What polities did the separatists create in the Donbas, and why did Russia not annex them outright, as was the case with the Crimea?
Pro-Russian rallies in the Donbas in March and April 2014 sometimes featured “elections" by acclamation of one of their own as “people's mayor" of the city or “people's governor" of the province.
Soviet-style populist rhetoric was also apparent in the names of the polities that the separatists tried to establish. As a sign of developing coordination behind the scenes, on April 7 the pro-Russian activists occupying government buildings proclaimed “people's republics" in Donetsk and Kharkiv. In the first city, the heart of the Donbas, there seemed to be little resistance. If anything, lower- level functionaries and the police still on the ground seemed agreeable to following the Crimea's path. In contrast, in Kharkiv, which lies northeast of the Donbas, the Ukrainian authorities quickly reasserted their control.But there remained another province in the Donbas, with its capital in Luhansk. On April 11 the United Command of the Army of the Southeast—and that was the first time most people heard about such an army—issued an ultimatum to the Luhansk provincial legislature to proclaim a people's republic within 10 hours and schedule a referendum on joining Russia. Actually, the rebels' three-way standoff with Kyiv's appointees and the remaining local elites in the province continued until the end of April, when the separatists finally managed to proclaim the Luhansk People's Republic and capture the provincial administration building on April 28 and 29, 2014.
Clearly, the events in Donetsk served as a catalyst for the proRussian victory in Luhansk, which ensued after a considerable impasse. Among the events that helped draw the battle lines were the first armed clashes between the “Donbas people's militia" and Ukrainian police and army units in mid-April, usually in connection with the rebels' attempts to take over police stations and military barracks outside their stronghold areas.
It was also on April 28, 2014, that the West introduced a second round of sanctions against Russia in connection with the Ukrainian crisis, a decision that failed to prevent and perhaps even prompted the all-out capture of Luhansk.Both of these self-proclaimed separatist entities followed the Crimean blueprint, holding snap referenda on separation from Ukraine on May 11, 2014. Their results were reported as 89.07 percent in favor of independence in Donetsk province and 96.2 percent in Luhansk province, with a turnout of 74 and 75 percent, respectively. The legitimacy of voting supervised by armed men and in the absence of access to official voter lists, which the Ukrainian authorities blocked, was questionable enough as it was, and it appeared even more dubious when the Donetsk authorities set about revising the results from 89.07 to 89.70 and back again to 89.07. Ultimately, the numbers game proved meaningless because Putin's Russia did not issue a response to the two republics' subsequent plea of acceptance, thereby derailing the Crimean scenario of speedy annexation.
On May 24, 2014, the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics announced their merger into the Federation of New Russia, a largely symbolic gesture seeking to capitalize on the currency of the term in Putin's historical lexicon. A month later, on June 24, the two polities proclaimed their confederation once more, this time within the very Soviet-sounding Union of People's Republics. All this feverish state building only suggested their uncertainty about the future—and about Russia's own intentions toward the Donbas after a quick victory failed to materialize.
Annexing the Donbas would have been a much more difficult and costly undertaking for Russia than the Crimean Anschluss. There was no ethnic Russian majority in the Donbas or relatively recent history of being part of the Russian SFSR. The Russian-backed militants did not control the entire territory of the two provinces, which did not have any natural borders comparable to the Black Sea around the Crimea.
The Crimean precedent had already put the West on alert, resulting in much diplomatic chagrin for Russia and the initial rounds of sanctions. Besides, did Russia really need the incorporation of the Donbas for its grand strategic designs? A “frozen conflict” that would leave the self-proclaimed republics a thorn in Ukraine's side was probably more useful, among other things, for preventing Ukraine's potential accession to NATO.In the summer of 2014, there were signs suggesting Moscow's intent to lend the self-proclaimed republics greater military support while at the same time preparing them for a longer existence in the political gray zone. In August some prominent separatist leaders, who were actually Russian citizens, such as Igor Strelkov (Girkin) and Aleksandr Borodai, were suddenly replaced by local figures, just as the Russian-backed forces went on a major offensive aimed at extending the area under their control. Yet the Russian authorities did not speak of absorbing the self-proclaimed republics in the Donbas; instead, they demanded that Ukraine empower the separatists politically without abandoning its responsibility to the region's population.
Years later the two “people's republics" remain in political limbo, with the Russian authorities emitting conflicting signals about their future. On the one hand, local elections (unrecognized by Ukraine and the international community) finally took place there in 2018, signaling that the status quo was to continue. On the other, in 2019 Russia intensified the process of awarding Russian citizenship to the local residents, which seemed to suggest that they would be able to escape to Russia should Ukraine end up taking back the occupied territories. For now, the leadership of the two self-proclaimed polities can only take comfort in being informally “recognized" by the other Russian-sponsored separatist enclaves in Moldova and Georgia.