Goodbye, ATO: Ukraine officially changes name of Donbas war

It’s still not a war, but maybe it’s progress. Ukraine formally dropped its “anti-terrorist operation” misnomer, or ATO, in describing Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014.

But the nation’s leaders still can’t bring themselves to officially declare as war the Kremlin’s military invasion that has killed more than 10,000 people and cost Ukraine control of the Crimean peninsula and parts of the eastern Donbas.

Instead, Ukrainian Petro Poroshenko on Feb. 20 signed into law the controversial Donbas integration legislation that renames the conflict as “taking measures to ensure national security and defense, and repulsing and deterring the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.”