By Tim Lister, CNN

(CNN) — As negotiations over a potential deal to end the war in Ukraine intensify, much of the discussion has centered around a part of the country’s east that has long been at the heart of Russia’s goals.

The Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk - collectively known as the Donbas - were an industrial powerhouse in the Soviet era, a place of coal mines and steel mills.

But the Donbas region also has rich farmland, important rivers and a coastline on the Sea of Azov.

Historically the Donbas was the most “Russian” part of Ukraine, with a significant minority of Russian speakers. On multiple trips to the area 10 years ago, it was clear there was little love for the distant government in Kyiv among some of its people.

It was here that Putin began efforts to destabilize Ukraine in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea. Pro-Russian militia, some of them well-equipped with tanks, popped up across the region, quickly taking the cities of Luhansk and Donetsk from what was then an ill-prepared and poorly motivated Ukrainian military.

For almost eight years, until the beginning of 2022, the breakaway enclaves saw fighting ebb and flow, as roughly 75,000 troops faced off along a 420-kilometer-long (260-mile) front line cutting through densely populated areas. More than 14,000 people were killed, according to Ukrainian figures.

The fighting also caused huge displacement. At least 1.5 million Ukrainians left the Donbas. But more than three million stayed and are now living under Russian occupation. Moscow has distributed hundreds of thousands of Russian passports to people in these areas.

As the low-intensity conflict rumbled on, Putin raised the stakes in July 2021 with a long essay full of historical grievances about the situation of Donbas.

“The most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy,” he wrote, adding that the residents of Donetsk and Luhansk “took up arms to defend their home, their language and their lives.”

And he saw a sinister sponsor of events – the West. The Ukrainian authorities “arrange bloody provocations in Donbas. In short, they attract the attention of external patrons and masters by all means,” said Putin.

He was laying the ideological groundwork for what would follow months later. On the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, Putin said that the so-called civilized world “prefers to ignore it as if there were none of this horror, genocide that almost four million people are being subjected to” and recognized Luhansk and Donetsk as independent states.

There has never been any evidence of genocide in Donbas.

Later that year Moscow unilaterally – and illegally – annexed both Luhansk and Donetsk after sham referenda, along with the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, despite only partially occupying them.

For the Kremlin, there’s a huge difference between withdrawing from occupied land (as the Russians did when they pulled back from much of northern Ukraine in 2022) and giving up areas formally absorbed into the motherland – especially for a leader like Putin who is fixated with a “greater Russia.”

Analysts say that at the current rate it would still take Russian forces several years to complete the occupation of what has been annexed. Equally, there is little chance Ukraine can recover much of what it has already lost: almost all of Luhansk and more than 70% of Donetsk.

But Kyiv still holds the “fortress belt” of industrial cities, railways and roads that is a significant barrier to Putin’s forces: places like Sloviansk, Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka.

As Russian forces have crept forward in Luhansk and Donetsk, tens of thousands of people have been forced from their homes. But in the part of Donetsk still held by the Ukrainians, many still remain. The main cities alone had a pre-war population of 400,000. Most have stayed, with the sound of battle never far away.

For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up the rest of Donetsk, territory many Ukrainian soldiers have given their lives to defend, would be political suicide. About three-quarters of Ukrainians object to giving up any land to Russia, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

To retreat from the rest of Donetsk would also leave the vast open plains of central Ukraine vulnerable to the next Russian offensive, as Zelensky has repeatedly pointed out, as well as being an unconstitutional surrender of Ukrainian land.

For Zelensky’s European allies, it would also transgress a key principle: that aggression cannot be rewarded with territory and Ukrainian sovereignty must be protected.

As it was in 2014, the Donbas remains the crucible of Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine – and the greatest test for Europe as it tries to cling on to a rules-based international order.

The-CNN-Wire
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