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Russia and Ukraine belong to the East Slavs and are very close in appearance, language and culture, and Ukraine is even known as "Little Russia".
In the new year, war is raging again.
On January 12, 2022, according to a statement relayed by the Russian newspaper Izvestia, the Donetsk Militia News Agency said that since January 10, Ukrainian troops have frequently shelled Donbass, shelling seven times in just 24 hours.
Destruction of donbass. Photography/OLGA, Source/Figureworm Creative
Eastern Ukraine is located east of the Dnieper River and includes regions such as Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk. Although this region belongs to Ukraine, for historical reasons, the Russian-speaking population accounts for the majority of the population.
In 2014, Donetsk and Luhansk declared independence from Ukraine, followed by the Founding of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic. Rich in coal resources, Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine and the center of eastern Ukraine, as well as the center of Ukraine's heavy industry, culture and education. The declaration of independence by Donetsk and Luhansk and their inversion to Russia is unacceptable to Ukraine, which has put Ukrainian rule in Kharkov at risk and Crimea in the south having joined Russia in 2014, making the situation in the region even more dangerous.
Eastern Ukraine on the map
In the important town of Dongwu, soldiers and families must fight
Hearing place names such as Kharkiv and Donetsk on the news makes it inevitable that people will be confused, and it feels that these places are place names that often appear in the Soviet film "Liberation" or the Russian documentary "The Great Patriotic War". In fact, as early as the Soviet Civil War, eastern Ukraine was one of the fiercely contested battlefields between the Red Army and the White Army. In 1922, Petriula was defeated by the Red Army, and most of the territory of Ukraine was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, except for western Ukraine, which was occupied by Poland.
Of course, the battle with the White Army was nothing more than an appetizer. The real battle was during the Great Patriotic War, when soviet and German forces repeatedly fought for Kharkov, an important town in eastern Ukraine, between 1941 and 1943, with a total of 4 battles.
Source/Frontline: Battle of Kharkov Russian game poster
On June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany gathered Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and other countries to launch a major offensive against the Soviet Union, which happened to be the day of the summer solstice. In Hitler's Barbarossa Plan, Kharkiv was included in the list and was one of the targets of the final stages of the offensive. On 24 October, just three months and two days later, the overwhelming German army attacked the city of Kharkov, and the German 6th Army and the 17th Army surrounded the area from the north and south flanks, and the city of Kharkiv fell into German hands on the same day.
The Second Battle of Kharkov took place from May 12 to 28, 1942. In the winter of the previous year, the Soviets had thwarted the German offensive momentum, and as the summer approached, the Soviets tried to seize the strategic initiative when the Battle of Kharkov broke out. The Soviets gathered 700,000 men from 6 armies and attacked on the north and south flanks, all of which suffered disastrous defeats; on the 25th, the Soviets fell into the encirclement of the Germans, and by the end of the 28th campaign, a total of 240,000 Soviet troops had been captured, 1,240 tanks had been destroyed, and the German side suffered only 5,048 casualties.
On 2 January 1943, the Soviets launched Operation Planet, coinciding with the German stalemate in Stalingrad, which broke through the German southern defenses from January to early February and captured Kharkov, Belgorod and Kursk. Soon after, the Third Battle of Kharkov broke out (19 February to 15 March 1943), this time the German Army Group South launched a series of offensive operations against the Soviets to retake Kharkov. The German counter-offensive eliminated a large number of Soviet troops and reoccupied Kharkov and Belgorod, temporarily stabilizing the southern line of the Soviet-German battlefield after the defeat at Stalingrad.
The Fourth Battle of Kharkov took place from 12 to 23 August 1943 as part of the Battle of Kursk. Building on the results of the last Battle of Kharkov, the Germans took the initiative to try to encircle the Soviets in the Kursk region and regain the strategic initiative, but progress was slow and the casualties were heavy. At this time, the Allies opened up the Italian battlefield again, and the Germans had to draw troops to Italy and were forced to terminate the attack. The Soviets launched a series of offensives, recapturing Oryol and Belgorod-Kharkov. The Germans retreated in the direction of the Dnieper and never crossed the Dnieper again.
If 1942-1943 was a stalemate on the Eastern Front of World War II, the eastern region of Ukraine was one of the important turning points. Kharkov's status is second only to Stalingrad. Located at the confluence of the Kharkiv, Lopan and Uda rivers, the city was one of the transportation hubs of Eastern Europe and briefly existed as the administrative capital of Ukraine in 1943. Unlike the long stalemate in Stalingrad, the city of Kharkiv changed hands several times. Neither the Soviet Union nor Nazi Germany refused to abandon this important town in eastern Ukraine and invested a lot of troops in this regard.
Constitution Square, Kharkiv, Ukraine. Photography / Sergii Zarevpanther, source / figureworm creative
A place of great resources, the hometown of martyrs
On February 14, 1943, krasnorton, a coal mining city in Luhansk, was liberated by the Red Army. The next day, a large number of bodies of slain youths were found in Shaft No. 5, and 71 bodies were later excavated. They were fighters of the anti-fascist organization "Young Guards" and local underground party organizations.
The Young Guards were an underground resistance group spontaneously formed by members of the local Komsomol, with about a hundred members, both men and women, and the youngest was only fourteen years old. On 20 July 1942, the Germans occupied the city of Krasnoden, and shortly thereafter the Young Guards were formed and operated until January 1943.
During this period, the Young Guards printed and distributed more than five thousand anti-fascist leaflets in Krasnåton, revealing the real situation on the front lines, refuting the demagogic propaganda of the German occupation forces, and calling on the populace to rise up and fight the German aggressors. Members of the group, along with underground Communists, vandalized electromechanical workshops and prevented Nazi Germany from using the Donbass region for arms production.
In 1942, on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the October Revolution, the Youth Guard hoisted eight red flags on the tallest buildings in the city of Krasnoden and on the outskirts of the city. On the night of 5 December, the Young Guards set fire to the building of the German Labour Exchange (known locally as the "Black Exchange"), burning the labor profile there, thus saving some 2,000 young men and women from the Klas norden region from being sent to Germany.
In January 1943, upon hearing of the defeat of the Germans on the Stalingrad front, the Young Guards were preparing to stage an armed uprising to eliminate the German garrison in order to complement the Advance of the Red Army. However, shortly before the planned date of the uprising, the group was exposed. Betrayed by traitors, 49 members of the group and 22 members of the Luhansk underground party were arrested and soon tossed into a 58-metre-deep pit in Shaft Krasnoden 5. Some people have been shot there before, and others have been pushed into deep pits and buried alive.
On March 1, 1943, they were buried in Komsomol Park in the Center of Krasnorton, where all five leaders of the Young Guard were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Another 13 members of the group were also on the arrest list of the German occupying forces, but they managed to escape, 7 of whom went to the front line to continue the fight against the invaders, and 3 died in the ensuing fighting.
In 1945, the Soviet writer Fadeyev wrote their story into a novel, The Young Guards.
The Young Guards book. Source/Douban
However, in the Donetsk Basin, the tug-of-war between the Soviet Union and Germany lasted for another six months, and complete liberation would not take place until the end of September 1943.
After the defeat of the Germans at Kursk, in order to liberate the Donetsk Basin, the Soviets launched the Battle of Donbass against the Germans. The Battle of Donbass began on 13 August 1943, with the right wing of the Southwestern Front launching an offensive that liberated Kharkov. On August 16, the Soviets were blocked by the Germans on the line of the Mius River, and a few days later the Soviets broke through the German lines and liberated Taganrog on the 30th, encircling and eliminating the German 29th Army.
At this time, the German Army Group South was shrouded in a cloud. Hitler had ordered "no victory, better death" at the Battle of Stalingrad, but at this point he had to change his usual stubborn attitude and allow his troops to retreat to the west of the Dnieper River. On 1 September, the Germans began to retreat from the Donbass front. In order to slow the pace of the Soviet offensive and buy time to build a strong defensive line on the Dnieper, the Germans used scorched-earth tactics during the retreat, burning a large number of villages, but under the struggle of the underground party and local workers, the industrial facilities and mines in the Donbas Basin were not destroyed.
The Soviets advanced 300 kilometers to the west, reaching the banks of the Dnieper River. As a result of this operation, the Donetsk Basin was completely liberated.
The Soviet Union received 21.1 million tons of coal from here in 1944, and by early 1945, three-quarters of the mines were back in production. As early as 1943, there was a metallurgical plant that fully resumed production. Just 30 days after liberation, two sets of generator sets were put into use. In September 1944, the production of machinery products in southeastern Ukraine reached 30% of pre-war levels, and millions of hectares of arable land had been sown and harvested.
Supplies from eastern Ukraine played a huge role in the late second period of World War II.
Why "Little Russia"?
Ethnic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians all originated in Kievan Rus' and Rus'. Kiev, now the capital of Ukraine, is known as the "mother of all cities" of the East Slavic people.
Kiev. Photography / Mariana Ianovska, source / Figureworm Creative
By the middle of the 12th century, Kievan Rus' was weakened by infighting and steppe peoples. It is said that the outskirts of Kiev at that time were deserted and the inhabitants had moved to the upper Volga River. After the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, the Rus' people living in the upper Volga Developed into a modern Russian nation, while western Ukraine was invaded by Poland and Lithuania, which later formed the prototype of the Ukrainian nation (The Lesser Russian Nation).
The word "Ukraine" is meant to be the "border region", which is said from the perspective of the Poles, after armed resistance by the Cossacks, the Ukrainians broke away from the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and joined the Muscovite Principality in 1654, loyal to the Tsar.
During the reign of Tsarist Russia, in order to bring the two sides closer, the term "Little Russia" was used extensively to refer to Ukraine. This identity is particularly strong in eastern Ukraine. At the beginning of the novel "The Young Guards", the sons of the workers and mines in the Donetsk Basin not only refer to their homeland as "Little Russia", but also ukrainians. However, with the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, the term "Little Russia" gradually became a derogatory term, which was considered by Ukrainian nationalists to be lacking in subjectivity, voluntarily subservient to others, and inferior to Russia.
Another annoyance to Ukrainian nationalists is the importance of the Russian language in Ukraine. In 1989, Soviet data showed that 12.2 per cent of Ethnic Ukrainians considered Russian to be their "mother tongue", and a 1989 survey of parents of some first-grade elementary school students in Kiev showed that only 16.5 per cent of respondents spoke Ukrainian at home, compared with only 4.7 per cent at work.
The Crimean Peninsula, bordering the Black Sea, was once the territory of the Crimean Khanate, and after Tsarist Russia annexed the Crimean Khanate, it moved into a huge number of Cossacks, so the Majority of ethnic Russians here. Another region is Donbass in the southeast. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the land was the domain of the Svoboda Cossacks, "Svoboda" means "freedom", and their neighbor was the Zaporizhian Cossacks. They chose to serve the Tsar and fought against the Crimean Khanate and the Turkish Empire. In 1721, a large number of coal mines were discovered in the Donetsk Basin, which contributed to its prosperity until the mid-20th century. In addition, Kharkiv, ukraine's second largest city and industrial center, was also formed on the basis of forts built by the Cossacks.
Historically, the region has oscillated between Ukraine and Russia, and it remains the subject of bitter disputes between the two countries. The main goal of the radical Ukrainian nationalists is to "de-Russify" the region and "re-Ukrainianize" ethnic Ukrainians who consider their mother tongue to speak Russian.
Back in 1993, a Ukrainian parliamentarian said state authorities and intellectuals were now struggling to correct "the false consciousness of those who have lost their Ukrainian identity." "When I set up two Ukrainian-speaking kindergartens in Kharkiv, more than twenty Ukrainian children were already enrolled," he said. "However, the linguistic situation in the region is not an easy task for ukrainian nationalist politics, or the effort is largely wishful thinking."
To this day, the Donbass region is dominated by Russian, and most ukrainians speak Russian.
Mirroring eastern Ukraine is western Ukraine. Western Ukraine was occupied by Poland in 1340-1349, divided by Austria in 1772, unified with most of Ukraine in 1944, and formally established as the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic at the Yalta Conference the following year. Due to its long period of Polish and Austrian rule, the local people's sense of identity with Russia was as low as a few percent. During World War II, the SS "Galician" division was dominated by Western Ukrainians, and at the time of the defeat of Nazi Germany, a large number of Ukrainian armed groups attacked the Soviet army, and the activities continued until around 1950.
Castles of Ukraine. Photography / Sergii Zarevpanther, source / figureworm creative
In the face of today's tensions, it is sincerely hoped that Ukraine will be able to return to peace and stability. After all, in the Soviet-German War, this land experienced one of the most brutal wars in human history.
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Author | Li Ke