Quotes About Donbass

Ukraine's Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire's belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine's 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

Ukrainian politicians' worst nightmare is Donbass separatism, the fear that one day eastern Ukraine will want autonomy, or even bid to rejoin Russia.

I will not agree to go to war in the Donbass. I know there are a lot of hotheads, especially those who hold rallies and say, 'Let's go fight and win it all back!' But at what price? What is the cost? It's another story of lives and land. And I won't do it.

If I meet Putin, I'll say to him: 'So you've finally given us back our territory, how much more are you ready to give as compensation money for taking away our land and helping those who took part in the escalation in Crimea and Donbass?'

Novorossiya or the New Russia of Catherine the Great and some of the Donetsk Republic of 1918. Hardly anyone in the Donbass noticed these people or what they were doing on the far fringes of political life.