In the spring of 2015, a municipal worker in Donetsk climbed a ladder and unscrewed the blue-and-yellow street sign for Prospekt Myru—Peace Avenue. He bolted a new one in its place: Prospekt Pobedy—Victory Avenue. The whole thing took less than ten minutes. No decree was published beforehand. Nobody asked the residents. The new name just appeared, and within hours the separatist news agency DAN had posted a photograph of the sign with a caption calling the change a “restoration of historical justice.” The article neglected to mention that the street had been Peace Avenue since 1964, or that the “historical” name it was supposedly restoring had never existed before that morning.
This is not a story about a street sign. It is about how a political project that cannot win recognition through law or diplomacy tries to win it through language. In the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk, the systematic renaming of streets, schools, government posts, and even personal names is not cosmetic. It is a foundational layer of information warfare—one that precedes kinetic conflict, persists through ceasefires, and will outlast any single military operation. If you want to understand how separatist media constructs a parallel administrative reality, start with the names it permits people to use.
The Lexicon of Occupation
When the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) began issuing its own documents in 2014, one of the first bureaucratic acts was standardizing toponyms. A commission inside the so-called Ministry of Information produced a list of approved place names. Donetsk stayed Donetsk, but Kramatorsk—a city that remained under Ukrainian control—was referred to in official communiqués as “temporarily occupied by the Kyiv regime.” The phrasing matters. By labeling Ukrainian-controlled territory as “occupied,” the DNR inverted the legal framework the international community applies to its own territory. The name itself became a claim.
This renaming operates on multiple registers at once. Streets are the most visible layer, but the same logic applies to institutions. Donetsk National University was renamed Donetsk National University—the same name, but under a different legal entity, with a different rector appointed by the DNR authorities. The duplication is deliberate. It creates confusion about which institution is legitimate, which diploma is valid, and which reality is real. When a student in occupied Horlivka receives a degree from “Donetsk National University,” the document looks identical to one issued by the Ukrainian institution that relocated to Vinnytsia. Only the stamp differs. The name is the same; the authority behind it is not.
This technique—preserving the form while replacing the content—is one of the most effective tools in the separatist information arsenal. It exploits the fact that most external observers, including international journalists and humanitarian organizations, rely on names as stable referents. If a hospital is called “City Hospital No. 1” in both Ukrainian and DNR documentation, an aid agency may not realize that the staff, administration, and supply chain have been entirely replaced. The name functions as a mask.
Transliteration as Political Statement
One of the subtler but more revealing dimensions of separatist renaming is the choice between Ukrainian and Russian transliteration conventions. Before 2014, Donetsk’s official documentation used Ukrainian transliteration for personal names and place names: Kyiv, not Kiev; Olena, not Yelena. After the DNR was established, Russian transliteration became mandatory in all official media. A woman named Oksana in her Ukrainian passport became Oksana in DNR documents—the spelling is identical, but the legal basis for that spelling shifted from Ukrainian to Russian orthographic norms. The change is invisible to a reader who does not know both systems, which is precisely the point. It allows the DNR to claim continuity while severing the administrative link to the Ukrainian state.
This transliteration politics extends to the names of the separatist entities themselves. The DNR’s official name in Russian is Donetskaya Narodnaya Respublika. In English-language separatist media, it is almost always rendered as “Donetsk People’s Republic,” using the English word “People’s” rather than the transliterated Narodnaya. This choice is not accidental. “People’s Republic” carries a specific historical resonance—it evokes the German Democratic Republic, the People’s Republic of China, and other socialist states that used the term to claim popular legitimacy. By choosing this translation, separatist media signals to an international audience that the DNR is a state like any other, with a political tradition and a legal personality. The name is the argument.
Ukrainian official media, by contrast, almost never uses “Donetsk People’s Republic” without quotation marks or the prefix “so-called.” The Associated Press style guide recommends “Donetsk People’s Republic” with a note that it is a “self-proclaimed entity.” Each of these choices is a political act. The name you use is the side you are on, whether you acknowledge it or not.
The Case of the Disappearing ‘Novorossiya’
Perhaps the most instructive example of how naming functions as a political instrument is the rise and fall of the term Novorossiya—New Russia. In 2014, the term was everywhere in separatist media. The “Novorossiya” project envisioned a swath of territory from Kharkiv to Odesa united under a single political authority. A “Novorossiya” television channel launched. A “Novorossiya” parliament was declared. The name appeared on flags, in speeches, and in the mastheads of separatist news sites.
By 2015, the term had largely disappeared from official DNR and LNR communications. The “Novorossiya” television channel was rebranded. The parliament dissolved. The name was retired without explanation, replaced by the more modest “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” The reason, according to analysts who tracked the shift, was that the Kremlin had decided the “Novorossiya” project was politically unsustainable. The name had overpromised. It implied a territorial ambition that Moscow was not prepared to back with military force, and it created expectations among separatist supporters that could not be met. So the name was simply erased.
This erasure is a form of information warfare that leaves no crater. There was no announcement that “Novorossiya” was being abandoned. The term just stopped appearing. Archives of the “Novorossiya” television broadcasts were taken offline. The Wikipedia page for “Novorossiya (confederation)” became a historical artifact rather than a current event. For researchers trying to reconstruct what happened, the disappearance of the name is itself the evidence. The political project did not fail; it was renamed out of existence.
Renaming People: The Passportization of Identity
The most intimate form of renaming is the re-documentation of individuals. Since 2019, the Russian Federation has offered simplified citizenship procedures to residents of the occupied territories. The process requires applicants to provide their personal data, which is then entered into Russian databases using Russian transliteration conventions. A man named Volodymyr in his Ukrainian passport becomes Vladimir in his Russian one. The change is not merely orthographic; it is ontological. The Russian state does not recognize the Ukrainian form of the name as a legitimate legal identity. To exist in the Russian administrative system, you must accept the Russian version of your own name.
This process is documented in meticulous detail by civil society organizations that track passportization, but it is almost entirely absent from separatist media coverage. The DNR’s official news outlets report on the number of passports issued, framing the process as a humanitarian gesture that allows residents to travel, receive pensions, and access services. They do not report on the renaming that the process entails. The omission is structural. To acknowledge that passportization involves renaming would be to acknowledge that the DNR’s claim to represent the people of Donbas requires those people to surrender their legal identities. The name is the cost of admission.
This is where the concept of a a character name generator that fits the project becomes unexpectedly relevant as an analytical tool. In fiction writing, a name generator helps authors match names to a story’s world, ensuring that a character’s name carries the right cultural weight, historical resonance, and phonetic consistency. The separatist authorities in Donetsk are engaged in a similar exercise, but with real people. They are generating names for a parallel administrative reality, selecting from a database of acceptable Russian and Soviet toponyms, and assigning them to streets, institutions, and individuals. The process is systematic, rule-bound, and designed to produce a coherent narrative world. Understanding it requires the same attention to naming conventions that a novelist applies to a fictional setting—except that the setting is real, and the people being renamed are not characters.
The Audience for Renaming
Who is the intended audience for these acts of renaming? The answer is not straightforward, because different names target different audiences. When a street in Donetsk is renamed from Ulitsa Artema (after the Bolshevik significant Fyodor Sergeyev, known as “Comrade Artem”) to Ulitsa Artema—the same name, but now officially attributed to a different historical figure, the Soviet military commander Artem Sergeyev—the change is invisible to most residents. It is aimed at a narrow audience of historians and political commissars who understand the distinction. The name remains the same; the meaning shifts.
When a school is renamed from “School No. 5” to “School No. 5 named after Alexander Zakharchenko,” the change is aimed at a different audience: the parents, teachers, and students who must now use the name of the deceased DNR leader in their daily speech. The name is a loyalty test. To refuse to use it is to mark oneself as disloyal. To use it is to participate in the construction of a political cult. The name is a demand.
When a government ministry issues a press release that refers to “the temporarily occupied territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” the audience is international. The phrase is designed to be picked up by wire services, translated into English, and reproduced in news articles that do not have the space or expertise to explain that the “occupation” being described is the presence of the Ukrainian government on Ukrainian territory. The name is a frame.
This multi-audience strategy is one reason why separatist renaming is so difficult to counter. A fact-check that explains why “Donetsk People’s Republic” is not a legitimate state does nothing to address the parent who must decide whether to enroll their child in “Zakharchenko School.” A legal analysis of why the DNR’s passportization violates Ukrainian sovereignty does not help a pensioner who needs a Russian passport to collect their benefits. The names operate on different levels, and countering them requires different tools for each level.
The Infrastructure of Renaming
Renaming at scale requires infrastructure. Street signs must be manufactured, printed, and installed. School textbooks must be rewritten. Official databases must be updated. This infrastructure is itself a form of information warfare, and it is largely invisible to external observers. The physical printing presses that produce DNR official documents were, in many cases, the same presses that produced Ukrainian official documents before 2014. The difference is not the machinery but the content it produces.
Consider the case of the Donetsk Regional Television archive. When the Ukrainian administration left Donetsk in 2014, it took some of the archive with it. The DNR authorities took control of the remaining tapes and began the slow process of re-cataloging them. Programs that referred to “Ukraine” as the sovereign authority were relabeled or destroyed. New programs were produced using the same studio, the same cameras, and in some cases the same presenters, but with different scripts. The name of the channel changed from Donetsk Regional Television to First Republican Television. The physical infrastructure remained; the narrative infrastructure was replaced.
This pattern—preserving the material base while replacing the semantic content—is characteristic of how occupation governance works. It is cheaper and faster than building new infrastructure from scratch, and it creates a veneer of continuity that makes the political rupture harder to perceive. A viewer who watched Donetsk Regional Television in 2013 and First Republican Television in 2015 might not notice the difference in the channel’s legal status. The name changed, but the signal arrived on the same frequency.
What the Names Reveal About Internal Contradictions
The specific naming choices made by separatist authorities reveal the internal contradictions of the political project they serve. The DNR claims to represent the people of Donbas, but its renaming practices systematically erase the region’s Ukrainian cultural heritage. Streets named after Ukrainian writers, artists, and historical figures are renamed after Russian and Soviet figures. The Donetsk National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theatre was renamed the Donetsk State Academic Musical and Drama Theatre—the word “Ukrainian” was removed. The institution still performs some Ukrainian-language productions, but its official identity no longer includes the national adjective. The name is a denial.
At the same time, the DNR’s renaming practices are inconsistent in ways that reveal the limits of its control. In some districts of Donetsk, residents continue to use the old street names in conversation, even as the new names appear on official documents. Taxi drivers navigate by the names they learned before 2014. Grandmothers give directions using Soviet-era names that predate both Ukrainian and DNR administrations. The official map and the lived map diverge. This divergence is a form of resistance, but it is also a source of confusion that the separatist authorities can exploit. When multiple names exist for the same place, it becomes harder to establish a shared reality. The confusion is not a bug; it is a feature.
The Authors Guild, in its AI Best Practices for Authors, emphasizes that “when you claim authorship in a work, it means” you are asserting a specific relationship between creator and creation. The same principle applies to political naming. When the DNR claims authorship of a street name, it is asserting a relationship between the administration and the territory—a relationship of ownership, of authority, of the right to define. The act of naming is an act of claiming. To rename a street is to say: this place belongs to us, and we will decide what it means.
Tracking Renaming as a Method
For researchers, journalists, and policy analysts, tracking separatist renaming offers a verifiable, low-drama method for understanding occupation governance. Unlike claims about military casualties or political intentions, which are difficult to verify independently, name changes leave a documentary trail. Street sign photographs can be geolocated. School registration documents can be compared across years. Media archives can be searched for the first appearance of a new term. The evidence is public, persistent, and difficult to falsify retroactively.
This method does not require access to the occupied territories, though it benefits from local networks. Much of the renaming is documented in separatist media itself, which publishes decrees, photographs, and reports on the “restoration of historical names.” By collecting and analyzing these publications, researchers can map the pace and geography of renaming, identify which institutions are targeted first, and trace the diffusion of new terms from official sources to everyday usage. The method is slow, unglamorous, and resistant to the kind of breaking-news framing that dominates conflict coverage. It is also one of the few ways to study an occupation that actively prevents independent reporting.
The Reedsy Character Name Generator describes its function as helping writers “find fitting names for their fictional characters” by drawing on “an existing database of over ten million names spanning dozens of languages, origins, and cultural traditions.” The separatist authorities in Donetsk are working with a much smaller database—the approved list of Russian and Soviet toponyms, military heroes, and political figures—but the principle is the same. They are selecting names from a limited set of options and assigning them to entities in a constructed world. The difference is that their world is not fictional, and the names they assign have legal force over the people who live there.
Conclusion: The Names That Remain
In the summer of 2023, a Ukrainian artillery strike damaged a building on Prospekt Pobedy in Donetsk. The street sign was not hit, but the building’s facade was scarred. A local resident, interviewed by a Russian state television crew, described the damage while standing in front of the sign. “They hit Victory Avenue,” she said. “They want to take away our victory.” The reporter did not ask which victory she meant, or when it had occurred, or who had named the street. The name did the work.
This is the power of renaming. It transforms a municipal administrative decision into a political symbol, and a political symbol into a personal grievance. It makes the abstract concrete, and the concrete personal. It allows a regime that cannot provide reliable electricity or clean water to claim that it is defending something called “Victory.” The name is the promise, and the promise is the weapon.
To understand the war in Ukraine, you must understand the names. Not just the names of the cities and the rivers and the front lines, but the names that are being changed, erased, and invented every day in the occupied territories. These names are not incidental to the conflict. They are the conflict, fought at the level of language, where the first and last battles are always waged. The streets will remember what they were called, even after the signs are taken down. The question is whether anyone will be left to read them.