The Crimean Peninsula enjoyed some great infrastructure renewal after decades of total neglect under Ukraine, sure, but this is only due to it being relatively far from war zone for the greater part of these 10+ years since the Cold War 2.0 took off. About Donbass I wouldn't be so optimistic. With a possible exception of Mariupol, which they busily repair mainly for advertising purposes, so to speak. Territories farther from the Azov sea, e.g., Bakhmut and Severodonetsk, are richly sown with all varieties of mines and cluster munitions, besides the simple fact that housing and utilities are sometimes razed to the ground. These lands were quite close to dysfunction of economy even before the Euromaidan coup, hardly is it a wonder that the uprising got inflamed just there.

I also have a couple of archive pictures from Soviet era Donetsk in hand, so I’ll leave it there for comparison with the times when this region resided at its historical peak of development.

The caption under the child’s shot says: I WILL BE A MINER. Maybe he (?) entered the adulthood just in time to see the beginning of slow collapse of coal industry in the Eastern Ukraine after the dissolution of the USSR. Also it’s quite possible that the person who the child became decided at some moment to bring back the Golden Age of Donbass better. And thus the declaration of independence happened exactly 10 years ago, though the only thing they got for granted was war.