Russian President Vladimir Putin declared victory one day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining bulwark of resistance in the province.

On September 8, 2015, former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma arrived in Minsk. He travelled to the Belarusian capital, as Ukraine's representative to the Trilateral Contact Group that seeks to end the conflict in Donbas.

DONETSK -- I don't know how the landscape around Zenit looked back when the military position was first established, but these days it surely resembles the set of an apocalypse movie. Only this is real, not cardboard-made. The few standing buildings look like a poorly played Tetris game, with huge holes between their bricks. The fields like an old junkyard with rusty damaged armored vehicles and car skeletons. The ground appears like it came down with a bad case of chickenpox, all littered with craters from Grad missiles and mortar rounds. The trees have no branches, their arms amputated by shrapnel.

The Russian president repeated his claim that Ukraine is "being managed from the outside."

DONETSK -- "Of course we want to stay in Ukraine. We were, are and want to be Ukrainians. But we just want peace, and if it will be different, it does not matter, because we just want to have bright blue sky and no shelling. I want to go back home, not to Russia, but home."