Eastern Ukraine’s natural wealth has long been a blessing and a curse for people living there, creating jobs but also making the region a target for ruthless exploitation of its resources, often accompanied by disregard – or worse – for its residents.
One hundred and fifty years after Russia was inviting British, European and American businessmen to industrialise mining of coal, salt and gypsum in eastern Ukraine – which it had seized from the Cossacks a century earlier – now US president Donald Trump wants to take possession of its rare earths and other minerals as “payback” for US military aid given to Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
He claims that a minerals deal is almost ready and discussions are under way to decide what land Kyiv would lose in a US-brokered peace settlement with Moscow – talk that reduces eastern Ukraine to a blank space on the map and a list of resources to be carved up between capitals, depriving its residents of a say in its future.
Victoria Donovan places the people of the Donbas area – generally taken to comprise the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk – at the heart of her book Life in Spite of Everything, and through their stories she uncovers layers of local identity and history like a geologist studying the strata of this coveted land.
She explores Donbas and its many meanings by following local friends and acquaintances through their homeland, “centring” the story on them rather than the powerful forces – from tsarist colonisers of the 18th century to Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin today – for whom this was merely a place to be seized and plundered.
[ The Marriage Vendetta by Caroline Madden: A charming and original debutOpens in new window ]
Donovan, a professor at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, intersperses her text with short chapters by Donbas natives, which shimmer with love for the cities, nature, history and culture of a region that was widely dismissed as a backwater of filthy industry, crime and corruption even before Russia began its attack on the area in 2014.
Most of those quoted will have now fled to safer parts of Ukraine and some will have seen their hometowns obliterated. Donovan says that witnessing this made it impossible to write with academic detachment, and instead she has produced a sad and angry history of Donbas that befits the agony experienced by its people.
