In eastern Ukraine, the documentary Mariinka traces several young Ukrainians whose lives have been forever shaped by more than ten years of war and conflict in the Donbas region. The world premiere of this film by Pieter-Jan De Pue will be on March 10 during the CPH:DOX festival in Kopenhagen (Denmark).

Declaring that Russia would annex four regions of Ukraine, which the West rejects as illegal, the Russian president accused the U.S. and its allies of ‘despotism’ and ‘Satanism’.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan to illegally annex four partially occupied regions in eastern and southern Ukraine lurched forward Tuesday, as Russian officials and Kremlin proxy leaders claimed that staged referendums showed that more than 95 percent of voters want to join Russia — an absurd level of support.

Since they first separated from Ukraine in 2014, a nexus of crime, corruption and rebellion has flourished in the Russian-backed Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’ as well as Russian occupied Crimea, a new report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime found.

Shakhtar Donetsk was forced from its home city and then its country by Russian invasions. Its next stop? A series of exhibition games drawing attention to Ukraine’s plight.

Scammers targeted people in developing countries.

Vladimir Putin claims to be defending populations in the Donbas. In fact, the Kremlin-controlled statelets there are dominated by military rule and repression of organized labor — a troubling indicator of the future Putin has in store for neighboring regions.

It was a week when Ukrainians saw their lives upturned. Artist and activist Diana Berg, born in Donetsk, reveals her fears but also the pride felt in the resilience of her peers. She runs TU platform, a space in Mariupol created by people who were united by the war and who began to fight it through cultural initiatives.

Ukraine crisis has thrust Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik into centre of events, amid claim they are puppets of Putin.

The Donbas region in eastern Ukraine has been a flash point in the escalating crisis between Russia and Ukraine, which hinges on land borders and strategic influence.

Russian-backed separatists in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions once got just passing attention. They loom much larger now as many fear what may come next in Ukraine.

Russian belligerence has drawn the world’s attention back to the eight-year-old secessionist rebellion in the Donbas region: a deadlocked, time-warped conflict with no end in sight.

The Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) uncovered a plot to covertly finance unrecognized republics in eastern Ukraine through South Ossetia.

An explosion that rocked a cafe in central Donetsk city, in eastern Ukraine, has killed Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, and injured several other top officials.

Filled with the violence and Orwellian unreality ruling eastern Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa’s feverish procession of scenes is handled with steely control.

On May 11th 2016, Donetsk celebrated the second anniversary of the proclamation of the Donetsk People’s Republic, which, together with the Luhansk People’s Republic, has been unrecognized by the international community. The celebrations took place under the shadow of the ongoing armed conflict with Ukraine. A photo report by the Polish photographer Wojciech Koźmic.

As an uneasy ceasefire continues to hold in Eastern Ukraine, VICE News returns to Donetsk with an exclusive film that follows some of the characters involved in setting up the self-proclaimed state of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Filmed over six weeks, this documentary follows the chaotic birth of the DPR as it tries to forge a path to independence and closer ties to Russia.

City tries to continue as normal as armed pro-Russian separatists slowly take over.