DONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) — From his bunker in eastern Ukraine, a 33-year-old soldier asks his comrades to fly a reconnaissance drone over his childhood home, hoping to get one last glimpse of it before it becomes just another city, shattered by years of fighting.
The soldier took up arms 10 years ago to protect his homeland. DonetskWell, Ukraine has been fighting Russian-backed forces since 2014. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the region has become synonymous with Ukraine’s fight for survival. The developments on the Donetsk battlefield are considered a gauge of the fortunes of both sides. during the war.
Over a decade of fighting, Ukraine has lost control of about 70% of the region.
“I saw my school destroyed and the community center where I used to take dance lessons reduced to rubble,” Fox said from a trench near her beloved Kostyantinivka, where Russian troops were steadily closing in.
“It’s hard when your whole life flashes before your eyes. The days when I was little, the places and moments that were important to me,” Fox said. She, along with other soldiers who spoke to The Associated Press, provided only her call sign, in accordance with Ukrainian military protocol.
industrial center destroyed
Before 2014, the Donetsk region, with a population of over 4 million people, was one of the most densely populated regions in Ukraine and an important industrial, political and economic center. But it has borne the brunt of the country’s economic losses since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, accounting for nearly half of the $14.4 billion in damages to Ukrainian businesses, according to a report last year by the Kyiv Institute of Economics.
Donetsk residents make up nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s internally displaced population, according to the International Organization for Migration, and there is little hope that they will return as much of what was once a powerful industrial center is now in ruins, active battlefields and under occupation.
Like many people in Ukraine, this is not the first time Fox has lost his home to war. In 2022, Russian forces captured Mariupol, a city in southern Donetsk where she also lived. This year, she has watched the front lines creep toward the city of her birth.
Why Donetsk?
The most active area of the 1,250-kilometre (780-mile) front is the Donetsk region, where both sides are trying to advance before winter sets in and the pace of fighting slows.
Russia already controls most of Donbass (the name of Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk), along with two southern regions. illegally annexed 3 years ago.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Kiev to cede control of the remaining region. analysts believe It would give Moscow a permanent launching pad to threaten the rest of Ukraine. The stakes are so high that Ukraine is determined to resist at all costs and defend whatever parts it still holds.
To advance into Kherson, Russia would have to cross the Dnipro River, but the flat, exposed terrain of the neighboring Zaporizhzhya region poses unique logistical challenges, said Taras Chumut, a military analyst and director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, a nonprofit think tank and charity that raises money to equip Ukraine’s military.
Chumut said that despite efforts led by US President Donald Trump to bring Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table stalled, Russia’s actions in Sumy and Kharkiv (regions in the northeast where Russia has a foothold) were not serious land grabs but efforts to create bargaining chips for future negotiations.
“If we can’t agree at the table, we can agree on the battlefield,” Chumut said. “Russia will stop where it is stopped by force, not where it chooses.”
Pavlo Yurchuk, commander of the 63rd Brigade, who has been trying to stop the Russian advance in Donetsk for more than a decade, believes the heavy fighting in the area is driven more by politics than military logic, as the terrain makes large-scale advances extremely difficult.
“There are no strategic advantages in the area for carrying out rapid offensive operations,” Yurchuk told reporters, citing a network of rivers, including the Siversky Donets, canals, and thousands of fortified villages, cellars and bunkers that favor the defenders.
But Putin has portrayed the region as historically Russian, due to its proximity to Russia, historical economic ties and the legacy of the Russian language imposed during the Soviet era.
“The Kremlin is persuading some of the population that this region is ethnically Russian and therefore ‘should be liberated,'” Yurchuk said.
My homeland is all of Ukraine
For Ukraine, the Donetsk region is where a new generation of professional soldiers grew up during a decade of hostilities.
“A lot of blood has been spilled here, and more blood will be spilled here,” said the Azov squadron commander, who goes by the call sign Grosser.
Grosser, a native of western Ukraine who has been fighting on and off since 2015, said Ukraine could benefit if it focused its efforts on Donetsk. But that is impossible, he said, because “he (Putin) will continue to apply pressure on all fronts.”
Ukrainians, who have been fighting for years for control of the region, fear that its collapse would not only mean the loss of thousands of lives but also lead to instability in the country. And on the front lines, few believe that Russia’s ambitions will end in Donetsk.
“If I had to race 30 kilometers for three more years, I would race 30 kilometers for three more years,” Yurchuk said.
Fox said he’s not just fighting for his Donetsk region roots.
“We’re no longer fighting for a single building or a single city,” Fox told The Associated Press. “My homeland is now all of Ukraine.”
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Associated Press journalists Vasilisa Stepanenko and Yehor Konovalov contributed to this report.
