Metamorphoses of the Administrative-Territorial Structure of the Donetsk People’s Republic Modern Territory

The purpose of the article is to summarize the existing development experience of the Donetsk People’s Republic in the context of the administrative and territorial structure’s formation and improvement. The authors summarize the existing experience of administrative and territorial division, highlight the most characteristic features of possible transformations, and substantiate the need for early implementation of federal legislation into the current activities of state and local government bodies using logical, comparative, descriptive, and cartographic methods, as well as the method of analogies. The article identifies patterns of the administrative-territorial arrangement transformation in specific historical conditions, establishes cause-and-effect relationships between transformations in social production and changes in territorial development, distinguishes individual economic interest groups that generate contradictions in public relations, identifies the concentration factors for public production facilities in certain territories, visualizes the results of administrative boundaries administrative-territorial entities’ structure changes using maps. The article describes the chronology of transformations in the structure of administrative-territorial units over more than 100 years of Donbass’s existence in modern history. The Soviet period (1917–1991) is characterized by changes in administrative boundaries and the structure of administrative-territorial entities. The Ukrainian period (1991–2014) is distinguished by the intensified tension between local governments and central authorities, management. The period of statehood (2014–2022) is characterized by the completion of preparatory work preceding the entry of the Donetsk People’s Republic into the Russian Federation.