Donetsk region, Ukraine (AP)-from a bunker in eastern Ukraine, the 33-year-old soldier asks his comrade to fly an unmanned plane of recognition about his childhood home, waiting for a final look before he becomes another city pulverized by years of combat.
The soldier took arms a decade ago to defend his native region, Donetsk, where Ukraine has been fighting the forces backed by Russian since 2014. Since the large -scale invasion of Russia in 2022, the region has become synonymous with the fight for Ukraine for survival. Battlefield’s developments in Donetsk are considered a fortune meter on each side in the war.
In more than 10 years of struggle, Ukraine has lost control of around 70% of the region.
“I saw my destroyed school, the community center where I once took dancing lessons reduced to debris,” Fox said in the shelter near his beloved Kostiantynivka, where Russian forces are constantly closing.
“It hurts because your whole life intervenes before your eyes, the days when I was a girl, the places and the moments they loved me,” said Fox, who, along with other soldiers who spoke with Associated Press, only provided his signal of call for a Ukrainian military protocol.
Industrial Heartland destroyed
Before 2014, the Donetsk region, home of more than 4 million people, was one of the most densely populated areas of Ukraine and a key industrial, political and economic center. But he has supported the worst part of the financial losses of the Nation since the large -scale invasion of Russia in February 2022, representing almost half of the $ 14.4 billion in damage to Ukrainian companies, according to a report last year by the Institute of the kyiv Economy School.
Donetsk residents represent almost a quarter of the population of internally displaced from Ukraine, according to the International Organization for Migration, and with much of the powerful industrial heart that once powerful is now in Ruin, an active battlefield or under occupation, have few hopes to return.
Like many in Ukraine, it is not the first time that Fox loses a home in the war. In 2022, the Russian forces captured Mariupol, the city of southern Donetsk, where he has also lived. This year, he has observed the line of the front to the city where he was born.
Why Donetsk?
The most active section of the 1,250 kilometers front line (780 miles) is the Donetsk region, where both parties are trying to make profits before winter approaches and slows down the rhythm of the battle.
Russia already controls most of Donbas, his name for Donetsk and neighbor Luhansk, who together with two southern regions, was illegally annexed three years ago.
The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, wants kyiv to give control of the rest, that analysts believe that Moscow would give Moscow a permanent pitcher of which to threaten other parts of Ukraine. With the high bets, Ukraine is determined to resist at all costs and defend every centimeter he still has.
To advance in Kherson, Russia would have to cross the Dnipro River, while the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region presents its own logistics challenges due to the flat and exposed field, according to Taras Chmut, a military analyst and director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, a non -profit thinking tank and a charity that collects to equip Ukraña forces.
Chmut says that Russia’s actions in Sumy and Kharkiv, regions in Northeast, where Moscow has maintained a point of support, are not a large number of lands, but an effort to create a negotiation chip for future negotiations, despite the fact that the efforts led by the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to ensure that Russia and Ukraine will sit at the negotiating table.
“When you can’t agree on the table, you agree on the battlefield,” Chmut said. “Russia will stop where you stop by force, not where you choose.”
Pavlo Yurchuk, commander of the 63rd Brigade who has been trying to stop Russian progress in Donetsk for more than a decade, believes that the intense struggle in the region is promoted more by politics than by military logic, since the land makes large -scale progress are extremely difficult.
“There is no strategic advantage in this area to perform rapid offensive operations,” Yurchuk told journalists, citing a network of rivers, including the Dnets of Siverskyi, channels and thousands of peoples, basements and fortified bunkers that favor the defender.
But with its proximity to Russia, the historical economic ties and the legacy of the Russian era imposed, Putin has portrayed the area as historically Russian.
“The Kremlin has persuaded parts of its population that the region is ethnically Russian and, therefore, must be” released, “said Yurchuk.
My house is all Ukraine
For Ukraine, the Donetsk region is the place where the new generation of professional soldiers grew during a decade of hostilities.
“A lot of blood has spilled here, and more they will be,” said a commander of the Azov company that passes through the call signal.
Ukraine could make profits if he concentrated all his power in Donetsk, said Grosser, originally from the west of Ukraine who has fought intermittently since 2015. But that is not possible because “he (Putin) will continue to press all the fronts.”
After years of fighting for the control of the region, the Ukrainians fear that their fall not only makes the thousands of lost lives, but also condemn the country to instability. And few on the front believe that Russia’s ambitions would end in Donetsk.
“If we have to fight three more years for 30 kilometers, we will fight three more years for 30 kilometers,” said Yurchuk.
Fox said he is not only fighting for his roots in the Donetsk region.
“You are no longer fighting for a single building or city,” Fox told the AP. “My house is now all Ukraine.”
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Associated Press Vasilisa Stepanenko and Yehor Konovalov’s journalists contributed to this report.
(Tagstotranslate) Donetsk Region (T) Eastern Ukraine (T) Ukraine