By Volodymyr Ischenko, Brill, August 2023

Abstract

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.

2 Tina Hildebrandt and Giovanni di Lorenzo, “Angela Merkel: ‘Hatten Sie gedacht, ich komme mit Pferdeschwanz?’” Die Zeit, 7 December 2022, https://www.zeit.de/2022/51/angela-merkel-russland-fluechtlingskrise-bundeskanzler (accessed 12 March 2023); Theo Prouvost, “Hollande: ‘There Will Only Be a Way Out of the Conflict When Russia Fails on the Ground’,” The Kyiv Independent, 28 December 2022, https://kyivindependent.com/national/hollande-there-will-only-be-a-way-out-of-the-conflict-when-russia-fails-on-the-ground (accessed 12 March 2023).

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).

7 Yaroslav Hrytsak, “Dvadtsiat dvi Ukrainy,” Krytyka, no. 54 (2002): 3-6.

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.

14 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?” Al Jazeera, 12 March 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/21/why-did-ukraine-suspend-11-pro-russia-parties (accessed 12 March 2023); Igor Burdyga, “These are the men Russia wanted to put in charge of Ukraine,” openDemocracy, 4 March 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-russia-opposition-platform-for-life-medvedchuk-boiko/ (accessed 12 March 2023).

15 Paul D’Anieri, “Gerrymandering Ukraine? Electoral Consequences of Occupation,” East European Politics and Societies 33, no. 1: 89-108.

16 Nicolai N. Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023): 241-42.

17 Jesse Driscoll, “Ukraine’s Civil War: Would Accepting This Terminology Help Resolve the Conflict?” PONARS Eurasia Policy memo, no. 572, 6 February 2019, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/ukraine-s-civil-war-would-accepting-this-terminology-help-resolve-the-conflict/ (accessed 12 March 2023); Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine.

18 Paul D’Anieri, “Ukraine’s 2019 Elections: Pro-Russian Parties and The Impact of Occupation,” Europe-Asia Studies 74, no. 10: 1915-1936.

19 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Three scenarios for the Ukraine-Russia crisis,” Al Jazeera, 16 February 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/2/16/ukraine-should-not-allow-others-to-determine-its-future (accessed 14 March 2023).

20 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict,” Jacobin, 3 October 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict (accessed 12 March 2023); Ishchenko and Zhuravlev, “How Maidan Revolutions.”

21 Vladimir Putin, “Ob istoricheskom yedinstve russkikh i ukraintsev,” Prezident Rossii, 12 July 2021, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66182 (accessed 13 March 2023).

22 Natalia Savelieva, “Eight Years of War Before the War,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 25 March 2022, https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46205/eight-years-of-war-before-the-war (accessed 13 March 2023).

23 Volodymyr Artiukh and Taras Fedirko, “No, the West Didn’t Halt Ukraine’s Peace Talks With Russia,” Novara Media, 17 October 2022, https://novaramedia.com/2022/10/17/no-the-west-didnt-halt-ukraines-peace-talks-with-russia/ (accessed 13 March 2023).

24 Anna Matveeva, “Donbas: The Post-Soviet Conflict That Changed Europe,” European Politics and Society 23, no. 3 (2022): 410-41.

25 Ihor Hurak and Paul D’Anieri, “The Evolution of Russian Political Tactics in Ukraine,” Problems of Post-Communism 69, no. 2 (2022): 124-125.

26 Matveeva, “Donbass”: 427.

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.

28 Shaun Walker, “Russia’s ‘valiant hero’ in Ukraine turns his fire on Vladimir Putin,” The Guardian, 5 June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/05/russias-valiant-hero-in-ukraine-turns-his-fire-on-vladimir-putin (accessed 18 March 2023).

29 Simon Shuster, “The Untold Story of the Ukraine Crisis,” Time, 2 February 2022, https://time.com/magazine/europe/6144693/february-14th-2022-vol-199-no-5-europe/ (accessed 13 March 2023).

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).

32 Hale and Kulyk, “Aspirational Identity Politics”; Mikhail Alexseev, “U.S. Foreign Policy: What Wins Hearts and Minds in Ukraine?” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 716, 25 October 2021, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/u-s-foreign-policy-what-wins-hearts -and-minds-in-ukraine/ (accessed 15 March 2023).

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.

37 Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: 111-12, 245-46.

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.

39 “Hromadska dumka: lystopad-2019,” Democratic Initiatives Foundation, 25 November 2019, https://dif.org.ua/article/gromadska-dumka-listopad-2019 (accessed 16 March 2023).

40 “Vid Paryzha Do Zhenevy: Yak Zminylas Dumka Ukraintsiv Pro Rosiisko-Ukrainsku Viinu Za Dva Roky Prezydentstva Zelenskoho,” Democratic Initiatives Foundation, 2021, https://dif.org.ua/uploads/pdf/172727059260c06af8056389.24490916.pdf (accessed 16 March 2023).

41 “Sotsialno-Politychna Sytuatsiia v Ukraini” (Kiev International Institute of Sociology, March 2015), https://kiis.com.ua/materials/pr/20152603_ratings/Ukraine2000_Results3 .pdf; “Sotsialno-Politychna Sytuatsiia v Ukraini: Lypen 2015 Roku,” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, July 20, 2015, https://www.kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=540&page=1. (accessed 16 March 2023).

42 “Ukrainian Civil Society Outlines ‘Red Lines’ President Zelenskyi Can’t Cross,” Euromaidan Press, 23 May 2019, https://euromaidanpress.com/2019/05/23/ukrainian-civil-society-outlines-red-lines-president-zelenskyi-cant-cross/ (accessed 16 March 2023).

43 Moss Robeson, “Bandera’s ‘Insurgency-in-Waiting’,” Bandera Lobby Blog, 8 December 2022, https://banderalobby.substack.com/p/banderas-insurgency-in-waiting (accessed 16 March 2023).

44 “How to Mainstream Neo-Nazis: A Lesson from Ukraine’s New Government,” bellingcat, 21 October 2019, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/10/21/how-to-mainstream-neo-nazis-a-lesson-from-ukraines-new-government/ (accessed 16 March 2023).

45 Christian Esch, Steffen Klusmann, and Thore Schröder, “Wolodymyr Selenskyj im Interview: ‚Putin ist ein Drache, der fressen muss‘,” Der Spiegel, 9 February 2023, https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/wolodymyr-selenskyj-im-interview-putin-ist-ein-drache-der-fressen-muss-a-458b7fe2-e15a-49a9-a38e-4bfba834f27b (accessed 16 March 2023).

46 Serhiy Kudelia, “Veto on Peace/Veto on War: President Zelensky’s Donbas Imbroglio,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 644, 3 April 2020, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/veto-on-peace-veto-on-war-president-zelensky-s-donbas-imbroglio/ (accessed 19 March 2023).

47 “Stavlennia Ukraintsiv Do Politykiv, Otsinka Diialnosti Orhaniv Vlady Ta Aktualnykh Podii,” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 14 October 2019, https://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=898&page=1&y=2019&m=10 (accessed 16 March 2023).

48 “Suspilno-Politychni Oriientatsii Naselennia Ukrainy”, Kiev International Institute of Sociology, April 2020, https://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/pr/20200406_pressconf/politics_april%202020.pdf (accessed 16 March 2023).

49 See multiple references in Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: 229-30.

50 Tetyana Malyarenko, “Transnistria Writ Large for Donbas? Several Battlefields Mark Ukraine’s Challenges,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 735, 24 January 2022, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/transnistria-writ-large-for-donbas-several-battlefields-mark-ukraines-challenges/ (accessed 21 March 2023).

51 Jonathan Brunson, “Implementing the Minsk Agreements Might Drive Ukraine to Civil War. That’s Been Russia’s Plan All Along,” War on the Rocks, 11 February 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/implementing-the-minsk-agreements-might-drive-ukraine-to-civil-war-thats-been-russias-plan-all-along/ (accessed 11 September 2022).

52 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Denial of the Obvious: Far Right in Maidan Protests and Their Danger Today,” Vox Ukraine, 16 April 2018, https://voxukraine.org/en/denial-of-the-obvious-far-right-in-maidan-protests-and-their-danger-today (accessed 19 March 2023).

53 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine’s Government Bears More Responsibility for Ongoing Conflict Than the Far-Right,” The Guardian, 4 September 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/04/ukraine-government-svoboda-clashes-conflict (accessed 19 March 2023).

54 Michael Colborne, From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right (Stuttgart: ibidem, 2022): 83-85.

55 “Polnyi Prank s Eks-Glavoi MVD Ukrainy Arsenom Avakovym,” 3 November 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmbh1S-wa9E (accessed 19 March 2023).

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).

59 Ibid.: 59.

60 This argument is developed in Ishchenko, “Behind Russia’s war.”

61 Christopher Miller, “Ukrainian Reform Activists Derail Effort To ‘Destroy’ Anticorruption Body,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 7 December 2017, https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-nabu-imf-world-bank-anti-corruption-efforts-thwarted/28902554.html (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).

63 “Efektyvnist Informatsiinoi Polityky Naperedodni Vyboriv: Rezultaty Vseukrainskoho Opytuvannia Hromadskoi Dumky, Provedenoho KMIS Na Zamovlennia HO ‘Detektor Media’,” Detector Media, October 2018, https://detector.media/doc/images/news/archive/2016/142044/3.pdf (accessed 20 March 2023); “Yak zminylys updobannia ta interesy ukraintsiv do zasobim masovoi informatsii pislia vyboriv 2019 r. ta pochatku pandemii COVID-19,” Detector Media, 29 September 2020, https://detector.media/infospace/article/181066/2020-09-29-yak-zminylys-upodobannya-ta-interesy-ukraintsiv-do-zasobiv-masovoi-informatsii-pislya-vyboriv-2019-r-ta-pochatku-pandemii-covid-19/ (accessed 20 March 2023); “Otsinka Dii Vlady, Epidemiia Koronavirusu Ta Reaktsiia Na Potochnia Podii,” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, 29 June 2020, https://kiis.com.ua/?lang=ukr&cat=reports&id=955&page=1 (accessed 20 March 2023).

64 “Dumky ta pohliady naselennia Ukrainy: Lypen 2020,” Social Monitoring Center, 21 July 2020, https://smc.org.ua/dumky-ta-poglyady-naselennya-ukrayiny-lypen-2020-1360/ (accessed 9 July 2021).

65 Vasyl Cherepanyn, “The people’s rebellion, or why a showman became president of Ukraine,” openDemocracy, 24 April 2019, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/the-peoples-rebellion-or-why-a-showman-became-president-of-ukraine/ (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.

68 Onuch and Hale, The Zelenskyi Effect: 196-201.

69 Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Towards the Abyss,” New Left Review, no. 133/134 (2022): 28-34.

70 “Otsinka hromadianamy sytuatsii ta protsesiv, shcho vidbuvaiutsia v kraini. Stavlennia do vstupu do Yevropeiskoho soiuzu ta NATO (lystopad-hruden 2021),” Razumkov Center, 24 December 2021, https://razumkov.org.ua/napriamky/sotsiologichni-doslidzhennia/otsinka-gromadianamy-sytuatsii-ta-protsesiv-shcho-vidbuvaiutsia-v-kraini-stavlennia-do-vstupu-do-yevropeiskogo-soiuzu-ta-nato-lystopad-gruden-2021r (accessed 19 March 2023).

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).

75 Onuch and Hale, The Zelensky Effect.

76 R. Kit, G. Toal, K.M. Bakke, and J. O’Loughlin, “How Reliable Are Polls In Wartime Ukraine?” PONARS Eurasia policy memo, no. 830, February 2023, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/how-reliable-are-polls-in-wartime-ukraine/ (accessed 17 February 2023).

77 Serhii Rudenko, “Spetsoperatsiia ‘Derusyfikatsiia.’ Interviu z holovnym redaktorom ‘Istorychnoi pravdy’ Vakhtanhom Kipiani,” Ukrainska pravda, April 25, 2022, https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2022/04/25/7341708/ (accessed 29 March 2023).

78 Branko Marcetic, “The State of Ukrainian Democracy Is Not Strong,” Jacobin, 25 February 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/02/ukraine-censorship-authoritarianism-illiberalism-crackdown-police-zelensky (accessed 29 March 2023).

79 Anatoli Ulyanov, “The Superfluous People of Eastern Ukraine,” LeftEast, 10 September 2022, https://lefteast.org/the-superfluous-people-of-eastern-ukraine/ (accessed 23 March 2023).