They were united into a single city in 1938, which grew over time despite destructive occupation by Nazi Germany during World War II.

[5] On 4 June 2014, at the beginning of the war in Donbas, militants proclaiming loyalty to the Russian-backed separatist Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) seized control of the border guards' base at Sverdlovsk, as well as taking over the city itself.

[9] On 22 August the same year, it was discovered that the LPR authorities in Sverdlovsk - as well as Chervonopartyzansk and other nearby settlements - had forbidden shops owned by people who held pro-Ukrainian views from selling bread.

Residents of the settlements began making a petition to end this practice, calling the bans on selling food "genocide".

[11] On 11 September 2014, it was reported that in the past month, sixteen people in Sverdlovsk had died of starvation in what Ukrainian media called a "famine in Donbas".

Elderly people with disabilities living on their own were particularly at risk of starvation, now that social services were unable to access the city.

[12] On 24 September, Information Resistance coordinator Dmytro Tymchuk reported that the Russian military, who had been fighting alongside the LPR militants in the war, were using an abandoned mine in Sverdlovsk as an impromptu mass grave for its dead soldiers in an attempt to hide casualties and obscure its role in the war.

People poured blue and yellow paint (the national colors of Ukraine) over the gate of an administrative building and threatened the militants.

[citation needed] On 21 August 2022, during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Luhansk Oblast governor Serhiy Haidai reported that the LPR authorities had forcibly conscripted 430 mine workers in Dovzhansk.