Southeast European and Black Sea Studies No Moscow stooges: identity polarization and guerrilla movements in Donbass (original) (raw)
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Playing a give-away game? The undeclared Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas
This article is based on my field research in Donbas in spring-summer 2014 and summer 2015. I trace the escalation of conflict in Donbas with particular focus on the contribution of var-ious parties to the escalation of violence. I first briefly describe the chronology of conflict escala-tion in Donbas and identify, analytically and empirically, different stages in the process in rela-tion to the strategies employed by the main actors. Second, I explain why ordinary competition among Ukrainian elite groups has transformed into full-scale war and how both Moscow and Ky-iv stoked the escalation. I argue that the Russian operation in Ukraine got stuck in the middle of its implementation. Now it requires critical re-thinking and re-shaping at all levels, starting from priorities and concepts to concrete measures due to mistakes, miscalculations and wrong assump-tions that Russia made when it began the war in Donbas. However, even if Russia made mistakes and miscalculated local support, it is very difficult to undo things now and go back to the status ante in Ukraine because of the mistakes that Ukraine made that exacerbated pre-existing social divisions and increased the distrust of Kyiv in Donbas. The greatest benefit for Russia is the con-tinuing instability in Ukraine. And with Western leaders currently occupied with other matters, Ukraine and Russia may well be heading into another bout of armed conflict.
The Separatist War in Donbas: A Violent Break-up of Ukraine?
2016
Ukraine previously experienced significant regional political divisions, including separatism in Crimea and Donbas. However, in contrast to post-communist countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and former Yugoslavia, prior to 2014 Ukraine was able to avoid a war and a break-up. This study examines the role of separatists, the Yanukovych government, the Maidan opposition and the Maidan government, far-right organizations, Russia, the US, and the EU in the conflict in Donbas. It uses a specially commissioned survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2014 to analyse public support for separatism in Donbas, compared to other regions of Ukraine, and the major factors which affect such support. It concludes that all these actors contributed in various ways to the conflict in Donbas, which involved both a civil war and a direct Russian military intervention since August 2014. The study links this conflict to the 'Euromaidan', specifically, the government overthrow by means of the Maidan massacre, and the secession and Russia's annexation of Crimea. The KIIS survey shows that support for separatism is much stronger in Donbas compared to other regions, with the exception of Crimea, and that the break-up of Ukraine is unlikely to extend to its other parts.
2021
Five years into the armed conflict in the Donbas, the war has exerted significant humanitarian costs. Perhaps as many as 13,000 people have lost their lives. 1 Perhaps as many as two million have become displaced. 2 Summary executions were certainly rare, but an unknown number experienced various forms of abuse and personal deprivations, including unlawful imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, forced labor, and expropriations. 3 The areas adjacent to the war zone are still littered with landmines and unexploded ammunition, which pose considerable risks to the civilian population, particularly children. 4 More than a million people are said to experience food insecurity. 5 Finally, the war adversely affected the economy of the region and exposed the population to novel ecological threats. 6 Yet the geopolitical significance and human costs of the war notwithstanding, in historical terms, the armed conflict in the Donbas must be categorized as rather limited-whether in terms of the involvement of the population, the intensity of fighting, the number of casualties, or the scope of violence against non-combatants. Overall, the military developments in the region remain within the larger post-World War II trend towards the "humanization" of warfare, apparent in the ascendance of the international humanitarian law and the relative decrease of violence against non-combatants. In the Donbas, such restraint was characteristic not only of the Ukrainian government and of the insurgents-the principal combatants-but also of the Russian Federation and even Russian nationalists, some of whom were in principle committed to total war and the destruction of the Ukrainian state. This is important to emphasize in light of the fact that fighting *I collected the material and wrote this article while being a Stasiuk and Bayduza post-doctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta in 2016-2018. I am particularly grateful to doctor Jeannete Bayduza for contributing the funds to a research fellowship of which I was an inaugural recipient. I also want thank many scholars who have influenced my thinking on the subject, perhaps, unbeknownst to them given our frequent disagreements on social networks (Volodymyr Ishchenko, Tetyana Maliarenko, Ivan Kozachenko, Ivan Katchanovski and Serhiy Kudelia, to name a few). Last but not least, I thank Ernest Gyidel and David Marples for painstakingly going through the draft and for helpful editorial corrections. David Marples deserves an additional credit for conceiving and organizing the conference for which I felt honored to receive an invitation and for which this article was written. I bear the sole responsibility for all the remaining flaws.