Donbass (Donets Basin)

Name and extent

The name is a portmanteau of 'Donets Coal Basin' (Донецкий угольный бассейн), from the Donets River. The same area is also known geographically as the region of the Donets Ridge (Донецкий кряж), a name established after the works of E. P. Kovalevsky in 1827 and 1829.

Several definitions of its extent coexist. In modern geopolitics it usually means Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, a usage that has grown since 2014. The Encyclopedia of History of Ukraine's 'small Donbas' is the northern part of Donetsk and southern part of Luhansk oblasts plus the attached part of Rostov Oblast. The historical coal-mining region excluded parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts but included areas in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and southern Russia, while the broad Russian-language definition takes in eastern Dnipropetrovsk (Western Donbas) and western Rostov Oblast (Eastern Donbas). Deposits found in the 1950s formed the 'New Donbas', the earlier workings the 'Old Donbas', and together they make up the Great Donbas of about 60,000 sq km.

Beginnings of industry

Coal was discovered in 1721 and Peter I issued a decree on prospecting for coal and ores on 7 December 1722. Small-scale mining continued to the end of the 18th century, but the industry grew only from the 1830s in response to the needs of the imperial navy and industry, and the industrial development of the Donbas proper began in the 1870s. The Catherine Railway (1884), linking the area with the Kryvyi Rih iron-ore basin, was decisive, and foreign capital from France, Belgium, Germany and Britain played an important role. Coal output rose from 1.4 million tonnes in 1880 to 11 million in 1900, with 68,000 miners; the first modern metallurgical plant was the Yuzivka works built by the Welsh industrialist John Hughes in 1872, and today's Donetsk began in 1869 as Hughes's Yuzivka on the site of the old Zaporozhian Cossack town of Oleksandrivka. By 1900 the Donbas outproduced the Urals, then the empire's largest metal producer, and by 1913 its 25.3 million tonnes were 87 percent of the empire's anthracite.

The growth of coal produced a population boom driven largely by settlers from Russia. Workers came from Russia rather than Ukraine, and as a result the Donbas became the most Russified part of Ukraine.

Labour and repression

Poor living and working conditions, low mechanization and hard labour produced regular strikes suppressed by police and gendarmerie. A major strike wave engulfed the Donbas during the 1905 Revolution, and in January 1905 the workers of Horlivka staged an armed uprising that was brutally crushed. The Donbas was never a stronghold of the Ukrainian national movement: before 1917 that movement had little impact there, and according to the 1922 Bolshevik census only 16.6 percent of Donbas Bolsheviks were Ukrainian by nationality and barely 4.3 percent could speak Ukrainian.

In February 1918, after the Bolsheviks withdrew from Ukraine under pressure from the German and Ukrainian armies, the short-lived Donets-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic was proclaimed in the Donbas, maintaining independence of both Ukraine and Russia. The region was then incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as Donets gubernia with its capital in Bakhmut, and in 1924 its eastern part, including Shakhty, Sulin and Taganrog, was transferred to the Russian SFSR. Revolution and civil war destroyed most of its industry: coal output fell from 25.3 million tonnes in 1913 to 4.6 million in 1920 and iron production to 0.5 percent of the pre-war level with only one factory in Yenakiieve operating; pre-war levels were restored only by 1928-1929.

The Donbas underwent Ukrainization in the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s, on a smaller scale than other regions. By 1933 the policy was abandoned and a new wave of Russification and repressions against Ukrainian activists followed, and in the 1932-33 Holodomor famine the Ukrainians, mostly rural peasant farmers, bore the brunt.

Soviet period

Up to the Second World War the Donbas was the leading industrial region of Ukraine and the entire USSR. Industrialization under the five-year plans rebuilt and expanded the anthracite mines and established machine-building, chemical and armaments plants, and by 1940 annual coal production reached 83.7 million tonnes. Under Nazi occupation (1941-1943) thousands of industrial labourers were deported to Germany for factory work; 279,000 civilians were killed in what was then Stalino Oblast (now Donetsk Oblast) and 45,649 in Voroshilovgrad Oblast (now Luhansk Oblast). The Red Army's Operation Little Saturn and the Donbas strategic offensive returned the region to Soviet control in 1943, and production levels of 1940 were restored only in 1949. As of 1955, 35 percent of Donbas miners still worked manually, over 70 percent of the mine workforce were young people, and turnover reached 40 percent.

The expansion of the 1950s came from more mines (306 in 1941 to 355 in 1955), mechanization, mines deepening by an average of 100 m every seven years, and a workforce rising from 200,000 in 1940 to 427,000 in 1955. In 1967 the Donbas mined 176.6 million tonnes of coal, 88.8 percent of all coal mined in the Ukrainian SSR and 29.7 percent in the USSR. The stagnation of the 1980s and the shift from coal to hydrocarbons reduced demand for expensive Donbas coal, though by 1985 the region still accounted for 20 percent of total USSR coal output, 35 percent of coking coal and 60 percent of anthracites. Glasnost emboldened Donbas coal miners to strike for republican management of the industry, and these strikes contributed to the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Through the 1960s and 1970s the Donbas remained at the forefront of Russification in Ukraine, yet opposition to the destruction of Ukrainian culture there was visible in the cases of Ukrainian human rights activists Ivan Svitlychny, Oleksa Tykhy, Ivan Dziuba, Nadiia Svitlychna, Vasyl Stus and Mykola Rudenko, who were born or studied and worked in the Donbas.

Independence and war

By the 2001 census the Donbas was a predominantly Russophone region: ethnic Ukrainians formed 58 percent of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9 percent of Donetsk Oblast, ethnic Russians 39 and 38.2 percent respectively, and Russian was the main language of 74.9 percent of residents in Donetsk Oblast and 68.8 percent in Luhansk Oblast.

In the 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence, 83.9 percent of voters in Donetsk Oblast and 83.6 percent in Luhansk Oblast supported independence. In 1993 Donbas coal miners went on strike, a conflict historian Lewis Siegelbaum described as 'a struggle between the Donbas region and the rest of the country', and a 1994 consultative referendum in the two oblasts saw close to 90 percent favour propositions on federalisation and official status for Russian that were not adopted. In the early 2000s power became concentrated in a regional political elite known as the 'Donbas clan', whose prominent members included Viktor Yanukovych and Rinat Akhmetov, and privatization of state industries led to rampant corruption; the term was used by regional historian Hiroaki Kuromiya.

From March 2014, pro-Russian and anti-government demonstrations following the Revolution of Dignity escalated in April into a war between Russian-backed separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics and the Ukrainian government, splitting the Donbas into Ukrainian-held territory (about two-thirds) and separatist-held territory (about one-third). Russian involvement evolved from support for demonstrations to military backing: the initial protests were largely native expressions of discontent and separatism had limited support before the war, but the unrest became armed conflict because of Russian military backing for what had been a marginal group, a conflict Hiroaki Kuromiya described as 'secretly engineered and cleverly camouflaged by outsiders'. Russian claims that Russian speakers were being persecuted or subjected to 'genocide', used to justify intervention, were deemed false; a 2018 survey of residents of Ukrainian-controlled parts of the Donbas found that 82 percent believed there was no discrimination against Russian-speaking people in Ukraine and 71 percent did not support Russia's military intervention to 'protect' them.

The war caused a vast exodus, forcing half the region's population to flee their homes. A UN OHCHR report of 3 March 2016 stated that the Ukrainian government had registered 1.6 million internally displaced people who had fled the Donbas to other parts of Ukraine, over 1 million were said to have fled elsewhere, mostly to Russia, and 2.7 million continued to live in areas under DPR and LPR control, about one-third of the Donbas. The Minsk Protocol of 5 September 2014 and Minsk II of 12 February 2015 called for eventual reintegration of the Donbas republics into Ukraine with a level of autonomy, but low-intensity fighting continued along the line of contact until 2022 despite 29 ceasefires, and the conflict was referred to as a 'frozen conflict'.

On 21 February 2022 Russia officially recognised the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, effectively killing the Minsk agreements, and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. The battle of Donbas began on 18 April 2022, and by August 2026 the Institute for the Study of War reported that Putin had given 15 different deadlines to capture all of Donbas since 2022 without meeting any of them. On 30 September 2022 Russia unilaterally declared its annexation of the Donbas together with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, and as of October 2025 the Russian Armed Forces controlled about 90 percent of the region.

Mining conditions and environment

Almost 330 coal seams have been found, most only 0.3-0.45 m thick, some up to 1.5 m. Of the top and middle seams lying up to 1,500 m below the surface, only 210 are thick enough to be worked economically and only 65 are mined today. Hard coal reaches depths of 1,800 m, in the Old Donbas coal is extracted to 1,000-1,300 m and plans were made for shafts to 1,500 m, and mining conditions are complex, with 95 percent of mines having methane challenges and 70 percent prone to coal-dust explosions. The Donbas's environment has been transformed more than any other part of Ukraine or Eastern Europe: inhabitants and industry suffer river pollution from the chemical industry and shortages of clean water, and the air is more polluted than in any other industrial or urban region of Ukraine.

The Donbas is the principal fuel and energy base for Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts and for Russia's Eastern Donbas in Rostov Oblast, and its chemical industry and machine-building centres include Sievierodonetsk, Luhansk, Lysychansk, Horlivka, Pervomaisk and Stakhanov. With the start of the conflict in 2014, 69 of 93 mines closed, coke production fell by 52 percent and construction by 40 percent, and more than half of the able-bodied population lost work and income; Russia's invasion heavily destroyed important industrial cities including Sievierodonetsk, Lysychansk, Rubizhne, Popasna, Vuhledar and Bakhmut, while in the Russian part of the Donbas the number of operating mines fell from 64 to 5 between 1995 and 2022.