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).

By Ted Snider, Antiwar.com, 8/30/23

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.

By Keith Gessen, The New Yorker, 8/29/23

If you want to hear a different perspective on the war in Ukraine, talk to Samuel Charap. A fine-featured Russia analyst with, at forty-three, a head of gray hair, Charap works at the RAND Corporation, a think tank that has been doing research for the U.S. military, among other clients, since the nineteen-forties. In the self-abnegating architectural spirit of many Washington institutions, it rents several floors of an office tower attached to a mall in Arlington, Virginia, not far from the Pentagon. The mall has a Macy’s and a Bath and Body Works, which are not places that Charap likes to go.

Charap, who grew up in Manhattan, became interested in Russian literature in high school, and then became interested in Russian foreign policy in college, at Amherst. He got a Ph.D. in political science at Oxford and spent time researching his dissertation in both Moscow and Kyiv. In 2009, he started working at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in D.C. Russia had just fought a short, nasty war with Georgia, but the incoming Obama Administration was hoping to “reset” relations and find common ground. Charap supported this effort and wrote papers trying to think through a progressive foreign policy for the U.S. in the post-Soviet region. But tensions with Russia continued to increase. In the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine, in 2014, Charap wrote a book, with the Harvard political scientist Timothy Colton, called “Everyone Loses,” about the background to the war. In it, Charap and Colton argue that the U.S., Europe, and Russia had combined to produce a “negative sum” outcome in Ukraine. Russia was the aggressor, to be sure, but by asking that Ukraine choose either Russia or the West, the U.S. and Europe had helped stoke the flames of conflict. In the end, everyone lost.

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I first met Charap in the summer of 2017, not long after the book came out, and in the midst of a maelstrom of anger at Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Robert Mueller had been appointed as special counsel for the Justice Department, Donald Trump had labelled the investigation a hoax, and Congress was in the process of passing a bipartisan sanctions bill against Russia. Charap was as angry as anyone else about the interference, but he thought the sanctions proposed in the bill were a mistake. “The idea of sticks in international relations is not just for beating other countries,” he told me at the time. “It’s for achieving a better outcome.” He used the example of the long-standing Iran sanctions, which had finally compelled Iran to come to the negotiating table and vastly limit its nuclear program. The sanctions on Russia, he went on, were not like that. “Sanctions are only effective at changing another country’s behavior if they can be rolled back,” he said. “And, because of the measures in this current bill, it’s going to be nearly impossible for any President to relieve them.”

In the following years, as Russia became more and more of a neuralgic subject in American politics, Charap continued to travel to Russia, engage with Russian counterparts, and look for ways to lower the temperature of the relationship. Going to Valdai—the annual conference where Vladimir Putin pretends to be a wise tsar interested in discoursing with professors on international politics—had become somewhat controversial. But, before the war began, Charap went to the conference whenever he could, and several times even asked Putin a question. “It’s my job to understand these people, and I was given firsthand access to them,” he said. “How can you understand a country if you don’t go and talk to the people involved in the decision-making?”

In the fall of 2021, Charap, along with much of the expert community in D.C., became worried that Russia was planning an invasion of Ukraine. In a piece in Politico that November, he urged the Biden Administration to work with Kyiv to make at least some nominal concessions, to see if the crisis could be defused. Two months later, as the crisis deepened, he wrote another piece, for the Financial Times. In this one, he argued that NATO should announce publicly that Ukraine was not seriously being considered for membership. “Nato cannot and should not accept being told what to do by Russia,” Charap wrote. “But Moscow’s inflammatory rhetoric should not distract from the fact that Nato is not prepared to offer Ukraine membership. If doing so could avert a war, why not find some way to say out loud what any Nato official would say behind closed doors[?]”

When I spoke to Charap around this time, he was freaking out. The disposition of Russian forces, their activities, the fact that blood supplies were being sent to the Russian encampments: none of this was the behavior of an army conducting an exercise. Even more worrisome was the tenor of Russian diplomatic communications. Their demands—not only that Ukraine promise to never join NATO but also that NATO pull its troops back to their 1997 locations—were simply unrealistic. “They’re asking the world’s most powerful military alliance to strip naked and run laps,” he said. “But the gun they’re holding is to Ukraine’s head.” Charap estimated that if an invasion was going to happen, it would happen in late February.

In late January of 2022, he co-authored an editorial for Foreign Policy in which he argued that sending anti-tank Javelin missiles and anti-aircraft Stinger missiles to Ukraine would neither deter Russia from invading nor meaningfully affect the military situation if Russia did invade. He once again urged that diplomacy be given a chance.

And then the war began. It turned out that Charap and his co-author were right about Western weapons and deterrence—the Russian Army went in despite the Javelins and Stingers that had been sent to Ukraine by NATO countries—but wrong about their military utility. The Russian Army used low-flying helicopters, vulnerable to Stinger fire, and sent armored vehicles, in a juicy column, straight down a main road toward Kyiv, where they were destroyed. Subsequent studies have pointed to Russian carelessness, timely U.S. intelligence, and, above all, Ukrainian mobility and courage as the prime factors in the debacle of the war’s first weeks for Russia. But the weapons helped.

Nonetheless, for Charap, there was more that the U.S. might have tried to prevent the fighting. In recent months, as the fighting has gone on and on, he has become the most active voice in the U.S. foreign-policy community calling for some form of negotiation to end or freeze the conflict. In response, he has been called a Kremlin mouthpiece, a Russian “shill,” and a traitor. Critics say he has not changed his opinions in fifteen years despite changing circumstances. But he has continued writing and arguing. “This is a five-alarm fire,” he said. “Am I supposed to walk past the house? Because, as bad as it’s been, it could get much, much worse.”

So far, the most active phase of negotiations to end the war took place in its first two months. During that time, there were numerous meetings between Russian and Ukrainian officials, most notably throughout March, in Turkey. At least one rumored proposal coming out of those talks had Ukraine agreeing to not seek NATO membership in exchange for Russia abandoning all the territory it had seized after February 23, 2022. Accounts differ about what happened next. It was not clear that the ever-shifting Russian delegations had Putin’s support, nor was it clear that Western countries were willing to provide the sort of security guarantees Ukraine sought in place of NATO membership. Soon these questions became moot. On March 31st, Russian troops withdrew from Bucha; Ukrainian soldiers who entered the city discovered mass graves and learned that residents had been tortured and randomly shot. Volodomyr Zelensky called what happened there “war crimes” and “genocide.” An early April visit to Kyiv from Boris Johnson, then the British Prime Minister, seems to have stiffened Zelensky’s resolve. After that, there were still occasional attempts at negotiation and mediation, but it was clear that both sides wanted to see what they could get by continuing the war.

In the spring and summer of 2022, Russia re-engaged in the Ukrainian east, trying to make progress in the Donbas region; it managed to level and capture the large port city of Mariupol, connecting the Russian mainland, through occupied Ukrainian territory, to Crimea. In the fall, Ukraine mounted a counter-offensive, which succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Ukrainian forces overran demoralized Russian troops in the Kharkiv region; they also laid siege to the city of Kherson, forcing a Russian retreat. In the winter, Russia was back on the offensive, occupying, after tens of thousands of casualties, the small city of Bakhmut, in the Donbas. Early this summer, it was Ukraine’s turn for another counter-offensive. This one was bolstered by much-publicized Western equipment and training, but so far it has not yielded anything like the successes of last fall.

At some point, this counter-offensive will end. The question will then become whether either of the sides is ready for negotiations. Russia has been saying for months that it wants negotiations, but it is not clear that it is ready to make any concessions. Most significantly, Russia has not backed off its demand for recognition of the territories it “fake-annexed” in September, 2022, in the words of Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group. Ukraine has said that it needs to continue fighting so it can expel the occupying forces and make sure that Russia never threatens Ukraine again.

The argument in the U.S. has split into two profoundly opposed camps. On the one side are people—not very many, at least publicly—like Charap, who argue that there might be a way to end the war sooner rather than later by freezing the conflict in place, and working to secure and rebuild the large part of Ukraine that is not under Russian occupation. On the other side are those who believe that this is no solution and the war must be fought until Putin is soundly defeated and humiliated. As the defense intellectual Eliot A. Cohen put it, in May, in The Atlantic:

“Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.”

The arguments seem to be based, ultimately, on three kinds of disagreement. One is about the timing and meaning of negotiations. In a Foreign Policy piece last fall, Charap’s RAND colleagues Raphael Cohen (Eliot’s son, as it happens) and Gian Gentile argued that any push by the U.S. for negotiations would send “a series of signals, none of them good.” As Raphael Cohen put it to me recently: “You’re basically telling the Russians, ‘Just wait us out.’ You’re sending a message to the Ukrainians and to the rest of our allies: the United States will put up a good fight for a little while, but in the end will walk away. And you’re telling the American public that we’re not really committed to seeing this through to the end.” Cohen added that he would feel differently if the Ukrainians no longer wanted to fight or, better yet, the Russians admitted defeat: “The bad guys have a choice in this, too. You have to get the Russians to a place where they view that they can’t win. Then we have something to talk about.”

Charap thinks this is a misunderstanding of what negotiations are and what they signal. “Diplomacy is not the opposite of coercion,” he said. “It’s a tool for achieving the same objectives as you would using coercive means. Many negotiations to end wars have taken place at the same time as the war’s most fierce fighting.” He pointed to the Korean armistice of 1953; neither side acknowledged the other’s claims, but they agreed to stop fighting to negotiate a peace deal. That peace deal never came, but, seventy years later, they are still not fighting. That armistice required more than five hundred negotiation sessions. In other words, it would be better to start talking.

Another disagreement centers on the possibility of a decisive Ukrainian battlefield victory. Charap believes that neither side has the resources to knock the other out of the fight entirely. Other analysts have also voiced this opinion, most notably General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in a controversial comment last November compared the situation with the stalemate that prevailed toward the end of the First World War and suggested that it may be time to seek a negotiated solution. But the other side of this debate has been more vocal. They see a highly motivated Ukrainian Army, supported by a highly motivated populace. They point to the relative cheapness, to the U.S., of a war that pins down one of its major adversaries. And they believe that, given enough time, and enough Western weapons and training, Ukraine could take back a fair amount, if not all, of its territory; sever the land bridge to Crimea; and get close enough to Crimea to deter any future Russian military operations.

The final disagreement concerns Putin’s intentions. The “fight to the end” camp believes that, if Putin is not decisively defeated, he will continue attacking Ukraine. And some believe that if not stopped in Ukraine, as he was not stopped in Chechnya, Georgia, or Syria, he will keep going—to Moldova, the Baltics, Poland. They believe that European security is at stake.

Charap, of course, disagrees. He believes that it is possible to make a ceasefire “sticky”—by including inducements and punishments, mostly through sanctions, and by monitoring the situation closely. As for the view that Putin is bent, Hitler-like, on unceasing expansion, Charap is cautiously skeptical: “We have to admit that this is a more unpredictable actor than we thought. So while I’m not prepared to accept the Hitler narrative about how far his ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, I don’t think that we can rule it out.” But ambition is one thing; capability is another. Even if Putin wanted to keep going, Charap said, “he doesn’t have the means to do it—as this war has amply shown.”

To Charap, “The strategic defeat of Russia has already taken place.” It took place in the first months of the war, when Russian aggression and Ukrainian resistance helped galvanize a united European response. “Their international reputation, their international economic position, these ties with Europe that had been constructed over decades—literally, physically constructed—were rendered useless overnight,” Charap said. The failure to take Kyiv was the decisive blow. “Their regional clout, the flight of talent—the strategic consequences have been huge, by any measure.” And, from a U.S. perspective, Charap argues, any gains during the past sixteen months have been marginal. “A weakened Russia is good,” he said. “But a totally isolated, rogue Russia, a North Korea Russia—not so much.” A year ago, Russia was not deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure; now it regularly bombs Ukraine’s energy grid and port facilities. With every day, the chances of an accident or an incident that brings NATO directly into the conflict increase. Charap is asking just how much that risk is worth.

“It’s not necessarily that I think Ukraine needs to make concessions,” he said. “It’s that I don’t see the alternative to that eventually happening.”

Earlier this year, Charap presented his position on the war at a security conference in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. During a hostile question-and-answer session, Edward Lucas, a former Economist editor, accused Charap of “Westsplaining,” and James Sherr, of the famed international think tank Chatham House, asked how he could be so sure Ukraine wouldn’t win the war outright. But the toughest question came from the Ukrainian activist Olena Halushka. “You are speaking a lot about the cost of fighting, the line of fighting here and there,” she said, in a strong but clear accent. “But what is your analytical perspective on the cost of occupation? Because if you take a look at what is happening, at all of the de-occupied territories, the patterns there are very similar. There are big mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, mass deportations—including the deportations of kids.” When Halushka concluded her remarks and sat down, the audience applauded.

Charap answered the other questions he’d been asked, but avoided responding directly to this one. When prodded by Halushka and the moderator, he said, “I don’t know exactly how to answer that question, except to say that of course I recognize there are horrible war crimes being committed under areas under Russian occupation. And it’s ultimately for the Ukrainian government to decide which is worse—the casualties that could occur as a result of the continued fighting,” or the brutality of the continued Russian occupation of Ukrainian land. Charap seemed uncharacteristically flustered. “I mean, I don’t know quite more what more to say to answer the question,” he said again.

It was the question—the tragic question—of how to think of the people who would be left behind if the line of contact were to freeze somewhere close to its current position. If the fighting went on, Ukrainian soldiers would die; if the fighting ceased, Ukrainian citizens would be trapped under a vicious and despotic regime.

I recently spoke with the Kyiv-based journalist Leonid Shvets, whom I have found, over the years, to have a knack for pithily formulating the views of the Ukrainian mainstream. He told me that conversations in which Americans came up with scenarios for Ukraine to surrender drove him up a wall. “Why don’t you surrender to the Chinese?” he said. “Give them Florida. You have lots of states, what’s one state less?” Florida, of course, was a complicated example. “Or, if you’re so eager to make a deal with the Russians, why don’t you give them some of your land? Give them Alaska.” He thought that anything short of total defeat for Putin would just mean that the war would start up again. “We went through this already in 2014,” he said.

“Here’s the problem,” he continued. “If we freeze the situation where it now is, not along Ukraine’s internationally recognized border but along whatever line the front happens to be at, then we acknowledge that internationally recognized borders are just a kind of fiction, which you can ignore. That’s a very bad lesson. And, second, if we put the borders in this new place, then we’re in a situation where this new border is worth even less than the internationally recognized border. Maybe a new military operation will move it even further, move it over here, or move it over there. So at that point it is just totally without meaning.”

Shvets acknowledged that people in Ukraine were exhausted after a year and a half of war. “No question, every day the war goes on is, for us, specific people who are lost, and specific houses that are destroyed. Absolutely. But we are not yet ready for defeat.” He went on: “There may come a point where we need to negotiate. But from where we are right now, that point is not visible to me.”

There are dissenting voices within Ukraine, but they are seldom heard from in public. One former official, who asked that we disguise his identity, told me, “The dialogue is not just toxic. If you are not jumping up and down with the mainstream, then you are an enemy.” The former official was not an enemy, but he did blame the Zelensky administration for its lighthearted and irresponsible attitude toward the Russian troop buildup in 2021. The former official was getting his family out of the country and making preparations for what he believed was an imminent attack. Meanwhile, Zelensky was telling people to remain calm and citing Ukraine’s sovereign rights. This, the former official said, was a grave miscalculation. “When there’s a crazy person next to you with a Kalashnikov, you don’t start talking to him about the U.N. Charter!”

The former official believes that the Istanbul talks were the best chance at a more or less stable peace. “Back then Bakhmut was a beautiful city,” he said. “Mariupol was under Ukrainian control.” But now “there is no win-win solution any longer,” he said. “Someone will have to lose.” He hoped it would be Russia. But he feared it could be Ukraine. I asked him when public opinion might begin to turn. “When every single person knows someone who has been killed or wounded,” he replied. The country was getting there.

For Charap, the Ukrainian position on when to stop fighting is decisive, but it’s an evasion of responsibility to pretend that the U.S. can’t have an opinion on the matter. “You have to do this with the Ukrainians,” he said. “You can’t do it to the Ukrainians. But to suggest that we have no ability to influence them in any way is disingenuous. Like, we feel it’s O.K. to advise them about everything under the sun, but not war termination?”

Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown who served on the National Security Council staff in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, goes further. “Fighting for every last inch of Ukrainian territory,” he told me, is “morally justified. It’s legally justified. But I’m not sure that it makes a lot of strategic sense from Ukraine’s perspective, or from our perspective, or from the perspective of the people in the Global South who are suffering food and energy shortages.” He said that the U.S. Administration needs to let the Ukrainian counter-offensive play out. But at the end of this year, or maybe early in 2024, it will have to talk with Zelensky about negotiations. “I wouldn’t say, ‘You do this or we’re going to turn off the spigot.’ But you sit down and you have a searching conversation about where the war is going and what’s in the best interest of Ukraine, and you see what comes out of that discussion.”

Of course, in the wake of everything the world has witnessed since February of 2022, this is easier said than done.

The debate in the U.S. over Russia and Ukraine has become one of the most vicious foreign-policy disputes in years. “It has come to resemble the debate over Iran policy that we were having in the twenty-tens,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center and a longtime critic of U.S. hawkishness toward Russia, told me. “It became less a debate about actual policy than a debate where people were very quick to call names, sling dirt, accuse people of being in league with foreign interests.” In the pages of Foreign Affairs, the arguments are polite, but in the wilds of Twitter, things get ugly.

Ashford said, “There’s a lot of emotion. This is a major war. Thousands and thousands of people have died. It’s barbaric, and people get very emotionally involved with their positions.” Emotional intensity is also, she added, a useful tactic for the hawks. “It can be quite an effective way to shut down discussions over negotiations—to argue that it’s a betrayal of Ukraine, that it’s going to get people killed, that it’s what Russia wants. ”

Rajan Menon, the director of the grand-strategy program at Defense Priorities, a think tank that advocates for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy, is a longtime analyst of Russian affairs. He’s visited Ukraine several times since the war began and written extensively on possible solutions to the conflict. He thinks Charap’s prescriptions for an armistice are premature—that there is not yet enough will on either side to stop the fighting—but he is dismayed by the rhetorical atmosphere in the U.S. “There are people who are looking with a good-faith effort to try to see if there’s a way out of this box,” he told me. “And for their trouble they’ve basically been lambasted as appeasers or sympathetic to Putin and so on. This has got to stop.”

Charap is clearly bothered by some of the vitriol that’s been directed at him, but he chalks up the intensity of the debate to the barbarity of the Russian military. “I need to keep doing my job,” he said, which is to think and analyze and propose.

In just the last few weeks, as the Ukrainian counter-offensive continued to make agonizingly slow progress, the conversation moved closer to Charap than it has in months. In mid-August, a Washington Post article revealed that U.S. intelligence assessed that Ukraine would not be able to reach the key city of Melitopol during this offensive, and Politico quoted a U.S. official wondering whether Milley had been right, back in November, when he suggested that it may be time to seek a diplomatic solution. Congressional support, which aside from the Trumpian right had been fairly unstinting, has begun to waver. “Is this more a stalemate?” the Republican congressman Andy Harris, a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus and a co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus, asked constituents at a town-hall meeting in mid-August. “Should we be realistic about it? I think we probably should.”

Some have pushed back on this analysis. The counter-offensive is not yet over, and there is a possibility that it will yet surprise everyone. “It’s been a miracle,” Olga Oliker, of the International Crisis Group, said of the successful Ukrainian resistance. “Maybe there’ll be another miracle.” The White House, at least publicly, has been of the same view. “We do not assess that the conflict is a stalemate,” the national-security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters last week.

Charap isn’t ready to call time on the Ukrainian counter-offensive, either. But he continues to worry that the Administration is being too cautious about starting work on a diplomatic solution. “Most people now recognize that Plan A isn’t working,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they’re prepared to discuss Plan B.” What would a Plan B look like? “It would be a diplomatic strategy,” he said. “It would be thinking about the choreography of how you engage.” It would be the “searching conversation” with Ukraine, and similar conversations with NATO allies. It would be trying to get Putin to appoint a representative who has authority to negotiate, and appointing such a representative on the U.S. side, with Ukrainian support.“This is the kind of pre-negotiation interaction that will be necessary to lay the groundwork,” Charap said, “and then you actually devote resources inside the government to thinking through the practicalities and getting the right pieces in place.”

He admits that such an initiative could fail: “The only way you really can know is if we actually try and it doesn’t work. You haven’t lost anything if you do that.” In Charap’s view, the risks of not trying are higher than the risks of trying. Every day, on the front lines of the biggest war in Europe since 1945, young men and women lose their lives. Many more will, before this is over. That’s one thing about which everyone is certain.

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 8/23/23

If the Ukraine war ended tomorrow, the United States still would need to send hundreds of billions in aid to that country. The bill includes continuation of military assistance, budget support for the Ukrainian government and reconstruction assistance.

President Biden has just asked for another US$24 billion to support Ukraine, primarily for military equipment but also budget support ($7.3 billion). While Congress is increasingly skeptical about another huge chunk of money to fund an endless conflict, this is peanuts compared with what will be asked after the war ends.

The World Bank has done a revised estimate on reconstruction needs, based on data from the first year of the war (February 2022 to February 2023). The Bank says that Ukraine needs $411 billion for reconstruction over a ten-year period.

That estimate will need to be significantly increased to account for February to August 2023 and beyond. It would make sense to think that even if the war stopped tomorrow, reconstruction aid would come to $600 billion or more, or more than half a trillion dollars. 

For purposes of comparison, the war in Iraq featured a reconstruction program of $60 billion. The US also spent $90 billion over twelve years to support Afghanistan (although the war continued in that country.)

There is no doubt that most of the US assistance to Afghanistan was probably stolen or went over to the Taliban. On top of that, billions’ worth of US war-fighting equipment was left in place and is now used by the Taliban.

In the case of Iraq, most of the aid was wasted thanks to bad management, corruption and poor planning.

The US and its allies will need to cough up $60 billion annually to support Ukraine, and expect that a lot of it will be stolen. It will have to keep the funding up for 10 years.

Consider that Germany has committed to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at $5 billion annually. But the German government in power is likely to be replaced soon, and that pledge is about as worthless as the Weimar mark.

Likewise, the UK economy is very dodgy, and finding serious money in future will prove a real challenge. The bottom line is that most of the money will have to come from Uncle Sam. 

It may be that some Washington insiders are thinking that the best thing is to prolong the war as long as possible, because if the fighting continues the US just needs to provide military assistance and budget support for the government, but not reconstruction assistance.

In effect, that is the Biden administration policy. By continuing the war the Biden government thinks it can convince Congress to keep paying and they can keep Ukraine “alive” by forking over arms and money to pay salaries and for needed supplies.

But will Congress be willing to keep spending for an endless war? It is likely Congress will want to know where the money is going, how it is used, and how the US government accounts for its spending. 

Most Americans oppose more aid to Ukraine. We are entering an election period with the first Republican presidential debates coming soon. Ukraine is sure to be an issue and some candidates, like Robert Kennedy Jr, who identifies for the time being as a Democrat, already are speaking out against supporting the war.

This could mean Biden will have a huge problem trying to get a skittish Congress, including his fellow Democrats, to sign up for more spending on a losing proposition.

It has long been understood that Ukraine is a corrupt country. Ukrainian politicians, including Zelensky, have offshored some of their wealth (Zelensky has a villa in Tuscany on the seashore in Forte dei Marmi which he bought before he entered politics and now rents to Russian clients at 12,000 euros a month).

President Biden’s son Hunter is embroiled in an investigation of payments and other activities centered partly on Ukraine’s Burisma energy holding company and in part on transactions in China. A Republican-dominated committee in the House of Representatives has sought to tie the president to the matters under investigation.

When the “big” reconstruction money starts flowing, assuming that happens, political and military officials in Ukraine will enthusiastically help the United States line their pockets.

Ukraine’s corruption was highly visible this month as President Zelensky fired all the military recruiters in the country because they were selling recruitment passes to young men seeking to avoid the war. 

Ukraine will end up being the most costly operation ever carried out by the United States. The US Marshall Plan for European reconstruction after World War II cost the United States $13.3 billion. That amount, in 2023 dollars, would be $173 billion, roughly a third of what reconstruction would cost for Ukraine.

There will be a strong lobbying effort by some US companies that anticipate getting rich providing support to Ukraine (these in addition to the usual suspects in defense industries).

We have seen them before in the Iraq reconstruction exercise. This lobbying will provide bait to Democrats and Republicans who otherwise might walk away from the war. But will it be enough to go against the will of American voters?

Americans can rightly ask: What are we getting for these huge outlays that will seriously burden US taxpayers? The US policy on Ukraine is a disaster from many angles, but for sure one of them is the huge dollar cost in supporting this endless misadventure.

Seymour Hersh just dropped a new article at Substack. You can find it here, but it’s behind a paywall, so I will summarize the main points below.

The main assertion of the article is that a US intelligence source of Hersh’s has stated that Putin was behind Prigozhin’s death and the reason was that Prigozhin was potentially provoking NATO and that was too reckless and unacceptable for Moscow:

“Prigozhin was provoking NATO and he had to go,” the US intelligence official said. “The last thing Putin wanted to do was to give NATO further cause to shelve its growing doubts about the endless financing of [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelensky.” 

So, the official said, “Putin did it.” Prigozhin had become too dangerous.

The intelligence source also reveals that the plane that blew up with Prigozhin and some of his closet associates onboard was suddenly and inexplicably pulled in for service the day before the doomed flight.

It was then, the intelligence official said, that bombs with delayed fuses bombs were placed in the wheelbase. The bombs were set to explode after the wheels were retracted.

The explanation for how the plane was downed sounds plausible. However, the source does not provide any evidence that it was Putin who actually ordered or approved it. The source provides a potential motive but motive alone doesn’t prove anything. Prigozhin had made many enemies who also had motives. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I still harbor some skepticism that Putin would do such a thing right in the middle of the BRICS summit, taking attention away from the constructive strides Russia and the rest of the BRICS countries are making toward a multipolar world. Why put a black mark on your own best PR?

I welcome readers’ thoughts in the comments.

Some additional interesting nuggets from the Hersh article include the claim by Hersh’s source (presumably from the CIA) that the US/UK media reporting on the progress of the war has been terribly inaccurate and is far too credulous of what Kiev says:

“The goal of Russia’s first line of defense was not to stop the Ukrainian offense,” the official told me, “but to slow it down so if there was a Ukrainian advance, Russian commanders could bring in reserves to fortify the line. There is no evidence that Ukrainian forces have gotten past the first line. The American press is doing anything but honest reporting on the failure thus far of the offense.

“What happened to the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine? Weren’t they supposed to open the door? And Zelensky is now claiming Ukraine had hypersonic bombs. He’s been bullshitting us like this as he always does. Where are the engineers and scientists manufacturing them? In a bunker somewhere? Or in Kiev? He’s pretending—stalling as long as he can?

The source suggests that military intelligence provides similarly poor information that is being used by the White House but that more accurate intelligence exists but is somehow prevented from reaching decision makers in the executive branch:

“Here is the key issue,” the official told me. “This kind of reporting from the military intelligence community is going to the White House. There are other views,” he said, obviously referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, that do not reach the Oval Office. “What is going to happen? Will we be supporting Ukraine as long as it takes? It’s not like we are fighting the Führer in Germany or the Emperor of Japan. The other day former vice president [Mike] Pence said that if we don’t defend Zelensky in Ukraine, Russia will come after Poland next. Is that the White House’s policy?” 

The source also told Hersh that the new Defense Minister of Ukraine, Rustem Umyerov, is even more corrupt that the one who just left (Oleksiy Reznikov), but interestingly Umyerov was not on CIA director William Burns’ list of corrupt officials provided to Kiev during a visit in January.

The last interesting comment by the intelligence source was that Putin is focused on running a war that he sees as critical to his nation’s security and doesn’t care what the American public thinks of him.