Donbass

This essay provides an economic geography perspective on the causes and consequences of the war in eastern Ukraine. It focuses on the controversial proposition that the armed conflict in 2014 was triggered by domestic, economically determined factors. The essay argues that economic and material circumstances in the region had generated neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a locally rooted, internally driven armed conflict. The role of the Kremlin’s military intervention was paramount for the commencement of hostilities. As the human and economic costs of the war continue to mount, Ukraine’s war-ravaged eastern regions face further depopulation, economic decline and erosion of development.

This chapter analyses bilateral Chinese–Russian energy relations , pre-and post Crimea. The signing of the Power of Siberia megapro-ject in May 2014, only two months after Russia's annexation of Crimea, created the impression that China bankrolled Russia out of the crisis. To assess the veracity of this impression, the authors draw a longer timeline of Russian–Chinese cooperation, examining general economic data as well as Chinese involvement in four concrete energy projects managed by leading Russian energy companies. They find that, in general, deals made from 2014 onward are in line with trends that originated well before the current crisis in Russia's relations with the West, and that Chinese financial contributions to the sector are not as large as they sometimes appear.

The leaked email accounts of Putin’s aide on Ukraine, Vladislav Surkov, are vast primary source collections that shed light on the backstage happenings of the Kremlin’s politics in the Donbas war. Surkov is an excellent dramaturg; he writes scripts, casts actors, analyzes their performance and narratives, runs promotions, and puts the repertoire into motion to achieve intended reactions of the target audience. Methods and resources employed against Ukraine have much in common with political technology that helps the Kremlin to manipulate public opinion as well as election systems using pseudo-experts, technical parties, fake civic organizations and youth movement such as Nashi, and covert media techniques. Moscow tactically promoted the myth of “Novorossiya”—later the circumstances forced Surkov to replace it with “Donbas.” These tactics gave false credibility to “separatists” who would voice Moscow’s objections to any attempts of Ukraine to drift westward, creating an illusion in the domestic and international audience: the separatists are not puppets of Moscow but desperately fight against Kyiv junta for their localized identity, and Russia is just there to offer them a helping hand. The Russian policy toward Ukraine after the 2013 fall is an extension of its “virtual” domestic politics, but not traditional diplomacy at all.

Ukraine previously experienced significant regional political divisions, including separatism in Crimea and Donbas. However, in contrast to post-communist countries such as Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and former Yugoslavia, prior to 2014 Ukraine was able to avoid a war and a break-up. This study examines the role of separatists, the Yanukovych government, the Maidan opposition and the Maidan government, far-right organizations, Russia, the US, and the EU in the conflict in Donbas. It uses a specially commissioned survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2014 to analyse public support for separatism in Donbas, compared to other regions of Ukraine, and the major factors which affect such support. It concludes that all these actors contributed in various ways to the conflict in Donbas, which involved both a civil war and a direct Russian military intervention since August 2014. The study links this conflict to the 'Euromaidan', specifically, the government overthrow by means of the Maidan massacre, and the secession and Russia's annexation of Crimea. The KIIS survey shows that support for separatism is much stronger in Donbas compared to other regions, with the exception of Crimea, and that the break-up of Ukraine is unlikely to extend to its other parts.

The effectiveness of recruitment strategies is crucial for sustainability of any insurgent campaign. This paper identifies eight mechanisms used to encourage overt and covert participation in the armed conflict in Donbas and shows that they varied depending on the type of service expected from a recruit. It relies on the original dataset compiled from studying 798 court cases of insurgents and informers convicted in Ukrainian courts in the period from October 2014 to March 2017. The paper finds that militants were more responsive to contractual or hierarchical mechanisms of recruitment, while informers who provided cover support were more likely to join through ideological appeals or activation of prior social ties.

THIS IS A PRELIMINARY DRAFT VERSION. FOR THE APPROVED AND EDITED VERSION WITH PAGE NUMBERING PLEASE GO TO THE PUBLISHER'S WEBSITE USING THE LINK ABOVE. The developments in Ukraine in 2014, including Euromaidan demonstrations, annexation of Crimea by Russia, and war in the country's two Eastern regions, became so intensely reported by Russian media that they often overshadowed internal news.1 In this review, I will try to take a closer look at the Russian discourses on Ukraine.

The paper focuses on the process of frozen or freezing conflicts
in the post-Soviet area and how they influence regional security in Eastern
Europe and South Caucasus. The key argument advanced is that the almost
three-year-long war in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) will become another frozen
conflict in the post-Soviet space. The reasons for this are the lack of agreement
between Ukraine and Russia on the future of the region and Russia’s support
for the Donbas administration. The main consequences of those conflicts are
destabilization, devastation and militarization of Eastern Europe. Russia has
experience leveraging conflicts of this type and using them to further its
foreign and security policy aims. Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova and
Ukraine are affected by the problem of frozen conflicts, which influence their
internal political, economic and social situation

The article analyses political mobilisation towards the establishment of an independent Ukrainian national church. Ukraine had three Orthodox churches, the largest of which is under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, while the others lacked ecclesiastical legitimacy.
On 11 October 2018, in a dramatic decision with geopolitical consequences, the Kyiv Patriarchate received ecclesiastical recognition from the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate. Drawing on 16 interviews with key clergy, academics and policy practitioners working on church-state relations in Kyiv, a literature review, and online data from Bulgarian,
Greek, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian sources, the article argues that the conflict in Donbas has been a key factor in the national and international mobilisation towards autocephaly. This article demonstrates that in Eastern Orthodoxy, churches perform state-like
functions in three areas, namely establishing diplomatic channels of communication; mobilising the faithful at national and international levels; and advancing human security discourses on violence, survival and tolerance.

Cet ouvrage examine les raisons qui, après la fin de la guerre froide, ont poussé des personnes et des populations entières, installées en Ukraine – ainsi que dans d’autres républiques d’ex-Union soviétique – depuis des siècles, à revendiquer une origine grecque et à élaborer des projets de migration de « retour » vers la Grèce. Il étudie les migrations grecques vers l’Empire russe où des Grecs, dans leur grande majorité ressortissants de l’Empire ottoman, se sont installés en nombre dès le XVIIIe s. Dans un second temps, il analyse les migrations de retour diasporiques et les migrations économiques transnationales d’Ukraine – et d’autres républiques d’ex-Union soviétique –, vers la Grèce et vers Chypre, dès la fin des années 1980. Il retrace, en particulier, l’histoire d’un groupe diasporique, les Grecs de Mariupol, et essaye d’analyser pourquoi il n’y a pas eu de « retour » collectif de ces Grecs vers la « mère-patrie imaginée ».

Accessible en ligne, sur OpenEdition, https://books.openedition.org/efa/4139

The main aim of the paper is to analyse the potential transitional justice mechanisms, directed at reintegration of Donbas, a territory temporarily occupied by pro-Russian separatists, being under the combination of a direct and indirect control of Kremlin, with Ukraine. In the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity and a remove of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych as a consequence of Euromaidan protests held in Kyiv, in the Winter 2013/14, Ukraine became a state involved in the international armed conflict covering its Eastern provinces as a result of an external aggression of the Russian Federation. Furthermore, since early-2014, Moscow is continuously using pro-Russian militants to form and uphold unrecognised, de facto regimes of the so-called 'Donetsk' and 'Luhansk People's Republic(s)' affecting the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state. It is argued that Kyiv shall take into consideration some of the peace and restoration models applied in similar conflict or post-conflict environments, such as the United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES) or the experience of numerous disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programs, filled with the transitional justice component. Moreover, by emphasising the context of a military (semi-frozen) conflict in Eastern Ukraine, the paper is going to shed more light on the possible application of transitional justice tool-kit in the ongoing conflicts scenarios and its potential contribution to the shift from a conflict to the postwar environment.

This article is unique G-mode of multidimensional classification method and its application in the analysis of hydrogeochemistry Donetsk basin. He has the following main advantages over other methods of classification: does not require a priori information for classification of observations; earmarks homogeneous observing classes and subclasses; evaluates information weight of each indicator, determines the distance between the homogeneous taxon's; assessment of the descriptiveness of the sign of the classification and others. G-method is widely used to analyze geochemical, environmental, kosmochemical, distance and other types of information. The method successfully used in examining objects, phenomena and processes on Earth, Moon, Mars, Saturn, comets, asteroids and deep space. The results of the use of G-method in analysis of hydrogeological data for the Donetsk basin identified direct and inverse geochemical zonality. This shows that in the region can be discovered oil and gas accumulations.

The aim of the paper is to explore the cultural context of the conflict in eastern Ukraine. From this perspective, the conflict in Donbas has to be seen not only in the context of a political game, socioeconomic transition and geopolitical interests, but also in the light of a cultural conflict rooted in history. According to Ukrainian researcher Mykola Riabchuk, Ukraine is divided, not between ethnic Rus-sians and Ukrainians, but between two different types of Ukrainian identity. These profound differences have been exacerbated by the events of the " Euromaidan " and, subsequently, the violent conflict between the separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics on the one hand and the post-revolutionary Ukrainian government on the other. This article focuses on how the cultural divisions of Ukrainian society have been used since the beginning of Ukrainian independence by the political elite as a tool of symbolic politics, contributing to the mass mobilization of Ukrainian society and the outbreak of a violent conflict.

This paper analyzes the role of far right in the Ukrainian politics during the “Euromaidan” and the war in Donbas. The issue of the involvement of Ukrainian far right organizations in the “Euromaidan” and the war in Donbas have been politicized and polarized. Russian and separatist politicians and the media often presented the “Euromaidan” as a “fascist coup” and the Maidan government as a “fascist junta.” In contrast, the governments and the mainstream media in Western countries tended to present the role of the far right in the “Euromaidan” and in post-Maidan Ukraine, specifically in the conflict in Donbas, as marginal. Previous academic studies generally reached similar conclusions. They focused on numerical strength and electoral support for the far right parties and ignored other aspects of influence of the radical nationalist and neo-Nazi parties, specifically their role in the political violence, such as the Maidan and Odesa massacres and the war in Donbas. However, the number of academic studies of the contemporary far right in Ukraine is generally limited.
            The research question is as follows: What is the role of the far right in the Ukrainian politics during and after the “Euromaidan”? This study analyzes the involvement of specific Ukrainian radical nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations in the “Euromaidan,” the Odesa massacre, and the war in Donbas, their performance in the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2014 and the 2015 local elections in Ukraine. The analysis focuses on major Ukrainian far right organizations, such as Svoboda (Freedom), the Right Sector, the Social-National Assembly, the White Hammer, the UNA-UNSO, Bratstvo, and C14, and paramilitary formations or special police and National Guard units organized and controlled to various extent by them, such as the Azov regiment, Dnipro, Donbas, Aidar, Sich, and St. Mary’s battalions, and the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps. It uses various sources of data, such as online recordings of live broadcasts and videos of the Maidan and Odesa massacres and the war in Donbas, official database of court decisions in Ukraine concerning investigations of the involvement of the far right in major cases of political violence, video recordings of the Maidan massacre trial, information posted on websites and social media groups of far right organizations, and media reports in Ukrainian, Russian, and English languages.
            The study shows that the far right organizations had significant but minority representation among the Maidan leadership and protesters, the post-Maidan governments, and in the presidential, parliamentary, and local elections. However, the analysis also shows that the far right organizations and football ultras played a key role during violent attacks, such as attempts to storm the presidential administration on December 1, 2013 and the parliament of Ukraine in January and on February 18, 2014. There is also various evidence of the Right Sector involvement in a violent attack of the Berkut police during its highly publicized dispersal of protesters on November 30, 2013. The Right Sector and Svoboda and smaller organizations had a crucial role in the violent overthrow of the Viktor Yanukovych government, in particular, in the Maidan massacre of the protesters and the police on February 18-20, 2014. The study demonstrates that the Right Sector, the Social-National Assembly/ Patriot of Ukraine, and groups of football ultras were involved in the Odesa massacre on May 2, 2014. This paper also shows that the far right organizations and their volunteer battalions and paramilitary units had a significant role in the civil war in Donbas but a comparably minor role in fighting with several regular Russian military units during direct military interventions by Russia in August 2014 and February 2015. Major implications of this study for the Ukrainian politics and the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine are discussed in the conclusion. This paper implies that the far right has significant but not dominant role in the Ukrainian politics during and after the “Euromaidan.” But far right organizations and their armed units had a key role in major cases of political violence during and after the “Euromaidan,” and they attained ability to overthrow by force the government of the one of the largest European countries.

Since the outbreak of the war in Donbas in 2014, the term opolchenie (insurgency) has become firmly associated with the militant groups controlling parts of eastern Ukraine. The word emerged as their preferred autonym, adopted by the progovernment Russian media and snubbed by Ukrainian outlets. Historically applied to the Russian volunteer military formations, "opolchenie" foregrounds the contentious idea of the grassroots nature of Donbas militias. Politically, it gestures towards the symbolic totality of the "Russian World" ("Russkii mir") mobilized to fight off foreign invaders. Using multimodal discourse analysis, I scrutinize the myth behind the name, examining how the image of the "opolchenets" ("insurgent") is cultivated as a transhistorical embodiment of heroic and virtuous Russianness in contemporary popular songs about the war in Donbas. I argue that songs serve to construct and popularize the new "opolchenets" identity in the Donbas region, simultaneously as an alternative to and extension of extant complex local identities.

The pro-Russian prisoners at Izoliatsiia went through similarly brutal torture often designed to extract preformulated confessions on, for instance, spying for Kyiv. The brutal persecution of “one’s own people” is a practice reminiscent of the Stalinist purges of the Bolshevik party and Soviet regime of the 1930s.

The article describes religious policy of the Soviet government concerning the Protestant communities on the basis of archival materials. Two different models of Soviet policy in the field of religion are analyzed, using the activities of the Commissioner of the Council for Religious Affairs in the Donetsk region in relation to Pentecostals and Adventists as an example. Ukrainian SSR was the "Bible belt" of the Soviet Union. Donetsk region was characterized by high percentage of Protestant communities in general and Adventist communities in particular. Most of the Adventist communities in the region were officially registered, and their members did not show significant dissident inclinations. Therefore, the case of Adventists serves as an example of the more tolerant Soviet religious policy, far from the usual stereotypes about repression and atheism. A slightly harsher attitude by the Soviet authorities can be observed towards the Pentecostal community. After the events of 1945, when the Soviet government forced Pentecostals and Baptists to unite, all Pentecostal communities automatically joined the ranks of opposition. Still, during 1965-1991, some registered Pentecostals made contact with the Soviet authorities. Unregistered communities remained a big problem for the Commissioner and were persecuted until liberalization of religious policy in the late 1980s. The authors pay particular attention to the examples of the way Pentecostal and Adventist regional leaders balanced the necessity to maintain friendly relationship with the authorities and the desire to worship God. It was this kind of controversy that became the main issue of the activities of Protestant religious organizations in the late USSR.

This paper examines the works of Ukrainian artists who comment on the current politics of memory in Ukraine, with the main focus on the artistic work of Nikita Kadan and David Chichkan, and the phenomenon of "Leninopad" - the demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin in Ukraine. Since the Maidan uprising in 2013/2014 and the subsequent attacks on the sovereignty and territory of Ukraine by Russia and the so-called “pro-Russian separatists”, there has been intense debate on how to interpret not only Ukraine’s dramatic present but also its complex and difficult past. The mechanism of forgetting about the Soviet past turned out to be particularly strong in Ukraine - forgetting by destroying, erasing, removing all physical remnants of the former system. The war for memory is taking place today with the destruction of Soviet monuments and other remnants of the Soviet history. The practice of ideological correctness is continued through the amputation of "unwanted" elements. It is not possible to have a private memory of the history of the nation, it is always a memory imposed and constructed by people who have power. In Ukraine, the future is to be built on a certain image of the past.

From June 22nd 1941, the Soviet state which was born from a revolutionary turmoil faced for the first time a full scale international war. As it was quickly named as “patriotic” by Stalin, this war saw a long lasting inflection of the Soviet discourse toward more nationalism. This could be felt also in movies. Hence, how the original revolutionary history would be linked with the new patriotic discourse? A focus on Leonid Lukov’s Alexandr Parkhomenko (1942) could help to see how the history of the 1918-21 Civil War was used and rewritten to serve the “Great Patriotic War” Soviet propaganda. Based upon four versions of the hero’s story issued by Vsevolod Ivanov between March 1939 and July 1942, this paper highlights the diplomatic, political and social constraints which shaped the movie as the public could eventually see it.

У статті аналізується навчальний процес у вищих духовних навчальних закладах Донецької області в 90-х роках ХХ – першому десятиріччі ХХІ століття. Для всебічного дослідження проблеми автором було залучено конфесійну періодику та нарративний матеріал (інтерв’ю з керівним складом духовних ВНЗ регіону)

Збірка статей за наслідками роботи всеукраїнської наукової конференції, що відбулася наприкінці 2014 р. в Інституті історії України НАНУ, висвітлює низку аспектів теорії і практики національного питання, актуалізованих подіями весни 2014 р.

Книга розрахована на читачів, які цікавляться вітчизняною історією.

State policy regarding the use of civilians for the defence of the country, promotion of military service and bringing them into the territorial defence battalions deserve special attention, given the difficult political and economic situation in the country after the Revolution Benefits. Thus, the experience of Ukraine regarding the formation of the system of territorial defence, and other mechanisms to combat the enemy in a hybrid war can serve as an example for other countries and alliances, in order to avoid similar mistakes and use them in the future for their own defence.

The paper reports The 3R (Three Ukrainian Revolutions) Symposium: Revolution , War and Their Consequences, which took place in Warsaw (Poland) on March 16-17, 2018. This multilayer event was organised as a part of the project named The 3R (Three Ukrainian Revolutions), initiated in the College of Europe in Natolin (Warsaw) in 2015, to provide the comparative studies over three revolutions witnessed in Ukraine in the last three decades. The 2018 conference gathered current and former politicians, diplomats, practitioners , scientists, journalists and social activists coming from mostly Ukraine and Poland, as well as the other states around the globe.

The aim of this paper is to present the role of visual representations in the weaponisation of social media on the example of the propaganda and agitation activities undertaken during the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The author presented the ways in which websites such as Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte are used to shape the social perception of the conflict and its participants, mobilize supporters and legitimize armed actions.

The seeming intractability of the conflict in East Ukraine can be explained by more than one factor. The paper argues that this war is based on the discursive construction of an enemy and much helped by demonization of the opponent. Ethnicization of political and economic differences between Ukraine’s regions makes compromise more difficult to reach. The invocation by the Ukrainian side of the identity markers of a savage, beastly outgroup, a “scum”, “subhumans,” “bastards,” when referring to the Donbass separatists, cannot but confirm the worst worries of those who might still be leaning to the idea of devolution and power sharing. The threats of legal punishment  propel continued resistance.

The author reaches a conclusion that an attempt to build a new Ukrainian nation by vilifying its Russophone constituents will fail. Political mobilization against the “Russian aggression” can be, at best, a temporary solution to the problem of the country’s unity. While the war against Donbass separatists consolidated Ukraine’s political nation, it has also demonstrated that the pro-Russian activists do not fit in there. It is still possible that meaningful devolution will help to heal Ukraine’s ethno-regional wounds. However, to assure such an outcome, Kiev and the West both need to stop molding an enemy figure out of Russia and Ukraine’s own Russian citizens.

Die Ukraine ist zwar kein EU-Mitgliedsstaat, jedoch aufgrund ihrer geografischen Nähe, prekären Situation und hohen Bedeutung für die europäische Sicherheitsordnung für die Union und Deutschland wichtig. Vor diesem Hintergrund verdienen die sogenannte „Ukraine-Krise“, d.h. die russischen Machenschaften in Osteuropa und ihre sicherheitspolitischen Folgen mehr Aufmerksamkeit. Die häufigen Diskussionen, ob die Ukraine und Russland zu Europa gehören, haben angesichts der Dringlichkeit existenziellerer Fragen eine therapeutische Funktion. Die „großen Fragen Europas“ lenken davon ab, dass die EU zunächst adäquate Antworten auf einige triviale Gefährdungen ihrer eigenen Sicherheit finden muss.

The facts, juxtapositions and arguments proposed by Kudelia are by themselves certainly of interest and well-presented. They should enter a full assessment of the emergence of the war. His observations, quotations and considerations are, by as such, valuable, relevant and correct. Yet, the summary picture that Kudelia paints in his text is unfinished. Though mentioning Russian “external prodding,” it overemphasizes existing tensions in the Donbas, and could thus misdirect readers unfamiliar with current Ukrainian history.