On April 12, 2014, the Russian-Ukrainian warwhich began with Russia’s illegal occupation of Crimea on 20 February 2014, has turned into a large and violent armed conflict. Many of the analysts, now in solidarity with Ukraine and active in condemning Russia’s large-scale invasion of February 24, 2022, remain ambivalent about its origins: due to Russian propaganda, theoretical preconceptions, simple naivety or other reasons , many of them indeed continue to make a clear distinction between the fighting in Ukraine before and after this date.
Russia’s role in the “rebellion” of eastern Ukraine
The Donbas war was one of several outcomes of a larger Russian attempt to take control of the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine, mostly Russian-speaking. Initially, the Kremlin intended to do this by minimizing military fighting. The best-known event of this (mostly secret but already widely organized and clearly military) operation was theannexation of Crimea by Russia between 20 February and 18 March 2014.
The attempt to capture what imperial Russian nationalists call Novorossiia (New Russia) included a multitude of other simultaneous subversive, hybrid, clandestine actions aimed at undermining social cohesion, political stability and the capacity of eastern and southern Ukraine, and not only. Among the most important tools of Russian hybrid warfare in mainland Ukraine as of early 2014 were the Russian and Ukrainian mass media under the influence of Russian or pro-Russian actors. However, the effect of Moscow’s demonization campaign on public opinion in eastern Ukraine remained limited. Not only Russian propaganda channels, but also foreign mass media often portrayed the pro-Russian demonstrations in Donbas at the time as an expression of supposedly widespread popular moods.
However, various opinion polls conducted before and during this phase paint a different picture. In March 2014, for example, still only a third of residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions supported the separation of Donbas from Ukrainea, while 56% rejected this idea. Many of the separatist actions in the cities of eastern and southern Ukraine were not only or not at all initiated locally, but were directed and financed from Moscow.
Strelkov’s Russian armed group and the escalation of violence
While tensions were already high in early April 2014, large-scale clashes only began in the second week of April. The new phase of the confrontation, in mid-April, saw the use of firearms and the omnipresence of Russian citizens. This escalation was the beginning of the Donbas war as an armed sub-conflict of Russia’s broader war against Ukraine, which began with Russian troop movements in Crimea on February 20, 2014 and has lasted until today. The Donbas war began when, on April 12, they were administrative buildings seized in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk of Donetsk Oblast under the leadership of irregular Russian fighters. The capture of Sloviansk was followed by the first large-scale fighting of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Anti-Ukrainian irregulars in Sloviansk were led by Russian citizen, retired colonel and former FSB officer Igor Girkin (alias “Strelkov”). Girkin’s armed group, consisting of over 50 irregular fighters, had just arrived in Ukraine via territory from already occupied Crimea, where most of these men had participated in the annexation operation. The group played a decisive role in the transformation of the Donbas regional civil conflict into a proxy interstate war between Russia and Ukraine. In an interview with the far-right Russian weekly Zavtra (Tomorrow) in November 2014, Girkin admitted: “I pulled the trigger on war. If our unit [armata] had not crossed the border [dalla Russia all’Ucraina]everything would have gone the way it went in Kharkiv [nell’Ucraina nord-orientale] and Odesa [nell’Ucraina meridionale]. […] [L’impulso alla guerra, che dura ancora oggi, è stato dato dalla nostra unità [armata]. We shuffled all the cards that were on the table. All!”.
The so-called Ukrainian “separatists” led by Moscow
Il April 13interim Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov announced thestart of the so-called anti-terrorism operation (ATO). The Ukrainian government’s initial decision to launch the defensive operation as an anti-terrorist rather than military operation – despite evidence from the outset of deep Russian involvement in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk – is sometimes interpreted as evidence of internal state conflict rather than international. However, this decision was made on pragmatic rather than paradigmatic grounds, especially because the Prevention of separatism is part of Ukrainian anti-terrorism legislation rather than on defence. In April 2014, Kyiv was unwilling to announce martial law before the presidential elections, which were scheduled for May 2014 and would have been canceled under the state of emergency.
Various research on the beginning and progress of the Donbas war has revealed the multiple connections between anti-Ukrainian irregular actors apparently independent in eastern Ukraine, on the one hand, and Russian state bodies, in Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Simferopol or elsewhere, on the other. The German-based Russian historian, Nikolay Mitrokhin, was among the first prominent academics to point out, in an article titled Transnational provocation, the crucial role not only of Russian irregular actors, but also of the Russian state in the outbreak of the apparently civil Donbas war. Later, the Japanese political scientist Sanshiro Hosaka with his articles, for example Russian Political Technology in the Donbas War, and the German researcher Jakob Hauter with his book Russia’s Overlooked Invasionconfirmed and supported Mitrokhin’s first indications.
Even before the appearance of detailed empirical investigations into Russia’s involvement, the latter factor appeared as the most plausible explanation for the outbreak of the war. The broader political context of the military escalation in Donbas in the spring of 2014 was, from the start, suggestive. It could not be a coincidence that the war was brewing and finally erupting at the same time that Russian regular troops were conquering Crimea and Russia was accelerating a multidirectional hybrid attack against mainland Ukraine. A strange aspect of the apparent “rebellion” in Donbas has always been that, from start to finish, it has never included any well-known political or other leaders, nor relevant political or other organizations in the region.
The arrival of Russian regular forces in the Donbas war
To this day, the Russia denies that its regular troops were actively involved in waging the Donbas war. This was, in fact, largely true until the end of August 2014. However, in addition to the crucial role of Russian regular troops in the annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014, several cases occurred in eastern Ukraine indicating the presence of not only irregular but also regular Russian soldiers.
The most infamous exception was thecrew of a Buk TELAR self-propelled surface-to-air missile system of the Russian Air Defense Forces which in July 2014 entered the territory of eastern Ukraine for a couple of days, accidentally shooting down the Malaysian Airlines passenger flight MH-17 which, with 298 civilians on board, was flying over the Donbas. At the same time that small Russian regular detachments, such as the Buk unit, supported pro-Russian irregulars fighting in the Donbas, the Russian army began firing across the border at Ukrainian troops. In the month of July 2014, several rocket and artillery attacks against Ukrainian positions from Russian territory were immortalized in photos and videos. The first of these attacks occurred on July 11, 2014 near the village of Zelenopillya, Luhansk Oblast, and caused the death of 30 Ukrainian soldiers and border guards. In a report published in December 2016, the famous OSINT group Bellingcat described Russian bombing of Ukraine on at least 149 separate occasions.
In the following month, Russia finally invaded mainland Ukraine on a large scale. The August 14, 2014a large column at least Two dozen armored personnel carriers and other vehicles of the Russian army crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border. This was the first massive intrusion of Russian regular forces into mainland Ukraine confirmed by independent observers. By the end of August 2014, up to eight so-called “battalion tactical groups” (BTG) of the Russian Armed Forces had been deployed on the territory of Ukraine, with over 6,000 personnel.
Despite these events, many politicians, journalists, diplomats and even some scholars around the world still follow the Kremlin’s propaganda narrative about the Donbas war of the last 10 years when commenting on these events. The media, political, academic and civil commentators should make sure to understand well the origins and nature of war. Politicians, diplomats and other actors interested in the future of Ukraine should explicitly and continuously emphasize in their public and non-public statements that the armed conflict in Donbas in 2014-2022 was a proxy interstate war between Russia and Ukraine and not an internal civil war within Ukraine.
Julia Kazdobina is a Senior Fellow at the Security Studies Program of the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism” in Kiev, while Jakob Hedenskog and Andreas Umland are analysts at the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies of the Swedish Institute for international business. This article is based on a soon-to-be-published SCEEUS report: