Agreeing to the "peace-for-land" formula will have dire consequences not even for Ukraine itself, but for the entire world. Ukraine has been functioning without Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea for 10 years. We survived without these lands and Ukraine did not die. But that is not the problem.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
Wojciech Siegień: I would like to start with the title of your book - How Ukraine lost Donbas, not How Russia took over Donbas. Are you suggesting by this that Ukraine is to blame for the loss of the Donbas.
Denys Kazanski: Here you have to catch the subtleties of the Ukrainian language. We did not write that Ukraine lost the Donbas, but that it was losing or is losing, that is, it is not a finite process. In the book, we try to analyze the mistakes Ukraine made, what it did not do, the actions it did not take to prevent the situation.
Let's remember how the Russian aggression began. It wasn't 2022, it was 2014, because Russian troops had already entered Ukrainian territory by then. The Russians denied it, because these were forces they called private military companies, such as the Wagner Group. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, admitted in an interview shortly before his death that the Wagner Group had just been formed in 2014 and had participated in the fights in Donbas. Later, Russian Cossack formations also appeared.
That is to say, military-not-military. Just like war is a special military operation.
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Rather, it was armed Russian units with Russian citizens, with Russian weapons, that came from Russian territory. Then came Igor Strelkov and his unit. The Russians entered Ukraine, hiding behind paramilitary formations, and Russia continues to pretend that its troops were not in Ukraine in 2014. Putin also took advantage of previously built groups of influence in Donbas, which allowed him to hide his aggression.
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One of the conclusions we draw in our book is that there was no grassroots separatism in the Donbas and the war would never have started without Russian intervention and resources. It also means that there would not have been a rebellious Donbas fighting against Ukraine and wanting to secede as an independent region. Without these diversionary groups, which were located directly in Luhansk and Donetsk, but also without the help of local elites, Russia would never have started this war.
From your book, we learn that the aggression began even earlier, long before 2014 and the entry of diversionary groups into Ukraine: when the Donbas became a kind of testing ground for the various types of hybrid activities that the Russian Federation was developing against Ukraine. You show, for example, how pro-environmental movements that were artificially created in the Donbas then evolved into anti-capitalist, anti-Western, and then suddenly anti-Ukrainian.
I would emphasize that these were not ecological movements, but pseudo-ecological ones. At one point, Ukraine had plans to develop shale gas deposits in the east of the country. Russia realized that these plans posed a threat to its gas monopoly, and that Ukraine could thus gain energy independence and thus give up Russian gas.
Did these movements pretend to be entirely grassroots initiatives? Were they supported by larger organizations or parties? .
They were supported, for example, by the Communist Party of Ukraine, which was controlled by Russia. Together they began to stoke an atmosphere of fear that shale gas was death to the environment, that gas extraction would poison the water, that it would be very harmful and people would start dying en masse. They created scary memes, photos, images full of skulls, skeletons, death. They used very strong messages that were meant to cause horror. And people who were uneducated and unfamiliar with the technology of shale gas extraction just started to get scared.
And did it work? Despite the fact that the Donbas had been suffering from reeling industry since the collapse of the USSR? .
Yes, because it fit in with the leftist slogans. The communists said: the capitalists want to get rich by pumping gas out of our land, and we will suffer and die from the consequences of shale gas extraction. It's just that the Donbas is being mined for coal, after all, so it's a very environmentally polluted region. Coal mining has caused disproportionately more damage than gas mining. These huge piles, the spoils stored on them, sometimes contaminated with radioactivity, lie on the surface, poisoning the groundwater. Anyway, the environmental and health damage associated with coal mining is well known.
Nevertheless, no one has spoken out against coal mining in the Donbas. .
The bogeyman was made of shale gas. And indeed, many of those people who pretended to be environmentalists literally found themselves in pro-Russian organizations after a few years. They forgot about shale gas, then they were already shouting that it was necessary to fight Kyiv's junta. And later we saw other transformations, for example, between the Kremlin and the so-called anti-vaccinationists, people who said COVID-19 was a conspiracy.
So the aggression started with these hybrid forms much earlier than 2014, and turned into a full-scale war over time. Do you see what's happening now in the Donbas as evidence that Russia knows how to plan strategic actions, or the opposite? .
I think this is an absolute failure of Russia, a failure of all their so-called soft power. Indeed, when we say that Russia's aggression began much earlier, as hybrid aggression, this was indeed the case. Russia used non-military forms for a long time. Its aggression against Ukraine never really stopped, only that it weakened in the 1990s due to the weakening of the Russian state itself. But in general, it continued all the time, and had more informational, media, ideological, political forms.
Russia subjugated Ukraine through political intrigue, trying to bring pro-Russian politicians to power in Ukraine, buying Ukrainian politicians, buying Ukrainian show business stars, some public figures. A lot of money was spent on this. Incidentally, the Russians themselves admitted this later in their interviews. There is a lot of material about it, they don't hide it. But it all ended in failure. The Ukrainians proved strong and resistant to these efforts.
But the eastern part of the country, as you describe in detail in the book, felt a lot of anti-Western resentment. These treatments fell on fertile ground.
Of course there was pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, it's true, but it wouldn't have been enough to stop our desire to enter the European Union, the common Western economic space, lest we become a second Belarus. Then the Russians turned to brute military force. What happened in 2022 was another failure, because this war in a limited format, which had been going on since 2014, also failed to produce the results the Kremlin wanted. Putin literally went into hysterics and decided on a major war. Although I'm sure he thought it would be like we're seeing now in Syria, that the Russians would come in and the Ukrainian army would just flee, that Zelenski would flee, just as Assad has now fled. But Putin's plans have failed time and time again, and that's why his entire policy toward Ukraine has been a series of failures. Where we are now, i.e. war, is a consequence of them.
In the media we regularly see the victims of the shelling of Ukrainian cities, but very rarely do we see what is happening on the other side of the front, in Donbas. We know that the Russians are trying to replace the population there, this is happening, for example, in Mariupol. But is there anyone left there? Are there still Ukrainians living in Donbas? And even if they are no longer Ukrainians, can the people who live there become Ukrainians in the future?.
This is a very difficult question, because no one can accurately answer it. No research has been conducted on the territory for 10 years. It is impossible, because there has actually been terror in these territories for 10 years. If someone there openly says that he is in favor of Ukraine, he will simply be arrested, imprisoned, declared a Ukrainian spy or killed. Such people simply disappear, there have been many such cases. In Donetsk and Luhansk, no objective surveys are simply not possible, even the population numbers are hidden. We know that from the territory that was seized by pro-Russian forces in 2014, about one million people left for Ukrainian-controlled territory in the first years of the war. These are those who were registered as internally displaced persons.
How many people lived there before the war? .
The total population on the territory of the current pseudo-republics was 3.5 million. This means that a third of the population, its most pro-Ukrainian part, fled. No one knows what happened after that. Russia tried to conduct a census about five years ago. They did it, but never published the data. It was even funny, because they intensively announced this census in their media. Then they said the data would be published later, and finally they refused to publish it at all, claiming it was classified information.
Moscow didn't like the results? Why? .
Most likely, some half of the population of what it was before the war remained in these areas. Young, active people left. Even those who were in favor of Russia also left - only that to Russia. Few people remained in Donetsk, because life there simply froze. It can be said that the city today is a military base. A curfew has been in effect there for 10 years. There are no normal living conditions. When we watch videos from there, showing a gathering or a meeting of residents of a block of flats or a meeting between an official and people, we can clearly see that there are very few men there. That's because the men of Donbas were either taken to the front or fled to avoid it.
Is this a kind of military matriarchy?
It's hard to call it a matriarchy, because women have no power there, they are not a subject. People have even been deprived of the right to elect a village chairman, because they are all appointed only from above, approved from Russia. Therefore, the situation in this part of Donbas is really very difficult. People constantly complain that the roads are in a very bad condition, there is no electricity, no water, elevators do not work. At the same time, there is no place to complain, because there is no local government that can be elected and that should be accountable to the people. Today's residents of the occupied Donbas are like characters in a computer game, who do not play any role in the gameplay, but simply move somewhere, forming a background. Because the local population doesn't really play any role for the Russians.
Not long ago, Volodymyr Zelenski met with Donald Trump in Paris, which can be seen as the beginning of the peace talks that Trump is so keen to push through. Ukraine would like a "peace through strength" agreement, but more often there is talk of "peace for land." How much land can you give up for peace? On your YouTube channel you recently showed Vladimir Konstantinov, the occupation chairman of the Crimea council, who also talks about peace for land, but from their side it looks like they are the ones preparing to give up even part of Ukraine's occupied territories, just so that Crimea remains with Russia..
I believe that agreeing to the peace-for-land formula will be tragic in its consequences even not so much for Ukraine itself, but for the whole world. It will be a colossal blow to all European values of Western democracy, it will hit the structure of the world we live in. Ukraine has been functioning without Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea for 10 years. We survived without these lands and Ukraine did not die. Our economy developed normally until 2022, even without these territories. It turned out that they are somehow not critically needed by us economically, we can do without them.
But that's not the problem. The trouble will be when it turns out that a dictator like Putin or Kim Jong Un can attack a neighboring democratic country, such as one that intends to join the European Union. In fact, Russia's aggression is a punishment for this democratic choice. It would turn out that you can attack a state, hit a children's hospital with missiles, destroy several cities with their populations, kill tens of thousands of civilians, and in the end the whole world will say: ok, fine, take it, this is part of the territory for you. Just raising the question of giving up territories for peace will turn the world upside down, because it will turn out that everything that we have been taught, that Western culture teaches us, even Hollywood movies - that it is impossible to give in to evil, that we are people who rebelled against enslavement, that it is always worth fighting for freedom - will suddenly turn out to be completely meaningless.
Western values will be compromised. And this is, after all, Putin's main goal? .
Yes. It turns out that a tyrant can come, kill absolutely innocent people, occupy part of a neighboring country, and the whole world will nod and say: yes, great, let's go on living as if nothing happened. And the question will arise: what are all these ideas of democracy and European choice worth if you can behave in this way? What is international law worth if you can attack a neighboring country, occupy part of it, and everyone goes along with it? What is the UN or the Red Cross worth? After all, these organizations have not protected anyone from anything. We have international organizations that are funded by us, we spend a lot of money on them. Meanwhile, the UN Secretary General comes and meets Putin, shakes his hand, even though Putin is wanted by the International Court of Justice for war crimes!
What could be the consequences of a Ukrainian, but also global, loss of trust in Western values? .
I think China could easily attack and destroy Taiwan. Or maybe tomorrow North Korea will attack South Korea? And then South Korea will find out that they are not in NATO after all, and neither is Ukraine, so no one will stand up for them. I can live without traveling to Luhansk. The greater tragedy will be that it will turn out that the whole world, all the people who advocated democracy, who told us that tyranny should be fought, that you can't attack another country and occupy its territory, just lied, that these were empty words. It will turn out that the world can just accept war crimes, the fact that you can kill people and children and no one will suffer consequences for it. This is what I find saddest.
But there is also another point of view on the problem of occupied territories. Because it could also be that the destroyed Donbas, returned to Ukraine will be like a Trojan horse or virus inside Ukraine. Aren't you worried that if the Donbas is returned to Ukraine, that it will be a kind of burden on the country, that it will work in favor of Russia all the time? .
Yes, indeed, there are such concerns. Everything depends on the conditions under which it will happen. Russia wanted to force Ukraine to sign the Minsk agreements, according to which the Donbas was to return to Ukraine with a special status. It was to be a state within a state, and in fact Russia would control it and influence Ukrainian politics in this way. The Russians thus wanted to gain a stake in Ukraine and possess influence over our sovereignty, over our foreign policy. If the return of the occupied territories were to take place in this form, it will obviously only bring danger. If we are talking about returning the territory to us on the terms that applied before 2014, then in this case everything depends on Ukraine.
But, as you say yourself, what the Donbas would look and function like after the eventual recapture is impossible to predict today. It is simply impossible to turn back time.
Now we can see that entire towns are literally being physically destroyed. There were 60,000 people living in Bakhmut, it was the main industrial center of the area, and now there is not a single person there. The city is completely destroyed, depopulated, there is no one left. It's a lifeless ruin, and there is no such problem as how to make the people on the ground not pro-Russian, because there are no people there. As for those who remained in Donbas, we need to examine who remained there, how many of these people there are. Before the hostilities started in 2014, Donbas had a really strong regional elite, people who owned companies, big oligarchs, serious politicians. But now, in 10 years of war, all this has turned into scorched earth.
We know what it looks like outside of completely destroyed cities like Bakhmut? .
The owners of the businesses actually lost them, because they were taken over by Russia, and many were destroyed. Russia simply cut the factories into scrap metal and carted them away. They don't work and will never work again. Many mines are closed and flooded. After 10 years of war, there is no local elite in the region, socially, but also naturally in many places it is such a moonscape, a desert. Perhaps something new will emerge there after peace, but at the moment it's hard to imagine what it will look like.
There are concepts for the renaturalization of Donbas. It may turn out that in a post-industrial world Donbas cities are unnecessary. Is it possible that nature will come and take over what is left? Is there a possibility that we will have a new kind of reserve in the Donbas, as is now happening in the Kachov Reservoir area?.
I don't believe in a reserve, because this land is really very mutilated by the war. And I think some areas will not be habitable for decades. In France, there is still the so-called zone rouge, an area where people are not allowed to enter. It's an area that's been abandoned since World War I, because there's so much shells and shrapnel in the ground where the front stood for several years that it can't be cleaned up. And this territory is simply like a forbidden, abandoned zone. I'm afraid it will be the same in the Donbas, because the area still needs to be demined before we can talk about rebuilding cities and start reconstruction. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the demining of areas where fighting took place 30 years ago is still going on. The land is full of shrapnel, exploding shells. Its cleanup requires a huge amount of money and a lot of time. How do you even go about doing all this? How long will it take?
Besides, time, after all, does not stand still. People who left the Donbas are trying to settle in new places. Many went to Europe, some to other cities in Ukraine, where they found jobs, their children went to school. After the war, they were supposed to abandon everything and come to some destroyed Bakhmut? If reconstruction even begins, how long will it take? How long will it take for the city to start performing basic functions? We don't have that kind of experience in our lives, that a territory after such destruction is rebuilt and the population returns there. So I think that perhaps part of the territory will turn into some kind of reserve, but not like national parks, but like the Chernobyl zona. Perhaps there will be some tours, stalkers leading people who want to see the ruins of cities that will resemble some ancient ruins, a territory unfit for life.
Do you think that a certain myth of the Donbas as an industrial region is ending before our eyes?
Donbas used to be very overpopulated indeed in the Soviet Union and Ukraine, it had an extremely high concentration of population, as more than 5 million people lived there. This is a record, nowhere else in Ukraine did so many people live. It seems to me that there will be a return to the days before industrialization, when a lot of people arrived during the construction of industry and settled the region in huge cities around the factories. Now it will all come back to a state where there will be a million and a half or two million people living in the surviving cities, near some enterprises that will be able to adapt to the realities of the post-industrial world.
Putin has no plans to colonize these regions? Did he start a war just to leave no stone unturned there? .
In the case of attempts to rebuild occupied Mariupol, the Russians have seen the economic feasibility of rebuilding it, since it is a city by the sea, they want to sell real estate there, make it a resort. For that, small towns are the most problematic area.
There was such a town Popasnaya. 20-23 thousand people lived there. It has been occupied by the Russian army since the spring of 2022. It was completely destroyed and they are not rebuilding it at all, they just abandoned it. There are 50 people left there, they live in ruins, with no light, no water, nothing there. What is to be done with it? What is the point of economically rebuilding this town? Who will come to live there? You can build a few houses in the steppe, but who will work there and where? Especially since businesses in the area have been destroyed. Who would rebuild Bakhmut, and for what purpose, if the industry that once made so many people live there is no longer there?
Another example is Marinka on the outskirts of Donetsk. Not even one whole house is left there. It's a huge dump of construction waste, and it's obvious that it would be more profitable to build a similar small town from scratch in the bare steppe than to rebuild the ruined one. At least then there would be no need to demine the territory. Today we don't know what this would look like, how such reconstruction would come about, and, above all, who would be responsible for it. The situation is unstable, no one knows how the war will end, what the agreement will consist of, if it will happen at all. I think that in this state of limbo there will be even less investors who will want to rebuild these cities. Besides, in Russia and Ukraine, the population is shrinking. There are no people like before, for example, after World War II, who could populate cities, build them. There are no peasants migrating from villages in other regions to cities to work. That's why I believe that in this respect the Donbas will never return to its pre-2014 state.
Do you think 2025 will bring any breakthrough on the frontline?
I am skeptical when I hear that the new year will bring some kind of breakthrough. I don't see any conditions for a quick end to the war, because I believe that the main problem of what is happening now is Putin's obsession, his blind hatred of Ukraine. It is impossible to rationally explain what Russia is doing. All the goals Putin has announced are not true. He said that Russia is defending Donbas, the Russian-speaking population. Only is this a defense of Donbas? There has never been so much grief and so many deaths in Donbas, such destruction, not even during World War II. Absolutely everyone in Ukraine hates Russia, even those who once loved it.
This includes those abandoned people, frustrated, abused by pro-Russian clans for more than 20 years before 2014, right?
Yes. There has been a process opposite to what Putin assumed, because instead of the declared denazification they got a nation in which 99 percent of the people deeply and sincerely hate them. If we're talking about demilitarization, well, I have no comment here, because the weapons Ukraine has now are modern Western weapons, missiles, aviation, tanks and everything else. Back then, when Russia decided to demilitarize us, Ukraine couldn't even dream of such weapons. Compared to 2022, Ukraine is much more militarized.
That is, Putin has achieved the exact opposite of everything he planned.
This man is simply a psychopath who wants to destroy Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for not wanting, like Belarus, to submit to Russia, for daring to make our European choice. Russia cannot achieve its goals, because they are not true, but it can continue to punish us, and this is the message of Putin's regime today: if you don't do what we want, we will kill you. Despite this, I don't see a firm stance from the West. They keep trying to flirt with Putin, to talk to him. And they listen to what Putin and Lavrov tell them. And they, in turn, see this weak position of the West and they are not going to stop, because they feel they can do what they want. That's why I don't believe in the end of the war in 2025.
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Denys Kazanski - investigative journalist, TV presenter and video blogger with an audience of more than one million subscribers in Ukraine. He is the author of Black Fever (2015), covering the topic of illegal coal mining in the Donbas region. He lived and worked in Donetsk until 2014.
