The other Ukraine war Analysis by Foreign Policy

Some details are revealed in an article by the Foreign Policy magazine that analyzes Anna Arutunyan's new book, which examines Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Before February 24 of last year, the phrase “war in Ukraine” referred to a simmering conflict in the Donbas between the Ukrainian Armed Forces and two Russian-backed breakaway territories, Donetsk and Luhansk. The conflict, which has claimed more than 14,000 lives since the outbreak of war in 2014, is now at risk of going down in history as a prologue to the full-scale offensive unleashed by the Kremlin last year.

Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle For Ukraine offers an in-depth account of the first days of Russia’s covert invasion of Ukraine in 2014 that, as the title suggests, was carried out by a murky medley of state and non-state actors. Arutunyan examines the motivations of the ragtag bands of militias, the oligarchs that funded them, and the officials in Moscow who, at turns, fueled the fighting and struggled to impose order amid the chaos. What becomes apparent is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no master strategist. The picture that emerges is of a Kremlin plagued by decision paralysis, paranoia, and poor intelligence. This, in turn, sheds new light on the roots of today’s war.

A journalist turned analyst, Arutunyan draws extensively from her time covering the annexation of Crimea and the early days of the war in the Donbas for USA Today and her work for the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization that seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts. Begun long before Russia’s February invasion, but published in its wake, Arutunyan acknowledges in the foreword that the book “would rub many people the wrong way” by offering a detailed examination of the motivations of those who stoked the war in the Donbas in 2014 while Ukrainian civilians are today terrorized by Russian bombs, but this is precisely where the book’s value lies.

In the aptly titled first section of the book, “How a Bunch of Guys Started a War…,” Arutunyan introduces us to the figures—some Russian, some Ukrainian—who sought to seize a moment in 2014 as the ghosts of imperialism, grievance, and separatism were awakened by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the wider political upheaval in Ukraine. In that country, a popular uprising had removed the country’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, and ushered in a new era of ambitious reforms.

Two of the principal architects of the first days of the war in the Donbas were Konstantin Malofeyev—a devout Orthodox oligarch enamored of the history of the Russian Empire who provided the money—and Igor Girkin, a wiry former member of the Russian security services who provided the muscle. The two men have long been thought of as in receipt of ideas and orders handed down from Russian officials to allow for a veneer of plausible deniability, but as Arutunyan demonstrates, they were equally proactive in pushing their own ideas up the chain as well.

In April 2014, Girkin led 52 men over the Russian border and into the Donbas, where they linked up with local armed groups. By the beginning of May, Arutunyan writes, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defense ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions.”

As in other breakaway regions in the former Soviet Union, Russian geopolitical entrepreneurs, and later the Kremlin, were able to exploit local grievances in the Donbas. This was Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where many regarded with suspicion the democratic revolution that was being led from Kyiv and set the country on a firmly pro-European course. The first phase of the conflict “was thus as much civil as it was geopolitical,” Arutunyan writes, “as much fueled by local divisions as it was by Moscow’s meddling.”

Arutunyan’s interviews with local separatists from 2014 underscore the complex nature of identity in the borderlands of the former Soviet Union and should serve as a word of caution for those who casually talk about the prospects for the disintegration of Russia in the wake of the current war. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to Dima and Sasha, the former a Ukrainian citizen, the latter a Russian, who both took up arms to fight for Girkin on the front lines against the Ukrainian army. “They came to feel that they, Russians, were being told they were somehow inferior, that they had no place in the new Ukrainian nation,” she writes.

Girkin pulled together a motley band of rebel fighters, but the one thing the separatists lacked in the early months of the conflict, Aruntunyan writes, was “Russia’s formal recognition and protection.”

The Kremlin ultimately did send in regular Russian forces in August 2014, a fact that has been well-documented by journalists and foreign governments despite Moscow’s repeated denials. Still, Arutunyan’s dissection of the months that preceded the covert invasion reveal how events got ahead of the Russian president as oligarchs, Russian lawmakers, and even his own security services—buoyed by the annexation of Crimea earlier that year—sought to seize their moment in the Donbas.

Putin is often described in omnipotent terms, yet those who have studied the Russian system closely describe the decision-making process within the Kremlin far more chaotically. Where things get messy is in what Arutunyan describes as Putin’s “rule by signal” model, in which nods and winks from the boss are subject to (mis)interpretation by the various players in the Russian system looking to enrich themselves and advance their own pet projects in the process. A contemporary example: The Wagner mercenary group and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin—which is at once independent of, but closely tied to, the Russian state—have been both indispensable in the Russian war effort and are reportedly at odds with the Ministry of Defense.

Various Russian freelancers forged ahead in 2014 with hopes of reestablishing Novorossiya, as the southeastern region of Ukraine was known during the time of the Russian Empire. Putin, meanwhile, was paralyzed—and highly cognizant that the risks of wading in were far higher and support for doing so weaker. “If [Putin] launched a full-blown military intervention, he would trigger a tougher Western response and quite possibly find himself trying to prop up a regime with no real constituency,” Aruntunyan writes. “Yet if he backed away entirely, he would show weakness to the Americans and to his own nationalists. He could neither advance nor abandon the Donbas project.”

Intercepted telephone calls between rebel leaders and officials in Russia reveal the chaos that reigned as Girkin begged for reinforcements from Russia. “We won’t hold on for certain. What we’ve got now just helps us keep our pants up,” he told the assistant of the newly installed head of Russian-occupied Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, in a call on June 8. Later that month, he would publicly accuse officials in Moscow of “systemically sabotaging” the separatists. Girkin has since become a prominent critic of how Moscow has executed its most recent invasion of Ukraine. His messages on Telegram are routinely cited in the Western press. Arutunyan’s account of his disillusionment with the Kremlin after 2014 is a timely reminder of the ax he has to grind.

Ultimately, Putin faced a quagmire similar to the one he faces today. Any perceived abandonment of the rebel groups and Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine risked inflaming Russian nationalists and imperialists that the Kremlin had sought to reassure. “For Putin, it was paramount that these people continued viewing the West as their true enemy, and not the Kremlin itself.” This also raises the question as to how Putin could not have foreseen the Pandora’s box of nationalism that would be opened by the most recent invasion.

For more than seven years, the Kremlin held off on recognizing the independence of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics. The full history of why Putin went from keeping the region at arm’s length to using it as justification to launch a catastrophic invasion of Ukraine is yet to be written. While few can envision how the current war will end, it nevertheless represents “the last, violent throws of a dying empire that will leave something new in its wake,” Arutunyan writes.