Russia has been trying for more than 11 years to take permanent control of a string of strategically important cities in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, and now hopes that a US-brokered deal will deliver what its military could not.
Heavily armed separatist militias covertly created, led and supplied by Moscow seized Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostyantynivka in April 2014, but were expelled three months later when Kyiv’s troops drove them back to their stronghold in Donetsk city, the provincial capital.
Since then, Ukraine has turned small industrial cities in the region into a “fortress belt” of multilayered defences.
It only stretches for about 50km but now, three-and-a-half years into a full-scale war, it still shields a vast swathe of vulnerable Ukrainian territory and several big cities from Russia’s invasion force.
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Kostyantynivka: 10km from frontline
At the southern tip of the fortress belt is Kostyantynivka, which is now home to an estimated 8,000 civilians out of a pre-war population of 65,000. They live under a daily barrage of Russian drones, missiles and bombs, and maps from the DeepState group that charts the battlefield suggest the front line is only 10km away.
Slovyansk/Kramatorsk: 30km from frontline
At the northern end is Slovyansk, about 30km from the front line, which all but merges with Kramatorsk to form one large conurbation. Before the war they were a hub for the heavy industry that sustained eastern Ukraine but now the local economy revolves around the military, for whom the cities have become crucial staging posts.
Kramatorsk is the administrative centre for the 30 per cent or so of Donetsk region that remains under Kyiv’s control, an area that is still home to an estimated 250,000 civilians, most of whom live in Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
All along the fortress belt, which is linked and supplied by the crucial H20 highway, Ukraine has expended a great deal of time and money on building fortifications, bunkers, tank traps and trenches, and laying mine fields, barbed wire and ranks of “dragon’s teeth” – heavy concrete cones that hinder tanks and other armour.
The towns and cities clustered along the highway are also favourable for defence. They sit close together, offering an enemy little space to outflank them, and are densely constructed; several are also built around sprawling Soviet-era factories that would serve as strongholds for Ukrainian forces if fighting reached urban areas.
It cost Russia many months and severe losses in personnel and weaponry to seize other, smaller cities in Donetsk region, such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka, indicating how difficult and bloody it would be for Moscow’s troops to launch a head-on assault against Ukraine’s fortress belt.
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It is more likely to try to cut Ukraine’s supply lines to Kostyantynivka and Druzhkivka by bearing down on the H20 highway from the town of Chasiv Yar to the east and from a salient near Pokrovsk to the southwest, in the hope of forcing Kyiv’s military to retreat in the face of possible encirclement.
Chasiv Yar, sitting on high ground between Bakhmut and Kostyantynivka, has witnessed one of the most brutal battles of the war. Russia now controls most of the destroyed town, with Ukrainian troops trying to cling on to its southwestern outskirts.
Pokrovsk: 10km from frontline
Russian forces have been about 10km from Pokrovsk for a year without being able to take another small city that Ukraine turned into a stronghold over 11 years of fighting. They are now trying to surround it and starve it of supplies by bombarding local roads.
Kyiv says Moscow is unable to consolidate any breakthrough in Donetsk, and now sends handfuls of soldiers through gaps in the front line to disrupt the Ukrainian rear and give the impression of rapid gains by raising Russian flags over abandoned villages.
Moscow used this tactic in advance of the US-Russia summit late last month, when hailing a sudden advance near Dobropillia, north of Pokrovsk.
Ukrainian reinforcements have now retaken some of the area, but the attack seemed timed to strengthen Kremlin demands that Kyiv give up all of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in exchange for an offer to freeze the front line further south.
Russia reportedly could also withdraw from parts of the Kharkiv region around Kupiansk and a sliver of Sumy province – but that amounts to only 400sq km of territory, compared to more than 6,500sq km that it wants Ukraine to give up in Donetsk and Luhansk, an area known collectively as Donbas.
That would mean simply abandoning the fortress belt and conceding “a critical defensive position, which Russian forces currently have no means of rapidly enveloping or penetrating,” said the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, adding that it would “likely take several years” for Moscow’s military to occupy the area.
Such a retreat would not only be massively demoralising for Ukraine, but would give Russia all the strategic defences it has forged over a decade and force it to urgently retrench in flat, less defensible terrain further west, while giving the enemy a platform for attacks on several major cities.
It could be catastrophic for the defence of Ukraine – and political suicide for its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
“We will not leave Donbas. We cannot do it. For the Russians, Donbas is a springboard for a future offensive,” he said recently. “I have heard nothing ... that would guarantee that a new war will not start tomorrow and that [Russia] will not try to occupy at least Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv.”
