Impossible Choices in the Battle for the Donbas

Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pavlo Kyrylenko and Serhiy Gaidai received phone calls from men they believed to be Russians, based on their accents. Kyrylenko and Gaidai, the governors of the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, respectively, were being enticed to defect. The pair—the top Ukrainian officials in parts of their country racked for years by conflict with Moscow-backed separatists—were offered the chance to join what the Russians were convinced would be their inevitable victory.

“This was before the phrase ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself,’” Kyrylenko told me, sitting in the basement of a Donetsk regional-government building while an air-raid siren rang. “I didn’t have such an eloquent way to answer, so I blocked the number.”

That was two months ago, and though both received death threats afterward, the “offer” was so absurd that turning it down was an easy choice, one that would pale in comparison to the life-and-death decisions they have had to make every day since.

Russian forces have in recent days refocused their attention from an attempt at taking Kyiv to trying to control the entirety of the Donbas, the area encompassing Donetsk and Luhansk. (Though the actual cities of Donetsk and Luhansk lie in Russian-controlled territory, the eponymous regions that surround them had been divided about evenly between Ukraine and the so-called People’s Republics.) Since 2014, it has been the site of a back-and-forth conflict that accompanied Vladimir