culture.’’ It is a grope at plausible deniability that
is implausible in at least two ways.
The fi rst is that Russia very obviously wields
great power in the D.P.R. and L.P.R. and has done
so since 2014. A lot of offi cial propaganda but lit-
tle in the way of genuine information escapes the
statelets, and foreign organizations are mostly
forbidden to work in them. The little we do know
comes mainly from fi rsthand accounts, social
media and a handful of humanitarian reports.
According to the D.P.R.’s and L.P.R.’s offi cial web-
sites, their government leaders are Ukrainian. But
according to defectors and released prisoners
with whom I spoke, Russia’s hand is everywhere
plain to see.
The ruble has replaced the Ukrainian hryvnia.
Residents are made to apply for Russian pass-
ports and relinquish their Ukrainian ones. They
vote in Russian elections, though it appears that
most of the three to four million people (a very
rough estimate) who live in the territories are
not aff orded full Russian citizenship. The vast
and oppressive security apparatus is managed
by Russian and Ukrainian agents. The teaching
of the Ukrainian language is forbidden, as is the
celebration of Ukrainian holidays. Defectors
describe increasingly wretched circumstances
— a scarcity of work and goods, failing social ser-
vices — but also a persistent hope among devoted
Russophiles that Putin will eventually incorpo-
rate them and life will improve. Before 2020, peo-
ple could cross in and out of the statelets with
ease. Since the beginning of the pandemic, only
two crossings have been open.
The partition of Donbas has split Ukrainian
families and neighbors physically, with some
members ending up in the D.P.R. or L.P.R., others
in Ukraine proper. It has also split them ideo-
logically. Before 2014, Ukrainian patriotism and
Russophilia could exist alongside each other, if
not harmoniously then at least not violently. But
with the war, Ukrainians, especially those in the
East, had to decide once and for all where their
allegiances lay. A father supported secession
while a son went off to join the Ukrainian Army.
A wife plotted to escape the L.P.R. while her hus-
band was content to stay. You hear these stories
constantly in Donbas.
The second way in which Putin’s denial of
involvement in Donbas is implausible is this:
Ukrainian secessionists aren’t interested in play-
ing along with his fi ction. Though the secessionist
movement in Donbas rose to the surface eight
years ago, it had been simmering for a genera-
tion, since the day in 1991 when Ukrainians voted
to become independent of the Soviet Union. The
vote, which passed overwhelmingly, including
in Donbas, was the fi nal nail in the coffi n of the
U.S.S.R. It wasn’t long before economic devas-
tation and fumbling governance made many
Ukrainians regret their choice. A defi ning trait of
modern Ukraine, that regret is felt with particular
bitterness in Donbas. Though it was provoked by
Russia and led in large part by Russians, the seces-
sion was successful because Russophile Ukraini-
ans participated in it at every turn and on every
level: Members of the country’s own security
services, politicians, offi cials and businesspeo-
ple, down to miners, metalworkers, pensioners.
One initial supporter of secession was a
woman named Kateryna, whom I met last sum-
mer in Kyiv. She had recently left the D.P.R. Kat-
eryna told me it was true that Russian propa-
ganda fl ooded Donetsk, where she lived, when
the war began, selling the story that bloodthirsty
Ukrainian fascists were converging on Donbas to
destroy it and the Russian language. Laughable
as this was, she said, people bought it. Even if
they hadn’t, however, the choice to secede felt
‘‘natural.’’ ‘‘It seemed to me at the time that it
would be better to join Russia,’’ Kateryna said.When I asked what her reasoning was, she said
there wasn’t much reason. It was just the popu-
lar sentiment. ‘‘There was just sort of this hope
that Russia was a big, great, powerful country.
We thought, let’s go there.’’ But seven years later,
without work or prospects, she left.
To Ukrainians who think as Kateryna once
did, Russia’s formal role in Donbas is precisely
the point. They have no more use for indepen-
dent republics than they had for an indepen-
dent Ukraine. Though secessionists, what they
want isn’t separation so much as reunifi cation
— with Russia.Today the Ukraine government denies that the
D.P.R. or L.P.R. exists, calling them ‘‘temporarily
occupied territories.’’ The boundary separating
them from Ukraine is not a border or a front
line but the ‘‘administrative line.’’ That line
extends for roughly 250 miles north to south,
cutting off the eastern corners of the Luhansk
and Donetsk oblasts and with them about 6,500
square miles of Ukraine along the Russian bor-
der. Civilians like Yuri and Masha in Pisky, who
live hard by the front on the Ukrainian side, are
in what’s known by the Joint Forces Operation,
the Ukrainian military entity that oversees the
front, as the Red Zone. Some towns along thefront resemble Pisky, their homes and public
buildings destroyed. Others have been partly
rebuilt. Aside from these obvious signs, the line
and the Ukrainian positions along it are mostly
hidden from view: forest trenchworks, observa-
tion posts beneath camoufl age netting, fi rebases
in abandoned factories, headquarters concealed
in the husks of apartment buildings.
For land mass, Ukraine is the second-largest
country in Europe after Russia, but since the
Donetsk airport was demolished in the fi ghting,
the only way to get to the front is overland. From
Kyiv, it is a 500-mile journey on indiff erent roads,
which I made in August. You pass through the
vast grain fi elds that once fed imperial Russia,
later so coveted by Joseph Stalin that he starved
and killed millions of Ukrainians to get at them.
You pass over the sites of some of the worst bat-
tles and most hideous massacres of World War
II. Approaching Donbas, the wheat gives way to
sunfl owers, and in the warm months, the fl orets
lend the atmosphere a golden tone.
Finally, you emerge into hill country. The
horizon is broken up by smokestacks and the
headframes of mines, and the gold is cut with
a gray haze. The hills stand on their own and
are strangely pyramidal; it’s like driving into
Giza. Then you see why: The hills are in fact the
decades-old culm banks of the coal mines. Some
rise hundreds of feet. Many are covered over in
shrubbery and trees.
Many of the mines are abandoned or
destroyed. Aesthetically, Donbas looks stuck
in time, somewhere between Khrushchev and
Brezhnev, all but taunting the foreign visitor
with its unrectifi ed Sovietness. Monuments
to the Great Patriotic War are everywhere.
The apartment blocks are insistently drab, the
housecoats threadbare, the haircuts practical.
The sidewalks are outlined by rusted overground
gas pipelines and the roads dominated by boxy
old Lada sedans and Dnepr motorcycles, often
equipped with sidecars.
Many Ukrainians in Donbas are wholly or
partly ethnically Russian and, what is more
important, culturally Russian. They speak Rus-
sian. In school, they were taught a patriotic ver-
sion of Soviet history. They watch Russian TV
and read Russian books and gather on Russian
social media. A man from Luhansk told me of
life there before the occupation: ‘‘It wasn’t infl u-
enced by Russia. It was Russia.’’
When Russia sent troops to the border early
last year, the point was unclear: Was it a warn-
ing to the newly inaugurated President Biden? A
reminder to Ukraine that Russia could overrun
it at any time? Some of the troops eventually
withdrew, but D.P.R. and L.P.R. forces under-
took a campaign of increased bombing and
sniping that persisted through the summer. Its
aim, too, was unclear, in both senses. Soldiers
were dying, and a lot of civilians were being
hit. The Ukrainian soldiers I spoke with agreedThe New York Times Magazine 31‘THERE WAS JUSTSORT OF THIS HOPET H A T R U S S I AWAS A BIG, GREAT,POWERFUL COUNTRY.WE THOUGHT,LET’S GO THERE.’