GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS
& PLACES OF SIGNIFICANCE

ATO is an acronym for the Anti-Terrorist Operation initiated by the Ukrainian government in 2014. Its main goals were to regain control of the administrative units captured and held by the separatists, to cut off the Russian- backed separatists from the Russian sources supplying them with weapons and military equipment, and to establish tighter control over the Russian-Ukrainian border. For legal reasons, the Ukrainian government has been using this term rather than calling the fighting in the Donbas area from 2014 onward a war.

Crimea is a peninsula located south of the Ukrainian region of Kherson and west of the Russian region of Kuban. Most of its border is constituted by a shoreline, as it is mostly surrounded by the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Administratively, Crimea is an autonomous republic of Ukraine, having gained its current status following a referendum on January 20, 1991. In March 2014, following the takeover of the territory by Russian-backed local separatists and Russian Armed Forces in unmarked uniforms, an unauthorized referendum was held. While the results of the referendum had been deemed illegitimate by the international community, they served as a basis for Russian annexation of the Crimea and the city of Sevastopol as federal subjects of Russia.
Strategic Significance: The Crimean peninsula is of strategic importance to the Russian Federation because of the military bases located there. The city of Sevastopol, located on the coast of the Black Sea, is the principal home of the Russian Black Sea fleet. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine signed a lease treaty that allowed Russia to keep the Black Sea fleet and its military personnel stationed in Sevastopol. In 2010, Ukraine extended the period of lease until 2042.
Symbolic Significance: Crimea acquired symbolic significance in the Russian national mythology after the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Khanate, then a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of the eighteenth century. The sacrifices involved in acquiring and keeping Crimea play a key role in the Russian sense of entitlement to the peninsula. Peter the Great (period of rule: 1682–1725) launched several unsuccessful campaigns against the Crimean Khanate to gain access to the Black Sea. Catherine the Great (period of rule: 1762–96) had annexed Crimea in 1783, an event that involved two Russo-Turkish wars—first to take it, then to keep it. Catherine’s adventurism in the Crimea hadn’t been unique, and fit into a larger expansionist plan—Catherine significantly extended the imperial borders, absorbing Crimea, the Northern Caucasus, Right-bank Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Courland, mainly at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. While not all her plans proved successful—for example, she failed to establish the Byzantine patrimony and secure access to the Mediterranean— Catherine did add some 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) to Russian territory. The period of Catherine’s rule is often referred to as the Golden Age of the Russian Empire.

The symbolic significance of Crimea as a site of Russian heroism had been cemented when the peninsula became a battlefield in the Crimean War (1853–56) and World War II. In both wars, Sevastopol was besieged and heroically, albeit unsuccessfully, defended. The city acquired a near sacral status as a battlefield that demonstrated Russian resilience and military prowess.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Crimea served as a beloved vacation destination for the Russian aristocracy and wealthy Russians and Ukrainians. Due to its mild climate and natural beauty, it was also a desirable place to relocate during the Soviet period. Political loyalty would often be rewarded with a Crimean country house (dacha) or an all expenses ticket (putevka) to a Crimean resort. The forcible deportation of the Crimean Tatars, as well as smaller local ethnic communities including Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks in 1944, and the 1945 dissolution of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (created in 1921) and Crimea’s administrative integration into the Russian SSR, had completed the long process of cultural and political absorption of the peninsula into the Russian administrative and symbolic space. In February 1954, Crimea was transferred from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian SSR. Critics of the transfer allege that it was unconstitutional, and personally motivated by the Ukrainian sympathies of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Officially, the transfer was presented as motivated by economic reasons; it was also presented a symbolic gesture marking the 300th anniversary of the “ Unification of Russia and Ukraine.”
The 2014 annexation led to the popularization of the “Crimea Is Ours” (Krym Nash) slogan, which has come to be seen as emblematic of the new wave of Russian nationalism and neo-imperialist sensibilities. The annexation of Crimea had been widely interpreted as the beginning of the New Golden Age of the Russian Empire and the first step towards the reunification of the former Soviet Union under the Russian leadership. In the popular imagination, the imperial and the Soviet histories have merged, yielding a single inchoate narrative about Russian greatness and exceptionality.

Identity Tensions and Political Volatility: The indigenous population of the Crimea are the Crimean Tatars. A large portion of their population had been forcibly relocated under the Stalinist regime in 1944. The relocation was intended as a form of collective punishment for the population’s alleged collaboration with the Nazi regime. According to the evidence gathered by volunteers in 1960s, 109,956 (46.2%) of the 238,500 Crimean Tatar deportees died of starvation and disease on their way to the Uzbek, Kazakh, and Mari Soviet Republics. However, in 1991 families of survivors started making their way back to the region and reclaiming what they considered ancestral lands. The resettlement made Crimea one of the most ethnically diverse regions of Ukraine, and one where hostilities between different ethnic groups were most apparent. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea had adopted three official languages for the peninsula: Ukrainian, Russian, and Tatar. The situation for minorities had rapidly deteriorated since the annexation, and a number of anti-Putin Tatar activists have been reported missing.

Debaltseve is a city in the Donetsk region located at a strategic highway and railway junction. In January and February 2015, it was a site of heavy fighting between DPR-LPR separatists and Ukrainian armed forces. Pro-Russian insurgents attacked Debaltseve from three sides, encircling the Ukrainian army stationed there, leading to what many survivors have described as a massacre. During the battle, Debaltseve was heavily shelled by Grad rockets and artillery, leading to the demolition of most of the buildings in the city. Together with the Battle of Ilovaysk, the Battle of Debaltseve has been interpreted as a major strategic failure on the part of the Ukrainian armed forces, and a major victory for the allegedly self-organized insurgents.

Dnipro (also known as Dnepr and Dnieper) is a major European river flowing through Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Symbolic Significance: the Dnipro’s symbolic significance as the source of power and vitality stems from its association with the Old Rus and now Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and with the region of Zaporizhia (see Zaporizhian Sich) that both stand on it. As a poetic topos, Dnipro figures prominently in the following key historical and literary texts: The Primary Chronicle of Kyivan Rus (Повѣсть Времѧньныхъ Лѣтъ), covering the historical period from 850 to 1110; The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, an anonymous epic poem that describes a military campaign (1185) of Igor Svyatoslavich against the Polovtsians; Ukrainian dumas, epic songs performed by itinerant bards that were especially widespread during the Hetmanate Era (1649–1782); “The Testament” by Taras Shevchenko (1845), a poem that often gets performed at the official ceremonies and state celebrations.
Historical and Political Significance: the Dnipro flows north to south through the center of Ukraine, dividing it into two historically and culturally distinctive regions, known as the Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine, respectively. While some also view these historical terms as corresponding to the later divisions into Eastern and Western Ukraine, the latter terms only came to be widely used in the twentieth century, with the establishment of the Ukrainian People’s Republic as a result of the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and Western Ukrainian People’s Republic proclaimed in the former Habsburg Empire in 1918; the two states briefly unified in 1919. After the 1921 Soviet-Polish Treaty of Riga, “Eastern” came to refer to the Soviet-ruled part of Ukraine, and “ Western” to parts that remained outside Soviet borders until World War II.
From the fourteenth century onwards, most of the Ukrainian territories were part of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which united in 1569 to form the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This period also saw the rise of the Zaporizhian Sich, a semiautonomous polity of the Ukrainian Cossacks, whose history had helped shape Ukrainian national identity discourse in the nineteenth and twentieth century. In 1648, the Cossacks rebelled against Polish rule and established a de facto independent state. Over the course of its existence, the Cossack State was at war with the Polish Crown, the Tsardom of Russia, and the Crimean Khanate. In 1654, a controversial Cossack leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, signed a treaty that led to the gradual absorption of Cossack lands into the Tsardom of Russia. In 1667, the Polish- Russian treaty of Andrusovo divided the Ukrainian territory into two parts, with the Dnipro serving as a natural borderline: the Left-Bank Ukraine came under the control of Moscow, and the Right-Bank Ukraine remained part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the partitions of Poland ( 1772–95). As a result, most of the modern-day Ukraine was brought under Russian control, while several regions were absorbed into the Habsburg Empire.

Donetsk and Luhansk are industrial cities and administrative centers of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (administrative regions). The two cities’ populations are 929,063 and 425,848, respectively (as estimated by 2016 report released by the State Statistics Service of Ukraine). Together, the two oblasts form what in the Soviet days came to be known as the Donbas region (acronym for the Donets basin, after the river Siverskyi Donets, a tributary of the Don, that flows through it). Since April 2014, the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk and portions of the respective oblasts have been controlled by Russian-backed separatists, who had proclaimed these cities as capitals of the Donetsk and the Luhansk People’s Republics (most often referred to by using acronyms of DPR and LPR, respectively). Although DPR and LPR are two nominally different republics, they operate as a single military unit and share the political goal of being annexed to the Russian Federation.

Over the course of the preceding decade, Donetsk, home base to Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch Rinat Akhmetov (No. 47 in Forbes’ The World’s Billionaires), had become a symbol of economic growth and stability in the Donbas region, culminating in the construction of a state-of-the-art Donetsk International airport. Built for the Euro 2012 soccer championship and costing nearly one billion dollars, the airport has been reduced to a pile of rubble as a result of the conflict in the region. The Ukrainian army soldiers and volunteers nicknamed “cyborgs” had held it for 242 days, regularly posting widely watched videos to social networks and YouTube. While the cyborgs’ desperate prolonged defense of the airport had been a source of inspiration and pride for many Ukrainians, the destruction of the airport indicates the general sense of chaos, confusion, and devastation in the formerly flourishing region.

The Donbas Humanitarian Crisis: According to a United Nations 2016 report, over 3 million people in Donbas now dwell in the conflict zone: 2.7 million of them live in areas controlled by separatist forces, while 200,000 people reside in the proximity to the contact line. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in 2016 that 69 percent of households in separatist-controlled areas had difficulty obtaining food due to rising prices and poverty. According to these 2016 figures, the conflict had also created 1.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Horlivka is a city in the Donetsk region with an estimated population of 256,714. It had been taken over by the separatist forces in April 2014. In July 2014, Ukrainian armed forces attempted to regain control over the city. The unsystematic battles over Horlivka lasted for forty-eight days (July 20–September 6). At the moment, the town of Horlivka remains under separatist control.

Kuban is a region in southern Russia, east of the Azov Sea, with a significant Ukrainian population that for a long time preserved cultural and linguistic ties with Ukraine. In 1932, the Soviets had introduced administrative and educational policies that aimed at obscuring the cultural connections between Kuban and Ukraine. These policies involved replacing the Ukrainian names of sites and places in Kuban with Russian ones and ensuring that all school subjects were taught in Russian. Like Ukraine, Kuban also suffered a heavy hit from the repressions of 1930s and the state-orchestrated famine of 1932–33 known as the Holodomor. While the 1926 Population Census indicates that 49.2 percent of the Kuban population identified as “ Ukrainian” (a controversial term that was resisted even by many local Ukrainian-speakers at the time), the 2002 census shows that only 0.9 percent do so.

Mariupol is a city located on the coast of the Sea of Azov, thirty-five miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border, with an estimated population of 461,810. In May 2014, a battle between pro-Russian DPR separatists and the Ukrainian army broke out in Mariupol after it briefly came under DPR control. The city was eventually recaptured by the Ukrainian state forces, and in June 2014 Mariupol was established as the provisional administrative capital of the Donetsk Region in the place of the separatist- controlled Donetsk.

Novoazovsk is a city located in the Donetsk region, near the Russian- Ukrainian border, with an estimated population of 11,760. The separatist forces took Novoazovsk in August 2014.

Pervomaisk is a city in the Luhansk region with an estimated population of 38,435. Since April 2014, Pervomaisk has been under the control of the Russian-backed separatists demanding an establishment of the Luhansk People’s Republic. As the Ukrainian armed forces attempted to regain control over Pervomaisk, Pervomaisk became a focal point of heavy fighting that resulted in the destruction of numerous buildings in residential areas.

Savur Mohyla is a strategic height located three miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Symbolic Significance: Savur Mohyla is referenced in several Ukrainian dumas, folk epic poems performed by itinerant bards (kobzars), who had usually used a string instrument of lute family (kobza) to accompany their singing. In an influential duma about Cossack Morozenko, Morozenko is taken to Savur Mohyla—a hill from where he can see “all of his Ukraine”—to be executed. During World War II, Savur-Mohyla became a focal point of intense fighting between the Red Army and the German forces. To honor the Red Army soldiers who had perished at this site, a war memorial had been erected there in 1963. Like most Soviet World War II memorials, it was constituted by an obelisk, a statue of a Red Army soldier raising his weapon, and a number of horizontal panels depicting the heroic feats of different constituents of the Soviet army. In 2014, the obelisk part of the memorial collapsed due to heavy shelling.

Political Significance: In July 2014, the DPR separatists took control of Savur Mohyla from the outnum bered and encircled Ukrainian troops who had defended it for 12 days. Over the course of fighting over the hill, the site changed hands eight times.

Yasynuvata is a town in the Donetsk Region with an estimated population of 35,836. Its location at the railway junction makes it strategically attractive to both sides. Since April 2014, it has been occupied by Russian-backed separatists. In August 2014, Ukrainian armed forces ventured to retake Yasynuvata from the separatists but their attempts proved unsuccessful.