Novorossiya, also known as New Russia or the Union of People's Republics, was a proposed confederation of the Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine which was declared on 22 May 2014 and suspended on 20 May 2015. Novorossiya was initially the name given to the former "Wild Fields" region of eastern Ukraine, which was sparsely populated until Czarina Catherine the Great oversaw its colonization by military colonists from hussar and lancer regiments, Ukrainian and Russian peasants, Cossacks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Hungarians, and other foreigners seeking to take advantage of land subsidies. The coal region of the Donbas was developed by the Welsh industrialist John Hughes, who founded Donetsk on the Don River. Cities were founded at Yelisavetgrad (Kropyvnytskyi) in 1754, Aleksandrovsk (Zaporizhzhiya) in 1770, Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) in 1776, Kherson and Mariupol in 1778, Sevastopol in 1783, Simferopol, Melitopol, and Pavlohrad in 1784, Mykolaiv in 1789, Tiraspol in 1792, Odessa in 1794, Yekaterinodar (Krasnodar) in 1794, Berdyansk in 1827, and Novorossiysk in 1838. The area came to have a sginficant Russian population, and the historical region of Novorossiya came to be a bastion of pro-Russian politics in an independent Ukraine after 1991. On 17 April 2014, amid the Russian Spring protests, Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed that the Crimea and the Ukrainian lands along the Black Sea which had been acquired from the Ottomans was part of "Novorossiya", justifying an irridentist claim to the region. The Euromaidan revolution in western Ukraine led to the anti-Maidan "Russian Spring" protests in eastern Ukraine, which led to the takeover of state administrative buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk by pro-Russian separatists and the start of the Donbass War. The self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic, two pro-Russian breakaway regions united in nostalgia for the Soviet era, anti-Western sentiment, and and staunch social conservatism, attempted to merge into a confederation called Novorossiya from 2014 to 2015, proposing a merger of their armed forces, but the project was put on hold on 1 January 2015 and frozen on 20 May 2015. In February 2022, Putin separately recognized the independence of the DPR and LPR.