On April 12, 2014, a group of armed Russians, led by a former FSB colonel, entered the city of Sloviansk in Ukraine's Donetsk region and declared it under the control of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. This date is considered the beginning of the Kremlin-instigated armed conflict in Ukraine, which would lead to a major war in 2022. Over the next few years, Donbas—a region in eastern Ukraine that had been one of the main industrial centers of the empire and then the Soviet Union since the late 19th century—transformed into one of the strangest, wildest, and most dangerous places on the planet.

Why did Donbas become the flashpoint for direct military conflict between Russia and Ukraine? How did the region drift further and further away from Russia in the post-Soviet decades—and how did Moscow (not) try to combat this? How did war and the "Russian world" gradually overtake and transform a prosperous region with the second-highest income in Ukraine, Beyoncé concerts, and one of the best football stadiums in Europe? How were the economies and politics of the self-proclaimed republics, which became the subject of contention and trade between Russia and the West, built? How did pro-Russian "states" repress dissent and create criminal political regimes? And how did all these events, which ultimately became the pretext and formal pretext for Putin's invasion of Ukraine, affect the people of Donbas—ordinary people who wanted to live peacefully on the same land where their ancestors had lived for generations?

Answers to all these questions are essential to understanding the circumstances and context that ultimately led to a major war. After 2014, the name "Donbas" became known worldwide—yet the voices of the people who fell under the steamroller of history and became the first victims of the aggressive actions of Vladimir Putin and his cronies were rarely heard. This book was written by an independent journalist who continued to work in the region after it was captured and occupied, and who can tell us about what Donbas experienced before and during the war and how it lives today, both as a witness, an investigator, and as a participant in the events.