“…Within Ukraine, the two capitals of the Donbas, eponymous with their surrounding oblasts, are only weakly in the orbit of Kiev; both are overshadowed by Kharkiv to the northwest. Indeed, in her book, Through Times of Trouble , Matveeva (2017, pages 69–91) titled her chapter on the Donbas 'a much unloved powerhouse,' and in it, she explains how and why the region's transition to an industrialized economy from an agrarian economy was not accompanied by a corresponding transition, using Krugman's (1992) and Fujita et al's (1999) terms, to core from periphery. Much like the people of Appalachia in the United States, the people of the Donbas—representing about 15% of Ukraine's nearly 45 million—have been left behind, and this neglect exposes what is perhaps the root of the ongoing war: remote, resource‐laden areas have long been understood to be vulnerable to exploitation and/or elite capture (see Perloff et al, 1960 and Blas & Farchy, 2022, respectively, for historical and contemporary perspectives).…”