Donbasification: How Russia Manufactured an Identity

I come from Sloviansk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. For anyone who has followed Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, the name will probably be familiar. Sloviansk was where armed men led by Russian citizen and former FSB officer Igor Girkin seized government buildings in April 2014, and where one of the first major battles of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine unfolded.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. And yet, more than twelve years later, I still regularly encounter versions of the same story: “that something happened in Donbas in 2014 because the people there were fundamentally different from the rest of Ukraine; that Ukraine somehow fractured naturally between a Russian-speaking East and a Ukrainian-speaking West; that an internal conflict erupted and Russia subsequently became involved.” For somebody from the region, it is difficult to overstate how profoundly misleading that narrative is. I also had an unusual vantage point from which to watch the mythology behind it develop. While I grew up in the Donetsk region, part of my family comes from the Lviv region, and I spent considerable parts of my childhood travelling between the two. East and West. The two “Ukraines” we were repeatedly told existed. I saw differences, of course. Ukraine is a large country. Its regions have different histories, accents, traditions, economic structures and experiences of the Soviet period – all of that is normal. But I also saw something else: how genuine regional differences could be exaggerated, manipulated and eventually transformed into supposed incompatibilities. Other Topics of Interest Poland Joins US Drone-Warfare Drills Built on Ukraine’s Battlefield Lessons Poland becomes the first NATO ally to join a US special-forces exercise adapted from Ukraine’s battlefield experience. For decades, Ukrainians were encouraged to see one another through caricatures. The West was supposedly nationalist, hostile to Russian speakers and alien to people in the East. The East was supposedly Russian, Soviet, culturally separate and suspicious of Ukrainian nationalism. Language became political identity. Geography became loyalty. Political campaigns exploited those divisions, while Russian television, culture, information operations and political influence continually reinforced them. Eventually, the mythology became so familiar that people outside Ukraine – and sometimes Ukrainians themselves – began treating it as an organic description of the country. My dear friend Vlad Vernygora, an international relations and political science scholar who now serves as an officer in Ukraine’s National Guard, has given this phenomenon a particularly useful name: Donbasification. Vlad is also a New Zealander. He studied at the University of Canterbury before building an academic career in Europe, teaching international relations and political science and researching, among other things, contemporary political empires and their strategic narratives. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, he returned to Ukraine and joined the National Guard. Today, he serves as an officer in the 1st Corps Azov. In a piece published by Estonia’s Delfi under the striking headline “A warning to Estonia: You too can be turned into a Donbas – so learn from us,” Vlad describes Donbasification as something much more sophisticated than separatism. It is the deliberate construction of an enemy-made regional identity inside another country: taking real regional characteristics, layering mythology, propaganda and historical distortion over them, exaggerating genuine differences, suppressing inconvenient history, and eventually presenting the resulting artificial identity as evidence that the territory never properly belonged within the nation at all – and using that manufactured division against the state itself. It is a phenomenon I recognise intimately, both as a Ukrainian from the Donetsk region and as someone who spent much of my childhood moving between Ukraine’s East and West. And it is worth examining in full, because Donbasification helps explain not only what Russia did to my home region, but something much larger: how an imperial power can manufacture the very division it later claims merely to have discovered. First, what exactly is Donbas? Even the word itself carries part of the story. Donbas derives from the Donets Basin – originally an economic and geographical description of the enormous coal and industrial basin that developed across parts of eastern Ukraine and western Russia. It was not an ethnic territory, nor a nation within a nation. It did not even correspond precisely to an administrative region. What we commonly call the Ukrainian Donbas broadly encompasses Donetsk and Luhansk regions, but the economic basin historically extended beyond them into parts of Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions and across today’s international border into Russia. Soviet atlases treated Donbas as an economic region: coal, steel, factories, mines. A resource basin, not a separate homeland. That distinction matters enormously, because one of Russia’s greatest propaganda achievements was transforming an imprecise term of economic geography into something that sounded almost ethnic, a cultural identity if you will. Eventually we began hearing about the supposed people of Donbas as though they constituted a separate people with a political destiny fundamentally different from that of other Ukrainians. This is the heart of what Vlad calls Donbasification. The myth grew through propaganda, Russian popular culture and disinformation, continually reinforcing the idea that Ukraine’s East was fundamentally different from the West and laying the ground for a supposed internal conflict. The most dangerous invention was the idea of a separate people of Donbas – a pseudo-identity that could eventually be used to justify separation and territorial expansion. Once that proposition becomes accepted, the next steps become much easier. If the people are different, perhaps they require autonomy. If they require autonomy, perhaps Kyiv is oppressing them. If Kyiv is oppressing them, perhaps resistance is inevitable. And if resistance is inevitable, perhaps Moscow is not invading at all, perhaps it is simply helping. That is how an imperial project is gradually rewritten as an internal dispute. Before Donbasification came Russification None of this began in 2014. Donetsk and Luhansk suffered terribly under Soviet rule, including through the Holodomor and Stalinist purges. Communities were destroyed, populations changed. Workers were brought from Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union to supply the enormous industrial machine being built around the mines and factories. And forced Russification followed. This happened throughout Ukraine, but its depth in the industrial East was particularly profound. A whole region was taught to forget its own voice. Russian language became dominant in urban public life, administration, higher education, professional advancement and media. Ukrainian schools disappeared or were converted to Russian-language instruction. Ukrainian was increasingly pushed into the private sphere and associated with villages, while Russian carried status, opportunity and power. Speaking Ukrainian could mean losing a career. Street names, newspapers, institutions – everything reinforced Moscow’s dominance. That distinction is essential because language would later be used as supposed evidence of national identity. Millions of Ukrainians were Russified and then their Russification was presented back to them as proof that they were Russian. It is an extraordinary circular argument. First an empire suppresses your language. Then it points to the prevalence of its own language as evidence that the land belongs to it. The demographic consequences of Soviet terror and industrial migration reinforced the process. Soviet symbols dominated public space. Russian television and publishing dominated cultural consumption. Generations grew up inside an information environment in which Moscow remained the cultural center of gravity even after Moscow ceased formally to govern Ukraine. But none of this transformed Donetsk or Luhansk into Russia. We have an unusually clear historical test of that proposition. On Dec. 1, 1991, Ukrainians were asked directly whether they supported an independent Ukraine. Every administrative region of the country voted yes. Nationally, support exceeded 90%. In Donetsk region, 83.9% voted for Ukrainian independence. In Luhansk region, 83.86% did the same. Crimea and Sevastopol returned majorities for Ukrainian independence too. That referendum is extraordinarily inconvenient for the mythology subsequently built around Ukraine’s East. When people there were actually asked which country they wanted to belong to, the answer was Ukraine. Manufacturing East against West But independence did not end Russian influence. Ukraine emerged from the Soviet Union politically and institutionally weak, with elites shaped by the system they had inherited. Russian economic leverage remained enormous. So did Russian media penetration, cultural influence and political networks. The Soviet architecture was not dismantled overnight. Russian-language television remained everywhere. Soviet monuments and street names remained. Russian cultural products saturated the information space. And alongside them came something more corrosive: the constant political construction of an East-West divide. This part of Donbasification is particularly personal for me because I knew both sides of the country that were supposedly incapable of understanding one another. I knew Donetsk region and I knew Lviv region. Growing up, I watched narratives about each being fed to the other. People in the East were repeatedly warned about dangerous western Ukrainian nationalists who supposedly hated Russian speakers. People in the West were presented with an East supposedly incapable of imagining itself outside Russia’s cultural orbit. Real political disagreements existed, so did regional differences. But those differences were repeatedly inflated into questions of identity and belonging. The trick was subtle. You do not necessarily have to persuade somebody that they are Russian. You only have to persuade people that they are not quite like other Ukrainians: that Kyiv does not understand them, that another part of their country despises them, that their language and way of life are somehow under threat, that their history is separate, and ultimately that perhaps they are being governed by somebody else’s state. Repeat that story often enough and for long enough, reinforce it through politics, media and culture, and gradually what were once ordinary regional differences can be turned into a fault line – one that, when the moment comes, can be deliberately exploited. The ground was prepared before the soldiers arrived Under Viktor Yanukovych – himself from Donetsk – corruption and Russian penetration of the Ukrainian state deepened dramatically, reaching extraordinarily high levels inside Ukraine’s political, security and defence institutions, while Moscow continued applying economic and political pressure. The narrative was that Donbas was strong, different, and that it would not be dictated to by Kyiv, while Russian television, popular culture and news reinforced the information environment in which these ideas circulated and became increasingly normalized. Then came 2014. In Crimea, Russian soldiers appeared without insignia while Moscow initially denied what it was doing, and in eastern Ukraine, Russia similarly sought to present its aggression as something indigenous – a local uprising rather than an operation directed and supported by Moscow. Sloviansk became one of the places where that fiction was born, which for me makes this far more than an abstract historical argument: it is my hometown. Russia would spend years describing the war that followed as a rebellion of Donbas against Ukraine. The mythology created before the war now became the explanation for the war. Russia did not simply exploit an existing separatist identity; it manufactured it. Continued in Part 2: “The Roots That Survived” The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.