Donetsk Oblast in the context of "Southern Ukraine offensive"

The Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine are areas of southern and eastern Ukraine that are controlled by Russia as a result of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the ongoing invasion. In Ukrainian law, they are defined as the "temporarily occupied territories". As of 2024, Russia occupies almost 20% of Ukraine and about 3 to 3.5 million Ukrainians are estimated to be living under occupation; since the invasion, the occupied territories lost roughly half of their population. The United Nations Human Rights Office reports that Russia is committing severe human rights violations in occupied Ukraine, including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture, crackdown on peaceful protest and freedom of speech, enforced Russification, passportization, indoctrination of children, and suppression of Ukrainian language and culture.

The occupation began in 2014 with Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea, and its de facto takeover of Ukraine's Donbas during a war in eastern Ukraine. In 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion. However, due to fierce Ukrainian resistance and logistical challenges (e.g. the stalled Russian Kyiv convoy), the Russian Armed Forces retreated from northern Ukraine in early April. In September 2022, Ukrainian forces launched the Kharkiv counteroffensive and liberated most of that oblast. Another southern counteroffensive resulted in the liberation of Kherson that November.

Ukrainian Greeks are a Greek minority that reside in or used to reside in the territory of modern Ukraine. The majority of Ukrainian Greeks live in Donetsk Oblast and are particularly concentrated around the city of Mariupol.

According to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, there were 91,548 ethnic Greeks in Ukraine, or 0.2% of the population. However, the actual percentage of those with Greek ancestry is likely to be much higher due to widespread intermarriage between ethnic Greeks and those Ukrainian citizens who are Ukrainian Orthodox, particularly in eastern Ukraine, as well as the absence of strong links to Greece or use of the Greek language by many with Greek ancestry in these areas and who therefore are not classified as Greeks in official censuses.

The war in Donbas, or the Donbas war, was a phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The war began in April 2014, when Russian paramilitaries seized several towns. Ukraine's military launched an operation against them, but failed to fully retake the territory. Covertly, Russia's military were directly involved, and the separatists were largely under Russian control. The war continued until it was subsumed by the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In March 2014, following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied Crimea. Anti-revolution and pro-Russian protests began in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, collectively 'the Donbas'. On 12 April, a commando unit led by Russian citizen Igor 'Strelkov' Girkin seized Sloviansk and other settlements in the Donbas. Separatists declared the Donetsk and Luhansk republics (DPR and LPR) as independent states. Russia covertly supported them with troops and weaponry. It only admitted sending "military specialists", but later acknowledged the separatists as Russian combat veterans. On 15 April, Ukraine began an "Anti-Terrorist Operation" (ATO). By August 2014, Ukraine had re-taken most of its territory. Russia responded by covertly sending troops, tanks and artillery into the Donbas, helping pro-Russian forces regain much of what they had lost. DPR leader Alexander Borodai said 50,000 Russian citizens had fought for the separatists by mid 2015, excluding the regular Russian troops that invaded.

Kharkiv Oblast (Ukrainian: Харківська область, romanized: Kharkivska oblast, Russian: Харьковская область, romanized: Kharkovskaya oblast), also referred to as Kharkivshchyna (Ukrainian: Харківщина), is an oblast (province) in eastern Ukraine.

Kharkiv borders Luhansk Oblast to the east, Donetsk Oblast to the southeast, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast to the southwest, Poltava Oblast to the west, Sumy Oblast to the northwest and Russia's Belgorod Oblast to the north. Its area is 31,400 square kilometres (12,100 sq mi), or 5.2% of the total territory of Ukraine.

On 30 September 2022, Russia, amid an ongoing invasion of Ukraine, unilaterally declared its annexation of areas in and around four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia. Most of Luhansk Oblast and part of Donetsk Oblast had been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014, while the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts were invaded by Russia in 2022. The boundaries of the areas to be annexed and their borders were not defined; Russian officials stated that they would be defined later. None of the oblasts were fully under Russian control at the time of the declaration, nor since. If limited to the areas then under Russian control (about 90,000 km or 15% of Ukraine's territory, roughly the size of Portugal) the annexation would still be the largest in Europe since World War II.

The move occurred after internationally unrecognized referendums held days prior, which were organized by Russian occupation authorities in territories where hostilities were ongoing and much of the population had fled. It occurred seven months after the start of the invasion and less than a month after the start of the Ukrainian Kharkiv counteroffensive. The signing ceremony was held in the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow in the presence of occupation authority heads Leonid Pasechnik, Denis Pushilin, Yevgeny Balitsky and Vladimir Saldo, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.

In late September 2022, in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian-installed officials in Ukraine staged so-called referendums on the annexation of occupied territories of Ukraine by Russia. They were widely described as sham referendums by commentators and denounced by various countries. The validity of the results of the referendums has only been accepted by North Korea.

The votes were conducted in four areas of Ukraine – the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine, and the Russian-appointed military administrations of Kherson Oblast and Zaporizhzhia Oblast, captured and occupied in the first week of the 2022 invasion – as well as in Russia. At the time of the referendums, Russia did not fully control any of the four regions, where military hostilities were ongoing. Much of the population had fled since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The referendums were illegal under international law and have been condemned by the United Nations as violations of the United Nations Charter.

Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych (born 9 July 1950) is a former Ukrainian politician who served as the fourth president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He also served as the prime minister of Ukraine several times between 2002 and 2007 and was a member of the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) from 2006 to 2010. Yanukovych was removed from the presidency during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which followed months of protests against him. Since then, he has lived in exile in Russia.

Yanukovych was a member of the pro-Russian Party of Regions. Before entering national politics, Yanukovych was the governor of his native Donetsk Oblast from 1997 to 2002. He was simultaneously the chairman of the oblast's legislature from 1999 to 2001. He first ran for president in the 2004 election, where he was declared the winner against Viktor Yushchenko. However, allegations of electoral fraud and voter intimidation caused widespread protests, in what became known as the Orange Revolution. The Ukrainian Supreme Court nullified the election and ordered a rerun, which Yanukovych lost to Yushchenko. Yanukovych ran for president again in 2010, this time beating Yulia Tymoshenko in an election deemed free and fair by international observers.

Eastern Ukraine or East Ukraine (Ukrainian: Східна Україна, romanized: Skhidna Ukrayina; Russian: Восточная Украина, romanized: Vostochnaya Ukraina) is primarily the territory of Ukraine east of the Dnipro (or Dnieper) river, particularly Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts (provinces). Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts are often also regarded as "eastern Ukraine".

Almost a third of the country's population lives in the region, which includes several cities with population of around a million. Within Ukraine, the region is the most highly urbanized, particularly portions of central Kharkiv Oblast, south-western Luhansk Oblast, central, northern and eastern areas of Donetsk Oblast.

Mariupol is a city in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. It is situated on the northern coast (Pryazovia) of the Sea of Azov, at the mouth of the Kalmius River. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was the tenth-largest city in the country and the second-largest city in Donetsk Oblast, with an estimated population of 425,681 people in January 2022; as of August 2023, Ukrainian authorities estimate the population of Mariupol at approximately 120,000. The city has been occupied by Russian forces since May 2022.

Historically, the city was a centre for trade and manufacturing, and played a key role in the development of higher education and many businesses and also served as a coastal resort on the Sea of Azov. In 1948, it was renamed Zhdanov (Russian: Жданов) after Andrei Zhdanov, a native of the city who had become a high-ranking official of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a close ally to Joseph Stalin. The name was part of a larger effort to rename cities after high-ranking political figures in the Soviet Union. The historic name was restored in 1989.