Donetsk Oblast, also referred to as Donechchyna, is an oblast in eastern Ukraine. It is Ukraine's most populous province, with around 4.1 million residents. Its administrative centre is Donetsk, though due to the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, the regional administration was moved to Kramatorsk. Historically, the region has been an important part of the Donbas region. From its creation in 1938 until November 1961, it bore the name Stalino Oblast, in honour of Joseph Stalin. As part of the de-Stalinization process, it was renamed after the Siversky Donets river, the main artery of Eastern Ukraine. Its population is estimated at 4,100,280.
Luhansk Oblast, also referred to as Luhanshchyna (Луга́нщина), is the easternmost oblast (province) of Ukraine. Its administrative center is the city of Luhansk. The oblast was established in 1938 and bore the name Voroshilovgrad Oblast until 1958 and again from 1970 to 1991. It has a population of 2,102,921.
From the end of February 2014, demonstrations by Russian-backed, pro-Russian, and anti-government groups took place in major cities across the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromaidan and the Revolution of Dignity, which resulted in the ousting of Russian-leaning President Viktor Yanukovych. The unrest, which was supported by Russian military and intelligence, belongs to the early stages of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The National Guard of Ukraine is the Ukrainian national gendarmerie and internal military force. It is part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for public security. Originally created as an agency under the direct control of the Verkhovna Rada on 4 November 1991, following Ukrainian independence, it was later disbanded and merged into the Internal Troops of Ukraine in 2000 by then-President Leonid Kuchma as part of a "cost-saving" scheme. Following the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, amidst the Russian intervention, the National Guard was re-established, and the Internal Troops were disbanded.
The war in Donbas, or Donbas war, was a phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The war began 12 April 2014, when a fifty-man commando unit headed by Russian citizen Igor Girkin seized Sloviansk in Donetsk oblast. The Ukrainian military launched an operation against them. It continued until it was subsumed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine are areas of Ukraine that are currently controlled by Russia in the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In Ukrainian law, they are defined as the "temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine".
The Territorial Defence Forces are the military reserve component of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been involved in territorial disputes with a number of other post-Soviet states. These disputes are primarily an aspect of the post-Soviet conflicts, and have led to some countries losing parts of their sovereign territory to what a large portion of the international community designates as a Russian military occupation. As such, these lands are commonly described as Russian-occupied territories, regardless of what their status is in Russian law. The term is applied to Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, maintaining too a strong political influence over Gagauzia (Moldova).
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that started in 2014. The invasion became the largest attack on a European country since World War II. It is estimated to have caused tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian casualties and hundreds of thousands of military casualties. By June 2022, Russian troops occupied about 20% of Ukrainian territory. From a population of 41 million in January 2022, about 8 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced and more than 8.2 million had fled the country by April 2023, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. Extensive environmental damage caused by the war, widely described as an ecocide, contributed to food crises worldwide.
Ukraine's easternmost oblasts, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv, are the site of a theatre of operation in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Hero City of Ukraine is a Ukrainian honorary title awarded for outstanding heroism during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was awarded to ten cities in March 2022, in addition to four already-named Hero Cities of the Soviet Union. This symbolic distinction for a city corresponds to the distinction of Hero of Ukraine awarded to individuals.
The battle of Donbas was a military offensive that was part of the wider eastern Ukraine campaign of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The offensive began on 18 April 2022 between the armed forces of Russia and Ukraine for control of the Donbas region. Military analysts consider the campaign to have been the second strategic phase of the invasion, after Russia's initial three-pronged attack into Ukraine.
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia occupied vast portions of the territory of Ukraine, having already occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as well as the entire Autonomous Republic of Crimea since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2014. Partisan groups began to be organized in mid-2022. These groups have been involved in intelligence-gathering, sabotage, and assassinations. Much of their activity has taken place in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The Russian occupation of Mykolaiv Oblast is an ongoing military occupation of Ukraine's Mykolaiv Oblast by Russian forces that began on 26 February 2022 during the Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of the southern Ukraine campaign. The Russian-installed occupation regime was called the "Nikolaev military-civilian administration".
The Russian occupation of Chernihiv Oblast was a military occupation that began on 24 February 2022, the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Steadily, Russian troops started capturing large parts of the Chernihiv Oblast to try to take the capital city of Ukraine, Kyiv. The capital city of the oblast, Chernihiv, was never captured. By April 3, Russian forces left the oblast, ending the occupation.
On 30 September 2022, Russia, amid an ongoing invasion of Ukraine, unilaterally declared its annexation of areas in and around four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. The boundaries of the areas to be annexed and their borders were not defined; Russian officials stated that they would be defined later. None of the oblasts were fully under Russian control at the time of the declaration, nor since. If limited to the areas then under Russian control the annexation would still be the largest in Europe since World War II.
This timeline of the Russian invasion of Ukraine covers the period from 8 April 2022, when the area of heavy fighting shifted to the south and east of Ukraine, to 28 August 2022, the day before Ukraine announced the start of its Kherson counteroffensive.
This is a list article about flags that have been used by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and in areas occupied by Russia and Russian-controlled forces during the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The Russian occupation of Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava oblasts relate to how in the early phases of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were reported skirmishes between Russian and Ukrainian forces in southern Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and northern Poltava Oblast. This resulted in the military occupation of several small villages and towns, spilling over from much larger targets in Donetsk, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
