DONETSK REGION, Ukraine (AP) — From a bunker in eastern Ukraine, the 33-year-old soldier asks her comrade to fly a reconnaissance drone over her childhood home, hoping for a final glimpse before it becomes just another city pulverized by years of fighting.
The soldier took up arms a decade ago to defend her home region, Donetsk, where Ukraine has been battling Russian-backed forces since 2014. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the region has become synonymous with Ukraine’s fight for survival. Battlefield developments in Donetsk are considered a gauge of each side’s fortunes in the war.
In over 10 years of fighting, Ukraine has lost control of around 70% of the region.
“I watched my school destroyed, the community center where I once took dance lessons reduced to rubble,” Fox said in the dugout close to her beloved Kostiantynivka, where Russian forces are steadily closing in.
“It hurts because your whole life flashes before your eyes — the days when I was a little girl, the places and moments that were dear to me,” said Fox who, along with other soldiers who spoke to The Associated Press, provided only her call sign per Ukrainian military protocol.
Industrial heartland destroyed
Before 2014, the Donetsk region — home to more than 4 million people — was one of Ukraine’s most densely populated areas and a key industrial, political and economic hub. But it has borne the brunt of the nation’s financial losses since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, accounting for nearly half the $14.4 billion in damage to Ukrainian businesses, according to a report last year by the Kyiv School of Economics Institute.
Donetsk residents make up nearly a quarter of Ukraine’s internally displaced population, according to the International Organization for Migration, and with much of the once mighty industrial heartland now in ruin, an active battlefield or under occupation, they have little hope of ever returning.
Like so many in Ukraine, it’s not the first time Fox has lost a home to the war. In 2022, Russian forces captured Mariupol, the southern Donetsk city where she has also lived. This year, she has watched the front line creep toward the city where she was born.
Why Donetsk?
The most active stretch of the 1,250-kilometer (780-mile) front line is Donetsk region, where both sides are trying to make gains before winter sets in and slows the pace of battle.
Russia already controls most of Donbas — its name for Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk — that along with two southern regions, it illegally annexed three years ago.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants Kyiv to cede control of the rest, which analysts believe would give Moscow a permanent launchpad from which to threaten other parts of Ukraine. With the stakes so high, Ukraine is determined to resist at all costs and defend every inch it still holds.
To advance in Kherson, Russia would have to cross the Dnipro River, while the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region presents its own logistical challenges because of the flat and exposed terrain, according to Taras Chmut, a military analyst and director of the Come Back Alive Foundation, a nonprofit think tank and charity that raises money to equip Ukraine’s forces.
Chmut says Russia’s actions in Sumy and Kharkiv — regions in the northeast where Moscow has maintained a foothold — are not a serious land grab but an effort to create a bargaining chip for future negotiations, even though efforts led by U.S. President Donald Trump to get Russia and Ukraine to sit at the negotiating table have stalled.
“When you cannot agree at the table, you agree on the battlefield,” Chmut said. “Russia will stop where it is stopped by force, not where it chooses.”
Pavlo Yurchuk, commander of the 63rd Brigade that has been trying to hold off Russian progress in Donetsk for over a decade, believes intense fighting in the region is driven more by politics than by military logic, as the terrain makes large-scale advances extremely difficult.
“There is no strategic advantage in this area for conducting fast offensive operations,” Yurchuk told reporters, citing a network of rivers — including the Siverskyi Donets — canals and thousands of fortified villages, basements and bunkers that favor the defender.
But with its proximity to Russia, historic economic ties and the Soviet-era legacy of imposed Russian language, Putin has portrayed the area as historically Russian.
“The Kremlin has persuaded parts of its population that the region is ethnically Russian and therefore should be ’liberated,” Yurchuk said.
My home is all of 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 been spilled here, and more will be,” said an Azov company commander who goes by the call-sign Grosser.
Ukraine could make gains if it concentrated all its might in Donetsk, said Grosser, a native of Western Ukraine who has fought intermittently since 2015. But that’s not possible because “he (Putin) will keep pressing on all fronts.”
After years of fighting for control of the region, Ukrainians fear its fall would not only render meaningless the thousands of lives lost but also condemn the country to instability. And few on the front line believe Russia’s ambitions would end in Donetsk.
“If we have to fight three more years for 30 kilometers, then we will fight three more years for 30 kilometers,” Yurchuk said.
Fox said she is not only fighting for her roots in the Donetsk region.
“You’re no longer fighting for a single building or city,” Fox told the AP. “My home now is all of Ukraine.”
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Associated Press journalists Vasilisa Stepanenko and Yehor Konovalov contributed to this report.
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