In this essay, translated from the French original published on the *Contretemps* web site*,* Ukrainian philosopher and feminist activist Daria Saburova uncovers the roots of the present Ukraine-Russia conflict. References in brackets and footnotes are in the original text, while website links have been added to provide access to relevant background information. Translation by Dick Nichols.
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So, one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will be a social revolution! [...] Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.
**—Lenin, "The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up", 1916
On September 30, Putin endorsed Russia's annexation of the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, following the bogus referenda held between September 23 and 27, repeating the scenario already tried out in 2014 in Crimea and the Donbass. This coup de force comes in the context of a major counter-offensive by the Ukrainian army in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions and aims to justify the “partial mobilisation” of Russian reservists announced on September 21.
While this new episode of “popular self-determination” should shed some light on what happened in 2014, some voices on the left are still accusing Ukraine of having provoked the current military escalation. This article looks back at the events of 2014-2022 to answer several questions that continue to tug at the heartstrings of the radical left and hinder its solidarity with the Ukrainian popular resistance. These questions concern the separatist movement and the war in Donbass, the Minsk agreements, the politics of the post-Maidan government, the advance of the far right and the prospects for the left in Ukraine.
On February 27, 2014, a few days after the fall of Viktor Yanukovych following the Maidan (or Euromaidan) revolution, a group of armed persons took control of the Parliament and cabinet offices of ministers in Crimea. The next day, the “little green men”, soldiers dressed in unmarked military uniforms, took over the airports of Sevastopol and Simferopol, as well as other strategic locations on the peninsula. More than two-thirds of the Ukrainian troops stationed in Crimea and 99% of the security personnel switched to the Russian side (Stepaniuk, 2022: 90). Barely three weeks later, following a hastily organised referendum, Putin signed the act of incorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation (d'Anieri, 2019: 1).
In April of the same year, in eastern Ukraine, separatist forces took control of administrative buildings in Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkiv, and called for referenda on independence for these regions. Although the Ukrainian authorities quickly regained control of Kharkiv, they were unable to recover the separatist regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, and the counter-revolution was at risk of spreading to other cities in the South-East.
The Ukrainian government responded to the creation of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (which declared their independence in May) by launching an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) with fighting that lasted until February 2015, when the Minsk II agreement was signed. Although this agreement contributed to a significant reduction in the intensity of the fighting, it suffered, as we know, the same failure as the first agreement of September 2014. Before the February 2022 invasion, the war had already claimed more than 13,000 lives and created nearly two million refugees (Melnyk, 2022).
The questions most often asked in connection with these events concern the nature of the conflict in Donbass and the inevitability of its expansion: was it a civil war, a war of Russian aggression against Ukraine or a war that could be characterised as inter-imperialist from the start? Could the continuation of the war in the Donbass and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine have been avoided if the Minsk agreements had been effectively implemented?
If we look for a purely descriptive answer to the first question, there is no doubt that the war in Donbass can be characterised as a civil war, as a part of the local population actually participates first in the anti-Maidan demonstrations and then in the pro-Russian separatist movement. The fact that the warring parties might receive external assistance does not change the validity of this description: civil wars generally involve external intervention in one form or another. However, on the political plane this issue quickly goes beyond the simply descriptive or theoretical aspect and becomes partisan, because it is a question of respective responsibilities that in turn determine political stances towards the Donbass conflict (Marples, 2022: 2; Goujon, 2021: 79).
Thus, Putin has always denied Russia's military involvement in the Donbass. The term “civil war” to describe what is happening there is part of the ideological arsenal of Russian propaganda. On the other hand, on the part of the Ukraine and the European institutions, the term "civil war" is banned even as they recognise the participation of the local population in the separatist movement. The war in Donbass has been described since 2014 (and officially since 2018) as a “Russian war of aggression”, to emphasise not only Russia's military involvement in a civil war that was already underway, but also, and above all, its decisive role in triggering it (Cherviatsova, 2022: 29). It is not denied that the local population joined the separatists, but they are seen as mere puppets of the Kremlin.
It has to be recognised that both these aspects of the conflict are present, and the question should rather be about the relationship between them. It is certain that the separatist movement would not have succeeded in gaining a foothold without a minimum of support from the local population, or rather without lack of support for the post-Maidan regime and for the Donbass liberation operation launched by the Ukrainian government in the spring of 2014.
There are no viable opinion polls regarding the territories under separatist control. But it should be remembered that in these territories, the Party of Regions and its leader Viktor Yanukovych, himself a native of Donetsk, won more than 80% of the vote in the second round of the 2010 presidential elections. A large part of the predominantly Russian-speaking population conceives of itself as “ethnic Russian”, shares nostalgic feelings for the USSR—both in its positive socio-economic aspects and in its socially and politically conservative aspects—and that the entire region is economically dependent on links with Russia (Marples, 2022: 3-4).
The events of 2014 can thus be understood as the culmination of a process over the previous decade in which the different fractions of Ukrainian capital invested in and exploited real divisions in identity and economy. By accentuating these divides each fraction could profile itself in the electoral game, relegating to the background the socio-economic and political concerns common to the working classes in all regions of Ukraine.
This was not always the case. The ethnocultural and linguistic theme of the “two Ukraines” only became central in politics after the 2004 elections between Viktor Yanukovych and Viktor Yushchenko. At the same time, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) was marginalised as an independent player in political life and entered into coalition with the Party of Regions. From 2004 onwards, Ukrainian political life would thus be permanently structured according to the division between, on the one hand, the national-democratic, liberal and pro-European camp claiming a West-Ukrainian identity and, on the other, the paternalist, Russian-speaking, pro-Russian camp, claiming a South-East-Ukrainian identity.
This divide also takes the form of a struggle over historical memory: some claim to be part of a national liberation movement with Stefan Bandera as a national hero, while the others emphasise the “Great Patriotic War” against fascism. Each side develops a diabolical image of the other: western Ukrainians are stigmatised as the heirs of Nazi collaborators, eastern Ukrainians as nostalgic for the Stalinism responsible for the death of several million Ukrainians during the famine of the 1930s. This domestic dynamic is accompanied on the geopolitical level by a rise in tensions between Russia and the West, which end up crystallising in a special way around the Ukrainian question (Gorbach, 2022).