The NATO-Russianproxywar in Ukraine has been trending towards a stalemate since the beginning of the year after Moscow’s growing edge in the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” ensured that it won’t be defeated. NATO is unlikely to be defeated either, however, since it’ll probably intervene directly – whether as a whole or via a Polish–ledmission that draws in the bloc via Article 5 – to freeze the Line of Contact in the event that Russia achieves a breakthrough and threatens to sweep through Ukraine.
The counteroffensive’s spectacular failure and the subsequently vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine strongly suggest that talks with Russia will resume by year’s end for freezing the conflict. Ahead of that happening, these wartime allies are frenziedly trying to convince their respective people that the other is responsible for this debacle simultaneously with formulating an attractive post-conflict vision of the future. The first is served by their vicious blame game while the second will now be discussed.
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s now polling third after winning last week’s debate and had earlier attracted enormous media attention for his outspokenness on sensitive issues, just published his “Viable Realism & Revival Doctrine” in an article for The American Conservative. Of relevance to this piece is his plan for ending the NATO-Russian proxy war. Liberal–globalist policymakers and their media allies responded with fury, and it’s not difficult to see why.
Ramaswamy describes the conflict as a “no-win war” that’s needlessly depleted Western stockpiles to China’s benefit. With a view towards more effectively containing the People’s Republic in the Asia-Pacific, he therefore suggests extricating the US from its proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. To that end, he proposes recognizing the new ground realities in Eastern Europe, ending NATO expansion, refusing to admit Ukraine to the bloc, lifting sanctions, and having Europe shoulder the burden for its own security.
The explicit goal is to “get Putin to dump Xi”, and that’s why he says that the quid pro quo is “Russia exiting its military alliance with China.” Ramaswamy is convinced that his plan will “elevate Russia as a strategic check on China’s designs in East Asia” if it’s implemented into practice, but the problem is that no such “military alliance” exists between those two. Moreover, it’s unrealistic to imagine that the US will “get Putin to dump Xi” since they’re good friends and their countries are strategic partners.
Having said clarified that, this plan does have its merits. From the Russian side, it ensures that country’s objective national security interests and gives it the chance to rely on the EU for preemptively averting potentially disproportionate economic dependence on China upon the lifting of sanctions. On the home front, Ramaswamy’s plan appeals to the pragmatic policymaking faction whose influence is on the rise as proven by the success over the summer of their policy towards India that was detailed here.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The US is looking for a “face-saving” way to resume peace talks like was previously explained, and the rising influence of pragmatic policymakers could lead to them overruling the liberal-globalists’ objections to this, though their rivals could still try to sabotage this. The enormous media attention that Ramaswamy has already generated, not to mention what he’s now receiving as a result of his proposal, could reshape the national discourse on the proxy war’s endgame.
Americans are becoming fatigued with this conflict but no one had yet articulated an attractive post-conflict vision of the future until now. Irrespective of Ramaswamy’s political future, his plan serves to spark a wider conversation at all levels about the pragmatism of compromising with Russia in order to free the US up for more effectively containing China in the Asia-Pacific. This can in turn facilitate the resumption of talks with Russia, especially if it emboldens pragmatic US policymakers.
The vicious blame game between the US and Ukraine over the counteroffensive’s failure leads to the inevitable one over who’s responsible for losing this proxy war, with all of this preceding America’s formulation of an attractive post-conflict vision of the future for its people and policymakers alike. The first dynamic is continually intensifying and making more headlines by the day, while the second is also presently unfolding but mostly in silence, and it’s this dynamic that Ramaswamy’s plan contributes to.
Accepting the impossibility of Russia abandoning its mutually beneficial cooperation with China and acknowledging that lifting the sanctions likely won’t happen either, the rest of his proposals could form the parameters of a potential Russian-American deal for ending their proxy war in Ukraine. That former Soviet Republic wouldn’t join NATO, nor would that bloc expand any further, and the West would de facto recognize the new ground realities in Eastern Europe while the EU bears the burden for its security.
Russia would obviously have to agree to some regional compromises too in that scenario, such as Ukraine’s privileged post-conflict relationship with NATO and the hard security guarantees that the Anglo-American Axis will likely provide, but these could be acceptable if its other interests are met. If there’s any movement in this direction, then it shouldn’t be maliciously spun as Russia conspiring to facilitating the US’ containment of China, but seen for what it truly is: Russia putting its interests first.
The U.S. dollar and euro were used to pay for 30% of Russian exports in July (compared to 87% before the war). On the one hand, by continuing to trade in euros or U.S. dollars, Russian companies make themselves more vulnerable to Western sanctions. On the other hand, switching to the rupee or the yuan is far from ideal due to problems with conversion, risk management and capital flow.
The problems with using rupees to buy Russian crude are a classic example. After the European oil embargo, India became the biggest buyer of Russian oil. That led to a radical imbalance in trade between the countries: in the first half of 2023, Russian exports to India were worth $30 billion, while imports were just $7 billion. Russian exporters are paid in Indian rupees, which is only partially convertible and literally has nowhere to go — at the moment, most of the money is just sitting in Indian banks. Many believe this was a major reason for the ruble’s collapse over the summer. Others feel the “rupee problem” is overstated. Either way, it is a direct consequence of the de-dollarized Russian economy.
The myth of the single BRICS currency
One solution to this problem is the Holy Grail of anti-Americanism — the introduction of a single currency for the BRICS countries of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. However, most believe that, even as this geopolitical club expands, a single currency is either an impossible dream or an expensive political sleight-of-hand.
Last week’s BRICS summit was interesting not so much because of what happened (offering membership of the group to Iran and Argentina, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Ethiopia and Egypt) but what didn’t. There was a total absence of any discussion of the previously-announced BRICS single currency.
Politicians in all BRICS countries have long talked about a single currency — although there has been little action. The idea is particularly popular among more anti-Western countries, who regard the U.S. dollar, euro and other Western currencies as instruments of neo-colonialism, or a means of inflating financial bubbles.
Putin said last year that BRICS countries were discussing the creation of an international reserve currency. Brazil’s president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva has also spoken in favor of the idea. South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor in January backed the creation of a single currency to finance projects between member countries and reduce dependence on Western currencies. In March, a nationalist member of the Russian parliament, Alexander Babakov, even went as far as to say that BRICS would print its own currency backed by land and rare metals. The U.S. dollar and the euro, he claimed, “are not backed by anything.”
What would such a single currency look like?
At one end of the spectrum, we have a true single currency like the Euro. But this cannot be replicated. There is no free movement of capital between BRICS countries since the authorities in Russia, China and India all restrict cross-border currency operations to varying degrees and their currencies are only partially convertible. There is also no free movement of labor between these countries. More importantly, the BRICS countries — apart from India — are on synchronized economic cycles that are driven by China’s demand for raw materials. And, while inflation in China is stable, in other countries it is not — which means the Central Banks cannot synchronize monetary policies. Any political decision to introduce a single currency would cost China dear.
A more realistic possibility is a synthetic unit, like the European Currency Unit (a precursor to the Euro). A closer parallel might be the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR). Much like the SDR when it was created in 1969, a BRICS unit of account could be based on a basket of currencies from participating countries. It could then be used to settle accounts instead of the U.S. dollar, euro, yuan or ruble.
Theoretically, it would be possible to introduce a specific unit of account that is not backed by anything, and use it to get away from pricing in U.S. dollars. But this does nothing to encourage de-dollarization — and, ultimately, is more or less the same as bartering.
What are the obstacles?
The major problem is political. India is unlikely to agree to a single currency that would be dominated by China, the largest BRICS economy (up to now, India has striven to contain its powerful neighbor). Russia would benefit from a BRICS currency, since it would gain access to a new reserve currency at a time when sanctions are boxing it in. But the other BRICS members do not have this problem, so the benefits for them would be minimal.
Another problem lies within the trade structures of BRICS. India and South Africa run a trade deficit, and using a single reserve unit would deplete their own reserves unless they could ensure a flow of revenues from outside. For Russia, that would be helpful in its current circumstances, but it would be hard to get its partners to agree.
And there is a final significant problem. Exporters in countries outside Russia that are not affected by sanctions can happily receive U.S. dollars or euros and exchange them for their national currencies. A new unit of account would require a newly-created market where the Central Banks of the BRICS countries would inject liquidity by buying and selling the new unit — while remaining unable to carry out emissions.
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval rating was 82%, according to the last available Levada centre poll.
Despite the speculation that the Russians might rise up and rebel following the start of the war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity remains higher than ever according to Levada.
Putin’s popularity had been hovering in the mid- to high-60s for much of the pandemic years, falling to a one-time low of 53 points in April 2020 when the first lockdowns were introduced before recovering to 66 in August that year.
However, following the invasion of Ukraine his popularity leaped over 10 points to 83 in March 2022 and has remained at between 81 and 83 points throughout the duration of the war, with the exception of September to November when it fell to 77-79 following Ukraine’s successful Kharkiv counter-offensive.
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has also enjoyed a bump in popularity, with his approval rating rising from the mid-50s pre-war to 69-71% since the start of this year. His approval was slightly down to 69% in July.
Mishustin’s government has also been lifted from around 50% approval pre-war to 67% in July and has consistently polled at 67-69% all year.
Russia’s regional governors are even more popular, as they have in the last ten years become more effective and have concerned themselves with dealing with the immediate needs of their constituents. Region governors received consistent ratings of between the high-50s to low-60s pre-war that rose to 69% following the start of the war and have stayed at 69-74 in since. In July their approval fell slightly to a still high 72%.
The Duma remains the most unpopular institution in Russia but even that has had a boost from the nationalist rhetoric and heavy-handed propaganda. Pre-war the majority of Russian disapproved of the Duma with a roughly 40%/50% approve/disapprove split.
However, that ratio flipped in March 2022 to a 59/36 approval/disapproval as the majority of Russians approved of the Duma and its actions. Since then the overall majority of Russians still approve of the Duma with the rate varying at 54-59, and the split was 57/35 approve/disapprove in July, the last data available, with the remainder expressing no view.
The surge in nationalism is also visible in Levada’s “which direction is the country going in?” poll. Pre-war around 50% of respondents thought the country was going in the “right” direction, with roughly 44% believing it was going in the “wrong” direction and the remainder having no opinion.
However, following the start of the war the number of respondents saying Russia was going in the “right” direction jumped to 69% in March 2022 and wrong fell to 22%.
Since then respondents have very consistently polled at 67-68% for the right direction, with a few aberrations, such as the months of the Kharkiv offensive disaster for Russia.
Those that think Russia is going in the wrong direction are consistently down 20 percentage points at around 22% compared to the pre-war period, while the “don’t know” category has remained the same, circa 10% for both pre-war and post-start of the war periods.
As for the propensity to protest with political demands, this has roughly halved between the pre- and post-start of the war periods. This metric is a little more volatile than the political approval results, but the propensity to protest with political demands has oscillated around 27-30% for most of the last five years, but it fell sharply in the first poll after the start of the war in May 2022 to 16% and was 17% in July.
Interestingly, the accompanying question of “could there be political protests and would you participate if there were?” has fallen even further. Pre-war the poll found somewhere between 19% and 29% said yes to this second question, but in May 2022 that fell to only 6%, its lowest level in years. Since then it has recovered to 15% in July, which is on par with many of the polls in the pre-war period.
The political protest questions suggest that immediately after the war started respondents were afraid to take to the streets because of the anticipated Kremlin crackdown. However, after the initial shock of the invasion wore off a small minority of around 15% remain opposed to the Putin regime and war has not added significantly to their numbers. The same people don’t like Putin now as didn’t like him before the war.
The propensity to protest with economic demands show almost identical patterns. Pre-war those that thought protests were possible numbered 25-30% with 21-29% saying they would participate if protests happened.
In the May 2022 poll that fell to 17% that thought protests could happen and 14% saying they would participate if they did. In July the same 17% said protests could happen but the number willing to participate has fallen to 10%.
The article discusses the political contention around the implementation of the Minsk Accords in Ukraine, and why the pluralist nation-building project required for the success of these accords failed. The much-debated cleavage between the more ‘pro-Western’ and more ‘pro-Russian’ regions of Ukraine requires that such an alternative be taken seriously. The article argues that neither the change of the balance in favor of the pro-Western electorate in 2014, nor the rise of Ukraine’s civic identity in response to Russian aggression can adequately explain the failure to develop a positive, pluralist nation-building project in the context of Minsk. It argues instead that the profound class and political asymmetry between Ukraine’s ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ political camps created different capacities for the universalization of their particular interests, and for effective political mobilization for and against the Minsk Accords in the context of Euromaidan’s revolutionary dynamics.
1 The Asymmetry of the “Two Ukraines”
Typically, the discussion of the failure of the Minsk Accords and the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion begins with the assumption of a fundamental incompatibility between Ukrainian and Russian interests. In this narrative, Russia sought to reintegrate the eastern part of Donbass back into Ukraine to gain control over all of the country, to secure a ‘sphere of influence’ there, or at least prevent the stabilization of a hostile Ukrainian regime. For Ukraine, implementing the accords was irrational, as it sought to regain full sovereignty over the entirety of its internationally recognized territory. The accords suffered from commitment problems, in so far as the international guarantors – France, Germany, and, formally, Russia – were seen as part of the conflict.1 It was a zero-sum game.
In retrospect, Ukraine may have been wise not to implement the Minsk Accords. According to interviews with former German and French leaders Angela Merkel and François Hollande, the fact that France, Germany, and the United States did not push for it bought Ukraine time to strengthen its military. This in turn led to more effective resistance during the early stages of a full-scale war with Russia in 2022.2
The Kremlin, by contrast, seems to have made a critical mistake in agreeing to the Minsk Accords instead of proceeding with invasion in 2014-15 against the government established by the Euromaidan revolution. In 2022 Russia was better prepared for economic war, but Ukraine was better prepared for conventional war, and could rely on consolidated Western support.
Such a zero-sum reading of the Minsk Accords avoids questions of social construction and the contested articulation of national interest and sovereignty. For example, on the eve of the invasion, the largest Ukrainian opposition party, the Opposition Platform – For Life, advocated Ukrainian neutrality and the full implementation of the Minsk Accords. A reading of the Minsk Accords as a win-win outcome compatible with Ukrainian national interests was still possible in the Ukrainian public sphere.
Ukraine’s much-debated regional cleavage requires that alternatives to the zero-sum reading of the Minsk Accords be taken seriously. Attitudes that could be broadly described as ‘pro-Russian’ or, more precisely, skeptical of the anti-Russian and pro-Western version of Ukrainian national development, were still shared by a large part of the Ukrainian public even on the eve of the invasion. The fact that they were more widespread in the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine than in the western and central regions, together with the strong regional patterns in most Ukrainian elections in the post-Soviet period, set the stage for a major debate on Ukrainian regionalism.3
One group of scholars, while disagreeing about the precise origins of the regional cleavage, i.e., on whether it was a proxy for the ethnolinguistic factors,4 a manifestation of the historically shaped and enduring political cultures,5 or the result of competing nation-building projects,6 tended to present the ‘Eastern/pro-Russian’ and ‘Western/anti-Russian’ sides of the cleavage as largely symmetrical.
An opposing group of scholars challenged this ‘East-West’ divide for concealing much more complex and fluid dynamics. From this perspective, Ukrainian regionalism does not reflect pre-existing regions, it is not a manifestation of other socio-cultural divisions, but primarily a social construction. As prominent Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak puts it, there were not ‘two’ but ‘twenty-two Ukraines’.7 This argument is supported by the claim that, since the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, and especially since the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has overcome its regional divisions through an inclusive civic identity.8
The failure of the Minsk Accords is a challenge for both approaches. De facto the diversity of the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ was articulated politically in just two main political camps which, for the sake of convenience, may be called Eastern and Western. One of the camps, however, turned out to be politically weaker than the other. This cannot be explained as an automatic outcome of the changes in Ukraine’s regional balance, or through a teleological narrative that leaves no chance for the historically doomed ‘pro-Russian’ camp. Drawing on our previous work on the post-Soviet hegemony crisis and maidan revolutions,9 I will ague that political contention over the implementation of the Minsk Accords revealed the crucial class and political asymmetry of the ‘two Ukraines’.
2 Pluralist Nation-Building – the Unrealized Option
The Minsk Accords were signed after a series of Ukrainian military defeats in 2014-2015, but ultimately failed to establish a durable ceasefire. They required the reintegration of the breakaway territories in Donbass back into Ukraine with a special status, and were therefore crucial for any future pluralist national development in Ukraine, particularly with respect to the Russian-language and the legacy of Soviet Ukraine as organic elements of the Ukrainian nation- building project.10
Any prospect of reconciling the agendas of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps was undermined by processes that began with the Euromaidan revolution, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbass, and nationalizing and repressive trends in Ukraine since 2014. The latter included restrictive legislation on the politics of memory, language, religion, and geopolitical re-orientation, repression of Ukrainian opposition parties, closure of major opposition media, and attacks on journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and activists from the ‘East’.11 The Minsk Accords, had they been implemented, envisioned a much more politically ‘Eastern’ Donbass being recognized and becoming a legitimate part of the Ukrainian nation again.
Scholars who question Ukraine’s ‘East-West’ divide tend to legitimize rather than explain the nationalizing developments. Russia’s aggressive actions since 2014 have indeed strengthened Ukrainian civic identity, but one cannot assume that the ethnic core of Ukrainian civic nationalism would be formed based on the ‘Western’ version of Ukrainian identity.12 Before the full-scale invasion, support for the ‘Western’ agenda, and repression of the ‘East’ was often not supported by the majority of Ukrainians.13 It is also problematic to justify the repression against the ‘East’ as a necessary crackdown on the ‘fifth column’. When the decisive test of loyalty came with the Russian invasion in 2022, the overwhelming majority of politicians, members of parliament and local councils, clergy, and media from the ‘East’ condemned the invasion, despite having been labeled ‘pro-Russian’ for years.14
From the alternative perspective of the symmetrical ‘East-West’ cleavage, these nationalizing and repressive developments were, first and foremost, a direct result of the loss of the most ‘pro-Russian’ parts of Ukraine in Crimea and Donbass in 2014, which accounted for 12-16 percent of the pre-war electorate. This resulted in the ‘gerrymandering’ of Ukraine, narrowing the electoral base for political parties from the ‘East’.15 Although the Minsk Accords might have restored some of this electoral balance, by themselves they would have been far from sufficient. Attempts to promote a substantive national dialogue (not only with Donbass, but with the larger oppositional segment of Ukrainian society) were already being marginalized or even suppressed. Such was the fate of the best-known initiative, the National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity, led by Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s personal friend, the popular TV celebrity Serhii Syvokho, who briefly enjoyed the formal status of an advisor to the National Security and Defense Council. The first formal presentation of his initiative on 12 March 2020, lasted only twenty minutes, before it was disrupted by seventy far-right militants from the Azov Regiment and the National Corps Party, who violently attacked Syvokho. Instead of punishing the attackers, Syvokho was dismissed from his post.16
The full implementation of the Minsk Accords would have required a reversal of many of the post-Euromaidan developments, including a radical change in the dominant discourse within the Ukrainian public sphere about the nature and origins of the war in Donbass, a series of institutional changes that would have required at least the beginning of a process of national reconciliation, and intensive efforts to create a more inclusive and synthetic definition of national identity.17
The supporters of the Minsk Accords, however, were never able to mobilize on a sufficient scale, or articulate an ideologically attractive pluralist nation- building concept that could serve as an alternative to the nationalizing and repressive path taken since 2014. I argue that this was the result of the interaction of civil society and the political regime in the context of the Euromaidan’s revolutionary dynamics, which the ‘East’ could not counter due to the fundamental political and class asymmetry of Ukraine’s regional cleavage. First, however, let us look at the question of whether the Kremlin had an interest in implementing the Minsk Accords.
3 What the Kremlin Wanted from Minsk
The Kremlin was interested in implementing the Minsk Accords because it would have improved the Russian elite’s global, regional, and domestic positions. It would most likely have stalled Ukraine’s Western integration by partially restoring the electoral base of the pro-neutrality ‘Eastern’ parties.18 The areas of Donbass with special status could also potentially have blackmailed the central government with secession.19 Second, the implementation of Minsk would have been an important symbolic defeat for other maidan revolutions throughout the former Soviet Union, diminishing the threat that they might spread to Russia.20 Finally, the transformations implied by the Minsk Accords would have prevented Putin’s feared ‘anti-Russia’ from developing in Ukraine, leaving open the possibility of Ukraine and Russia evolving even if as two separate states – like Germany and Austria – but for ‘one and the same people’ in Putin’s nationalist vision.21 The current war to destroy Ukraine through military aggression has likely ended any such possibility for the foreseeable future.
Some argue that the gradual institutional and legislative unification with Russia22 shows that the Kremlin intended to annex Donbass long before its full-scale invasion.23 However, this may be a retrospective interpretation. As Matveeva shows, practically all the measures taken by Russia until 2020 to integrate Donbass were largely symbolic and/or reversible.24 Even allowing Donbass residents to acquire Russian citizenship through a simplified procedure was not much different from the procedures in other breakaway territories in the post-Soviet space that Russia did not annex.25 The beginning of the distribution of Russian passports could have been intended to force Ukraine to speed up the implementation of the Minsk Accords. Moreover, the number of Russian passport holders in the breakaway areas began to grow rapidly only in 2020, when Ukraine blocked border crossings with the government-controlled territory, ostensibly because of COVID, and depriving Donbass residents not only of social services, but also of the opportunity to renew their Ukrainian documents.26
Had the Kremlin aimed to annex territories beyond Crimea, it would have been much easier to do in 2014. Russia would have benefited from the post-revolutionary disarray, and the still stronger pro-Russian attitudes of the segment of the Ukrainian population that felt alienated by the Euromaidan revolution, not to mention the poor state of the Ukrainian military at the time.27 The goals that drove the decision to launch the invasion, or that emerged after the initial military assault failed, should therefore not be ascribed retrospectively without proper evidence.
Instead, in 2014, the Kremlin only prevented the defeat of the pro-Russian irredentist insurgency in Donbass, but did not support the maximalist goals of establishing ‘Novorossia’ in all of southeastern Ukraine. This later became a point of bitter criticism of Putin by some of the sidelined insurgent leaders.28 The reason for the Kremlin’s choice of this sub-optimal strategy was that its initial goal, to be achieved through the Minsk Accords, was to transform Ukraine from within by reversing the post-Euromaidan developments. This goal was revised only after the initial strategy failed. Putin probably saw the sanctions against Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s friend and leader of the most popular opposition party in Ukraine, and the closure of Medvechuk’s popular television channels in Ukraine as proof that no Russia-friendly political force would be allowed to join the government and implement the Minsk Accords. The first phase of the Russian military concentrating on Ukraine’s borders followed very soon thereafter.29
One can debate whether the Minsk Accords were a Trojan Horse that would have reversed pro-Western progress in Ukraine,30 but the argument that the Kremlin was never serious about implementing them has no substantial evidence behind it.
4 Minsk and the Ukrainian Nation-Building Project
On the contrary, the implementation of the Minsk Accords would undermine the ‘Western’ agenda for Ukraine, which was articulated as a zero-sum game against Russian interests. Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration would likely come to a halt. It would also be a final sign of the failure of the Euromaidan revolution, which would then be interpreted as a needless sacrifice and undermine the arguments of the opposition in Russia and other post-Soviet countries. Finally, it would preclude excluding the ‘Russian’ and ‘Soviet’ from Ukraine’s national identity. The Minsk Accords were thus a threat to the specific national project that envisioned Ukraine’s future as being the same path that Central Europe chose after 1989.
This nation-building project served specific class interests. Domestically, these were primarily the interests of the professional middle class, which was excluded from post-Soviet ‘political capitalism’ and whose life propects and political influence rested on closer integration with the West.31 Outside the westernmost regions of Galicia, the more affluent people were, the more they supported ‘Western’ agenda.32 They saw the main obstacle to their interests not only in Russia but in the Soviet legacy, interpreted as oppressive and imposed from the outside, misrecognizing and downplaying its emancipatory origins and modernizing achievements. Its degraded economic remnants, socio-political institutions, and culture were perceived as perpetuating corruption and the rule of ‘oligarchic’ political capitalists. The plebeian masses who yearned for some stability after the disaster of the post-Soviet collapse of the 1990s were portrayed as sovok – a ‘backward’ thinking homo sovieticus that lacked civic qualities and were easily manipulated by authoritarian leaders. This portrayal of a large part (if not the majority) of one’s own people as the crucial obstacle to Western-oriented ‘civilizing’ progress was not unique to Ukraine. It was shared by other middle-class opposition movements in post- Soviet countries, including Russia.33 Within Ukraine, however, it overlapped with the regional cleavage that amplified the othering of the ‘Eastern’ citizens, especially in Donbass.34 They were labeled a liability to Ukrainian nation- building, as defined by the ‘Western’ agenda.35
Insofar as the ‘Western’ Ukrainian project was about the integration of Ukraine into the periphery of the larger West, it had only a limited capacity to include those Ukrainians whose lives depended on what remained of Soviet heavy industry and trade links with Russia.36 Assimilation and coercion were to substitute for lack of appeal and negotiation over things the ‘Western’ camp believed were non-negotiable.37 The Minsk Accords envisaged the integration of Donbass on fundamentally different terms.
5 Civil Society vs. Ukrainian Society
The reason for the failure of the Minsk implementation does not lie primarily in its lack of support from Ukrainian society, but in the asymmetrical political capacity of the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps in Ukraine. The neoliberal and nationalist agendas of ‘Western’ civil society were often not representative of Ukraine’s majority; however, they were empowered as a result of the Euromaidan deficient revolution.38 The state of public opinion and political contention following Zelenskyi’s victory in 2019, which many saw as a window of opportunity to make progress on a peace settlement in Donbass, illustrate this point.
Zelenskyi’s unprecedented and astounding electoral victory over Petro Poroshenko, who had campaigned heavily on the ‘Western’ camp’s agenda of no compromise with Russia, happened thanks to massive support by voters in the southeastern regions. In November 2019, a staggering 75 percent supported Zelenskyi’s idea of direct negotiations with Putin over Donbass, 74 percent believed that reaching a ceasefire should be one of Zelenskyi’s highest priorities, and 59 percent supported a military disengagement in Donbass.39 At the same time, however, the specific clauses of the Minsk Accords, especially calling for amnesty for combatants and the creation of a local people’s militias’, were unpopular.40 Since most Ukrainians initially supported the accords, and in March 2015, even supported a peace settlement on ‘any terms’ if a compromise could not be reached,41 it suggests that Ukrainian disappointment with the Accords in 2019 might have more to do with their inability to bringing peace to Ukraine, rather than their fundamental unacceptability.
To prevent any shift in policy, immediately after Zelenskyi’s victory, prominent politicians, public figures, and NGOs of the ‘Western’ camp drew ‘red lines’ in domestic and foreign policy that Zelenskyi could not cross. The ‘No to capitulation!’ campaign began in the fall of 2019 and was led by Poroshenko’s and the other parties that had just lost the elections, with strong participation from radical nationalists. It specifically targeted German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s proposal for a step-by-step protocol for implementing the Minsk Accords.42
The campaign eventually included explicit threats of violence against Zelenskyi and insubordination by the far-right Azov regiment, which tried to sabotage the disengagement of Ukrainian and separatist forces.43 On 9 October 2019, he met with the ‘No to capitulation!’ campaign leaders (which included not just Azov but the neo-Nazi terror group C14) to reassure them that the Steinmeier Formula would be rejected.44 Zelenskyi later mentioned that his visit to the frontlines in Donbass and meeting with Azov soldiers made him realize that the Minsk Accords could not be implemented.45
At its height, however, the ‘No to capitulation!’ campaign could rally no more than 10,000 people, even in Kiev. Even though more than two dozen local councils (mostly in western regions) passed statements condemning the Steinmeier Formula,46 only 26 percent of Ukrainians supported the protests, compared with 41 percent who opposed them.47 The ‘anti-capitulation’ camp thus represented neither Ukrainian society, nor even appealed to the majority of Zelenskyi’s own voters. 43 percent of those who would vote for him in April 2020 agreed that Zelenskyi ‘goes along with the radical part of the population’, while only five percent of Zelenskyi’s voters believed that he goes along with the ‘Kremlin’s fifth column’.48 The situation in public opinion polls was more or less symmetrical: neither the opponents of Minsk nor its supporters could claim a majority. However, in terms of capacity for street mobilization and armed threats, the balance was drastically in favor of the ‘Western’ camp. There was no significant extraparliamentary mobilization in support of implementing the Minsk Accords.
6 Zelenskyi’s Weak Populism
An active campaign by the new and initially very popular president might have compensated for this asymmetry and perhaps tipped the balance in favor of the Minsk Accords. Instead, during the months leading up to the Russian invasion, senior Ukrainian officials repatedly stated that the accords were ‘impossible’ to implement, and that any attempts to do so would lead to the ‘country’s destruction’.49 Legislation on the ‘transition period’ for these regions once de-occupied, which Zelenskyi submitted to parliament in 2021, excluded any special status for Donbass and amnesty for the combatants, and restricted political and civil rights for local residents.50 The choice of assimilation and coercion for a Donbass now perceived as a ‘security threat’, rather than the recognition of regional diversity and negotiations over a common future that were required for the success of the Minsk Accords, resulted not from a lack of popular support for the accords, or from the threat of violent destabilization, but rather from the limited capacity of Zelenskyi’s populist government to pursue an autonomous strategic vision of Ukraine’s future.
Some observers fear that implementing the Minsk Accords could lead to political destabilization, or even a civil war.51 The danger posed by radical nationalists in Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan politics has been systematically downplayed,52 despite their demonstrated willingness to take action against those they suspect of ‘capitulation’. For example, on 31 August 2015, several police officers were killed, and over a hundred other injured by a hand grenade thrown by a far-right militant outside the Ukrainian parliament, while it was debating the special status of Donbass.53
But even if progress in implementing the Minsk Accords provoked some violence, it is questionable whether the nationalists would be able to split the military and law enforcement enough to unleash a full-scale civil war (beyond the war that had already been going on in Donbass). The Russian threat remained a consolidating factor. Moreover, the more moderate wing of the ‘Western’ camp was unlikely to support such actions without the approval of the Western powers. It is telling that Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s powerful Interior Minister until 2021, who was widely suspected of backing the Azov regiment,54 did not mention any threat of domestic violence if the Steinmeier Formula was implemented, when he spoke to a person he believed to be former US Ambassador Michael McFaul in 2022. Instead, Avakov speculated that Zelenskyi was simply afraid of losing popularity, and worried that his aides were trying to outmaneuver the Russians without having any real alternative to Minsk.55
In fact, after securing unprecedented single-party control in the Ukrainian parliament, Zelenskyi demonstrated that he was capable of pushing through highly controversial initiatives. For example, he pushed through a very unpopular land reform bill in the face of more than 70 percent public disapproval, and strong vested interests.56 Similarly, he did not revise any of the ethnonationalist policies pursued by his predecessor, and even doubled down on Poroshenko’s repression of the ‘Eastern’ camp in 2021, much to the displeasure of his ‘Eastern’ electorate.57
Unlike the Minsk Accords, however these divisive steps were supported by neoliberal- nationalist civil society, and at least tacitly sanctioned by Western powers and international institutions. This ‘sandwich’ model proved sufficient to push through post-Euromaidan reforms when neither the ruling party or the opposition were enthusiastic about challenging the interests of the ‘oligarchic’ political capitalists who continued to have a strong influence on Ukrainian politics.58 Neoliberal-nationalist civil society generated reform ideas and played the role of watchdog over their implementation by the government, while Western states and international institutions used their leverage economic and political leverage over the Ukrainian government, which had become critically dependent on the West since the Euromaidan revolution.59
This symbiosis worked best in the case of ‘anti-corruption’ and similar neoliberal reforms. Here the interests of the professional middle class, building their careers in sectors oriented to Western markets or even directly supported by Western donors, aligned with the interests of transnational capital, which benefited from the opening of markets and more transparent rules.60 For example, in the fall of 2017, the conflict between the recently created independent Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Ukrainian government escalated, and on 6 December 2017 the parliament decided to change the law to simplify the procedure for dismissing its head.61 That evening they were threatened by the US, EU, World Bank, and IMF with a reduction of financial and military aid to Ukraine, and the next morning this revision was removed from the parliament’s agenda.
The civil society of the ‘Western’ camp presented open external pressure on Ukraine’s internal affairs as being in Ukraine’s national interest, thus universalizing particular class interests. The regular interference by Joe Biden, then the Vice President of the United States, in the internal affairs of Ukraine under president Poroshenko could thus be presented as nothing ‘obviously incriminating or even particularly embarrassing’, since it was what ‘Ukrainian civil society’ demanded.62 Here again, however, civil society diverged from Ukrainian society. For example, multiple polls showed that either a majority or a plurality of Ukrainians were skeptical of this level of cooperation with the IMF, because they saw it as jeopardizing Ukraine’s sovereignty.63 In July 2020, 67 percent of Ukrainians did not believe that Ukraine was truly independent. Indeed, 43 percent said that the Ukrainian president was ‘fully dependent’ on foreign countries and international organizations, and another 41 percent described him as ‘partially dependent’. Only 4 percent believed that such foreign influence was unequivocally helpful.64
Zelenskyi’s stunning victory in 2019 is sometimes referred to as an ‘electoral maidan’,65 and indeed, it is similar in that it responded to the deep crisis of political representation without offering any well-articulated and organized alternative. This made it vulnerable to being hijacked by agents with relatively unpopular agendas, but relatively strong political capacity buttressed by external support.66 Zelenskyi thus faced the problem of many contemporary populists who benefited from the weakness of the old elites, rather than the strength of ‘new faces’.67 In addition, unlike his Western populist counterparts, he had no real party or movement of his own before 2019, and therefore lacked middle-rank people to fill crucial bureaucratic positions. Lacking a coherent political team, he relied instead on his personal network from show business, and, increasingly, technocrats and opinion leaders from ‘Western’ civil society, some of whom had previously opposed Zelenskyi.68
The erratic moves of his first term are the result. Pressures from powerful oligarchic groups, neoliberal-nationalist civil society, and Western powers resulted in contradictory initiatives, rather than a coherent strategy or meeting the expectations of his voters.69 As a result, Zelenskyi antagonized a number of powerful groups in Ukrainian politics, while becoming increasingly perceived as just another ‘oligarch’ by the population right on the eve of the invasion.70 The failure of the original Russian plan to decapitate the Ukrainian state in a quick ‘special military operation’ may have rallied most Ukrainians around the flag and provided Zelenskyi with an opportunity to consolidate power. This, however, should not be attributed retrospectively.
7 The Political Weakness of the ‘East’
The absence of any comparable mobilization and pressure in support of the Minsk Accords points to a critical asymmetry between the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps of Ukraine’s regional cleavage. Unlike the former, the latter was led by political capitalists who made their fortunes during the Soviet collapse, and their appropriation of the selective benefits of the post-Soviet state. Their relationship to their electorate was one of patronage rather than leadership. Skilled in patronal politics,71 able to control large informal networks of parliamentary deputies, and even win national elections, their capacity to coordinate collective action, extra-parliamentary mobilization, and promote a shared ideology around particular interests remained weak.
These post-Soviet political capitalists never offered a sustainable model for growth. Even in countries where they consolidated into authoritarian regimes, such as Russia or Belarus, their main appeal was restoring stability after the disastrous 1990s. When Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions collapsed in 2014, no new overarching coordination mechanism emerged, at least for the major groups of political capitalists. This resulted in the political fragmentation of the ‘Eastern’ camp, and a diminished capacity for collective action even in defense of its own vital interests. The loss of access to the traditional ‘administrative resource’ meant an ever shrinking material base for nurturing a loyal middle class.72
One striking difference between the ‘two Ukraines’ is the weakness of the ‘Eastern’ civil society, even in comparison with the narrowly based civil society of the ‘Western’ camp.73 Instead of supporting smaller but more coherent ideological parties, universities, magazines, and intellectual networks, the money of ‘Eastern’ political capitalists went to patronage-driven electoral machines, TV stations, and loyal media pundits. This was enough to win local, and sometimes national, elections, but it was not enough to forge an attractive, broadbased, pluralist nation-building project for Ukraine that would appeal to both the Ukrainian public and the West. The ‘Western’ camp, by contrast, offered the illusion of rapid modernizating integration into Euro-Atlantic community (even if problematic), while it was not at all clear what the ‘Eastern’ camp offered beyond stagnation. It is noteworthy that the main political parties of the ‘Eastern’ camp called themselves simply ‘Opposition bloc’ and ‘Opposition platform’, defining themselves foremost in a negative way against the post-Euromaidan developments.
This affected the ability of the ‘Eastern’ camp to mobilize and put pressure on the government. Within this camp the Communist Party of Ukraine had the best capacity to do so, but it was weakened by nationalist attacks in 2014, lost its most militant sections in Crimea and Donbass, and was then disbanded and suppressed under the ‘decommunization’ laws.74 Zelenskyi’s accommodation with the ‘Western’ camp after his so inspiring victory over Poroshenko triggered the attempts to mobilize the ‘betrayed majority’, best manifested in Anatolii Sharii’s party, which was founded by one of Ukraine’s most popular bloggers. But its limited success, primarily among youth in southeastern Ukrainian cities, was probably aborted by the Russian invasion in 2022.
8 Conclusion
Neither the change of the regional balance in 2014, nor the rise of civic identity is sufficient to explain the failure of the pluralist alternative for Ukraine that was required for the success of the Minsk Accords. The profound class and political asymmetry between Ukraine’s ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps structured the political contention over the accords in the context of the post-Euromaidan developments. Like most other contemporary revolutions, the Euromaidan resulted not in the democratic consolidation of society, but rather in strengthening middle-class civil society vis-à-vis a weakened Ukrainian state, now critically dependent on Western financial, political, and military support. Within the civil society, the ‘Western’ camp was politically stronger, and got even more resources and opportunities, although its class interests and political agendas often differed from the views of the majority of Ukrainians.
A different national development for Ukraine, as a pluralistic country that could serve as a bridge between the West and Russia, was certainly possible. Getting there, however, required an institutionally protected national dialogue among Ukrainians who had sharply opposing views. Thanks to the weak ability of post-Soviet political capitalists to lead their constituency politically, intellectually, and morally, and universalize their particular interests in a pluralist nation-building project, the portion of Ukrainian society that potentially backed a non-zero-sum articulation of the Minsk accords was poorly ideologically interpellated and weakly mobilized. The full-scale invasion by Russia may cut Ukraine in two, rather than giving it a chance to sew itself together.
Since the invasion, some claimed that the regional cleavage had lost its relevance, and that perhaps, it has always been a ‘myth’.75 They base this on public opinion surveys, which are significantly less reliable and representative during wartime.76 It is just as possible, that we are seeing not so much a positive unity under the ‘Western’ camp’s leadership, but rather a temporary coalition against the momentary enemy.
Nevertheless, for the adepts of the ‘Western’ nation-building project in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion is an opportunity for a radical and uncompromising transformation of the whole country, on a scale that would have been impossible in peacetime.77 As a result, with their political and public representatives repressed, fleeing from the country, forced to become even more loyal supporters of Zelenskyi than the pro-Western parties, or some to collaborate with Russians,78 a large group of Ukrainians are now being turned into objects of assimilation. Only some of them accept the process and become its active subjects. Others are squeezed between the ‘Western’ nation-building project, and Putin’s ‘one and the same people’, even though they fit neither. Their situation is oddly reminiscent of the situation of Ukrainians in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, who, although not discriminated against as individuals, were prohibited from expressing their collective identity because its very existence was deemed a security threat.
These ‘Other Ukrainians’ suffer not only the brunt of the current invasion, but the suspicion of secretly harboring sympathies for the aggressor. One Ukrainian refugee artist, Anatoli Ulyanov, aptly describes them as caught between two fires:
Imagine you are a Russian-speaker in some bombed-out Eastern Ukrainian city, waiting to be liberated. Some of the ‘liberators’ will be first checking your closets for young men to mobilize and use as a Z-branded canon fodder. The other liberators make it clear that they see you аs nothing more than a ‘vatnik’, a Homo Sovieticus. All that remains for you to choose is which knife you would like to be liberated with: the good knife of the victim or the evil knife of the aggressor?79
These ‘Other Ukrainians’ never wanted war, and became its greatest victims.
1 Paul D’Anieri, “Commitment Problems and the Failure of the Minsk Process: The Second- Order Commitment Challenge,” Post-Soviet Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2022.2158685; Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll, Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023): 194.
3 See Oksana Myshlovska and Ulrich Schmid, eds., Regionalism Without Regions: Reconceptualizing Ukraine’s Heterogeneity (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019) for one of the most comprehensive recent reviews of the question.
4 E.g., Lowell Barrington, “Is the Regional Divide in Ukraine an Identity Divide?” Eurasian Geography and Economics 63, no. 4 (2022): 470.
5 E.g., Ivan Katchanovski, Cleft Countries: Regional Political Divisions and Cultures in Post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2006).
6 E.g., Mykola Riabchuk, “‘Two Ukraines’ Reconsidered: The End of Ukrainian Ambivalence?” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15, no. 1 (2015): 138-56; Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016).
8 E.g., Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale, The Zelenskyi Effect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
9 Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, “How Maidan Revolutions Reproduce and Intensify the Post-Soviet Crisis of Political Representation,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 714, 18 October 2021, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/how-maidan-revolutions-reproduce-and-intensify-the-post-soviet-crisis-of-political-representation/ (accessed 12 March 2023); Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev, “Post-Soviet vicious circle: revolution as a reproduction of the crisis of hegemony,” in Dylan J. Riley and Marco Santoro eds., The Anthem Companion to Gramsci (London: Anthem Press, forthcoming).
10 Here, I draw on Richard Sakwa’s definition of the “monist” and “pluralist” nation-building projects in Ukraine. See Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine.
11 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Nationalist Radicalization Trends in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine,” PONARS Eurasia Policy memo, no. 529, 17 May 2018, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/nationalist-radicalization-trends-post-euromaidan-ukraine (accessed 12 March 2023); Volodymyr Chemerys, “Totalitarian Tendencies in Post-Maidan Ukraine,” openDemocracy, 26 October 2016, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/totalitarian-tendencies-in-post-maidan-ukraine/ (accessed 12 March 2023); Lucan A. Way, “Ukraine’s Post-Maidan Struggles: Free Speech in a Time of War,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019): 48-60; Georgiy Kasianov, “Ukraina Kak ‘Natsionaliziruiushchee(sia) Gosudarstvo’: Obzor Praktik i Rezultatov,” Sotsiologiia vlasti 33, no. 2 (2021): 117-145.
12 Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism: Euromaidan Eventful Nationalism in Ukraine,” Post-Soviet Affairs 36, no. 3 (2020): 226-45 provides an extensive criticism of quite a popular but flawed counterposing of the ethnic and civic nationalisms in post-Euromaidan Ukraine.
13 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “NATO through Ukrainian Eyes,” in Grey Anderson ed., Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War (London: Verso, forthcoming); Ishchenko, “Nationalist Radicalization Trends;” Zhuravlev and Ishchenko, “Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism”: 231-33; Kasianov, “Ukraina Kak ‘Natsionaliziruiushchee(sia) Gosudarstvo’”: 134-35; Zhurzhenko, “Fighting Empire, Weaponising Culture: The Conflict with Russia and the Restrictions on Russian Mass Culture in Post-Maidan Ukraine,” Europe-Asia Studies 73, no. 8 (2021): 1459; Henry E. Hale and Volodymyr Kulyk, “Aspirational Identity Politics and Support for Radical Reform: The Case of Post-Maidan Ukraine,” Comparative Politics 53, no. 4 (2021): 713-751.
27 The original plan for Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 was fundamentally premised on the destabilization of the Ukrainian central government, which would ensure stronger local collaboration and weaker military resistance, see J. Watling, O.V. Danylyuk, and N. Reynolds, “Preliminary Lessons from Russia’s Unconventional Operations During the Russo-Ukrainian War, February 2022–February 2023,” Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies Special Report, 29 March 2023, https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-russias-unconventional-operations-during-russo-ukrainian-war-february-2022 (accessed 29 March 2023). Generals are always prepared to fight the last war.
30 Adam Potočňák and Miroslav Mares, “Donbas Conflict: How Russia’s Trojan Horse Failed and Forced Moscow to Alter Its Strategy,” Problems of Post-Communism (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2022.2066005.
31 Ishchenko, “Behind Russia’s War.” The term “political capitalists” is understood as “the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage is derived from selective benefits from the state, unlike capitalists whose advantage is rooted in technological innovations or a particularly cheap labor force.” For a similar use, see, e.g., Iván Szelényi and Péter Mihályi, Varieties of Post-communist Capitalism: A comparative analysis of Russia, Eastern Europe and China (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
33 Olga Baysha, Miscommunicating Social Change: Lessons from Russia and Ukraine (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018).
34 Zhuravlev and Ishchenko, “Exclusiveness of civic nationalism.”
35 For an extensive collection of post-Euromaidan officials’ statements tagetting the “wrong” Ukrainians, see Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: 116-18.
36 For economic interests behind the war in Donbass, see, e.g., Yuri M. Zhukov, “Trading hard hats for combat helmets: The economics of rebellion in eastern Ukraine,” Journal of Comparative Economics 44, no. 1 (2016): 1-15.
38 Ishchenko and Zhuravlev, “How Maidan revolutions.” This is a typical outcome of contemporary urban civic revolutions, see Mark R. Beissinger, The revolutionary city: urbanization and the global transformation of rebellion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022): 359-416.
56 Olga Baysha, “On the Impossibility of Discursive-Material Closures: A Case of Banned TV Channels in Ukraine,” Social Sciences & Humanities Open 6, no. 1 (2022): 1-7.
57 “Stavlennia do zaborony kanaliv ‘112,’ ‘ZIK’ і ‘NewsOne:’ rezultaty telefonnoho opytuvannia, provedenoho 5-7 liutoho 2021 roku,” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 11 February 2021, https://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=1006&page=1&y=2021&m=2 (accessed 19 March 2023).
58 S. Nitsova, G. Pop-Eleches, and G. Robertson, “Revolution and Reform in Ukraine: Evaluating Four Years of Reform,” PONARS Eurasia, July 2018, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/node/9864 (accessed 20 March 2023).
62 Simon Shuster, “Exclusive: How an Accused Russian Agent Worked With Rudy Giuliani in a Plot Against the 2020 Election,” The Time, 3 June 2021, https://time.com/6052302/andriy-derkach-profile/ (accessed 20 March 2023).
66 Ishchenko and Zhuravlev, “How Maidan Revolutions.”
67 Paul Chaisty and Stephen Whitefield, “How challenger parties can win big with frozen cleavages: Explaining the landslide victory of the Servant of the People party in the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary elections,” Party Politics 28, no. 1 (2020): 115-126.
71 Henry E. Hale, Patronal politics: Eurasian regime dynamics in comparative perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
72 Atsushi Ogushi, “The Opposition Bloc in Ukraine: A Clientelistic Party with Diminished Administrative Resources,” Europe-Asia Studies 72, no. 10 (2020): 1639-1656.
73 Volodymyr Ishchenko. “The Ukrainian New Left and Student Protests: A Thorny Way to Hegemony,” in Magnus Wennerhag, Christian Fröhlich, and Grzegorz Piotrowski, eds., Radical left movements in Europe (London: Routledge, 2017): 216-218; Maxim Gatskov and Kseniia Gatskova, “Civil Society in Ukraine,” in Alberto Veira-Ramos, Tetiana Liubyva, and Evgen Golovakha, eds., Ukraine in Transformation: From Soviet Republic to European Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 123-144.
74 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine,” in F. Escalona, D. Keith, and L. March eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 665-692. Volodymyr Ishchenko, “The Ukrainian Left during and after the Maidan Protests,” Study requested by the Die Linke delegation in the GUE/NGL, 2016, https://www.academia.edu/20445056/The_Ukrainian_Left_during_and_after_the_Maidan_Protests (accessed 22 March 2023).
The trouble started in 2014. A US supported coup took out the democratically elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, with his eastern base, and replaced him with a West leaning president who was handpicked by the US. Victoria Nuland, who is now Acting Deputy Secretary of State and who was then Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, can be heard on an intercepted phone call selecting Arseniy Yatsenyuk as America’s choice to replace Yanukovych. He did.
The new government changed Ukraine. For the first time, the government had been changed by western Ukraine and its monist vision of the country crushing the ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine and the pluralist vision it had hoped for. The pluralist dream died, and the ethnic Russians of the Donbas would suffer attacks on their language, their culture, their rights, their property and their lives.
After the coup, the first election brought Pyotr Poroshenko to power. Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island and the author of The Tragedy of Ukraine, says that Poroshenko would transform into the “prime sponsor . . . of Ukrainian nationalism.” Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent, says that Poroshenko’s government represented “a monist vision of Ukraine statehood that denied the pluralist alternative demanded by the Donbas. . ..”
By May 2014, the people of the Donbas had rebelled against the coup government and had approved referendums declaring some form of autonomy. Civil war followed.
The solution with the greatest signs of life was the Minsk Accords, which were brokered by France and Germany, agreed to by Ukraine and Russia, and accepted by the US and UN in 2014 and 2015. The Minsk Accords would peacefully return the Donbas to Ukraine in exchange for autonomy.
Recent corrections to the historical record have revealed the Minsk Accords to have been a deception. Recent statements by each of Putin’s partners in negotiating the Accords, Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande, have unmasked the Minsk Accords as a deceptive soporific designed to lull Russia into a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful settlement while actually buying Ukraine the time it needed to build up an armed forces capable of achieving a military solution.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a host of Ukrainian officials have added their signatures to that testimony. Petro says that “From the outset, Ukraine’s strategy was to prevent the implementation of Minsk-2.” Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin, Petro reports, says that “Ukraine’s sole objective in signing Minsk-2 was to rebuild the Ukrainian army and strengthen the international coalition against Russia.” He then adds, reinforcing the deception, that “That was understood from the very first day.” According to Petro, “[t]he Minsk-II Process . . . was explicitly rejected by senior Ukrainian government officials at the end of 2021.”
Former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has said that “The war [in Ukraine] might have been prevented – probably would have been prevented – if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO.” Since Ukraine, Germany, France and the US – who failed to pressure Ukraine to implement the Accords nor to provide Zelensky the support he needed were he to implement them—were not willing to abide by the Minks Accords, that raises the crucial question, Was Putin? Had his negotiating partners been sincere, would the Minsk Accords have been implemented and the current war possibly avoided?
In his important biography of Putin, Philip Short says he was: “For Moscow, progress needed to come through implementation of the Minsk accords.”
In a recent article on the reasons for the failure of Ukraine to implement the Minsk Accords, sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko gives several reasons why Putin was serious about implementing the accords, including, that “It would most likely have stalled Ukraine’s Western integration by partially restoring the electoral base of the pro-neutrality ‘Eastern’ parties” and “the transformations implied by the Minsk Accords would have prevented Putin’s feared ‘anti-Russia’ from developing in Ukraine, leaving open the possibility of Ukraine and Russia evolving peacefully as two separate states . . ..”
Prior to the war, Putin had consistently resisted annexing the Donbas. In 2014, when the Donetsk and Lugansk regions held referendums on autonomy, Putin asked them to delay them. When they went ahead with them anyway and voted for autonomy, Putin did not recognize the results. Sakwa says that Putin “repeatedly reject[ed] requests to accept the territory as part of Russia.”
Dmitry Trenin, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, points out that when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Putin was acting “on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force ‘in Ukraine’ not just in Crimea.” But Putin resisted pressure from Russian nationalists to annex the Donbas and instead remained committed the Minsk Accord’s plan to keep the Donbas a part of Ukraine.
Putin, at the time, “believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements.” Russian hardliners have criticized Putin for that restraint and blamed it for the current crisis. They have criticized him for stopping at Crimea and not annexing the Donbas as well. They have chastised him for trusting Germany and France’s promise to ensure the implementation of the Minsk Accords.
But Putin’s commitment to the Minsk Accords did not seem to waver until the revelations by Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko proved his hardline critics right. Following their revelations, Putin told the nation that “For years, Western elites hypocritically assured us of their peaceful intentions, including to help resolve the serious conflict in Donbass.” He then went on to charge that “[t]he West lied to us about peace while preparing for aggression, and today, they no longer hesitate to openly admit it.”
Right up until the war, Putin remained committed to the Minsk Accords. Geoffrey Roberts, in an article called “Now or Never: The Immediate Origins of Putin’s Preventative War on Ukraine,” in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, quotes Putin as saying that he is “convinced” there is “still . . . no alternative.” In August, 2021, in response to a question from the press following talks with Merkel, Putin said “we have no other tool to achieve peace, and I believe they should be treated very carefully and with respect.” Roberts says that, in a November 13 interview, Putin “reiterated Russia’s commitment to the implementation of the Minsk agreements, saying there was no other mechanism to resolve the Donbass problem.”
At the same time Putin complained to Merkel that “Ukraine has adopted a number of laws and regulations that essentially contradict the Minsk agreements. It is as if the leadership of that country has decided to give up on achieving a peaceful settlement.” Putin was referring to laws that prohibited the use of Russian language and culture from official use and education and the shutting down of all ethnic Russian television and media outlets.
Putin continued to speak with the French and German brokers of the Minsk Accords in the days right before the war. Roberts reports that Putin spoke with Macron on February 12 and complained of the West’s failure to prompt Kiev to implement the agreements. The next day he told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that he believed a solution within the Minsk agreements was still possible but that Germany and France had to pressure Ukraine. But, though the key players in the Minsk negotiations continued to meet in the days right before the war, “it was clear,” Sakwa says, “that Ukraine was in no mood to fulfill the Minsk-2 agreement.”
Though perhaps no one else was – not Ukraine, not the US, not Germany or France – Putin seems to have been serious about the Minks Accords. Since their implementation may have prevented the war, the implications are significant. Although it does not absolve Putin from the decision to launch the war, it does suggest, along with the December 2021 proposal on mutual security guarantees Putin sent to the US and NATO, that he was trying to prevent it.
Ted Snider is a regular columnist on US foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.
