant and a coal mine in what is now Donetsk, and the city was named after him – Hughesovka or Yuzovka – until the Soviet era.

The birth and rapid growth of both cities followed the czarist government’s drive to develop the immense coal and iron ore deposits of what is now eastern Ukraine.

Communist Moscow further spurred the region’s development, and tens of thousands of ethnic Russians settled there, making urban areas almost exclusively Russian-speaking.

Coal and mines grew deeper next to hillocks made of spent ore, and foundries, chemical and power plants dotted the region.

The political heyday of Donetsk began in 2010, when its native Viktor Yanukovych became Ukraine’s president – and brought cohorts of his cronies to Kyiv.

They tried to wrestle control of Ukraine’s politics and economy – but triggered months-long protests that began in November 2013 and ended in February 2014, when the Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych from office.

The protests are known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity – but Russian President Vladimir Putin still calls them a “coup”.

‘Russian spring’

In the czarist era, the region was known as Novorossiya – or New Russia – and the Kremlin would use the name in 2014 as it proclaimed the “Russian Spring” or “liberation” of Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine.

But pro-Russian rallies and uprisings in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and Odesa, its largest seaport on the Black Sea, failed.

However, thousands of Russian volunteers flocked to Donetsk and Luhansk to aid separatist militias – while many locals were ecstatic about the “Russian Spring”.

“Putin will come and restore order here,” one of their supporters, a rotund minibus driver named Valerii, told this reporter in April 2014 in Donetsk.

But four months later, after the separatists tried to confiscate his minibus, he locked his apartment, loaded the bus with his most valuable belongings, and left for Kyiv.

‘Price tag’

Even though Ukraine barred any economic ties to the separatist regions, they still exist – and even involve top politicians.

Pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko, who came to power after the Revolution of Dignity, admitted that he channeled government funds worth tens of millions of dollars in exchange for Donetsk coal in the winter of 2014-2015 because otherwise “half of Ukraine could have frozen”.

But Russia still had to bankroll the separatist provinces spending billions of dollars a year.

So, what are Moscow’s economic goals in Donbas?

“Very simple – to lower the price tag of maintaining the occupied territories,” Aleksey Kusch, a Kyiv-based analyst, told Al Jazeera.

To achieve that, Russia may want to remove the middlemen who pocketed the lion’s share of profits from the export of coal and steel and the delivery of humanitarian aid that was immediately resold on the black market.

“They kept up to 70 percent of the profits,” Kushch said.

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Why Russia recognised separatist-held regions in east Ukraine

By Niko Vorobyov  Published On 22 Feb 2022

Saint Petersburg, Russia – The tense standoff between Russia, and Ukraine and Western governments sharply escalated on Monday night as Russian President Vladimir Putin recognised two breakaway regions held in eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian rebels as independent states and ordered troops into the territories.

“I deem it necessary to make a decision that should have been made a long time ago – to immediately recognise the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR),” he said in a televised speech.

The move was condemned by Western countries at a marathon meeting of the United Nations Security Council, during which many speakers raised an alarm of a Russian invasion into Ukraine. The United States also responded by barring citizens from doing business with the rebel territories and warned of further sanctions, as did other allies.

Putin’s announcement came as more than 100,000 Russian soldiers remain stationed on the Ukrainian border, with tens of thousands more taking part in training exercises in neighbouring Belarus, amid accusations of attacks by the Ukrainian military on rebel positions, sparking fears that Russia will intervene on the rebels’ behalf and launch a campaign beyond areas already ruled by the separatists.

Ukraine has denied it is behind the attacks.

Although a law officially recognising the DPR and LNR has yet to pass the Federation Council, Russia’s upper chambers of parliament, the matter could be settled as early as Tuesday.

Putin also instructed the Russian army to act as peacekeepers to the newly recognised “republics”, where he had earlier described the situation as a “genocide”.

Further complicating things, the two self-proclaimed “people’s republics” also claim the rest of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as their territory, beyond where they already control. Whether this means Russian forces will attempt to push further into Ukraine, past the pre-existing front lines, is not yet known.

“Essentially, this represents a much less apocalyptic option than the kind of full-scale invasion the West has been predicting,” security expert Mark Galeotti told Al Jazeera.

“However, the key question would be whether this means recognising the pseudo-states, which would be politically aggressive but not necessarily lead to wider war, or whether Moscow would assert that they have a right to all of the Donbas region, including government-held areas,” Galeotti added.

“That would mean war.”

Up until now, Russia has denied it is a party to the east Ukrainian conflict, despite serving Russian soldiers having fought on the separatists’ side. Openly deploying the army on their behalf would breach the 1975 Helsinki Accords, which includes clauses on the “inviolability of frontiers” in Europe, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine.

The DPR and LNR now find themselves, to a certain extent, in a similar position to the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. During the civil wars which rumbled across Georgia in the early 1990s, the two breakaway areas on the border with Russia declared their independence.

In 2008, the Georgian army tried taking them back by force, launching an assault on the rebel stronghold of Tskhinvali, only to find the Russian military pushing them all the way back to Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.

Russia said its forces were acting as peacekeepers against Georgian aggression, and recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s statehood shortly after the war.

Aside from Russia, only a small handful of countries – mainly Russian allies such as Syria and Venezuela, as well as the tiny Pacific island of Nauru – recognised their independence, while Georgia denounces what it calls an illegal Russian occupation of its territory, where Russian forces are still stationed.

In 2009, a European Union report accused Georgia of opening hostilities, and the Georgian leadership had made reclaiming its territory a priority. Nevertheless, many see parallels between Moscow’s support for rebels in Georgia, and Ukraine.

“This is all happening according to the playbook and the scenario we saw here,” Georgian security expert Mariam Tokhadze told Al Jazeera from Tbilisi. “It’s eerily familiar – the bombing of a sleeping town, the talk of genocide, we have heard this all already. The idea is to destabilise a country to the point that it is embroiled in a permanent internal chaos.”

This view – that the aim is chaos, rather than conquest – is shared by Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko.

Ishchenko told Al Jazeera the recognition of the separatists is born of the Kremlin’s frustration with the Ukrainian leadership and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s failure to carry out the terms of the Minsk agreements, which ended the heaviest fighting in eastern Ukraine in 2015 and would have entailed compromise with the rebels; as well as the shutdowns of Russian-language TV stations and the arrest of Viktor Medvedchuk, an oligarch and politician widely seen as friendly to Russia.

“Putin hoped for the Minsk accords’ implementation,” Ishchenko said. “He lost his hope starting with Zelenskyy’s repression against Medvedchuk a year ago, and ending with the dissatisfying reactions of the West and Ukraine to Russian coercive diplomacy recently. It’s a part of the strategy of gradual destabilisation of Ukraine, a much smarter strategy for Putin than the all-out ‘imminent invasion’.”

According to Ishchenko, while Russia says it is ready to return to the Minsk accords’ framework, Ukraine “is shortsightedly relieved to proclaim it’s dead”.

“Russia will continue to raise the stakes in its strategy of coercive diplomacy in order to destabilise Ukraine and force it to a more enforceable ‘Minsk-3’ or gradually dismantling the Ukrainian state or revising its borders,” Ishchenko said.

Aside from Russia, the DPR and LNR have also been recognised by Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while on Tuesday the Syrian government said it supported Putin’s move to recognise them and would cooperate with them.

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