La importancia de Donbass (English)

Budapest or Geneva are the first two locations floated for a summit, the first face-to-face meeting between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky since the Normandy Format meeting in December 2019, which has yet to be confirmed. “Putin doesn’t even mention Zelensky’s name. Will he sit down with him to negotiate?” The New York Times wondered yesterday, adding that “the Kremlin is keeping its options open, but analysts say the Russian leader would probably only meet with his Ukrainian counterpart to accept a capitulation.” Analysts, that is, those whose position makes them quotable by the Western press, are oscillating between demanding capitulation—despite the fact that neither the terms currently offered by Russia nor those of Istanbul in 2022 or Minsk in 2014-2015 demand surrender —and fear of Zelensky. More pragmatically, the Kremlin appears to be considering how to show its willingness to make the gestures demanded by Donald Trump, among which a meeting of presidents clearly stands out, while giving up as little ground as possible on the diplomatic front, where Ukraine, always supported by its allies, boasts a greater strength than its relative weakness on the front lines and its complete economic dependence on it demonstrate.

Without bothering to recall what happened between the signing of the Minsk agreements, which concluded the heated phase of the Donbass war, and the Russian invasion, the media have drawn a direct line between “the first invasion of Ukraine” and February 24, 2022. In this way, the flagrant Ukrainian failure to fulfill the commitments made upon signing them, the economic, banking, and transport blockade, and the years of insults to the region’s population have been erased from the collective memory. Petro Poroshenko declared that “our children will go to school; yours will sit in basements,” a phrase he concluded by adding the reason, “because they don’t know how to do anything.” The contempt for the population of the industrial region increased with the Ukrainian nationalist wave of 2014 and reached its peak when a portion of the population took up arms to defend themselves against Ukrainian aggression. However, it was not born after the victory on Maidan; it simply reproduced attitudes that had already emerged in western Ukraine during World War II. The discourse of Ukrainian unity has always ignored the cultural and economic differences between the regions and the specific characteristics of Donbass, which is more dependent on the Russian market than other Russian-speaking areas such as Kharkiv. Ignored for years due to the lack of interest of the Western media, the contempt of the political class and its influencers persists even now, as the region returns to the center of political debate.

“Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea are Ukraine’s most problematic regions. The concentration of Vatniks per square kilometer before 2014 was absolutely devastating. All I remember from those days is that they were constantly offended for no reason and, frankly, not appreciated. All they talked about was how great Russia is compared to Ukraine and how tough Putin is,” wrote Lesia Dubenko, a frequent publicist on this war who has even written for the Atlantic Council, last week. Comparing Donbass with other Russian-speaking regions such as Kharkiv, Dubenko added, “One of the reasons the Russians haven’t been as successful there is because they’re not well-received. The local population doesn’t help them, unlike in Donetsk, where, by many people’s admission, the locals often help the enemy. It’s a piece of shit, and even the mere prospect of having to live again with a bunch of vatnik zombies who will drag Ukraine into a dark geopolitical situation gives me a headache, to be honest. I want Ukraine to join the EU and be a socially homogeneous country without all these Russia-loving bastards, who are entirely responsible for their own decisions and dreams.” A socially homogeneous country where only nationalist discourse is acceptable, imposed as the official national narrative, has been Ukraine’s main objective for the past eleven years. Ukraine has always insisted on the need to recover Crimea and Donbass but has never stopped hating the population there.

After years of ignoring its existence, imposing an economic blockade intended to sink its economy, and suggesting that those who felt Russian abandon their lives and move to Russia, Ukraine has remembered the importance of Donbass. Suddenly, Donald Trump’s explicit announcement ordering Ukraine to accept territorial concessions and the apparent possibility that the United States might not be absolutely opposed to all of Donbass remaining in Russian hands has once again made Donetsk and Luhansk the focus of political debate. Generally without specifying whether they are talking about the parts still under Ukrainian control (1% of Luhansk and 24% of Donetsk, only in the latter case with major cities on the Kyiv side) or the entire territory, that is, the DPR and LPR, the Western discourse, starting with that of Foreign Minister Merz and continuing, of course, with Volodymyr Zelensky, emphasizes the unacceptability of ceding territory to Russia. For example, one cannot leave in Russian hands something that has not even been fought for and that Moscow has not captured militarily—a curious argument considering that Ukraine aspired to recover the lost territories after failing to win the war, explicitly admitting that it had no intention of even making the minimal political, cultural, and economic concessions stipulated in the Minsk agreements.

“Russia is trying to convince the world that the occupation of part of Ukraine is a path to peace. But this violent blackmail could become endless. Today it’s ‘give up this,’ tomorrow it’s ‘give up that,’ or there will be war. Ukraine, on the other hand, wants to speak legally. Take bilateral agreements, border delimitation maps, and international obligations as examples. Show us where they justify the confiscation of territory as a result of a war of aggression,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak yesterday, ignoring the fact that he himself was negotiating an agreement in 2022 according to which Ukrainian territorial losses would have been limited to Crimea, handed over to Russia by its own organized citizenry—with Russian military participation limited to deterrence—while Ukraine reacted to the protests by withdrawing the region’s autonomy, and to Donbass, whose recovery required compliance with terms that, despite having signed, Kyiv always considered an unacceptable capitulation. Bankova also prefers to forget that “ATO,” the anti-terrorist operation she invented to justify the use of armed forces on national territory, was also a war of aggression in which Ukraine attempted to resolve a political problem by military means. Before the Alaska summit, Podolyak wrote that Kyiv would evaluate its results based on three criteria: “an immediate, unconditional, and complete ceasefire,” “principles of the future peace process agreed upon with Ukraine and Europe, without Moscow having veto power,” and “a clear signal to all other countries receiving Russian resources: supporting the war means isolation and loss of market access.”

Although the meeting between Putin and Trump left setbacks for Ukraine on all three fronts, Podolyak has not lost his arrogance and wants a summit between presidents for image reasons in the Global South. Andriy Yermak’s advisor, who, when the 2023 counteroffensive failed, was already arguing that Kyiv’s plans did not involve fighting for territorial integrity people by people all the way to Crimea, assuming that Ukraine’s diplomatic strength would achieve the goal, still dreams of the international isolation of Russia that the EU promised in February 2022 and that remains a pipe dream 18 sanctions packages and three and a half years later.

Podolyak, who in 2023 dreamed of the kind of collective punishment Ukraine would inflict on the disloyal population of Crimea, seems to be suffering from flashbacks to the days of Minsk. “There will be no trade in territories or special status for the occupied regions,” he wrote, apparently referring to the special status for Donbass that Kiev pledged to grant to the parts of Donbass under the control of the DPR and LPR as a condition for regaining the territories. “First, people must stop dying. Only then can politics begin,” he wrote, even though his main patron, Donald Trump, had already abandoned the demand for a ceasefire as a prerequisite for a political process and was openly favoring a resolution under the premise of “peace for territories,” which Podolyak now attributes to Vladimir Putin and presents as a sign of Russian weakness.

“Any process that begins with an invasion must culminate in the aggressor being held accountable. Appeasement will only pave the way for further ultimatums,” he insisted yesterday, even though European countries are now limiting themselves to fighting to prevent Russia from acquiring more territory than it currently controls and have for the time being renounced their claims to Crimea and the Russian parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye. And as a macabre joke after 11 years of attacks, 8 years of blockade and non-payment of pensions and social benefits to do as much harm as possible to the most vulnerable population and two years of indiscriminate attacks against the city of Donetsk with the sole objective of terrorizing those who still reside in the city of a million roses that they now try to talk about with nostalgia, the advisor to the President’s Office even allows himself to suggest that, in this meeting between Putin and Zelensky, which is necessary for the Global South to understand what Russia’s evil intentions are, “the Ukrainian side clearly describe the legal mechanisms for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, citizen representation and security guarantees.” While Donald Trump assumes that, in exchange for peace and security guarantees involving the United States, Ukraine will cede part of Donbass still under its control, and European countries cling to Slavyansk and Kramatorsk, in some cases using openly racist and dehumanizing similes, members of the Ukrainian government, from their parallel reality, continue daydreaming about a pipe dream that was always impossible. Because it is not Moscow that is snatching Donbass from Kyiv, nor will it be Ukraine that will relinquish a large part of Donbass, but rather a significant percentage of the population of Donetsk and Luhansk that, more than a decade ago, renounced Ukraine.