Why Would Handing the Whole Donetsk Region to Putin Ruin Millions of Lives?

In the spring of 2024, together with my team at UNITED24 Media, we spent the night in the city of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. We rented a spacious apartment, went out for dinner to a newly built boulevard, and bought snacks there for a trip to the southern part of the region. Back then, Russia had managed to break Avdiivka’s defenses and began a gradual advance toward Pokrovsk itself, so we went there to report. More than a year later, nothing living remained of the city: the Russian army still has not occupied the town, but is destroying it step by step with constant shelling. Before the war, almost 100,000 people lived in Pokrovsk. They all lost the lives they had spent decades building: homes now stand in ruins, and nothing remains of Pokrovsk’s once-large factories. Ukraine’s largest mine, “Pokrovska,” has also closed.

Western media report that Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine hand over the entire Donetsk region without exception. As of October 2025, the Russian army occupies about 70% of the region. Notably, Russia began its war in the Donetsk region 11 years ago—in the spring of 2014. And since then, it still has not been able to seize the region, even after three years of extremely intense war. Now it simply wants to take these lands.

However, Ukraine still controls large cities like Kramatorsk, Sloviansk, and others. Overall, out of almost 1,300 populated places, still, every third is under Ukrainian control.

Before the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, about 1.9 million people lived in territory controlled by Ukraine in the Donetsk region. Over the following three years the number of people living in Ukrainian-controlled areas fell sevenfold—to 250,000 people. The remainder were forced to flee the war that Russia brought to these lands. Homes, family and social ties, businesses, jobs, and the histories of hundreds of thousands of families have been destroyed. Everything people worked for their whole lives has been taken by Russia.

A quarter of a million people in the Donetsk region remain on Ukrainian-controlled land today. They continue to live in their homes and apartments, work, raise children, and build their future. Enterprises, factories, mines and production facilities operate here; trade continues. Kramatorsk is home to the Kramatorsk Heavy Machine Tool-Building Plant, which manufactures the Bohdana self-propelled artillery system—today one of the most widely produced self-propelled artillery systems in the world. In Kramatorsk there is also the Novokramatorsky Machine-Building Plant (NKMZ), known as the largest European plant for non-series heavy engineering. Another major city in the region, Sloviansk, used to host dozens of different enterprises and today is fully or partially destroyed by Russian shelling.

On what grounds can territories that have been part of Ukraine for almost 35 years be simply handed over to Russia? First of all, this contradicts the Constitution of Ukraine; no one in Ukraine can make such a decision. Moreover, such a demand contradicts common sense: 250,000 people who lived in Ukraine and in recent years fought for its independence would be forcibly handed over to another country, where they would be sent to filtration camps and punished for supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine? Or forced to leave their homes, fleeing the occupiers’ hostile regime and abandoning their entire lives?

Putin’s actions prove he will not stop at Luhansk or Donetsk regions. In the early stages of the full-scale invasion his forces entered Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, advanced into Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and planned an amphibious landing in Odesa region. Today fighting is also taking place on the border with Dnipropetrovsk region.

“Handing over the Donetsk region” is only rhetoric aimed at testing how weak Ukraine or its Western partners might be. Putin will clearly not make concessions. The opening of a new front in the Kharkiv region in the spring of 2024—after which the town of Vovchansk was destroyed—and an attempted attack on the Sumy region (which was countered by fighting in the Kursk region) are evidence of this.

At the same time, the only thing the Russian occupier is capable of is destroying these lands. Mariupol, Volnovakha, Maryinka, Avdiivka, Toretsk, Bakhmut, and hundreds of other towns and villages have been wiped off the face of the earth. Today, Russian shells are destroying Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk.

Instead of handing Ukrainian lands to Russia, we must work to reduce the enemy’s offensive capabilities and cut its economic means for doing so—namely by continuing to destroy the main resource that fuels this war: oil and gas. That is why the Ukrainian army needs the means—missiles and drones—that allow the destruction of refineries and the infrastructure that enables profit: extraction, processing, and transportation. Today, this is the number-one target and precisely the thing that keeps hitting Russia’s economic ability to continue the war.