In Washington, support for Ukraine immediately became a bipartisan issue. On March 6, the House of Representatives approved $1 billion in financial aid to Kiev by a vote of 385 to 23. The White House introduced sanctions against Russia. Conservatives and liberals alike asked for an even stronger response. Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Robert Menendez demanded that Obama send weapons to Ukraine. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times urged the president to act preemptively and start rescuing another post-Soviet nation potentially facing Russian intervention—Moldova.[1]
Within weeks, the Moscow-supported “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk began battling Ukrainian forces. By March 2016, according to U.N. estimates, there were 9,160 deaths.[2]
Russian Volunteers
In neither Ukraine nor Russia are Donetsk and Luhansk referred to as “eastern Ukraine,” a broad term that is applicable to several additional provinces. The region is called Donbass.
Donbass stands for “Donetz Coal Basin”—the Donetz a river, and coal the essence of the local economy. Donbass is part of the steppes. It supported no urban centers before the Russian Empire secured it, and no significant towns until coal became an indispensable commodity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Almost every settlement was born as a mining town, and most remain mining towns today. The peak of development happened in the 1920s and 1930s. As a result, the foundations of Donbass social norms and human geography are neither Ukrainian nor Russian, but Soviet, formed by central planning serving the needs of industrialization. Migration of a skilled workforce, establishment of vocational and technical education, city planning—nothing was spontaneous. Donbass is a product of social engineering. Nowadays, its coal deposits depleted and heavy industry outdated, many towns of Donbass resemble former mill towns in the American Northeast: places where economic depression manifests itself in decay, unemployment, poverty, and anger.
The exact mechanism of the separatist insurgency in Donbass is still not known, but it was neither a grassroots revolution, as Moscow claims, nor a conspiracy cooked up in the Kremlin, as Kiev insists. The overthrown president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, was from Donbass, and his ouster was a victory of Donbass’s nemesis—nationalist Galicia.
The whole of Ukraine was in turmoil between February and April of 2014, and at first, the rallies in Donbass did not look so different from those roaring in Lviv or Odessa. When pro-Russian activists in Donetsk and Luhansk proclaimed “people’s republics,” it sounded almost like comic relief. It took the Kremlin to turn a soap opera into a war.
It does not look as if Moscow planned the infiltration of eastern Ukraine as a smooth continuation of the expansion begun in Crimea. Nor was it attempting, as it is often argued, to create a land corridor to Crimea along the coast of the Sea of Azov. No Russian traffic there would ever be safe from Ukrainian paramilitary attacks. Most likely, Putin opted for the escalation because he was angered by the U.S. reaction to the “ascension” of Crimea into Russia, yet scornful of the first round of sanctions. Indeed, in the spring of 2014, they did not bite. Like a willful cat testing the limits of what he can get away with, the Russian leader supported the separatist insurgency with no endgame in mind except to further destabilize Ukraine. As Andrew S. Weiss put it, “Mr. Putin’s efforts look more like a short-term tactical play than a carefully considered embrace of an ethnocentric approach to defending Russia’s declared interests in the neighborhood”—and that was precisely what made the Ukraine showdown “even scarier and more dangerous.”[3]
It is not impossible that Putin also saw the stealth invasion as an opportunity to perfect the hybrid warfare first applied in Crimea, a novel stratagem blurring the lines between soft and hard power, already praised by Western military professionals. A former NATO commander, Admiral James G. Stavridis, said he admired the “finesse” of the campaign in Crimea and that the strategy was applicable “no matter where you are operating in the world.”[4]
The first important step was the decision to prompt Russian volunteers to organize through the Internet, set up recruiting sites and physical training camps and, last but not least, let them cross the Russo-Ukrainian border with weapons. Some of the most notorious volunteer commanders later claimed full responsibility for what happened next. “If my group had not crossed the border,” one of them boasted, there would have been no real fighting: “Just a few dozen killed, burned, arrested. That would have been all.”[5]
From the Ukrainian side, the “pro-government” forces also consisted largely of volunteers. The so-called volunteer battalions belonged to far-right groups and egomaniac millionaires. Azov Battalion, originating in the neo-Nazi movement, wore Waffen-SS symbols on its insignia. The billionaire Ihor Kolomoyski equipped the Dnipro Battalion.[6] And so on.
Radicals from Russia crossed into Donbass with ease. So did soldiers of fortune and sociopaths. Tim Whewell of the BBC described a grotesque mix of monarchists, secular nationalists, Orthodox mystics, and people who had signed up to “save the Russian state” from Western aggression. Aptly, Whewell reminded readers about the Russian tradition of volunteering abroad to protect Slavic “brethren”: in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, after the heroine dies, her lover Vronsky signs up to fight against the Turks in Serbia. In the 1990s, Russians fought alongside Serbs in the Yugoslav wars.
Other fighters were “clearly driven partly by an existentialist quest to give meaning to their lives,” reading Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre between battles. Because they all kept their mouths shut, it was impossible to tell whether a young man had joined the separatists “in search of money or adventure” or had been “ordered to Ukraine as part of an unofficial mission that will never be acknowledged,” an article in the New York Times Magazine reported.[7]
After Putin decided to have boots on the ground, military professionals arrived, bringing advanced weapons such as Buk surface-to-air missiles. It is unlikely that the Russian high command planned attacks or calculated strategic costs in Donbass. Most probably, it just made sure that the separatists had everything necessary to sustain their armies. The Kremlin stayed in the shadows, allowing the leaders of the two “people’s republics” every foolishness. The purpose was to keep the rebellion aflame.
At the end of 2014, New York Times correspondent Andrew Roth wrote: “The scale of destruction throughout the region is often breathtaking. Residential apartments bear craters from tank shells. Many places, especially smaller towns, lack basic utilities, like water and electricity. Power lines have been downed, mines flooded, substations incinerated and rail service halted.” The “minister” of building, architecture, and utilities of the Luhansk “People’s Republic,” plucked straight “from the trenches,” still sported a pistol on his hip. The regime imposed by the insurgents was a mixture of village justice, warlordism, and patriarchy. An attempt was made to prohibit single women from visiting bars and clubs.[8]
2
Nick Cumming-Bruce, “Death Toll in Ukraine Conflict Hits 9,160, U.N. Says,”
4
Michael R. Gordon, “Russia Displays a New Military Prowess in Ukraine’s East,”
5
“Strelkov priznal otvetstvennost’ za voyennye deistviya na Ukraine,” Lenta.ru, November 20, 2014, http://lenta.ru/news/2014/11/20/strelkov (retrieved November 20, 2014).
6
David Stern, “Ukraine Underplays Role of Far Right in Conflict,” BBC, December 13, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30414955 (retrieved December 13, 2014).
7
Tim Whewell, “The Russians Fighting a ‘Holy War’ in Ukraine,” BBC, December 17, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30518054 (retrieved December 18, 2014); Joshua Yaffa, “The Inconvenient Soldier,”
8
Andrew Roth, “Ukrainians in the Battered East Scramble in Darkness as Winter Nears,”