Donetsk

A Cossack settlement called Oleksandrivka stood on the Kalmius by 1779, and a small coal mine was later opened there. The city's real beginning came in 1869, when the Welsh businessman John Hughes built a steel plant and several coal mines; the workers' settlement merged with the village and took his name as Yuzivka, or Hughesovka. Hughes's residence and the houses for foreign workers gave the southern part of town an English look, and in 1917 Yuzivka, home to about 50,000 people by the start of the century, became a city.

Soviet rule renamed it Stalin in 1924 and Stalino in 1929, and in 1932 it became the centre of a new Donetsk region. The mines and mills grew enormously, and the city did not have a piped drinking-water system until 1931. By 1941 about half a million people lived there; after the war it stood at 175,000; during the German occupation of 1941–43 the occupiers ran prisoner-of-war camps in the city. In 1945 young ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania were sent to rebuild Stalino and work in its mines as forced labour. In 1961, during de-Stalinisation, it was renamed Donetsk after the Siverskyi Donets River, and from 1978 it had more than a million people.

After independence the mines remained dangerous, with deadly disasters such as those at the Zasyadko mine in 2007 and 2015. On 7 April 2014 pro-Russian activists seized the regional administration and declared the "Donetsk People's Republic", and the city became one of the main sites of the war, with almost a year of fighting at its airport. In 2022 Russia recognised the republic and, on 30 September, claimed to annex it — a claim not recognised internationally.

Donetsk built its identity around coal and steel. The city counted 125 mine slag heaps, the terykony, within its limits, yet in the 1970s it earned the nickname "city of a million roses" for the flowers planted along its avenues and parks; by 2010 it counted more than a million rose bushes again, and roses appear on its coat of arms.

Football is the city's great passion. Shakhtar Donetsk, the miners' club, won the UEFA Cup in 2009 — the first Ukrainian club to win a UEFA competition since independence — and moved into the Donbas Arena that year, hosting Euro 2012 matches there. Since the war began the club has played in exile, in Lviv, Kharkiv and Kyiv and, since 2023, in Lviv again. The opera and ballet theatre, built in 1936, has been home to the Donetsk Ballet since 1946 and from 1994 staged the international World Ballet Stars festival.

Forged Figures Park, opened in 2001, grew out of a yearly smithcraft festival whose prize pieces were left to the city. Before 2014 Donetsk was a mostly Russian-speaking city with a mixed sense of identity, and much of its cultural life — its football club, its technical university, many of its artists and writers — has been split since then between the occupied city and Ukrainian-held territory.

About 900,000 people lived in the city in 2022 by official estimate, and the wider urban area merges with Makiivka and other mining towns. Donetsk has been losing people for decades — a 2012 UN report already counted it among the world's fastest-depopulating cities — and the war has driven many more away.

The economy was built on 17 coal mines, five large metallurgical plants and dozens of engineering firms, and heavy industry left the city with serious pollution. Since 2014 it has run under occupation rule: the rouble replaced the hryvnia from 2015, and the technical university split in two, with a Ukrainian campus moving west and finally settling in Drohobych in 2024 while the Russian-controlled one stayed in Donetsk.

Water has become one of the hardest problems. In 2025 tap water in the city ran green and foul-smelling and had to be treated and boiled, and in July 2025 the occupation authorities announced that water in Donetsk, Makiivka and nearby towns would be turned on only every two or three days for a few hours. When forced mobilisation was declared in the occupied city in February 2022, many residents tried to hide to avoid being sent to the front line, and shelling has repeatedly caused civilian deaths.

The Donbas eats from the common Ukrainian table: red borscht of beets, cabbage, potatoes and tomatoes; varenyky, boiled dumplings filled with potato and fried onion, cabbage, quark or cherries; holubtsi, cabbage leaves rolled around rice or millet, often with meat; and salo, cured pork fatback. Dishes associated with the Donbas itself include baked ham hock and the many versions of okroshka, a cold soup made with a base of kvass, whey or even mineral water and seasoned with sour cream.

Soviet canteen cooking left its mark too: the Soviet kitchen spread dishes such as Caucasian shashlik and Central Asian plov across the country. The city's large markets, among them the central market on Shevchenko Boulevard, supplied produce from the surrounding steppe, while restaurants and cafés clustered along Artema Street.

Kvass, a fermented drink, and horilka, the Ukrainian spirit, often infused with fruit, herbs or hot peppers, are the traditional drinks.