With the fall of Lysychansk on 3 July 2022, Russia completely occupied Luhansk oblast, Ukraine’s easternmost province.
Luhansk oblast, a Soviet planner’s invention, is stitched together from patches of various historical regions. It resembles a bell pepper cut down the middle from west to east by the Siversky Donets River. To the south is the urbanised and industrialised Donbas, which Russia occupied in 2014 with the help of separatist auxiliaries that drew their strength from the local ethnically diverse Russian-speaking proletariat.
Russia made a play on the vast, thinly populated expanse of steppe and farmland north of the Siversky Donets River and found many local administrators prepared to organise the supposed independence referendum of 2014. But separatism did not flourish in the black earth of the north. Smallholder farmers and businessmen founded an armed self-defence unit which scrapped with separatist forces and eventually became a battalion of the Ukrainian army. Tens of thousands of displaced people took refuge in the area from Russia’s occupation to the south, bolstering pro-Ukrainian locals and enriching the economic and social life of the region.
