In Donbass, Pro-Russian sentiments run deeper than the conventional narrative of a Russian propaganda campaign
In July I travelled to the Luhansk region of Ukraine and visited the only crossing point to the so called ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’. I was given an excursion by a guide and a Ukrainian army officer who gave me the official line on the situation in the region, namely, that Russia and its puppets are entirely to blame for the conflict. Yet what resonated with me more were two chance encounters I had with locals who opposed the official Ukrainian narrative in the Donbass region. In February 2014, Ukraine was embroiled in a revolution that led to the overthrow of the Ukranian government. Successive governments took on a closer relationship with the European Union, a move that inevitably complicated relations with Russia, Ukraine’s biggest trading partner at the time. Tensions continued to escalate. By March, a war erupted between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government in the old coal-mining region of Donbass.
To the Ukrainians, the Donbass war was the result of land seizures by Russian-backed separatists and Russian “volunteers” — any Ukrainian who opposed this narrative must have fallen prey to Russian manipulation. What I learned from the pro-Russian Donbass locals, however, was quite the contrary: that their deep resentment toward the Ukrainian government was less the result of propaganda on TV than the lessons drawn from months of living in the warzone. It is important to understand that many people in the Luhansk region are not anti-Ukrainian (or even pro-Russian) purely because they are Russian speakers and therefore susceptible to Russian propaganda. Watching Russian television (which was playing in many cafes despite being illegal in Ukraine) may have indeed provided some coherence to their view. However, the Donbass conflict is too often portrayed in the West as a struggle between Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers. In fact, it hinges on radically different interpretations of the tumultuous events of 2014. Russia’s main success has not been the mobilisation of loyal ‘Russians’ in Ukraine, but in destabilising the region in such a way that the Ukrainian army seemed, to many in the Donbass, to be the architects of instability.
My first encounter was with a lady living in the town of Shchastya, who chose to remain anonymous. What used to be a 15-minute drive from Luhansk now requires a three-hour journey by bus and many hours queuing to cross a badly damaged footbridge. She reported that when the separatists took control of the region, the only representatives in her town were local young men who took up the separatist banner after the Maidan revolution. When asked what it was like to live in the so-called ‘LPR’, she answered that nothing much had changed. The local militia were composed of local youths with no interest in harming their neighbours. She was generally reluctant to go into much detail about the separatists and their motivations.
Everything changed when the town was liberated by Ukrainian soldiers three months later. “What kind of liberation was this?” she asked. The Ukrainian army had bombed the town and billeted soldiers in abandoned houses without compensation, she claimed. More importantly, the Ukrainian army had pushed the Russian-backed separatists not far out of the town to the Siverskiy Donets river. The vehicle bridge connecting the town to Luhansk has remained closed ever since, with both sides blaming each other for being unwilling to turn it into a safe crossing. It was obvious that the loss of access to Luhansk had a deep psychological effect on the lady, alongside the obvious economic damage. Shchastya had always been a satellite town for Luhansk and most residents worked or sold their products there. The town thus went from being intimately connected to a major city, to being stranded far from any other urban area and restricted by terrible roads. The town is more than two hours from the temporary capital Severodonetsk, which in any case has a population one fifth the size of Luhansk in 2013. The residents had been transformed from urbanites to rural isolation in a matter of days. Crucially, however, in her interpretation of events, the town’s hardship started not with separatist takeover, but with the Ukrainian liberation.
I had my second encounter in the even smaller town of Bilovodsk. During a heavy storm, my friend and I ducked into the local church where we met a priest who was jolted by our sudden presence. Sporting a matching Adidas tracksuit and skufiya (an Orthodox priestly hat), the priest introduced us to the Church which he had devoted his life to reviving after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He quickly got into a heated argument with my friend over an icon commissioned in St Petersburg. The priest revealed that his church had remained part of the Moscow Patriarchate and he refused to join the new Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He railed that as a priest, who had buried the bodies of countless local young men killed in the war, his absolute priority was peace. He could not understand the need for war with Russia, whose border was only a few kilometres away and with which the town had always been intimately connected. Once again, for him, the Donbass conflict started not with separatism but the arrival of the Ukrainian army. He made no connection between the army’s arrival and the Russian-backed separatists’ seizure of control. He saw it as a Ukrainian nationalist project to find artificial divides between Ukrainians and Russians.
During the long hours crawling along the region’s potholed roads, I tried to make sense of what I had heard. I have generally been highly critical of Russia’s deceitful intervention in Eastern Ukraine. Yet I could not ignore the experience of local people who had witnessed and suffered from the conflict. They were not simply susceptible to Russian propaganda; both the priest and the lady were educated people who had formed opinions based on what they had experienced. Perhaps more importantly, both had been largely politically ambivalent before the war. These were not displaced Russians hankering for a return to the Soviet Union and willing to lap up Russian propaganda about Slavic brotherhood. Unsurprisingly the priest was extremely negative about Soviet rule.
What we need is to move away from easy theories of ethnic allegiance or the ‘Soviet mentality’ of the Donbass population. Such theories are generally poorly substantiated and play into the Kremlin’s hands by suggesting that the identitarian conflicts in Ukraine are unresolvable. Instead, we need to think about the historical conditions of the Maidan Revolution and the Donbass conflict and how they shaped these cleavages.
At the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok September 5th, Vladimir Putin declared that: “We are not responsible for the Ukraine crisis. We did not support the unconstitutional coup in Ukraine, and we did not provoke the reaction of part of the country’s population to these actions… as for Crimea, the Crimean people made a decision. The question is closed as a matter of history.”
There are already excellent articles debunking these claims in detail, yet it is important to underscore some key points about Putin’s narrative. It relies on the premise that the Maidan Revolution was a coup by violent Ukrainian nationalists. This claim is hard to debunk entirely, given that there were armed protesters on Maidan Square who fought with police and violated the strict emergency laws voted in by the Yanukovych government. It is also true that the early presidential elections voted for unanimously by parliament ignored some of Ukraine’s constitutional provisions. However, it is only convincing if one whitewashes other facts, such as the disproportionate violence of the police and Berkut special forces units against earlier protests, and the well-documented use of sniper rifles by government forces which contributed to the high death toll.
Maidan will no doubt remain a contested event. Yet Putin’s more dubious claim is that the events of Maidan sparked the general crisis in Ukraine. The Kremlin frames the war in Donbass as a consequence of the new government’s decision to crush those who legitimately rose up to protect their communities from the ‘fascist’ regime. As the priest in Bilovodsk believed, this was an ideological project of Ukrainian nationalists to create an artificial rift with Russian culture. This is the Kremlin’s most refutable claim. Since independence, Ukraine’s electoral map has been split along an East-West axis. The East has generally been closer to Russia and largely secured Yanukovych’s election in 2010, while the West has been pro-Western, more Ukrainian-speaking and the driver behind the election of Yushchenko in 2005. Contrary to Putin, far-right parties such as Svoboda (‘Freedom’) have enjoyed much lower electoral success in Ukraine than in Western Europe and Russia. In fact, in the 2014 post-Maidan parliamentary elections Svoboda’s vote share actually fell from 10.4% to just below the 4.7% and the number of seats in parliament from 37 to 6.
Rather than accept Putin’s narrative of a covert CIA-backed fascist vanguard taking control with an anti-Russian programme, we can look to a far simpler explanation. The upsurge of anti-Russian and pro-Western sentiment in Ukraine was a direct result of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the arming, funding and directing of separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine.
As Stephen Sestanovich has pointed out, this was not a grand plan but a major strategic blunder. Putin had pushed Yanukovych to scrap the EU Association Agreement for a deal with his Eurasian Economic Union and encouraged his crackdown on the Maidan protesters in the same way the Kremlin has crushed protests in the run-up to the Moscow City Council elections. Yanukovych’s failure and overthrow threatened to be a major embarrassment to Putin. Rather than accept a temporary defeat and begin the task of undermining the new government, Putin adopted a strategy of annexation and chaos to totally destabilize Ukraine. Yet in doing so he has created his own nightmare – a Ukraine where a majority support NATO and EU membership, while previously they had been ambivalent.
Why is understanding the situation in Ukraine not as an identitarian split but as a divided interpretation of history important? It is because thinking of Ukraine as a country divided by irreconcilable and primordial differences based on culture and language is exactly what Putin wants the world to think. In this interpretation, the lady from Shchastya and the priest from Bilovodsk will forever remain part of the ‘Russian world’, and Eastern Ukraine will be crippled by conflicting identities and values for at least a generation. If we accept this, we implicitly lend credence to the idea that there is a ‘Russian interest’ in Eastern Ukraine which Putin can claim to safeguard and represent.
Neither the lady or the priest expressed themselves in identitarian terms. For them, the war was a question of history, and most importantly of historical blame. On the contrary, they were opposed to the Ukrainian authorities precisely because they believed it was provoking a divide which did not really exist. Politics is often about directing people’s anger, and, in this case, they saw the Ukrainian side as the cause of their suffering. Perhaps their linguistic and cultural background had gravitated them towards Russian media and its narrative of blame. However, this was not primordial anger, but one which is open to reassessment and negotiation under the right circumstances. By recognising this, we may realize that the Russian-sympathisers of Donbass are not a perennial feature of Ukrainian politics, which have to be managed or excluded. If they can see with their own eyes that the Ukrainian polity is becoming a just one which cares for all its citizens, they may be convinced to alter their historical perspective. This is truly Putin’s worst nightmare: that a former Soviet and Slavic country which was the cradle of Russian civilization might turn out to be a shining example of liberal democracy. The Kremlin will fight hard to make sure that never happens; but in the meantime, the West needs to stop treating Ukraine as a divided basket-case and recognise that securing a just and prosperous Ukraine will help to build a secure and democratic Europe.