In the last couple of weeks, Russia withdrew its forces from around Kyiv and announced that its true goal is to “liberate” Donbas, which means it’s probably a good time to review where Donbas is and what’s been happening there.

My usual disclaimer: I’m not a political scientist, historian, or journalist. I don’t know nearly enough. What follows is based on the materials I’ve been reading lately, mostly peer-reviewed scholarly articles covering the period between 2013 and 2020 and focusing specifically on the Donbas war. (I’ll include all the sources at the bottom.)

Let’s begin with the easy questions: What is Donbas? Where is it?

The Donbas region is an area in the east of Ukraine, on the border with Russia. It includes the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, as well as Mariupol, which has been under siege since the start of the war. The region’s history and identity are tightly linked to coal mining and metallurgy that developed there in the 19th century. The term “Donbas” means Donetsk [Coal] Basin. The region’s geographical proximity to Russia and the fact that Russian workers would migrate there to work in those industries accounted for the high percentage of the Russian-speaking population in the cities. (The countryside was mostly Ukrainian speaking.) During the Soviet years, Donbas was celebrated as a major industrial and proletarian area.

Now, to understand what’s been happening there (and to answer the question popular among the supporters of Putin’s war: “Where have you been the last 8 years?), we must begin with 2013 and the Maidan revolution.

In general, even after Ukraine’s independence, the feelings and allegiances of its people varied geographically. Eastern regions, like Donbas, had a higher percentage of those identifying with the Russian (or perhaps Soviet) way of life, while the central and western parts of Ukraine were more strongly oriented toward the west/Europe. The same can be said about Ukrainian presidents, some of whom had close ties with Russia. One such president was Victor Yanukovych, deposed in 2014 as a result of the Maidan revolution (or Euromaidan as it’s sometimes known).

In his article “A Tale of Two Regions,” Ihor Stebelsky writes that “From a geopolitical viewpoint, Putin and the Russian elite generally saw the Euromaidan as a revolution sponsored by Western powers to wrest Ukraine away from the inherent domain of Russian influence.” This view is not entirely untrue, even if it doesn’t take into account the will of the Ukrainian people. In 2013, the EU offered Ukraine (along with a few other former Soviet republics that were now independent states) to join as an associate member. Russia didn’t like this and responded with a trade war against Ukraine in August 2013. When, after much hemming and hawing, President Yanukovych ultimately refused to sign the associate agreement with the EU, the people, already fed-up with his corrupt and authoritarian administration (he re-wrote the constitution, forced the parliament to give him more power, went after the opposition, and jailed one of his rivals) responded with protests on Kyiv’s main square, the Maidan.

This was at the end of November 2013. Months of protests followed, with the protesters on the one side and riot police and government-hired thugs on the other. In mid-January 2014, the clashes became bloody. (The protesters that were killed in Kyiv that January and February are often referred to as the “Heavenly Hundred.”) Eventually, the Ukrainian parliament turned against Yanukovych, and he fled to Russia. The parliament voted to remove him as president and appoint an interim one instead. A provisional government was formed, led by the opposition.

During this tumultuous time, Russia took the opportunity to occupy and annex Crimea. On February 26, armed men in unmarked green uniforms appeared on its streets. They took over the Crimean parliament, installed a Russia-friendly government, cut off Ukrainian television channels and newspapers, and hastily set up a referendum. The referendum itself took place in March 2014, and supposedly, 99% of the population came to the polls, all voting in favor of the new pro-Russian government. (In his book The Gates of Europe, Serhii Plohy writes that according to the Human Rights Council, fewer than 40 percent of registered voters participated in the referendum.)

The Ukrainian government didn’t recognize the results of the referendum or the annexation of Crimea that Putin announced two days later, but there was little they could do at the time. Its army was no match for the Russian army.

Next, the Russian government set its sights on Donbas. Again, it’s important to keep in mind that the population of both Crimea and Donbas had a lot of ethnic Russians, some of whom weren’t happy with the Maidan revolution and subsequent changes in the country’s regime. (The deposed president Yanukovych was from Donetsk.) And so, Stebelsky writes, “it was not surprising that a confrontation developed, curated from Russia with a deluge of political narratives, spurring protests and seizures of public buildings.”

What did Russia want at that point? Plohy suggests that ultimately, it wanted “to stop Ukraine’s movement toward Europe.” The Kremlin would’ve liked to see Ukraine federalized, “with the provision that every region would have veto power over the signing of international agreements,” but if that scenario failed, the next step would be to try to partition Ukraine. Stebelksy agrees, writing that “the war in the Donbas was seen by Moscow as a way to stop Ukraine’s integration with the European Union and to bring Ukraine back under its sway.”

Shortly after the annexation of Crimea, paramilitary units (trained and financed by the Russian government) entered the Donbas region. By the end of May, Donetsk and Luhansk areas within Donbas were overtaken by Russian nationalists and local activists. The Ukrainian army responded, with many volunteers joining the fight.

Some have described the war in Donbas as a civil war, others as a confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. Then there are those who see it as an intrastate conflict with significant Russian involvement. The latter, writes Ivan Katchanovsky (“The Separatist War in Donbas”), tend to conclude that the war “started primarily because of domestic factors, such as ethnicity, language, economic links to Russia, and the vacuum of power in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions following the overthrow of the Yanukovych government and [later] seizures of local administrations by separatists and Russian paramilitary units.” Andrew Wilson, however, argues in his 2016 article “The Donbas in 2014” that while there was “sufficient alienation from Kyiv to provide a baseline for a local civil conflict … all the key triggers that produced all-out war were provided by Russia and by local elites in the Donbas.”

(In other words, if you believe in the “civil war” model, you see the Donbas war as the result of the discontent felt by the Ukrainians living in that area (the east against the west). If you are a proponent of the other two models, you believe that all the discontent aside, if it weren’t for the Russian involvement, the Donbas war wouldn’t have happened.)

The response from the Ukrainian side was decisive. Writing about it, Katchanovsky (the one seemingly pro-Russian academic source I came across), claims that while the Ukrainian military might have been reluctant, initially, to use force against the separatists, “the paramilitary units and special police battalions, organized by the radical nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations” had no such qualms. (He does use the term “neo-Nazi” rather liberally in his article. Given how broadly the Russian propaganda has been using this term to label anything related to Ukraine, it does give me a pause. I’ll have to research the groups he mentions and do a separate post on the whole Nazi/neo-Nazi thing.)

By the early July of 2014, the separatists found themselves on the verge of defeat. Russia, though, wasn’t prepared to allow this. In “Clearing the Fog of War,” Ralph S. Clem writes that the Kremlin must have anticipated the overthrow of Yanukovych, because as early as February 2014, it was holding large-scale military exercises alongside the eastern border with Ukraine. In July, when supplying the insurgents with new weapons proved to be not enough, Russia engaged in direct military action against Ukraine. (Yes, that’s right, direct military action against Ukraine back in 2014!) Clem writes that this included “transferring armor and other heavy weaponry across the Russo-Ukrainian border; conducting cross-border rocket and artillery attacks against Ukrainian units operating inside Ukraine; and sending units of the Russian army into Ukraine.” In his article, Clem demonstrates that these assertions have been verified by official and public-sourced data, such as satellite imagery and ground-level photography. But of course, the Russian government has denied its involvement.

In the fall of 2014, the diplomatic process began, with Minsk I Agreement signed in September, followed by Minsk II Agreement signed in February. The agreement, a sort of a roadmap to peace, consisted of a 13-point plan that started with cease-fire and withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the front line and ended with the territories in question reintegrated into Ukraine. However, under this agreement, Ukraine would have to change its constitution to decentralize its control of Donbas.

In “The Ukraine Conflict and the Problems of War Termination,” Deborah Sanders and Christopher Tuck write that the Minsk agreement was problematic from the start — ambiguous in many respects and “extremely unpopular in Kyiv as it was signed under duress.” It gave Russia almost everything it wanted, they explain, “an autonomous territory on its border with its own armed militia.” On the other hand, it made “Ukraine responsible for the separatist territories, while giving the Donbas enough autonomy to constantly challenge the Ukrainian state.”

The agreement didn’t bring peace. While the intensity of the fighting might have lessened, the military actions continued. Analyzing the situation in 2020, Sanders and Tuck write that neither side was motivated enough to end the war: for each, “the costs of the conflict [could be] limited” while “improvements in their future military situation [were] possible.” In the years since signing the agreement, Ukraine’s military capabilities improved, as did its bargaining position. By 2017, the Ukrainian forces advanced farther, took back some territories, and solidified their defenses. Additionally, NATO became “progressively more willing to confront the Putin’s regime,” as could be seen in its increased presence in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s economic dependence on Russia also decreased, with Ukraine relying more on the exports to the EU.

Russia didn’t stop either but continued to support the separatists by enhancing their operations, reorganizing them into more efficient units, supplying them with weapons and machinery, and yes, directly participating in some of the key battles. Russia also continued its attempts to destabilize Ukraine by demanding legitimacy and autonomy for the separatists and even holding elections in the rebel-held parts of Donbas in 2018.

At the time, Ukrainians were seeing the conflict in Donbas as “an undeclared Russian war against Ukraine.” Well, there’s nothing undeclared about Russia’s current “special operation,” and the causes remain the same. In the words of Sanders and Tuck, they are to do with “Moscow’s unwillingness to recognize Ukraine as a distinct nation. For Russia, both Ukrainians and Belarussians are branches of a single Russian nation, and their statehood cannot exist outside of Russia’s ‘zone of privileged interests.’”

Sources:
Clem, R. (2017) “Clearing the Fog of War: public versus official sources and geopolitical storylines in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 58.6: 592–612
Haran, O. and M. Yakovlyev (2019) “Identity, war, and peace: public attitudes in the Ukraine-controlled Donbas.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 60.6: 684–708
Katchanovski, I (2016) “The Separatist War in Donbas: A Violent Break-up of Ukraine?” European Politics and Society 17.4: 473–489
Plohy, S. (2015) The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. (New York, NY: Basic Books)
Sanders D. and C. Tuck (2020) “The Ukraine Conflict and the Problems of War Termination.” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 33.1: 22–4
Stebelsky, I. (2018) “A tale of two regions: geopolitics, identities, narratives, and conflict in Kharkiv and the Donbas.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 59.1: 28–50
Wilson, A. (2016) “The Donbas in 2014: Explaining Civil Conflict Perhaps, but not Civil War.” Europe-Asia Studies 68.4: 631–652

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