Valeria Lazarenko. European Politics & Society. Volume 20, Issue 5, December 2019.
Introduction
The current conflict in Ukraine is a trigger for social, political and economic processes, and therefore requires specific narrative frameworks to help people to understand what is going on. Armed violations in eastern Ukraine from May 2014 evoked plenty of contradictions concerning such deep realms as the values and ideals existing in complex Ukrainian society. More than a million and a half of the people from the conflict-affected area became internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Academics coming from different perspectives define the situation as a ‘conflict’, ‘armed conflict’, ‘war’, ‘civil war’, ‘insurgency’, or ‘anti-terroristic operation’. The latter is what Ukrainian authorities officially named it up to 22 February 2018, when Ukraine adopted a new law and re-labelled the Anti-Terroristic Operation as the Operation of Joint Forces. Some Western scholars characterize the war in Donbas as a Russian invasion, starting with special units of ‘green men’ and then followed by regular Russian troops (Czuperski, Herbst, Higgins, Polyakova, & Wilson, 2015). In contrast, other scholars emphasize the expansion of US-led NATO forces towards Russian borders, and Western support for the regime-change in Ukraine, as a trigger for the Russian annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Donbas (Mearsheimer, 2014; Sakwa, 2015). Some studies portray the conflict as a civil war along with Russian military intervention, which they define in various ways (Katchanovski, 2016).
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, for example, classifies the conflict in Donbas as intrastate armed conflict, where
an armed conflict is a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in one calendar year.
However, there are two aspects to the current conflict with reference to the major struggle areas, Crimea and Donbas, which have differing international status. Crimea, according to the International Criminal Court Preliminary Report remains
… an international armed conflict between Ukraine and the Russian Federation which began at the latest on 26 February 2014, and that the law of international armed conflict would continue to apply after 18 March 2014 to the extent that the situation within the territory of Crimea and Sevastopol factually amounts to an ongoing state of occupation.
Eastern Ukraine, according to this report, continues to be in a situation of armed conflict, and the Prosecutor’s Office is still
determining whether the otherwise non-international armed conflict involving Ukrainian armed forces and anti-government armed groups could be actually international in character; the Office continues to examine allegations that the Russian Federation has exercised overall control over armed groups in eastern Ukraine.
Nevertheless, the official naming of the conflict was changed when the current President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, on 20 February 2018 signed into law the new Donbas integration legislation that justifies the conflict as ‘taking measures to ensure national security and defence, and repulsing and deterring the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts’. Approved on 18 January 2018, with 280 votes in favour, by the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament with 450 seats, the law declares Russia an aggressor state that occupies parts of Ukraine and governs them with its own authorities. As a result, it also states that Russia is mainly responsible for protecting human rights and providing decent living conditions for the local population in the occupied territories. Such relabelling of the conflict raises the new discourse concerning the situation in Ukraine. It also adds even more complexity to the multiplicity of strategic narratives that form the discourses within which Ukrainians live today.
A generalized narrative about the state, its history, present conditions, and future aspirations, may be defined as a form of a ‘national biography’, that is, an abstraction, a ‘simplified story that leaves out some things at the expense of others to carve out a distinct life path, which makes certain traits visible’ (Berenskoetter, 2014). The process of creation of such a story requires not only acts of selection but also creative acts of interpretation. As Berenskoetter states, narratives are mostly aimed at providing the Self with knowledge about its place in ‘the world’, specifically to situate the Self and delineate its existence in time and space, and provide a necessary sense of orientation in past, present and future. However, narratives shared on a community level serve to fulfil the overall human need to inscribe themselves into larger, permanent, spatial and temporal structures in an attempt to give meaning to their existence—and that is a way of visualizing the nation as an imagined community (Anderson, 1991). So, the narrative tends to function as an ‘anxiety-controlling mechanism’ needed to provide the communities with a sense of ontological security, postulate their existence. Nevertheless, the ‘ontological structure of a community is not sustained by acts as such, but through a narrative that renders acts meaningful in time and space’ (Berenskoetter, 2014).
The concept of strategic narratives points up the fact that stories have always shaped the way humans understand the world. Despite the fact that today’s world is more chaotic than rational, the narrative is the thing that keeps people together, and so becomes even more crucial for ordering and explaining the chaos (Burke, 1969). Nowadays, strategic narratives, formed at a state level and spread throughout media communication, can be considered as a soft power, as they specify how people relate to certain actors, events, and explanations that describe the history of a country, or the specifics of a policy (Roselle, Miskimmon, & O’Loughlin, 2014). Narrative communication is a process that helps understanding of how soft power resources work, especially with the use of culture, values or policies, to form personal narratives. Thus a biographical narrative of the state delineates ‘an experienced space (giving meaning to the past) intertwined with an envisioned space (giving meaning to the future) and delineated through horizons of experience and of possibility, respectively’ (Berenskoetter, 2014). However, narratives are not easily controlled but may be used strategically as a representational force (Mattern & Mattern, 2005). There are three primary levels to analyse strategic narratives, that are inextricably linked: international system narratives, national narratives and issue narratives (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, & Roselle, 2017).
This article will summarize two national-level strategic narratives regarding the conflict—one Ukrainian and one Russian—as well as one dealing with the international system, as perceived by the Ukrainian population. Narratives of each level seem to be soft power resources and always raise discussions on the importance of media and propaganda, and their responsibility for the onset of the conflict. Ukrainians are continually finding themselves in a virtual battlefield of media discourses: while the Western and Ukrainian press and TV stations threaten audiences with the spectre of a new Cold War caused by Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin-controlled press and TV stations are doing the same, fuelling the atmosphere of being encircled by current or potential enemies (Lakomy, 2016). Therefore, due to a profound lack of journalist objectivity while reporting the course of events in Eastern Europe, it is increasingly difficult to carry out an unprejudiced analysis of this conflict and acknowledge all the complexity that Ukrainians are experiencing on a daily basis.
While the vast majority of academic investigations concerning the conflict in Ukraine aim to make a sophisticated analysis and find out objective information, this article takes an overview of the situation from a social psychology viewpoint. Consequently, this article will present and analyse the central strategic narratives, which form a continuum for the majority of the personal stories about war and peace.
Story #1. Ukraine struggling for freedom
The main Ukrainian strategic narrative, distributed through the media and the speeches of state authorities, can be simplified to a linear interpretational matrix. Here the story begins at the end of November 2013, when the highly-corrupt regime of president Yanukovych deprived Ukrainians of their expectation that the association treaty with the EU would be signed. His refusal to do so was a trigger for civil protests, lately called ‘Euromaidan’. Government forces suppressed these peaceful protests; some activists and police officers were murdered. Finally, president Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Ukraine started building a new democratic state.
Shortly after, uniformed troops without any recognizable insignias arrived on the Crimean Peninsula, and within a few days seized the main administrative buildings, supported by locals afraid of regime change. A referendum was held on 16 March 2014, and led to the so-called ‘incorporation’ of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The process remains unrecognized by Ukrainian officials, as there is no legal procedure in the constitution allowing for a member of the state to withdraw from it and join another country. Since 18 March 2014, Crimea has remained under Russian occupation, and Ukraine has severed ties with the peninsula—for instance, by cutting the transportation, water and energy supplies Furthermore, people who come to Crimea through Russia, immediately are seen as illegal entrants across Ukrainian borders and are banned from entering Ukraine for the next couple of years.
In terms of the Ukrainian national strategic narrative, the conflict in Donbas may look like a continuation of Russian imperialistic politics aimed at seizing Ukrainian territories. In this narrative, Russian forces were deployed in Eastern Ukraine to provoke insurgency and separatism movements in Donbas. All the subsequent events are a heroic struggle of Ukrainians against the aggressor and invader: the Ukrainian army is fighting Russian forces and separatists, who are not actually Ukrainians.
It is also presupposed that people in Crimea and Donbas do not have enough Ukrainian identity, mostly because of being Russian-speakers and supporters of a pro-Russian regime. Lack of ‘Ukrainity’ in the Eastern region is usually inferred from the fact that the Donetsk and Luhansk Regions, along with Crimea, were the most pro-Russian and proCommunist regions in Ukraine since its independence in 1991, as measured by voting, foreign policy orientations, and support for Russian as the second state language in Ukraine (Katchanovski, 2016). Such points were also expressed by Ukrainian opinion leaders, who literally claimed that ‘Sevastopol is not Ukraine’ or that Crimea and Donbas should separate from Ukraine, years before the conflict. So that is one of the reasons why the situation may not look like a civil war, but like struggling with the impersonalized and dehumanized collective image of the enemy.
The Ukrainian strategic narrative also includes the thesis that low living standards, economic decline, and constant danger are the price of freedom. That is why questioning, complaining and raising doubts about the rightfulness of current policy is not acceptable, whether for journalists, academicians, or critical social media users. It is worth admitting that the Ukrainian strategic narrative is developed at a governmental level, for instance by a specific Ministry of Information Policy, created to disseminate the government propaganda and shape coverage of the war in Donbas in the media and social media (Katchanovski, 2016). However, in 2015, the year of the most violent clashes during the conflict, only 32 per cent of Ukrainians believed that the war in Donbas is a separatist rebellion supported by Russia. According to the same Razumkov Centre poll, 28 per cent thought that this was a war between Russia and Ukraine, 16 per cent that this was a civil war, 8 per cent that this was a war between Russia and the US, and 7 per cent that this was a fight for independence of the self-proclaimed republics. Katchanovsky suggests that while a significant minority of Ukrainians shared the propagated view that the war in Donbas is a war between Ukraine and Russia, the majority of the respondents saw it as an intrastate conflict with Russian involvement.
Besides controlling the view of the present, the Ukrainian strategic narrative also tends to incorporate past events into the general story of struggling for freedom. The result of this process is, for instance, the never-ending rewriting of history and the changing of emphasis on past events, creating new heroic stories and reforming the attitudes towards historical actors. Thus, a decommunization law officially stated the crimes of the Soviet regime, and required the renaming of cities, towns, and streets, as well as rewriting school textbooks on history. However, this process is poorly supported by historical and cultural work that would be able to explain the complexity of Ukrainian history to the majority of the population. Instead, people face on-going situations of ‘gaslighting’ when the beliefs, social attitudes, and even street names may change faster than their perception, so people may never know what information to believe today (Nuzov, 2017). Therefore the continuing process of understanding the present requires responsible contextualization, to avoid a perception of the historian ‘as a doctor, who has to prescribe society medicine against communism or nationalism’ (Portnov, 2017).
The narrative described can be seen as a perfect example of relative deprivation theory, generally used to explain the collective violence as a result of anger caused by discontent and lack of civil rights among a notable group in society (Jakobsen, 2011, Chapter 1). According to this theory, mostly developed by Ted Gurr, relative deprivation is a consequence of a discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities, so the likelihood of rebellion increases when discontent connects with political targets. Frustration becomes aggression, and dissatisfaction actualizes in acts of rebellion (Gurr, 1981). The Ukrainian strategic narrative could be a manifestation of the theory, as people as people experienced the gap between their expectations (of their government signing the association treaty with EU) and the reality. Thus, protests became a proper way to deal with discontent.
This narrative is the dominant one in the official Ukrainian context, and it moulds general perceptions of what is happening. Moreover, this militaristic narrative plays with words like ‘dignity’, ‘democracy’ and so on, and thus may be the root cause for tensions in society, blaming and ‘othering’ people who moved away to escape the war.
Story #2. Russian narratives of insurgency
Official Russian rhetoric about the situation, or, in academic terms, the Russian strategic narrative towards Ukraine, is grounded on two main points: the incorporation of Crimea and the protection of the Russian-speakers in the diaspora.
Despite the preliminary decision of the International Criminal Court that claims that the situation on the Crimean Peninsula is an ‘ongoing state of occupation’, the official Russian position, supported by the media, labels it as ‘incorporation’ and ‘restoration of historical justice’. From this position, armed individuals wearing no identifying insignia, are presented as ‘the polite people’, who arrived in Crimea to save the Russian-speaking population from feasible violations by the new Ukrainian government.
The above-mentioned protective story justified military intervention in the eyes of people and was used to convince the dwellers of Eastern Ukraine that they were in potential danger from the change of political regime in the spring of 2014. These claims mostly appealed to the Russian language-speakers, Russian being spoken by the majority of Donbas inhabitants, also appealing to an element of their personal and national identity. So, the menace of being oppressed for the language they used was persuasive enough for them to vote on the referendum to withdraw from the Ukrainian state.
The Russian perspective toward the Euromaidan and the subsequent events suggests that it took place because of direct Western involvement, and that the West manifestly failed to deal with, and even made a pact with, extremism. That is why most of the reports from the Russian government-affiliated media maintain Euromaidan was a direct consequence of support from the EU and United States (Marples, 2016). The events of Euromaidan itself are perceived as a coup d’état that removed a democratically-elected president from power as a result of extremist neo-Nazi involvement on the one hand and as a direct consequence of Western involvement on the other.
Again, this strategic narrative includes the continuous denial of a Russian presence. Both these aspects of the Russian story may seem controversial; nevertheless, they still accompany each other: for instance, Ivan D. Loshkariov and Andrey A. Sushentsov argue that the Russian diasporants in the new ‘republics’ had to accept that, on Ukrainian issues, Moscow maintained a restrained policy and that ‘Russia promotes Ukrainian territorial integrity instead of support for the diaspora’. They also claim that Russians in Donbas are forced to reimagine and reflect on their legacy and their attitude towards their diasporal homeland (Loshkariov & Sushentsov, 2016).
Moreover, journalists and academic scientists also stand firm on the position that Ukraine is not a point of Russian strategic interest and that no expansion—neither by hard power nor by soft power—is being advanced. According to Novaya Gazeta journalist Kanygin, ‘The Kremlin … wants to shove the [rebel] republics back into Ukraine on the condition of some sort of autonomy’. 9 Whereas, as Robinson admits, most Western observers believe that the call for autonomy hides a desire to extend Russian influence into Ukraine, and that Moscow has always opposed the uprising in Donbas (Robinson, 2016).
This narrative spreads, not only via Russian media, but also via the statements of Ukrainian public actors. For instance, Gennadiy Kernes, a mayor of Kharkiv, the second biggest city in the country, in 2015 completely denied Russian aggression; the same view was expressed by Mikhail Dobkin, the leader of the opposition in Ukraine. It is worthwhile admitting that such phrases were taken out of context from the interviews, where the politicians explained their positions in complex ways. Nevertheless, such statements are rapidly incorporated into the narrative of Russian ‘non-presence’, as was a claim of Georgii Tuka, deputy minister of the occupied territories. He stated that ‘there is no war between Ukraine and Russia’, meaning the absence of legal procedures to concede the Russian occupation of Donbas. This claim was immediately extracted from its context and appeared in the media as proof of the strategic narrative being discussed.
However, Andrei Skriba claims that in the European part of the post-Soviet space, Russian interests are restricted only to economic cooperation, security, regional stability, and cultural contacts, but admits the preservation of historical influence. These interests determine Russian actions and reactions to other countries’ policies (Skriba, 2016). However, there are still emerging attempts to claim Ukraine to be a failed state, or even a pseudo-state: for instance, references to the etymology of the word ‘Ukraine’ meaning just a ‘borderland of something bigger’.
The picture of this narrative is not complete without mentioning the sub-narrative of ‘Neo-Nazi insurgency in Kyiv’, that caused the suppression of legitimate power, and was led mainly by far-right groups. The term ‘fascists’ is often used in the media, holding people in the discourse of the Great Patriotic War and ‘rightful’ military aggression with a protectionist core. The emphasis on the new Ukrainian regime as followers of Bandera (a Ukrainian Insurgency Army leader during the WWII, accused by the Soviet regime of collaboration with the Nazis) reveals the intention to rewrite history and thus becomes a source for speculation about protecting the truth and reshaping the historical discourse (Marples, 2016). Furthermore, some Russian political experts express pride in the seizing of Crimea without any military clashes and compare it with less successful operations performed by the West.
All these aspects also fit the concept of grievance as the main trigger of civil war (nevertheless the Russian discourse does not use this term). For instance, Tor Bukkvol mentions three axioms that depict Russian foreign policy and lie beneath the described narrative: whole post-Soviet territories as a ‘one nation’, popular uprisings as a weapon used by the West, and 20 years of humiliation of Russia, and suggests that as long as the axioms constitute the dominating discourse, they will have explanatory power whether people believe them or not. They are perceived as established truth severe consequences for those who express it (Bukkvoll, 2016). So, whereas we do not know for sure how many people in Russia really share this particular narrative, it may still shape their story of conflict and affect their attitude towards anything that has happened.
Story #3. Geopolitics
The narratives described above, both Ukrainian and Russian, are examples of national strategic narratives, each one of them constructed at the governmental level and spread through the media in order to justify the actual state politics. The third story to be characterized is one of global strategic narrative: its implications can be found in international media and the speeches of global leaders, and it describes what is happening in Ukraine on a geopolitical level.
This narrative is a kind of continuation of the Cold War, which did not end, despite Fukuyama’s thesis, but acquired the new form of a Global War (Chandler, 2009; Fukuyama, 2010). The cornerstone of this narrative is the use of the term ‘hybrid war’, which designates different kinds of asymmetrical military actions, with the use of weapons as well as communication and media. Scholars define hybrid war in different ways, but most explanations refer to a military strategy with the synchronized use of multiple instruments of power tailored to specific vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions to achieve synergistic effects. Regardless of the absence of an agreed definition of hybrid warfare, the current conflict is an example of it.
Ukraine, according to the geopolitical narrative, turns into a battlefront between the global West and Russia. So, there is rivalry between people armoured either by American or by Russian weaponry, opposing each other in order to reach some geopolitical goals. This narrative took on a new wave of popularity as an interpretational scheme after the resolution of the US to support the Ukrainian army by lethal weaponry, and was incorporated as a victory into the Ukrainian strategic narrative, or, in the Russian narrative, as evidence supporting the western origin of the Ukrainian conflict.
According to academic research, the tactics of hybrid war as we know it today are not something new and were used by Russian forces long before the articulation of the Gerasimov doctrine—a document from 2013, claimed to be a justification or even prerequisite of Crimean annexation. All the previous conflicts in post-Soviet space—the ones in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Nagorny Karabakh and Transnistria—followed a similar pattern, with usage of deployed Russian militaries, media propaganda and the rhetoric of protecting the Russian-Speakers (Filip, 2017; Ionita, 2014; Renz, 2016). So the goal, according to this geopolitical narrative, was to surround Russia by frozen conflicts in neighbouring countries in order to stop NATO’s expansion toward Russian borders (Gardner, 2016).
Unlike the two previous narratives, this one is inferred not from the deprived actor approach, but from the rational actor approach that assumes economic variables better explain the onset of rebellion than social ones (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004). Since the economic component is one of the most important in this theory, and the economic benefits of conflict are one of the most obvious, this narrative assumes the occurrence of smuggling, unauthorized flows of arms, alcohol and drugs, which are possible under the gray zones economy, as well as the overall policy of weaponry trading and economic sanctions (Echevarria, 2015). Moreover, the current Ukrainian economy strongly depends on IMF loans and investments. However, this narrative is barely covered in official Ukrainian sources and is a piece of information that Ukrainians are more likely to get from the Western media. That is why this narrative appears more truthful due to the effort required to develop it.
One more topic that is covered by the geopolitical narrative is that whereby the Russian annexation of Crimea is seen as a failure of the global West in their goal to keep safety and security in Europe (Mearsheimer, 2014).
Russian annexation of Crimea and clandestine intervention in eastern Ukraine in 2014, followed by overt Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, have revealed the complete failure of NATO, the European Union (EU), and Russia to negotiate a new post-Cold War Euro-Atlantic security architecture from Vancouver to Vladivostok. That could have been more inclusive of Moscow’s geostrategic and political-economic interests as had initially been proposed at the end of the Cold War. (Gardner, 2016)
That is why the annexation of Crimea may seem an old-new form of Russian imperialism, and the conflict in Ukraine—a consequence of Russian expansion. Such suggestions may to some extent seem beneficent for the Central European states, notably Poland, interested in creating a buffer zone between themselves and Russia (Lakomy, 2016).
Being inside this discourse results in forming the attitude that ‘no one cares about us’ among Ukrainians, and even in sad jokes like ‘United States will fight with Russia until the last Ukrainian passes’. Moreover, these attitudes lead to self-victimization and aggravation of the trauma experienced by the displaced people who feel themselves to be hostages of circumstances, bereaved of any right to influence what is going on. The dysphoria is intensified by the introduction of peacekeeping forces into Ukraine, which seems to indicate the collapse of all attempts to find a way out of the existing conflict independently and the recognition of Ukraine as a failed state.
Even though this narrative seems a typical example of a rational politic explanation, it remains a narrative in its essence, and only puts events into a concrete interpretational matrix. Nevertheless, some questions remain unanswered by this narrative, such as why Ukraine did not resist while Crimea was annexed? Ukrainian government claims Russia an aggressor. There are also questions concerning ongoing economic relations between Ukraine and Russia: despite the tendency to reduce the amount of exports and imports in 2014–2015, Russia remains the principal Ukrainian investor, and value of economic relations even rose in 2016–2017.
Personal stories of war and peace
None of the described strategic narratives can or may be assumed to be the truth, as these stories are notably simplified versions of the ongoing events. Moreover, the term strategic narratives, according to Felix Berenskoetter, is an abstraction allowing communities to develop their own biography and knowledge about their place in ‘the world’, in order to meaningfully situate the Self, and delineate its existence in time and space, to provide us with a necessary sense of orientation about where the community comes from and where it is going (Berenskoetter, 2014).
Nevertheless, each one of the described stories—the metanarratives—becomes itself a specific form of discourse, or a form of reality, where people with entirely different backgrounds and personal experiences co-exist. So, these discourses are continually making an impact on the process of constructing personal narratives; they situate the personality within the context of his/her world and explain what is happening around them, specifically for the individual constructing their personal narrative.
The complexity of the analysis of the situation is that this conflict, to some extent, is a conflict of identities—personal ones, formed under the influence of a familiar Donbas narrative, and of strategic narratives at the national level. In the spring and summer of 2014, these narratives became so polarized that the existence of various interpretations of events within a shared space was barely possible. Considering the complexity of the situation and the persistence of the conflict, we may say that the current conflict allows no simplifications on a personal level.
Analytical literature does not pay much attention to regional Donbas narratives, which have a considerable influence on the self-perception of inhabitants and the construction of their personal and group narratives. The historical background of Donbas allows it to be labelled as ‘the land of freedom’: previously called Dyke Pole (The Wild Steppe), this territory has been a no-man’s land, a borderland between surrounding countries, a specific frontier, populated by those who choose a tough but a free life on the margin of the civilized world (Kuromiya, 2016). The discovery of coal and iron in the late nineteenth century prolonged this story, as its industrial potential attracted many workers from both the Ukrainian and Russian lands surrounding the territory. Donbas remained a ‘free land’ during the 1917 revolution and civil war and accepted rule neither from Kyiv nor Moscow. Moreover, a new socialist republic emerged there in 1918, but later it was included in the Ukrainian part of the Soviet state. Even during Stalin’s time, Donbas could provide some anonymity for those willing to melt into the mass of workers, and so was a fruitful ground for spreading alternative ideas and opposition to the Soviet regime. The same thing, according to Kuromiya, happened in the 1970s, with most of the pro-Ukrainian intelligentsia coming from Donbas.
Nevertheless, the controversial Donbas narrative of freedom did not oppose the idea of Ukrainian independence, and, in 1991, 93 per cent of Donbas inhabitants voted for sovereignty. However, the historical unmanageability of Donbas, local narratives about selfsufficiency and a mixture of identities among its inhabitants, together with the economic decline of the 1990s, led to unhappiness about the Ukrainian idea on the part of Donbas. Nonetheless, this discontent was not manifested in directs calls to action. Part of the reason for the separatist movement and war in the Donbas still lies with local identity politics, but only a part. The identity created in the Soviet Donbas is persistent and resilient, providing a baseline identity marker differentiating the region from the rest of Ukraine (Wilson, 2016). However, Michael Gentile has argued that slightly sharper Ukrainian and Russian/East Slavic identities have replaced blurred identities. Ethnic minorities have emerged at both ends of the spectrum, but geopolitical attitudes also have also shaped the identities, rather than the other way around (Gentile, 2014).
Self-sufficiency and not obeying to the rule of any centre are deeply rooted in Donbas identity, as is the coal-mining industry. For instance, a City Day celebration in Donetsk and Luhansk is combined with Miner’s Day, and all the folklore, songs and expressions somehow refer to coal mining and the heroism of miners. At the same time, coal mining remains a hazardous job, and the metaphor of a ‘vertical horizon’ is a part of the local narrative. The vertical horizon means the danger and the feelings of people who go deep under the surface every day, risking not coming back. Life at constant risk with the permanent proximity of death is what lies deep in the core of the Donbas mentality. Thus, power and silence become the core elements of identity, but, as Prykhodko argues, this is a ‘specific form of power, which grounds not on justice, because justice is born in communication and silence makes justice impossible’. Another core element of Donbas identity is a continual feeling of being on the symbolic borderland, which results from the history of the region and, according to Gentile, such borderland narratives also have become grounds for propaganda development (Gentile, 2017).
Donbas identity as described may seem controversial, but it is strong enough to be shared and protected by dwellers of the region, and is a characteristic cementing their community. That is why the economic decline during the independence period (since 1991), together with constant talk about the unprofitability of coal mining (and all the region), resulted in discontent with Ukrainian policy, and, even more, in fear of losing local identity by changing the economic model and turning towards the Ukrainian language and culture as the preferred one. Discussions about successful examples of local redevelopment, like the Ruhr basin and Northern England, led to even stronger fear of the ‘Westerns’, who ‘will come and take our identity’, literally meaning deconstruction of a surrounding familiar and comfortable social space. Such ambiguity, together with economic instability, finally became a fertile ground for propaganda (Matsuzato, 2017). Thus, for the number of internally displaced people from Donbas interviewed in Kiev in 2017, attending the referendum and offering support for selfproclaiming republics in the Spring of 2014 was a logical step to protect their own identity from the potential danger of Kyiv protests, and a way to oppose the change of legitimate regime, rather than an act of political will aiming to join Russia.
I was standing in a line for almost four hours just to vote for our independence. I believed that it was my response to Turchinov, Parubiy (Maidan leaders—auth.). Now I understand how strong the propaganda was because people with university degrees like me believed every single word from the radio—the words of Kateryna, 48, from Horlivka, about May 2014.
Regardless of the political outlook and ideas, summer 2014 was the bifurcation point for most of Donbas’ inhabitants. It was a moment to choose whether to stay—and accept the situation of war, and, subsequently, join the insurgency,—or to leave, and remain elsewhere till the end of the conflict. Those who had the opportunity—a car, relatives outside the occupied territories, job prospects, or any sum of money for the first time—left. These were mostly people of the younger generation, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—those who had some resources and were motivated to save their children. Elderly people, lacking power and resources, mostly preferred to stay in a war-affected region, trying to preserve their property—or, in other words, the symbolic result of their life, manifested in the amount of material goods they had acquired (Kuznetsova, 2017),—which is a typical pattern of forced migration (Manning, Geddes, Manning, & Geddes, 2006).
Analysis of interviews with people who were forced to leave their homes, the IDPs, shows that all of the personal stories of displacement have a tendency to idealize the past, and refer to those events as the ‘good old times’, regardless of political views, discourse, and personal experience. Displaced people mostly share one of two ways of self-perception: as a victim of armed conflict or as a person kicked into starting a new life.
When I go back to Luhansk in my memories … I see that I would have no future there even if life had been peaceful. I’d probably work as an accountant on a crumbling factory or just got married. Kiev gives far more opportunities for a young person, but I would not have moved here unless the war had set on
mentioned during the interview with Khrystyna, 26, from Luhansk, while Kseniia, 50, from Donetsk claimed: ‘My life was just interrupted. I will never forgive the people who ruined everything I had and ruined Donetsk, the most beautiful city in the world’. So, the different responses to individual and shared collective trauma remain one of the most important topics to be investigated by Ukrainian psychologists.
Narratives of adaptation also show some biases: while one aspires to returning home (and the word ‘home’ itself adds additional symbolic meaning), others tend to a symbolic ‘burying’ of the past, getting rid of things from the past, changing profession, making new social connections, and renouncing the ‘previous life’. Another aspect of personal narratives of adaptation is a ‘survivor complex’ that makes people feel guilty for leaving their homeland and people they know, or even for being alive.
My grandmother passed away two years ago, but I still feel the grief and the guilt … If only I could spend her last days with her! Instead, I was just waiting for the permission to cross the frontline … I think about her every single day of my life in a city that is still peaceful in the times of this ugly war—says Tetiana, 23, a displaced person from Donetsk.
The process of adaptation can proceed either as integration into new communities or as self-isolation, as a consequence of deep psychological trauma and feeling one’s otherness in a new place that seems an unfriendly and unfamiliar one even after several years have passed (Bulakh, 2017). A compromise strategy is a strong identification with local IDPs’ communities, which is typical for people who moved together with their friends, or even relocated together with their employers, being able to preserve the established system of connection within a familiar community.
When I just moved to Kiev, I spotted many cars with Luhansk and Donetsk license plates in the neighbourhood. Indeed, a lot of DPs are still living there, including my friends. Sometimes I can even hear the familiar dialect near my new home, here is something like a Small Donbas
– shared Taras, 28, from Luhansk, while Zoya, 36, from Donetsk mentioned:
In July 2014 our organization decided to move to Kiev. Of course, for some time, we all thought. Some refused, but the majority agreed. We are still working in the same team as in Donetsk. Even the office looks pretty similar ….
However, the process of adaptation of displaced people to new life conditions is only a part of the general reconciliation processes in Ukrainian society (Ivashchenko-Stadnik, 2017). Here, two of the main stumbling blocks are blaming one part of the society for the onset of a conflict, and the tendency to simplify the explanation of the current situation (D’Anieri, 2016). According to Vasiutynskyi, four models for laying the blame for the military conflict are present in Ukrainian society: political (blaming political opponents), projective (blaming the government), isolationistic (generalization of blame and impunity), and conspiracy (blaming third parties and world government). These models lie beneath the strategies of collective adaptation to changing life conditions and show that cross-blaming might be the main disconnecting factor within the society (Vasiutynskyi, 2017).
Research performed during recent years shows that Ukrainian society still has common ground in seeking reconciliation, conflict transformation, and community security building. Besides different models of imposing guilt for the onset of the war, dwellers of Eastern and Western Ukraine still both consider negative peace—literally meaning the absence of war—as a principal social benefit, and both have aspirations for reconciliation and the development of an integrated and peaceful society in the future (Vasiutynskyi, 2016).
Conclusion
While the armed conflict is still ongoing, Ukrainian society remains overloaded with different strategic narratives. These simplified, and, to some extent, exaggerated stories are disseminated throughout different media and affect the perceptions of Ukrainians who need to inscribe their personal stories on the overall discourses. However, these discourses contradict each other and thus make the interpretations of the conflict even more complicated.
The official version of events portrays a national biography of Ukraine as a freedom fighter and depicts the conflict as a prolonged rivalry with Russia, an aggressor that occupies parts of Ukraine and governs them with its occupying authorities. The regions under conflict seem problematical because of a lack of Ukrainian identity. The observed economic decline and rise of authoritarian tendencies are interpreted as the price of freedom and democracy.
The second story about the events is an example of Russian strategic narrative, which justifies the annexation of Crimea by claims of protecting the Russian-speakers. The same explanation was used as a propaganda tool for fuelling the conflict in Donbas in the spring and summer of 2014. However, the narrative as described creates controversies between denying a Russian presence in Eastern Ukraine and indirect support of insurgency.
The third narrative is a more generalized geopolitical story, where Ukraine is seen as a battlefield between the global West and Russia, or, in other words, this story is a prolongation of the Cold War. The current conflict, thus, is a way to stop NATO expansion to the East while Ukraine remains a buffer zone between Europe and Russia with its imperialistic ambitions.
All the above-mentioned narratives are built on real facts and events, mired in a hyperinterpretation, and enhancing the reality. At the current stage of the conflict, as it slowly gets to a frozen phase, it is barely possible to look for objectivity, so the society members choose a simplistic way, adopting one or other of the interpretational matrices, which are only partially true.
However, the personal narratives form inside these absolutized narratives and still reflect these generalized stories. Internally displaced people, who were forced to leave their homes because of armed conflict, form their personal stories of war and peace in order to deal with the deep psychological trauma of displacement, and their stories are formed within the contradictory fields of multiple discourses and interpretations of the conflict. As a result, the discrepancy between personal experience and dominating media discourses creates even more tensions within the society and make trust and reconciliation-building even more tangled. Nevertheless, most of the personal stories are balancing between the described discourses. As the conflict is still ongoing, there is much difficulty in analysing and conceptualizing it. A positive security approach, which pre-supposes articulating the threads and the capacity to determine ways to end, mitigate or adapt to those risks and threats either individually or with other actors (Hoogensen Gjørv, 2012), supposes making the vulnerable communities of internal migrants visible in order to achieve broader human security in society. That is why the personal stories of war and peace should be collected now, because right now there is the possibility of helping the displaced people to adapt to their new life conditions, and right now complex programmes for peace education in the future can be elaborated. Moreover, achieving positive peace may be possible through engagement, overcoming ignorance, and finding common ground, that is already identified as shared values of peace and security.
Overall, there is no objective narrative, and the personal stories cannot be objective either. All the strategic narratives described are, to some extent, disjunctive, aimed mainly at marking the differences and to speculate on languages, identity, and history, and as a result lead to ignorance, ‘othering’, and post-memory. However, researches in the field of social psychology show that, despite differences in some values, Ukrainians from different parts of the country still have much in common—in particular, they want at least a negative peace (absence of war) and smoothing of contradictions in society. Such aspirations may become a platform for further reconciliation through culture and dialogue, restorative justice and peace education programmes.