Donbas, 1991–2014
Politics, Identity, and the Road to Uprising
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Donbas was a model region of the Soviet modernization model. In the 1990s, this region in eastern Ukraine, dominated by the mining industry, experienced economic collapse. People’s lives were marked by unemployment, environmental pollution, a decline of public services, and pervasive corruption. The Party of
Regions, founded by local industrial leaders, attempted to revive the old self-image of a proud industrial region in the 2000s through paternalistic policies. But its authoritarian rule stood on feet of clay. When President Viktor Yanukovych fell in February 2014 following the Maidan protests in Kyiv, a power vacuum emerged in Donbas. Pro-Russian groups rushed in to prepare the ground for an armed uprising: marginalised anti-European groups and local petty criminals supported by intelligence operatives, Don Cossacks, and militant nationalists from Russia, as well as the local Russian Orthodox Church.
(Osteuropa 5/2025, pp. 95–114)