For seven years after Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, I lived in the city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Donbas region. I started a family there.

Russia's war has since claimed the apartment we lived in for the first five years; the new home we barely had time to enjoy on a street lined with horse chestnut trees; the resort beneath the pines at nearby Kreminna where we were married; the maternity ward where our daughter was born; my office; my wife's alma mater; our favourite Georgian café, run by refugees from North Ossetia; the big supermarket we used for the weekend shop and both corner shops we ran to for last-minute ingredients.

Practically everything we knew in the areas of Donbas that were controlled by the Ukrainian government before February 2022 is now a shell-pocked ruin.

The news from eastern Ukraine can be overwhelming in its scale and tragedy. Previously obscure cities and villages soar to prominence at the moment of their destruction. Some linger in the headlines for months as Ukrainian forces doggedly defend the ruins.

Despite this, it is easy to lose the full scope of the horror, and to miss the thoroughness with which Donbas is being destroyed. In the words of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyi: "We understand that after this war nothing will be left alive there."

Was some other destination possible for this traumatised place? If so, where were the off-ramps? Where would they have taken us? These are some of the questions I have been reflecting on over the past year.

Destruction and death everywhere

In 2014, Donbas was split in two when the Russian military and local Russian-backed separatist groups seized control of its most urbanised areas. In blandly neutral humanitarian speak, the two areas became known as 'government-controlled areas' (GCA) and 'non-government-controlled areas' (NGCA), though the latter were better known as the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk 'people's republics' or simply: the occupied territories.

Both GCA and NGCA communities suffered in the hot war of 2014-15 and the low-level artillery exchange of the following seven years, though the majority of the 3,400 civilian deaths that occurred were in the NGCA.

At the time of writing, all the cities within the GCA have been destroyed or rendered almost unliveable, except for Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, as well as a smattering of small industrial and farming towns in the western part of Donetsk region.

The first city to be devastated was the largest and most vibrant: seaside Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. The restrictions that the Russian army placed on civilians trying to flee the city mean it certainly is the war's largest hotspot of human suffering.

From Mariupol, an arc of destruction spreads northwards, roughly following the line of contact fixed in the 2015 Minsk 2 peace agreement all the way to Severodonetsk, the post-2014 capital of Luhansk region. A new branch of devastation also extends up the previously untouched western edge of Luhansk, where the Ukrainian army clawed back territory during their lightning offensive in neighbouring Kharkiv region in September 2022, but then came under annihilating artillery fire.

Within the ravaged government-controlled areas, there are only variations on the theme of devastation. Some cities - such as Lysychansk, the depressed coal-mining centre known as the 'cradle of the Donbas' - were contested relatively briefly. They came under Russian occupation with the majority of their housing stock intact, but still with harrowing traces of artillery siege.

Other cities are effectively wrecked, but contain enough islands of intactness and vestiges of their basic infrastructure to support a fraction of their pre-invasion population. These include Severodonetsk, where, against a backdrop of constant propaganda, the Russian occupying forces have replaced thousands of windows and patched heating pipes to make raw existence possible again in a few neighbourhoods.

Lyman, liberated last October, is in a similar state. The Ukrainian authorities are gradually restoring basic services, but 80% of housing remains uninhabitable. One acquaintance from Lyman recently returned to the city to find several of his extended family's houses destroyed, one family business ransacked by occupying forces and covered in obscene graffiti in Russian and Tuvan, and another business flattened by a Ukrainian rocket because those same occupiers were sleeping in its basement.

Finally, there are the many villages and towns across the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbas, where every home has been reduced to a pile of brick, cement, shattered beams and asbestos roofing tiles. This is the fate of Vuhledar (meaning 'the gift of coal') and Mariinka on the western outskirts of Donetsk's industrial sprawl, Soledar ('the gift of salt') and its surrounding villages, and almost all of the western part of the Luhansk GCA. It is presently occurring in Bakhmut, the oldest city in the region.

These areas, surrounded by bomb-cratered fields and the ruins of local industry, are the least likely to be eventually repopulated. Some attempts may be made to re-establish the largest towns. But I fear many bombed-out villages will simply disappear into elderberry and black locust tree thickets, as they did after the Holodomor of the early 1930s and the Second World War.

According to the UN Human Rights Office, as of March at least 3,762 Ukrainian civilians have died in Donbas GCA since the Russian invasion of 2022. In other regions such as Kyiv oblast or Izium, the true scale of civilian suffering became clear only after liberation, when mass graves could be exhumed and carefully documented. But the Ukrainian authorities have not been able to reach Severodonetsk, Volnovakha and, in particular, Mariupol, to capture the full scale of the horror.

Perhaps 90% of the surviving population of the cities damaged or destroyed by Russia are now displaced - in other parts of Ukraine, the EU and (willingly or otherwise) Russia. Even in Luhansk's rural north, which was occupied with barely a fight, the exodus was massive, leaving schools half-emptied and a population heavily skewed to the elderly.

The economic foundations of Donbas GCA are similarly ravaged. Not just the Soviet-era giants - such as the devastated Azovstal and Ilich iron and steel works in Mariupol, the Azot fertiliser plant in Severodonetsk or the salt mines of Soledar - whose destruction was so thorough that it becomes difficult not to see deliberate intent. This also means the economically vital modern factories tucked into the industrial districts surrounding the Soviet dinosaurs. Tens of thousands of hectares of farmland are contaminated with unexploded ordnance, as are virtually all the region's managed forests along the Siversky Donets river.

The non-government-controlled areas - the so-called 'people's republics' - have faced far less destruction, though the UN estimates 632 civilians have been killed there since 2014. (It is not clear if residents killed by Russian troops once they have entered communities are included in the count.) The hardest-hit NGCA city is its largest, Donetsk, where the once quiet downtown has suffered a series of heavy artillery strikes. (Ukraine disputes that it is responsible for some of these strikes, and photos on social media suggest some may have come from other Russia-controlled territories).

Far more costly in lives has been Russia's press-gang mobilisation of local men into auxiliary separatist army units since the full-scale invasion last year. Poorly equipped and poorly trained, for the past 14 months they have been thrown headlong at Ukrainian positions.

Exact figures are unknown, but Russian nationalist, mercenary and critic of Russian army leadersh,ip Igor Girkin regularly describes the ravaging of the "republican" mobilised troops, while their agonised spouses have published numerous video petitions to Vladimir Putin begging him to send their husbands home.

The NGCA contained the lion's share of Donbas industry before Russia's invasion in 2014. But a combination of trade isolation imposed on the occupied territories by Kyiv, and Moscow's neocolonial mismanagement has squeezed the life out of the region's once-mighty coal mines, steel mills and factories. The Donetsk 'people's republic' recently decided to close three of the largest remaining coal mines, blaming Ukrainian shelling, which prompted much jeering from locals.

Was a different outcome possible?

The horror of all this has made me run the past nine years over and over in my mind, looking for any juncture where it could have pivoted to a different outcome.

The overwhelming responsibility lies with Russia, of course. That country's decision-making became utterly subsumed to the personalistic, paranoid, (a)historically-obsessed vision of one man, Vladimir Putin. The longer his absolute hold on power has lasted, the less likely it seems he could be convinced not to pursue his messianic vision. If any alternative outcome could have been possible, it lies in the decisions of Ukraine and its Western partners on how to interact with that gradually radicalising force in Russia.

In retrospect, the best chances were at the very beginning, back in 2014. In her 2022 book, 'Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow's Struggle for Ukraine', journalist Anna Arutunyan convincingly argues that the Kremlin was ad-libbing its Donbas policy in 2014. She suggests that Russia was edged into deeper and deeper commitments in eastern Ukraine, to arm proxies and occupy territory, thanks to ideological entrepreneurs such as Girkin.

A prolonged occupation may not have been Russia's original goal, but it became unavoidable for lack of an alternative way to demonstrate even meagre success in the face of Ukraine's military defiance in Donbas.

At the time, of course, it was almost impossible not to see the 'Russian Spring' - the pro-Russian unrest in eastern and southern Ukraine - as a logical follow-up to the annexation of Crimea. Impossible for Russia's clients, who were sure annexation of the Donbas was in reach and commensurately cranked up the intensity of their armed separatism, and for Kyiv, who saw Moscow tugging at all the country's seams.

The next possible pivot followed the brutal fighting of 2014-15. The internationally negotiated agreements between Russia and Ukraine known as the 'Minsk process' was acknowledged by all parties as the pathway to de-escalation, but it turned into an agonising cul-de-sac. Austrian academic, former OSCE employee and Minsk negotiator Wolfgang Sporrer has pointed out that the plan's fundamental flaw was that it hid the "real questions" behind the conflict.

This included how much decision-making about geopolitical orientation Ukraine was willing to cede to Russia in exchange for de-escalation - hidden beneath narrow but vaguely worded questions of how much autonomy Moscow's proxies in the east would receive. The process became hopelessly mired in those details, with Kyiv fiercely opposing the creation of a state within a state in eastern Ukraine, and Moscow using the Minsk process to legitimise exactly that prospect.

The last theoretical pivot seems to have been the short-lived negotiations of March last year, when Ukraine shocked the world with its successful defence of Kyiv and northern Ukraine. Delegations from Kyiv and Moscow were negotiating directly on the very questions that had been so obscured in the Minsk process. And then they simply stopped.

A debate rages online about whether this was the result of Western undermining and foreign partners' desire to "keep striking at Putin" (to quote former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who played an intermediary role); cautionary scepticism about Russia's intentions (I struggle to imagine a moment of sober lucidity in Putin's decision-making between extended periods of snarling revanche); Putin's alleged demands that Ukraine's army be scaled back to skeleton crew levels; Zelenskyi's alleged belief that the Ukrainian public would not accept the terms of an agreement; his disgust at the war crimes uncovered in liberated Bucha and Irpin - or some combination of these.

Whatever the case, that was the last glimmer of possibility that anything would change the deepening rut that has led to the annihilation of Donbas.

'Lousy peacemaking'

The most honest soul-searching should look in both directions that Ukraine and the West could have pivoted towards: a much earlier, Western-armed, resolute and systematic military response to Russian intervention; or what might be termed 'lousy peacemaking,' a paraphrase of the saying "a lousy peace is better than a good war".

Most importantly, these reflections should consider what moves could have been made away from the 'neither fish-nor-fowl' status quo of 2014 to 2022. That period saw dogmas emerge in rhetoric and negotiating positions in Ukraine and the West. These dogmas were not matched by the necessary force of arms from western countries to either deter or rapidly repulse Putin's Russia when it responded with further escalation.

The scenario of a more resolute military response to Russia begs the question: when? Specifically, when did Ukraine's military undergo enough of a transformation from the inexperienced, undermanned vestige of the Soviet army circa 2014 to the extraordinary force it is today? It should be said that providing Western munitions earlier in the quantities we see now would almost certainly have triggered today's 'Big War' with Russia at a much earlier stage. At what point had Ukraine's army become the force that could therefore have effectively used Western arms against the Russian onslaught?

'Lousy peacemaking' in the spring of 2014, during the eight years of Minsk or in March 2022, would have meant navigating the narrow horizons violently chauvinist Russia imposed on Ukraine for the time being, and seeking an arrangement within them that was maximally tolerable. I personally advocated this position for many years and still, achingly, wonder what a concerted effort in this direction could have produced.

But 'peacemongers' like myself should ask ourselves the difficult questions, too. If Putin's alternative to Minsk was to decapitate the Ukrainian state and launch total war not only on its physical infrastructure but also on cultural institutions - down to village libraries - then what did the Russian president expect to accomplish through those negotiations? It would seem Putin's goals indeed went far beyond those stated in the deadlocked Minsk process.

Rather than pivoting away in either direction, we got the scenario that many of us who had advocated pursuing a 'lousy peace' feared: despite the West's vastly superior arsenal, the deliberative and bureaucratic processes of these democracies did not keep pace with the Kremlin's centralised, autocratic decision-making.

Western arms are incrementally strengthening Ukraine's position and may eventually provide superiority - but only after its army had to hold back the Russian war machine in Donbas with bloodied hands. Through their remarkable skill and bravery, Ukrainian soldiers have slowed the Russian machine's progress almost to a stop, where it began to resemble a mill whose grist was the cities, towns and villages of Donbas.

From openDemocracy