This chapter examines Donbas as the symbolic landscape where memory, loss, and imagination fused into the early mythology of Novorossiya. Long before the full-scale invasion, the region’s abandoned mines, fractured communities, and unresolved Soviet past created conditions in which fantasies of rescue, revenge, and righteous suffering took root. Here, industrial nostalgia mingled with wartime folklore, and echoes of World War II blended with apocalyptic conspiracies, Orthodox socialist visions, and pulp-fiction imagery. Enemies appeared as “fascists,” “zombies,” or inhuman creatures; defenders imagined themselves as heirs to vanished empires or guardians of a threatened world. Donbas became less a territory than an emotional stage on which longing, grievance, and myth intertwined, allowing participants to see violence as cleansing and sacrifice as destiny. The chapter traces how this imaginative scaffolding made later escalation feel not like a new conflict but the continuation of a story already unfolding in the region’s inner life.