CNN —
A dozen tourists have been banned for life from China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding for reportedly displaying bad behavior around the animals.
A total of 12 people between the ages of 26 and 61 have been issued lifetime bans from the center, according to a post on the Research Base’s official WeChat account.
The badly behaved visitors were “caught either throwing bamboo shoots, lollipop sticks, cigarettes, eggs or bread and spitting into the outdoor play area of the pandas on different occasions,” read the WeChat post.
The pandas are all fine and healthy, it added.
The Research Base has not publicly identified any of the banned guests or their nationalities. The WeChat post explained that the tourists were not all together – the offenses took place between April and June of this year.
The base, which is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Chengdu, has detailed visitor instructions on its website.
“Please be mindful of your own and animals’ safety,” reads one note. “Stay quiet and keep clear of animals; littering, spitting, throwing food into the animal activity field and other behaviors threatening animals’ safety are prohibited.”
Simply put, the region is of territorial and ideological significance and making gains there could provide the Kremlin some form of victory after struggling to achieve its initial objectives in the war.
Valeriy Akimenko, a senior research associate at Conflict Studies Research Centre, said that Russia sees the land as valuable and “as historically Russian, ‘gifted’ to Ukraine during the Soviet era.”
“It is also part of the ‘Russian World’ concept Moscow aims to construct,” he added.
The region, almost twice the size of Belgium, is an industrial powerhouse filled with valuable coal and metal deposits and processing centers as well as strategically important ports on the Sea of Azov, which sits between Russia, Crimea and Ukraine.
From industry to invasion
Since Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Moscow-backed separatists have battled Ukrainian forces in the Donbas. The conflict lasted eight years and killed an estimated 14,000 people, according to the United Nations, until Russia invaded its neighbor nearly two months ago.
That move followed Putin's recognition of the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” They are named after the two main areas that together make up the Donbas.
“Technically, the aim of the Russian ‘operation’ is to ‘defend Donbas’, one of the narratives promoted [by the Kremlin],” Akimenko said. “Thus, the capture of Donbas would allow Russia to claim success [and] declare ‘victory,’ interim as that might be given Russia’s evidently greater ambitions.”
Putin originally appeared set on deposing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's western-leaning government and re-exerting the Kremlin's influence over its neighbor with a sweeping military operation.
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Now that Russian forces have regrouped in Ukraine’s east and south, the expectation by both Ukrainian state officials and outside observers is that Moscow will try to take the territory and begin an offensive from there, especially after its efforts to occupy Kyiv failed.
"The operating assumption is that once the effort to invade Ukraine from multiple fronts has failed, then Russia decided to recalibrate its offenses and start to focus all its forces on one region in the hope that that will enable Russia to break through Ukrainian defense lines," said Udi Greenberg, a historian of modern Europe at Dartmouth College.
Victory for Russia then could be to annex the Donbas, slicing off a significant portion of Ukraine and depriving the country of access to those resources that make the region so valuable. Or, if they believe they could see further success, Russia could use the territory as a launching pad to continue its offensive through the rest of the country.
"South of Kharkiv they tried to break through toward Kramatorsk, toward the administrative border of Donetsk Oblast,” he explained, using a word that refers to an administrative region. “Luhansk is largely under their control except for major populated areas, while Donetsk is largely under our control. We resist there for the moment."
Dmitri Polyakov
Ukrainians remain optimistic that they can win this war. But they see the fight as one not just being waged on the ground and in the air with Russia, but as a constant struggle to secure more support from their partners in the West that they say could prove decisive.
Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a social media post that the battle for Donbas was essential to the country and its “outcome will determine the fate of this phase of the war.”
While Russian forces may occupy cities and towns and kill Ukrainian troops, he remained confident that the Ukrainian military would maintain an “active, mobile defense” and beat back their invaders.
“The forces that the Russians have accumulated in the Donbas region are not enough to achieve their goals, these forces are disparate and weakened,” he said. “The only justification for this attack is the political will to move forward and the inability of the military to convince the Russian political leadership that they cannot achieve their goals.”
The main challenge for Ukraine remains the same: acquiring enough weapons for the battles ahead.