Donbas: The Ukrainian Roots That Survived

Part one of this two-part series traced how Russia spent decades turning an economic region – the Donets Basin – into a manufactured identity, using it to justify the war that began in 2014. Part two turns to the evidence Russia’s story cannot explain: the Ukrainian identity that survived underneath it, and the ways Donbasification continues today. And yet the roots survived There is another part of Vlad’s argument about Donbasification – the deliberate construction of an enemy-made regional identity inside another country – that matters just as much: Donbasification did enormous damage, but it never entirely succeeded.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Beneath decades of Russification, Sovietisation and propaganda, Ukrainian identity survived. The history of the region itself makes that clear. Vasyl Stus, one of Ukraine’s greatest poets and dissidents, came from Donetsk. He refused to surrender his Ukrainian identity to the Soviet system and eventually died in a Soviet prison camp. Anatolii Solovianenko, the extraordinary tenor from Donetsk, carried Ukrainian song onto the world’s stages. Volodymyr Sosiura, born in Debaltseve, gave Ukraine one of its most enduring declarations of national love: “Любіть Україну — Love Ukraine.” These people did not somehow exist in spite of the region, they were of it. And before 2014, something else was happening across Donetsk and Luhansk. New cultural spaces were emerging. Artists, activists, festivals and civic initiatives were beginning to reconsider what a modern eastern Ukrainian identity could look like – industrial, often Russian-speaking, carrying a complicated Soviet inheritance, and completely Ukrainian. Other Topics of Interest Germany to Send New Air Defense Packages to Ukraine as Russia Escalates Drone Attacks Germany has been one of Ukraine’s key air defense supporters since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, supplying systems including Patriot and IRIS-T. Russia’s great miscalculation was assuming Russification had killed those roots. Azov and the contradiction Russia cannot explain That becomes particularly visible in the story of Azov. Few Ukrainian military formations have been subjected to as much Russian propaganda as Azov. Its early history has been endlessly extracted from context and weaponized by Moscow to construct one of the central justifications for Russia’s war: the absurd proposition that Russia invaded Ukraine to denazify it. Whatever debates may be had about individuals and symbols in the formation’s earliest period, turning that history into a description of today’s Azov – or, more extraordinarily, of Ukraine itself – is pure propaganda. Today the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov is part of Ukraine’s National Guard and part of the 1st Corps Azov. Its soldiers come from across Ukraine. And, as Vlad points out in his article, its current brigade commander comes from the Donetsk region. There is something wonderfully destructive to the Kremlin narrative in that simple fact. A man from the region Russia claims it came to rescue commands one of the Ukrainian formations fighting Russia. I am from Donetsk region too. And our stories are hardly exceptional. There are thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians from the East, many of them Russian-speaking, serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces, National Guard and other formations. Others support Ukraine from abroad. Some, like Vlad, returned and put on a uniform. Others, like me, work from countries such as New Zealand to build political, humanitarian and public support for Ukraine. And some remain inside territories Russia occupies. Resistance behind the occupation Perhaps nowhere is the failure of Donbasification clearer than there. The Yellow Ribbon civil resistance movement operates throughout Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk. Its activists live under a regime in which openly expressing Ukrainian identity can bring interrogation, imprisonment or worse. Yet Ukrainian flags, yellow ribbons, leaflets appear everywhere. In October 2025, activists even unfurled a Ukrainian flag near Donbas Arena in occupied Donetsk. They are small acts only if one ignores the circumstances in which they occur. For Russia, these people should not exist. If the Kremlin’s story were true – if these territories were naturally Russian, if their populations had simply been waiting for Moscow to liberate them – there should be no need to imprison people for displaying Ukrainian symbols or suppress Ukrainian education. There should be no Yellow Ribbon. Donbasification is still happening Donbasification is not merely something Russia did before 2014; Vlad’s concept is strikingly contemporary, and we can watch its machinery operating today. In July 2026, Human Rights Watch documented what Russia is doing to Ukrainian children living under occupation. Ukrainian-language education is being suppressed. Children are pushed into Russian curricula. Accessing Ukrainian education online can bring surveillance and punishment. Russian passports are required to graduate. Schools deliver anti-Ukrainian propaganda and militarized education. An OSCE expert mission reported this year on the systematic militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children and the displacement of Ukrainian language and identity from education in occupied territories. The process is familiar: suppress Ukrainian education and history, make Russian the language of authority, reshape the information environment and teach children that Russia is their country, only to later point to the resulting Russification as evidence that the population was Russian all along. This is Donbasification in perhaps its most concentrated form, and a reminder that Russia’s war has never been only about territory, but also about determining the identity of the people who live on it. A lesson from home There is a reason this subject stays with me. I come from the place Russia spent years telling the world was not really Ukrainian. Russia tried to turn my city into evidence of its own mythology. And because another part of my family comes from western Ukraine, I also grew up knowing the people we in the East were supposedly so fundamentally different from. Russia told eastern Ukrainians one story about western Ukrainians and told the world another story about us. Eventually those stories became part of the justification for war. This is also why the lesson of Donbasification matters far beyond Ukraine. Russia’s ability to identify genuine differences within societies, exaggerate them into supposed incompatibilities and then weaponize the resulting divisions is not unique to Donbas, nor is it confined to conventional warfare. For Western democracies confronting Russian disinformation, political interference and other forms of hybrid warfare, understanding how those narratives are constructed – and how easily they can become accepted as organic divisions within a society – is part of understanding the threat itself. But the deeper story of Donbas is not that Russia successfully created another people. It is that, despite extraordinary efforts to do exactly that, it failed. Ukrainians stood up when the invasion came and continue to fight together. The roots survived. They survived in Ukrainian poets writing under Soviet repression. In miners and workers who voted for Ukrainian independence. In the cultural revival beginning before 2014. In people from Donetsk and Luhansk who fought for Ukraine when Russia arrived. They survive today in soldiers from the East serving in Ukrainian formations, including Azov. In Vlad, serving Ukraine in the National Guard. In those of us abroad who continue advocating for the country from which we came. And they survive in a yellow ribbon tied somewhere in occupied Donetsk by a person who cannot safely tell us their name. Russia’s great strategic fiction was to transform an economic region into an identity, that identity into a grievance, the grievance into a supposed conflict and the conflict into justification for conquest. That is Donbasification. Understanding it matters because Russia’s most effective weapon was never simply the lie that Donbas was Russian. It was persuading people, slowly and repeatedly, that Ukrainians on opposite sides of their own country had less in common with one another than they actually did. Regardless of where we were born, what language we spoke, or what lies Russia told, Ukrainians chose Ukraine. And that is the warning: never let an enemy write your identity for you. Ukraine has paid an unimaginable price for that lesson. Others should learn it without having to do the same. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.