4,000 Days: The Siege of Donetsk Comes to an End

In the past few weeks, Russian troops have begun the final stage in the long, grueling effort to end the nearly 4,000-day Siege of Donetsk. As I write these words, Russian soldiers are storming key towns to the west and north of Donetsk — Kurakhove, Velikaya Novosilka, Dzerzhinsk (Toretsk), and the outskirts of Pokrovsk.

We are witnessing a watershed moment in military and world history. Kiev’s 10-year Siege of Donetsk is a brutal atrocity committed by a government that claims to be “European”. Kiev says the ethnic Russians of Donetsk and all Donbass are “Ukrainians” — yet it bombs them. This is a war crime of staggering proportions. Western governments not only conceal this atrocity, but they eagerly participate.

Ukraine’s crimes are many, but the Siege of Donetsk alone justifies Russia’s actions to protect the people of Donbass. International law is very clear — UN member states have a right to humanitarian intervention when war crimes are committed. The world has not seen such a brutal siege of a major city since the Nazis besieged Leningrad for 900 days (September 1941-January 1944). Indeed, the regime in Kiev venerates Nazi collaborators such as Stepan Bandera.

Yet, the vast majority of people in North America and Europe know almost nothing about the Siege of Donetsk. They live in a false reality, fabricated by western state and media disinformation that claims no Siege of Donetsk has taken place.

If you don’t know anything else about this conflict, just remember — the city of Donetsk is Europe’s largest and longest-running crime scene. And ultimate responsibility for these atrocities leads to Washington DC, London and Brussels.

In early 2014, Donetsk and all of Donbass were still a part of Ukraine. That changed in May 2014 when Kiev’s illegitimate nationalist regime (installed by the U.S. and UK) launched a brutal crackdown on peaceful Russian-speaking protestors, unleashing the regular army and far-right death squads.

In spring 2014, CIA director John Brennan (the Obama/ Biden White House) was directly involved in giving the green light to and supporting massacres, executions and kidnappings of Kiev’s political opponents in Donetsk and across Donbass.

A local Donbass official said — “The army only shoots at its people once; the second time, the people will see the army as a foreign force”. Kiev drew first blood. Just remember that. Any suffering that Ukraine now endures is a punishment that it brought upon itself, just like Nazi Germany. Kiev can end the war now — give Donbass its freedom. Anyone who struggles to understand this only needs to look at the 4,000-day Siege of Donetsk.

Today, after more than a decade of terror, the nearly one million people of Donetsk can finally sleep at night. This is a turning point in modern history. The Russian army has defeated a coalition of almost 50 enemy countries led by the U.S. that provides Kiev with vast amounts of weapons, money and intel.

If you depend on western media outlets for news, then you might think the city of Donetsk doesn’t exist. Western journalists avoid visiting the city as if it’s the epicenter of a deadly plague. They’re afraid to come face-to-face with the truth.

Perhaps every once in a while western media mention the city, though only briefly and in the context of the “brutal Russian occupation”. In modern western geopolitical mythology, Donetsk and all of Donbass are populated by ‘patriotic Ukrainians’, but ‘evil Russian orcs invaded’ and seized control.

In late 2014, the Ukrainian army dug deep fortifications along the city limits, besieging Donetsk from both the west and the north. Densely-populated satellite towns, such as Avdeevka, became staging grounds for Ukrainian artillery that mercilessly pounded Donetsk’s public markets, bus stations, schools, hospitals and power stations. The city lost power and other basic utilities. Thousands of Donetsk residents have been killed and wounded.

A few hundred thousand people fled Donetsk city and its region, choosing to go to Russia and not westward. (In total about 6 million Russian speakers fled Ukraine to find safety in Russia, which is the single largest destination for Ukrainian refugees).

Remember, this all happened many years before Moscow sent an expeditionary force into Ukraine in late winter 2022. Before that incursion, only the Donbass militia held the line against Kiev’s forces determined to exterminate the people of Donbass. Help from abroad was meager and sporadic, only materializing in the form of volunteer units since many people in Donbass have relatives across the border in Russia.

A key moment in breaking the Siege of Donbass came in February of this year when courageous Russian troops snuck through a large underground pipe leading into Avdeevka, right under Ukrainian noses, breaking through a key fortification.

The Russians quickly liberated Avdeevka, which was the linchpin in Kiev’s massive fortification system surrounding and brutalizing Donetsk. Since then, to the west of Donetsk, hundreds of square miles of farm land and dozens of villages have been liberated by the Russians, who are warmly welcomed by the locals.

Russian troops have pushed Kiev’s forces back beyond 30 miles, out of artillery range. The city is still vulnerable to HIMARS short-range missiles provided by the U.S., but Russian missile defenses are usually effective. Drones, however, still plague city districts that are closer to the front.

Ending the Siege of Donetsk is a major watershed for the entire global community; a turning point in the global war against resurgent Anglo-American imperialism (as former Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently said on TV when he admitted that Ukraine is nothing more than an Anglo-American “proxy”).

The U.S. and its allies have lost the initiative in Ukraine. Eventually, Moscow will dictate its terms — a Ukraine free of U.S./NATO control, and the right of Russian-speaking regions to determine their destiny and remain in the Russian Federation.