What shared characteristics led the Crimean Peninsula and the Donbas region to become conflict zones?

These two regions are not in immediate geographic proximity to one another. The Donbas, comprising Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, is Ukraine's easternmost region, bordering on Russia in the north and east.

Moreover, the economic profiles of the two regions are dia­metrically opposed. The Crimea's economy is based primarily on tourism, with winemaking and servicing the naval bases the only notable industries prior to the exploration of offshore and onshore gas fields starting in the 2000s. The Donbas, in contrast, is an old in­dustrial region, with coal mines and steel mills dominating its steppe landscape since the late nineteenth century. Many older mines and factories have become obsolete, but the Donbas's metallurgy and chemical industries have found their place in the global economy of the twenty-first century.

A look at the ethnic composition of the two regions does not re­veal an obvious connection either. Whereas ethnic Russians have constituted a majority of the Crimean population ever since Stalin's deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, ethnic Ukrainians have continued to outnumber them in the two Donbas provinces. As of the last census in 2001, the main ethnic groups in the Crimea were Russians (58.5 percent), Ukrainians (24.4 percent), and Crimean Tatars (12.1 percent). In the Donbas, ethnic Ukrainians constituted 56.9 percent in Donetsk province, where 38.2 percent claimed Russian ethnicity, and 58 percent in Luhansk province, which had 39.1 per­cent Russians.

However, the same 2001 census put the Crimea and the Donbas in a category of their own as the only two Ukrainian regions where the majority of the population claimed Russian as their native lan­guage: 77 percent in the Crimea, 68.8 percent in Luhansk, and 74.9 per­cent in Donetsk province. This discrepancy between self-identified ethnicity and mother tongue is indicative of the cultural assimila­tion of Ukrainians during the late Soviet period. The resulting hybrid identity often correlated with an allegiance to the Soviet version of modernity and, after its disappearance, to the strong paternalistic re­gime in Russia.

In both regions, the local identity also has strong symbolic connections to the imperial past. Generations of Russian journalists and schoolteachers have perpetuated the image of Sevastopol as the “city of Russian naval glory,” heroically defended both during the Crimean War and World War II. Soviet films, songs, and political pronouncements lionized the (always Russian-speaking) Donbas miners as model workers, shouldering their patriotic duty to pro­vide the country with fuel. Such historical myth-making became ingrained in local identities. More important, however, it became encoded in Soviet great-power ideology, which Putin's Russia is trying to revive.

In the decades since Ukraine's independence, both regions initially served as the electoral base of the Communist Party; this residual al­legiance made sense, as both regions cultivated identities linked to the Soviet past, in addition to being heavily Russian-speaking. In the 2000s, however, Yanukovych's Party of Regions gradually ab­sorbed the Communist Party's constituency. The new political force promoted a Russophone regional identity that was also anchored to the belief in a strong state and extensive state services. When it was losing on the national political scene, the Yanukovych camp tried twice, in 2004 and 2014, to play the regional separatism card. As present-day events have shown, because of Russia's proximity and increasingly assertive policies, this was a dangerous game.

When mass protests began in 2014, the Yanukovych clique em­ployed a familiar strategy of framing the unrest as an identity con­flict, a war against Russian culture in Ukraine. Yet, they soon lost control over the genie they summoned when Putin's Russia marched in to “protect” its “compatriots." It mattered little whether the latter even wanted to be protected, for on the eve of the war, opinion polls in the Donbas showed that only about a third favored separating from Ukraine and joining Russia.¹ The conflict quickly shifted its focus from building a multicultural Ukraine to rebuilding a greater Russia.