page_title: Donbass
section_title: Demographics and politics
hierarchical_section_title: Donbass / Demographics and politics
caption_attribution_description: English: Most common native language in urban and rural municipalities of Ukraine according to 2001 census
context_page_description: The Donbass or Donbas is a historical, cultural, and economic region in eastern Ukraine and southwestern Russia. The word Donbass is a portmanteau formed from Donets Basin, in reference to the river Donets that flows through it. Multiple definitions of the region's extent exist, and its boundaries have never been officially demarcated.
  The most common definition in use today refers to the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, whilst the historical coal mining region excluded parts of these oblasts, and included areas in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and Southern Russia. A Euroregion of the same name is composed of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in Ukraine and Rostov Oblast in Russia. Donbass formed the historical border between the Zaporizhian Sich and the Don Cossack Host. It has been an important coal mining area since the late 19th century, when it became a heavily industrialised territory.
  In March 2014, following the Euromaidan and 2014 Ukrainian revolution, large swaths of the Donbass became gripped by unrest.
context_section_description: According to the 2001 census, ethnic Ukrainians form 58% of the population of Luhansk Oblast and 56.9% of Donetsk Oblast. Ethnic Russians form the largest minority, accounting for 39% and 38.2% of the two oblasts respectively. Modern Donbass is a predominately Russophone region. According to the 2001 census, Russian is the main language of 74.9% of residents in Donetsk Oblast and 68.8% in Luhansk Oblast. The proportion of native Russian-speakers is higher than ethnic Russians because some ethnic Ukrainians and other nationalities also indicate Russian as their mother tongue.
  Residents of Russian origin are mainly concentrated in the larger urban centers. Russian became the main language and lingua franca in the course of industrialization, boosted by the immigration of many Russians, particularly from Kursk Oblast, to newly founded cities in Donbas. A subject of continuing research controversies, and often denied in these two oblasts, is the extent of forced emigration and deaths during the Soviet period, which particularly affected rural Ukrainians during the Holodomor which resulted as a consequence of early Soviet industrialization policies combined with two years of drought throughout southern Ukraine and the Volga region.
  Nearly all Jews, unless they fled (and sizable numbers of Donbass Jews did, in fact, flee in 1941), were wiped out during the German occupation in World War II. Donbass is about 6% Muslim according to the official censuses of 1926 and 2001.
  Prior to the Ukrainian crisis in 2013–14, the politics of the region were dominated by the pro-Russian Party of Regions, which gained about 50% of Donbass votes in the 2008 Ukrainian parliamentary election. Prominent members of that party, such as former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, were from the Donbass.
  According to linguist George Shevelov, in the early 1920s the proportion of secondary schools teaching in the Ukrainian language was lower than the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in Donbass – even though the Soviet Union had ordered that all schools in the Ukrainian SSR should be Ukrainian-speaking (as part of its Ukrainization policy).
  Surveys of regional identities in Ukraine have shown that around 40% of Donbass residents claim to have a "Soviet identity". Roman Horbyk of Södertörn University wrote that in the 20th century, "[a]s peasants from all surrounding regions were flooding its then busy mines and plants on the border of ethnically Ukrainian and Russian territories", "incomplete and archaic institutions" prevented Donbass residents from "acquiring a notably strong modern urban – and also national – new identity".
caption: Districts with a majority of native Russian speakers are shown in red (census 2001)
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