Siege of Sloviansk 2014
Recorded location from Wikidata; battle sites are often approximate.
Key facts
| Year | 2014 | Wikidata P585 (point in time) |
|---|---|---|
| Era | Post-1945 (1946 onwards) | derived from year |
| Location | Ukraine | Natural Earth (modern borders) |
| Continent | Europe | Natural Earth |
| War / conflict | War in Donbas | Wikidata P361 |
| Participants | Igor Girkin | Wikidata P710 |
| Coordinates | 48.8700, 37.6250 | Wikidata P625 |
About the battle
The siege of Sloviansk was conducted by Ukraine between 12 April 2014 and 5 July 2014. It began when Sloviansk was seized by the fifty-strong unit of heavily armed Russian militants led by Russian citizen Igor Girkin. Following three months of heavy fighting between the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the separatist and Russian forces, the Ukrainian government retook the city as the pro-Russia rebels retreated to Donetsk. The engagement in Sloviansk marked the first military engagement of the War in Donbas.
On 12 April 2014, as unrest grew in eastern Ukraine following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, masked men in fatigues, armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, took over the town and began to fortify it. They claimed to be local fighters of the Donetsk People's Republic, but were actually Russian Armed Forces 'volunteers' under the command of Russian GRU colonel Igor Girkin ('Strelkov'). In response, the Ukrainian Yatsenyuk Government created the first Anti-Terrorist Operations zone (ATO) and launched a series of counter-offensives against the insurgents, resulting in a standoff and violent skirmishes. Girkin later acknowledged that his men's seizure of Sloviansk sparked what would become the Donbas War.
As tensions in the city increased, the insurgents began to take journalists and others captive, instigating a hostage crisis.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Siege of Sloviansk (revision 1376718881), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Changes: excerpted from the article lead section; shortened by selecting paragraphs and trimming at a sentence boundary; formatting and citations removed. No text added.
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Other battles of the War in Donbas
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- Battle of Debaltseve 2015
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All 11 battles of the War in Donbas →
Browse more: battles in Ukraine · Europe · Post-1945 battles