An article that promises to explain and in particular:
During spring and summer 2014, ‘eastern Ukraine’ as an imagined entity ceased to exist. The cities of Donetsk and Luhansk became the capitals of the self-proclaimed ‘People’s Republics’, directly experiencing the horror of armed conflict. Kharkiv, however, avoided this fate, and Dnipropetrovsk emerged as a symbol of loyalty to the Ukrainian state—the ‘heart of Ukraine’. The following question naturally arose: why did the cities of eastern Ukraine take such different trajectories? Why didn’t Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk become Donetsk and Luhansk?
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-rus...raine-was-lost