Donetsk

A Welsh ironmaster named John Hughes founded this city in 1869, and for over a century the place bore his name—Yuzovka—before Soviet renaming buried the origin story. Hughes chose the spot for the same reason organisms colonize any habitat: resources. The Donets Basin held coal seams so rich that by 1913 the region produced 87% of the Russian Empire's coal and half its metallurgical coke. Hughes's ironworks, built to forge rails for Russia's expanding railway network, was the seed crystal around which an entire industrial ecosystem crystallized.

Under Stalin's Five-Year Plans, Donetsk became a showcase of Soviet heavy industry. Four metallurgical plants, dozens of coal pits, and a population exceeding a million made the city synonymous with productive capacity. The Donetsk Metallurgical Plant alone produced steel that built infrastructure across the USSR. But monocultures are fragile. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, industrial production cratered and average wages fell 80% by 1993. Miners struck repeatedly, their grievances against Kyiv's management foreshadowing deeper fractures.

The pre-2014 city still generated roughly 30% of Ukraine's exports through coal, steel, and heavy machinery. Then came the rupture: Russian-backed forces seized the city in April 2014, declaring it capital of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. Ukraine's coke production collapsed from 23.7 million tonnes in 2013 to 2.7 million tonnes as the Donbas was severed from the national economy. Factories were destroyed, mines flooded, and a population of over a million scattered.

Donetsk illustrates what happens when a city's entire metabolism depends on a single industrial ecosystem and that ecosystem is physically severed. The coal and steel that built the city became the strategic prize that destroyed it—a resource curse measured not in corruption but in artillery shells.