Exploring the Diverse Cities of Donbass: From Mariupol to Lisichansk and Bakhmut

Mariupol

In the past, you couldn’t go wrong with locating the industrial heart of the Donbass in Mariupol. Two metallurgical giants – the Ilyich Combine and Azovstal – were the first things that came to mind when hearing the name of the city in Soviet times. They ensured a certain level of prosperity, employed most of the 500,000 inhabitants at the peak and polluted the air.

Mariupol is not a typical, but a completely unusual city for the Donbass. While elsewhere there was first a large factory and around it a place for its workers developed, here, on the shore of the Azov Sea, it was the other way around. The port city in no way derives its raison d’être from its economic potential. The first settlements were built here long before our era. From the 16th century, the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the Crimean Tatars took turns claiming the area for themselves.

In 1778, now under Russian rule, the modern history of the city began. Under Catherine the Great, it quickly filled with Greeks from Crimea. The tsarina wanted to transform the south of her empire into blooming landscapes on the one hand, and ensure predictable conditions there on the other. The Christian Greeks came at just the right time for her. Similar to the Germans on the Volga, they were lured to Mariupol, the Marienstadt, with solid privileges.

More than a hundred years later, the Greeks made up the majority of the city’s population. And until recently, Yuri Chotlubej, an ethnic Greek, served as mayor for many years (1998-2015).

When the railroad came to Mariupol in the 1880s, the port was built and a rapid economic boom began, foreign investors flocked to the city, consulates and trade missions were opened. The beginnings of metallurgy also go back to this time. Mariupol became a city of the world, but not for long. Her charm faded rapidly in the Soviet Union. What counted now were the proletarian muscles and nerves of steel.

During the Second World War, 85 percent of the city, which was temporarily occupied by the Germans, was destroyed. And now, 80 years later, she’s on the ground again. In 2014, after the “Euromaidan” in Kiev, supporters of a “federalization” of Ukraine had demonstrated for weeks, occupied the city administration and hoisted flags of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” on buildings of state institutions. However, after an armed confrontation that left dead and injured, Ukrainian security forces regained control of the city shortly before a referendum on the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics was held in Donbass.

Mariupol ultimately remained in Kyiv’s hands, but was one of the first targets of Russia’s “special operation,” which began in February 2022. After weeks of fighting, what was left of it was “liberated,” according to official diction. While the broken Ilyich plant is to be rebuilt, Azovstal is history, according to Russian officials. An industrial park is to be built there.

Lissitschansk

People all over the world got to know Lisichansk from a camera perspective in the last few months. Luckily it wasn’t a reporter’s camera. Danish filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont has shot two multi-award-winning documentaries there over the past six years. The second, “A House Made of Splinters‘ was nominated for an Oscar this year.

From the perspective of a social institution that offers children from precarious family backgrounds temporary shelter, the film reveals war damage that takes place in secret. Parents who have lost their footing and take refuge in alcohol, children who just want to be children and hope to the last to be able to go home again. Social workers who lovingly care for them. Wilmont shot in Lisichansk for a year and a half, he was there every other month and managed to make the children behave so freely, as if the camera weren’t there at all.

There is hardly anything to be seen of the city itself in the film, but the fates of its protagonists, even its anti-heroes, arouse curiosity. Lisichansk is located in the north of the Lugansk region. At the time of filming it was under Ukrainian control. However, a large part of the 100,000 inhabitants who lived here until February 24, 2022 felt close ties to Russia, to Russian culture, and voted for “pro-Russian” opposition parties in elections. In Wilmont’s one-and-a-half-hour docudrama, everyone except one policeman speaks Russian, both children and adults.

In the spring of 2014, Lisichansk fell to separatists for several months before being recaptured by the Ukrainian army. The war in Donbass has made many in the village, which was only 20 kilometers away from the then “contact line”, unemployed and uprooted.

The city is considered the “cradle of Donbass”. It was founded in 1710, and a few years later coal mining began in the vicinity. Today Lisichansk is characterized by greenery and beautiful nature in a hilly landscape. But the fighting in spring 2022 caused severe destruction. In July, the Russian army took the city. Back in February, a day after Russia recognized the so-called Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, the inmates of the social center from “A House Made of Splinters” made their way to more western regions of Ukraine.

Bachmut

No city in Donbass has suffered more from the fighting between Russia and Ukraine than Bakhmut. Since August 2022, it has been more or less under constant fire because of its strategic location and has turned into a landscape of ruins. Its former 70,000 inhabitants have become homeless.

Photographs from the recent past show a well-kept and progressive-looking city. It was renamed Bakhmut in 2015 as part of “decommunization”, which is state policy in Ukraine. It was called that until 1924, before the new Soviet power gave it the name Artyomovsk, in honor of the revolutionary and Lenin comrade-in-arms Fyodor “Artyom” Sergeyev. The Soviet designation is still widely used in the Russian media and by official sources such as the Ministry of Defense.

Bakhmut, 90 kilometers from Donetsk, historically dates back to an outpost ordered by Ivan the Terrible in 1571 to protect against Crimean Tatar attacks. Peter the Great had a fortress built here in 1701. Even then, Bachmut was known for its rich salt deposits. But they didn’t make the city really rich.

During World War II, Bachmut was also occupied by the Wehrmacht from November 1941 to September 1943. In 2014, the city briefly belonged to the Donetsk People’s Republic. In the meantime it has almost been razed to the ground.

Tino Künzel

Founded by Germans: New York

There is another big name in the Donbass, albeit in a small town: New York. The place not far from Bachmut was once founded by Mennonites who had immigrated from Germany. How they came to New York is not known. One theory is that it was inspired by a trip to New York by a local fabricator named Jakob Unger. Today the city has 12,000 inhabitants, a chemical plant, a train station, a park and a German cemetery.