Ilmari Käihkö. The Journal of Slavic Military Studies. Volume 34, Issue 1, 2021.
Introduction
The War in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine followed the Maidan Revolution of February 2014. By the end of that year, the conflict had become a limited war where both Ukraine and Russia used limited means to reach similarly limited aims. This is hardly surprising, considering the overall recession of declared inter-state wars. To date, however, little attention has been paid to the central role played by people who did not belong to armed forces or other state security institutions during the early stages of the War in Donbas. Both classic and contemporary military theory perceives the involvement of the people in war to mark the difference between limited and total war where all limits would be breached. People’s participation in war has been linked to rapid escalation, over-reaction, and unlimited war that escapes political control. Carl von Clausewitz famously separated people, the military, and the government in his theory of war and went as far as to describe people’s war as nothing less than ‘a state of anarchy declared lawful, which is as dangerous as a foreign enemy to social order at home’. Considering the continued centrality of control of force to state sovereignty — a claimed monopoly on the legitimated use of physical force within a certain geographic area — these considerations have changed little from the 19th century. As the common moniker ‘non-state actor’ suggests, people’s participation in war threatens both control of force and state sovereignty.
Escalation is thus traditionally understood to concern both control and, especially, use of force. Both constitute core issues of strategy, which this article investigates in the War in Donbas. This article traces the sequence of events from the 2013-14 Maidan protests in Ukraine to war proper in its eastern Donbas region, where people played a central role after mobilizing into volunteer battalions and separatist forces. Despite the centrality of people-in-arms and their attempts to escalate the conflict, the war never witnessed similar levels of violence as in perhaps the closest comparative case where such actors played a prominent role, the Yugoslav Wars of 1991-2001, not to speak of the more recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. Why did the War in Donbas not escalate out of control, or why did the predominantly non-state belligerents escalate the conflict in Donbas in a limited and symmetrical manner?
As always, there are many ways to explain an outcome — in this case why the war did not rapidly escalate into an unlimited war. The volunteer phenomenon only lasted about a year before the government in Kyiv put most of them under state control. On the separatist side, those deemed too radical were replaced or assassinated. Neither Ukraine nor Russia wished to see an open war and thus had a keen interest in de-escalating the situation. The non-state actors’ lack of arms, munitions, and vehicles limited escalation as well. Although these kinds of rational factors are important, they do not give a full account of the situation. In the early stages of the war, these non-state actors were the driver not the passenger. Both the separatists and the volunteer battalions who mobilized against them actively sought to escalate the conflict. For separatists, this was the only way to change the status quo; they had to control territory to justify a Russian intervention. Preventing the Crimean scenario from repeating in Donbas prodded the pro-Ukrainian volunteers to meet them head on and to drag the state and its armed forces into war. A few volunteers even talked of bringing about a full-scale Russian invasion to mobilize all of Ukraine.
Herein lies the puzzle. Although both the separatists and the volunteer battalions sought to escalate the ends of the conflict, despite their nature as non-state actors, they acted in rather conventional ways. Their organization closely replicated regular state militaries. Although atrocities were committed by both sides, the existing evidence suggests that they were not systematic. As a result, this article argues that the War in Donbas was a rather conventional war. By calling the war conventional, I do not mean that the war was not shocking nor that it conformed to expectations of what war should be. Rather, conventional refers to conventions, and hence norms, or ‘expectations about appropriate conduct which serve as common guidelines for social action’. As Michael Howard has pointed out, without control war descends to mere anarchy. Aside from material and rational considerations, shared understandings of war and cultural value systems also play a role: ‘One does not cease to be a moral being when one takes up arms, even if required by military necessity to commit immoral acts’. These kinds of cultural factors are necessary for understanding why the War in Donbas did not escalate further, when existing theories expected them to do so and when at least some of the belligerents saw escalation as necessary. Simply put, shared normative frameworks shared by Ukrainian belligerents narrowed down available courses of action and hence helped to shape escalation into symmetrical and limited escalation.
Earlier perspectives
Previous studies of the War in Donbas have typically relegated Ukraine itself to a mere battleground, where Ukrainian actors are understood through what Kimitaka Matsuzato calls a ‘Cold War perspective’ as either pro-West or pro-Russian. Polarized pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian framings of the War in Donbas see the conflict either as a civil war where Russia plays little or no role or as an inter-state war where domestic Ukrainian factors matter little. None of these perspectives lends itself well to a strategic analysis of this war. As conflicts are inherently reciprocal affairs, it is necessary to analyze all actors involved. Regardless of how one estimates the Russian influence in the war, the volunteer battalions’ — who were the ‘first on the front lines’ and who thus ‘saved the country’ – assumed escalatory potential alone makes it necessary to consider their role in the war. The empirical contribution of this article comes in the form of a chronological reconstruction of the escalatory acts during the first year of the conflict, focusing on the Ukrainian perspective. The main evidence used in this article comes from over four years of engagement with Ukrainian volunteer battalion fighters, complemented by dozens of interviews with civil society activists, military personnel, and policymakers.
When it comes to studies of escalation, these have almost exclusively followed the path established during the Cold War. This has left escalation in conflicts that do not concern great powers largely unexplored. Investigation of the war in Ukraine is important, as it is taken as the archetypal gray zone conflict where ambiguity complicates responses. The theoretical contribution of this article questions the usefulness of the binaries of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ combatants and ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ warfare as explaining escalatory dynamics. Although non-state actors played a central role in the War in Donbas, their normative framework was largely the same. This normative framework becomes the key to understanding escalation in this conflict: Within its own context, the War in Donbas is a conventional one.
The first section of this article discusses escalation or the increase in conflict scope and intensity. The second section focuses on the relationship between people and escalatory dynamics. Closely connected with escalation and loss of control, people-in-arms have been viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, the War in Donbas illustrates the increasingly central roles played by the people in contemporary war. The third section describes the methods used in this investigation. This is followed by a chronology that divides the first year of the war into four phases, starting from the Maidan Revolution in 2014 to its immediate aftermath that witnessed increased subversion in the east. Soon, this subversion turned into violence and a war between people. By the summer, the Ukrainian military became more involved and executed a major offensive that captured much ground from separatists, who risked becoming encircled. The separatists were only saved by the intervention of regular Russian troops, which twice defeated the combined Ukrainian forces, forcing Ukraine to sue for ceasefires in September 2014 and February 2015 respectively. The final section discusses why the War in Donbas was conventional and how shared norms limited escalation.
Escalation in war
In his investigation of the concept of escalation during the Cold War, Lawrence Freedman notes that ‘students of strategy generally agree that escalation refers to an increase in the scope and intensity of a given conflict’. Escalation has been viewed both as an independent force that concerns all wars that veer toward extremes as well as a deliberate act to be exploited. Both interpretations highlight the need to control force but also how escalation is viewed as an inherent part of warfare or use of force. In theory, victory in war goes to the side that succeeds in out-escalating its opponent. This is suggested by Clausewitz’s metaphor of a pair of wrestlers, where superior force used by one side forces the other to meet in kind or to admit defeat.
Although theoretically sensible, there are two immediate issues with this metaphor. The first one is that the metaphor fails to account for the limitations to use of force and hence escalation. Clausewitz was aware of these limits and ascribed them to friction and politics. The later bias in escalation theory toward great powers, nuclear weapons, and game theory nevertheless resulted in limited theorizing regarding escalation when it comes to the most common kinds of war in contemporary times or more limited conflicts that include non-state actors. The second issue with the wrestler metaphor concerns the means of escalation, which are confined to use of force alone. Even if force is understood to encompass ‘both the physical means of destruction — the bullet, the bayonet — and the body that applies it’, it is more useful to consider escalation as the use of various forms of power, both hard and soft.
This wider range of escalatory means is recognized by Herman Kahn, who constructed an escalation ladder where the first rungs prior to use of force consisted of verbal recognition of ‘ostensible crisis’; ‘political, economic, and diplomatic gestures’; ‘solemn and formal declarations’; and ‘hardening of positions — confrontation of wills’. As the presence of these rungs at the bottom of the ladder suggests, they may well be necessary preparations for use of force: Words both justify and polarize. Non-violent measures, not least in the form of soft power, may thus still be used after conflicts have turned violent and reached higher rungs of escalation. In fact, words in the form of diplomatic gestures are typically required for de-escalating and terminating conflict.
Taking an issue with Kahn’s Cold War view that the most likely deterrent to escalation was the fear that the opponent would react and especially overreact and lose control of war, Isabelle Duyvesteyn argues that when it comes to
what for the sake of argument will be called irregular war, there does not seem to be a fear of overreaction on the part of the main participants, the terrorists and insurgents. It could be argued that overreaction is actively sought to provide an advantage to the actor using either strategy.
Although this view partly derives from the notion that non-state actors need to compensate their material weakness with indiscriminate acts, the reality may, however, be somewhat more complicated. Considering Fred Iklé’s view that the first reason states seek to limit war is to curb economic and social costs, it is necessary to recognize that even non-state actors depend on some manner of popular support and legitimacy. It is thus reasonable to assume that they too possess lines they find difficult to cross, connected to culture-specific understandings of what is just. This is for instance touched upon by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer in their discussion of soldiers’ ‘frames of references’, as well as by M. L. R. Smith and David Jones, who highlight the important influence of ‘value systems’ for use of force.
Values also play a central role in understanding warfare and forms of escalation. In militaries, these understandings have been formalized into doctrines. According to Jan Willem Honig, by the mid-19th century ‘a coherent, modern set of beliefs emerges as to what war is which can be taught to a dedicated body of men who can act upon the teachings in an organised and purposeful fashion’. This set of beliefs in turn serves as a foundation for the role models military institutions use when transforming individuals into soldiers.
Although this kind of special knowledge was crucial for the formation of the military profession, Honig also argues that these beliefs can become a straitjacket as war becomes ‘above all a normatively ruled practice’. These kinds of norms — suggested by the notion of conventional war — are nevertheless necessary for escalation to serve a strategic role in the first place as actions need to be mutually intelligible. Conventions allow escalation to focus on use of force along a somewhat pre-established path (such as the 44 rungs of Kahn’s escalation ladder). Although non-state actors are assumed to benefit from acting in unconventional ways, this may primarily be the case in situations where norms are weak. Even then, unconventional ways often result in tactical benefits but strategic drawbacks, precisely because they are unintelligible and considered outrageous. The upshot for escalation reflects Freedman’s view that
The danger of explosion in this process was reduced so long as both sides had some appreciation of the limits within which they were operating, or, more to the point, recognized certain limits that, if transgressed, heightened the risk of explosion.
According to Kahn, it is the sum of these kinds of restrictions that explain why superior force alone does not guarantee escalation dominance or a situation where the opponent must cave in. It is thus not always the strongest party that wins war. The case of Ukraine illustrates that although strength helps, norms are necessary for waging war in the first place. The situation with both material strength and norms was nevertheless complicated by the fact that early on in the conflict the central actors were the people.
The war between the people in Donbas
People have long played an ambiguous and often unwelcome role in Western military theory. For instance, when Rupert Smith recognized their definite role in contemporary ‘war amongst the people’, they remained little more than a target and a terrain in conflicts with intervening, typically multinational, military forces (Smith does not spend much time discussing his service in Northern Ireland). Such an outsider perspective allows circumventing social and cultural factors. A decade later, the people became a central tenet in what Honig calls the ‘democratisation of war’, a general trend driven by an emancipatory logic of the privilege to assert rights, by force if necessary. This democratization results in ‘fragmentation and relative levelling of power’, which in turn contribute to the small scale of most contemporary conflicts. Linking fragmentation to escalation, Honig observes fragmentation in the warfare between Ukraine and Russia in 2014, ‘when both sides only used a fraction of the military power at their disposal’. The connected levelling of power in turn results in a situation where ‘the weak are gaining in relative power to the strong’. This empowerment — where proliferation of technology also plays a role — elevated people from mere targets and decisive terrain to nothing less than central actors.
People indeed became an indispensable part of the War in Donbas. As made clear by Andrew Wilson, three ingredients were necessary for the conflict in Ukraine to escalate into war: people, elites, and Russian intervention. Wilson’s main point was to counter ideas that the conflict was purely a domestic matter where Russia played no role whatsoever. Yet conversely his argument also goes against those who explain the war as mere Russian invasion. It may have been a war among the people, but as these people essentially fought the early part of the war, it was more importantly a war between people. As older ideas of ‘people’s war’ suggest, the participation of the people made the war an inherently political one and brought forward questions of escalation.
This corresponds to the observation of Clausewitz on the consequence of the French Revolution, when war ‘had again suddenly become an affair of the people’ after being freed from the monopoly of kings.
Henceforward, the means available — the efforts which might be called forth — had no longer any definite limits; the energy with which the War itself might be conducted had no longer any counterpoise, and consequently the danger for the adversary had risen to the extreme.
This promise of an absolute war counted as an unprecedented escalation in itself. It was clear that this also posed a grave danger: A war of the people meant that war became ‘freed from all conventional restrictions, broke loose, with all its natural force’. Not surprisingly, the conservative Prussian associated the people with ‘the original violence of its elements, hatred and animosity, which may be looked upon as blind instinct’. In contemporary terms, the people complicated the seemingly simple formula of strategy, traditionally understood as the relationship between ends, ways, and means.
Although Honig saw that the fragmentation and leveling of power limit the scale of war, the role played by the people nevertheless questions the main source of limitation — restricting warfare to military professionals. The greater role of the people becomes tied with ideas of escalation as an antithesis to control, necessary for executing strategy. This view is for instance clear in Freedman’s notion regarding the inherent problem of non-state actors: They complicate the control of force, as they per definition remain outside unified control structures. Although the goals of the Ukrainian volunteer battalions and the government on the one side — and especially of the separatists and Russia on the other — aligned, they were not the same. The reciprocal nature of war nevertheless meant that their actions influenced all other actors, not least in terms of escalation. As Clausewitz already suggested, it is counterintuitive that a conflict where non-state actors dominated would assume a conventional form.
Methodological note
According to Smith and Jones, factors such as value systems are discoverable only by ‘qualitative, case study-based, historical mode of inquiry’. This article builds on information acquired from around a hundred interviewees, collected mainly during 117 days in Ukraine, but supplemented by others in Denmark, Sweden, and the United States. Several of these interviewees can be described as key informants, whom the author has met repeatedly and kept in touch with through instant messaging, e-mail, and phone calls, in many cases since April 2017. During stays in Ukraine, the author has always lived together with these informants, who include volunteer battalion members, a family of Donbas refugees, and a civil society reformer. The remaining interviewees include top-level politicians, security officials, military personnel, and Maidan activists. The polarized context has also meant that the author has only been able to access informants on the government side.
The following chronological account focuses on observed escalation during the first year of conflict. This focus on observed action is necessary, as information about the ends sought by different actors remains limited. Although many acts of escalation came in the form of force — both its use and deployment — others were symbolic or verbal acts taken in various forums. What stands out is the symmetrical escalation between belligerents, which lacked acts of ‘explosion’ or ‘over-reaction’ after the initial inhibition to use violence was transgressed on Maidan.
The Maidan Revolution
After years of balancing between the East and the West, by the end of 2013, the ruling Ukrainian elites found themselves in a situation where they would need to favor one at the cost of the other. The EuroMaidan protest began on 21 November, after President Viktor Yanukovych abruptly abandoned plans to sign a long-prepared association agreement with the European Union, opting for closer ties with Russia instead. EuroMaidan followed a familiar script that had been successively refined since the Revolution on Granite in 1990 and occupied urban space in the Kyiv Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. Initially dominated by students, there were clashes with the police who sought to prevent the protestors from setting up tents that would provide them shelter from the elements. On 30 November, the security forces tried to disperse the unarmed protestors by force. This escalation was unprecedented in the history of independent Ukraine and transformed Euromaidan into Maidan. At stake was no longer a single political decision or Ukraine’s international alignment. As Marci Shore describes,
‘Maidan’ had become an impassioned protest against brutality, corruption, and rule by gangsters. It had become a revolt against proizvol — a Russian word combining arbitrariness and tyranny, the condition of being made an object of someone else’s will.
This escalation set in motion an unpredicted response, bringing hundreds of thousands of protestors to Kyiv alone to demand the Yanukovych government resign. The continuity from past protests is clear from the results of one survey, which found that 63 percent of Maidan protestors had participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution, also known as the first Maidan. Yet whereas Western Ukraine was already ‘won’ by those opposed to Yanukovych, his opponents in the East — the political stronghold of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions — realized that all depended on victory in the capital. It was the independence square, the Maidan, which became the battleground between the opposing wills.
Escalation continued by both sides, until central Kyiv witnessed recurrent street battles between protestors and security officials and hired thugs. Government escalation came not only in the form of violence but also legislation. This culminated in the so-called dictatorship laws, hastily passed by the parliament on 16 January. With protestors facing the prospect of years in prison and realizing that this revolutionary opportunity would not repeat itself, this escalation seemingly left them two options: victory or defeat. This contributed to what Tetyana Malyarenko calls zero-sum strategy and further polarization not only between the protestors and Yanukovych but even within the Ukrainian society.
The first fatalities occurred on 22 January, when three protestors were shot. On 18 February, Yanukovych accused the protestors of calls to take to arms, calling them terrorists. Just like the dictatorship laws (which had been amended but not revoked), even escalation in the war of words served to steepen the Maidan activists’ demands. Two days later and after a brief truce, scores of protestors were killed by sniper fire. This escalation caused an international outrage. The following day Yanukovych, three opposition leaders, representatives of several European Union countries and Russia, ‘Concerned with the tragic loss of life in Ukraine, seeking an immediate end of bloodshed and determined to pave the way for a political resolution of the crisis’, convened to sign an Agreement on settlement of the political crisis in Ukraine that began with this very passage. The Russian representative did not sign the agreement, which some Maidan activists also perceived as falling short of forcing Yanukovych to step down. The protestors had little faith in Yanukovych honoring the agreement but budged when the Polish foreign minister warned them that if they don’t accept the agreement, ‘you will have martial law, the army, you will all be dead’. Yanukovych also had reason to fear for his safety. The next day he fled to Russia through Crimea, leaving behind a political vacuum and a divided country. The revolution was won, but new troubles awaited.
Subversion in the southeast
Although revolution offers a more positive narrative for the fragile post-revolutionary Ukrainian nation-in-the-making, it simultaneously obfuscates important domestic dimensions of the war. These do not merely concern the roots of separatism. According to Malyarenko, the post-Maidan euphoria meant that, for revolutionaries, ‘any compromise would have been seen as a national reproach or treason’. Combined with the lack of a comprehensive strategy during the first months of the conflict, escalation was to be expected.
From this perspective, the subversion in Donbas was merely a continuation of the Maidan — where more than 130 protestors and perhaps 18 police officers had been killed. The visible role played by far-right actors, such as the Right Sector alliance and the Svoboda party, served to discredit the revolution as a coup d’état ‘for the majority of the population in South-Eastern Ukrainian provinces, thus forming the grounds for the civil war’. Tensions rose as Yanukovych’s security forces — predominantly recruited from the more politically reliable East — returned home after battling with protestors at Maidan. Initially, anti-Maidan activists copied methods used on the Maidan. Although they too set up protest camps and occupied administration buildings, their success was much more limited. The initial demands for federalization and later separatism too harked back to the days of the Orange Revolution, where elites in the East had used similar threats to gain leverage.
That the core roots of the conflict go deeper than Yanukovych alone is illustrated by how quickly he became a spent force in Ukraine. According to Paweł Pieniążek, ‘the new administration is targeted and becomes an embodiment of evil. Yanukovych has been erased from the collective memory very quickly. “What does Yanukovych have to do with this? He doesn’t rule in Kiev”’, noted one of his interviewees in Donbas.
Yanukovych was indeed gone, but his flight had left Ukraine in a situation where the legitimacy of its political institutions was questioned by a significant portion of the population. The government was broke, and as the Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov later admitted, ‘our country had neither the government system, nor the defense system back then’. The situation raised fears regarding the future — fueled by Russian media — and almost immediately led to demonstrations against the new government in Kyiv. There was widespread insecurity on the Crimean peninsula regarding its autonomy, as well as the status of the Russian language. Following repeated clashes between pro-Russian separatists and Kyiv loyalists, on 27 February so-called polite little green men — whom everyone knew to be Russian soldiers — occupied government buildings in Crimea.
Supported by American and German assessments, a Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council meeting on the following day concluded that any attempt to oppose Russia would be taken as an escalation and a declaration of war, which Kyiv was bound to lose. Ultimately, the Ukrainian officers and soldiers serving in Crimea experienced that the government in Kyiv was avoiding responsibility. The decision to use force against Russians understandably weighed heavily on their shoulders. Armed resistance would probably have amounted to not only suicide but furthermore to Russian invasion.
The interim government was barely able to object when a referendum of independence that led to a request to join Russia was announced for 16 March in Crimea. This start of what was called the ‘Russian spring’ encouraged a similar scenario in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s action in Crimea thus amounted to stoking of further separatism, which alone questions any notions that ‘Moscow was dragged into’ the conflict in Donbas. The weakness of the Ukrainian state meant that for separatists, many of whom now left Crimea to the east, ‘everything was possible, just everything’. All that was required was an escalation of the situation, which would result in Russian military intervention and annexation. To some extent separatist escalation was also necessary to show the world that the separatists were more than a Russian proxy. According to Matsuzato, this was the reason the separatists defied Putin’s wishes to postpone the referendum for independence: There was a hope that escalation of the conflict could force Russia to intervene militarily.
The time appeared ripe for such escalation. In early March, the Ukrainian government witnessed the mobilization of 200,000 Russians on its borders. Yanukovych continued to be recognized as the legitimate president of Ukraine in Russia and had publicly appealed to Putin to intervene and restore him to power. This posed the largest threat to the government, which had to organize new elections. It was clear that Ukraine was not ready for war. This contributed to the official line in Kyiv that there was no War in Donbas, nor would there be one. As a result, separatism spread largely unopposed.
Yet the situations in Crimea and Donbas were hardly comparable. To some extent, both the government and their opponents presented what were considered new political projects in Donbas. As Wilson notes, there was a baseline of alienation from Kyiv, but it needed to be triggered by local elites and Russian intervention before it flared into an armed conflict. This in turn provided further polarization. Yet similar alienation is true for many of the first wave of separatist leaders, who were at best marginal figures in Donbas politics before Maidan. Many were Russian citizens, several with security service backgrounds.
The first demonstrations against the government in the east began on 1 March, when pro-Russian and anti-Maidan rallies gathered tens of thousands of participants. In Kharkiv thousands of people stormed the administration building, which had been occupied by around 500 pro-Maidan activists for six days. The governor and the police stood by as the pro-Maidan activists were dragged out from the building and forced to run the gauntlet between angry crowds. On the same day, demonstrators in Donetsk chose a ‘people’s governor’, who replaced the Ukrainian flag in front of the Regional Administration Building with a Russian one. As authorities did little to discourage them, the demonstrators soon returned and stormed the building. Following the Crimean example, they announced a referendum for independence. By early April, they began to occupy government buildings, as Maidan activists had done earlier. These developments were still ignored by the newly appointed governor. Some viewed the government’s passivity as sheer unwillingness and sought to take matters into their own hands. They organized themselves as ‘little black men’, an antidote to the ‘little green men’. What had worked in Crimea would not do so in the southeast. With a spiral of escalation, ‘politeness’ alone soon became untenable, as some of the same people who had battled in Maidan again faced each other in the East. The result was war between people.
The war between the people
People played a fundamental role in the early stages of the War in Donbas. Both the volunteers and separatists sought to escalate the situation to force the hand of Kyiv or Moscow to support them. Yet there was a significant difference in their views. As Igor Girkin — perhaps the most important early separatist leader — later remembered, in April 2014 it was possible to achieve much with very little escalation. Because of the support for Russia among parts of the population in the East, heavy weapons were unnecessary. Yet he also admitted that
Donetsk and Luhansk cannot stand against the Ukrainian army alone … . Initially, we assumed ‘the Crimean scenario’. Nobody wanted fighting for Donetsk and Luhansk republics. We thought — the Russian administration would come […]. It would be one more republic in the Russian Federation.
Recognizing this danger, Ukrainian ‘patriots’ realized that they had to follow suit if they were to prevent further unraveling of Ukrainian territorial sovereignty. They felt that there was little the government could — or would — do, aside from pointing a finger at Russia and threatening separatists with consequences if they did not disarm and leave the occupied buildings. As one member of the parliament admitted, in early April the government had little means at its disposal in Donbas: ‘We didn’t have any troops there, but only 2,000 police officers who refused to obey orders, and who were not ready to retake the seized buildings and defend their Motherland’. According to Matsuzato, there were plans to recapture the Donetsk administration building in early April, but no one with authority to do so was willing to take responsibility for the potential bloodshed.
The government’s passivity encouraged both the separatists and the volunteers who opposed them to continue escalating the situation. Although separatists saw the situation as a unique window of opportunity, the volunteers largely considered the army toothless due to lack of equipment and motivation, as well as Russian infiltration. The volunteers felt the need to take action against separatism, but they also sought to escalate the situation in order to drag the state into the conflict. This escalation was nevertheless not only done militarily in the East but even politically in the capital, where the volunteers enjoyed wide support. A concrete sign of escalation and polarization was the way combatants began to take their masks off, as the fear of legal consequences faded. Simultaneously, both volunteers and separatists began to perceive that capture amounted to death sentence. Whereas the separatists viewed regular soldiers as functionaries and described them as brothers, volunteers were demonized. Although this contributed to escalation between these groups for whom surrender became more difficult, the escalation was nevertheless limited to two types of combatants. Neither side sought to dehumanize ordinary people across front lines.
The war escalated on 12 April, when Girkin’s 52-strong group occupied Sloviansk, a city of 117,000 inhabitants located between Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Luhansk. The following day saw the first firefight in eastern Ukraine, in which a captain of the armed forces was killed. Afraid of Russia’s repetition of the Crimean scenario in the east, Turchynov reported that the Security Council had decided to launch an anti-terrorist operation (ATO) to resist pro-Russian forces. This commenced on 15 April.
Described as a ‘full-scale’ military operation under the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), ATO would proceed ‘gradually, responsibly and in a measured way’. Besides Russian special forces and terrorists, ATO would also target ‘hundreds of people who have been deceived by Russian propaganda’. According to Turchynov, the aim of the ATO was to ‘protect Ukrainian citizens, to stop the terror, to stop the crime, to stop the attempts to tear our country apart’. Although the ATO was treated as a domestic operation to avoid escalating the situation with Russia, the Russian response was reportedly that Ukraine had to choose between tanks or talks. The Ukrainian government’s position was summarized by the Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, who noted that ‘we were aware that at any stage any blood could be used by the Russian Federation as a reason for active interference and media campaign to support terrorism’. Yet violence was still the only available response. As Avakov continued, ‘if faced with armed resistance of Russian saboteurs, we had to liquidate the threat as negotiations with the terrorist were impossible and unacceptable’.
The ATO immediately got off to a bad start. On 17 April, soldiers from the 25th Airborne Brigade attempted to capture Kramatorsk, south of Sloviansk. They were surrounded by local residents and surrendered their equipment and half a dozen armored vehicles, including a 120 mm NONA self-propelled mortar, to separatists. As soon as Ukrainian forces began to use armored vehicles and artillery, the separatists answered in kind.
A larger concern was illustrated by Turchynov’s lamentation: ‘At the initial stages, the local residents brainwashed by the Russian propaganda were as much of a challenge as the militants and the Russian troops’. In the absence of orders, Ukrainian soldiers by and large refused to use force. As Ruslan Homchak, a commander of an ATO zone noted,
we weren’t ready, our soldiers, our officers, we weren’t ready to fire at our own people … as we are the People’s Army, we didn’t harm the people […]. But when the armed people appeared from behind their [the unarmed civilians’] backs, then maybe we should have had to shoot at those armed people […]. Those were not Russians but Donbas residents shooting at us, though we did them no harm. That was a psychological moment. They were ready to kill us, without any hesitation, while Ukrainian soldiers weren’t ready to kill them.
This clearly identified the people as the main issue in the war. And as members of the 25th Brigade explained their comrades’ surrender, half of the brigade came from the region. Some were sympathetic to the separatists, and many found it impossible to use force against civilians.
The Ukrainian security forces focused on controlling big cities and the passive containment of the ‘separatist plague’; it was the volunteers who escalated the situation. They ‘were the first to start firing’. As one of the early commanders summarized the volunteer ethos, ‘in order to win the war somebody had to start shooting the terrorists. We can’t win the war by urging the enemy to stop it’. Frustrated with what Homchak called the psychological barrier to escalate the use of force, it was necessary for the volunteers to show example, if not drag the military over this threshold.
Part of the military’s passivity can be explained by lack of means: As the chief inspector of Defense Ministry of Ukraine described, ‘we didn’t get involved upon our initiative as we lacked resources’. Yet another reason can be found from the military’s adherence to legal frameworks. Commanders claimed that they had no right to do anything without the declaration of martial law. To solve the impasse, the government began integrating the volunteers into the more flexible structures of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as National Guard and Special Police units. Martial law itself would have come at a great political cost, as it would have prohibited elections and supported Russian claims of Ukraine as a failed state. On top of this, the lamentation of several volunteers regarding the fact that the officers on the Ukrainian, separatist, and Russian sides had gone to the same schools and knew each other intimately may also have influenced their willingness to fight. In the meantime, separatists too began to consolidate forces. Cities controlled by separatists were operating as separate entities, and it became Girkin’s task to unite the separatists. This was not an easy task, as the goals of the separatists (themselves divided into several factions) and Russia did not perfectly align.
On 2 May a football match brought thousands of people to Odessa, where they planned to march for the ‘Unity of Ukraine’. Obstructed by the occupants of an anti-Maidan camp, clashes erupted. First opposing sides pelted each other with stones, then with Molotov cocktails and self-made grenades, before the numerically inferior anti-Maidan activists resorted to firearms. After several casualties on both sides, the anti-Maidan activists became surrounded in the House of Trade Unions, which caught fire. The day left 48 dead, including 42 in the building itself. Many more were injured. There were three major takeaways from these events: The security forces were neutral at best and fifth columnists at worst; the conflict would turn increasingly violent further East, where separatism was stronger; and it would be the people who would execute this violence. Understandably, the violence also further polarized the situation.
The separatist referendum was held on 11 May. Kyiv did nothing to stop it, aside from stating that according to Ukrainian laws a sub-national referendum was illegal. The last survey that included the areas that had since come under separatist rule conducted in early April 2014 nevertheless shows that federalization and especially secession enjoyed limited support even in the East. Like elsewhere, many who voted did so to express their dissatisfaction with the general state of affairs. The vaguely formulated alternatives unconnected with clearly formulated policies further complicates interpreting the results. The referendum was not monitored even by Russian observers or the kind of Kremlin-supported ‘election observation mission’ that had been present during the Crimean referendum. The separatists effectively arranged, conducted, and monitored the voting that gave legitimacy to their own political project. ‘The referendum was the symbolic end of opposition to the separatists. From now on nobody will dare challenge them’.
When it was time for the Ukrainian presidential elections two weeks later, Donbas was deemed irrelevant. Separatist leaders consider Russia’s biggest mistake in the conflict to consist of recognizing Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire politician, as the legitimate representative of Ukraine. According to Girkin, ‘from that moment, with international recognition, we began to suffer defeat and tolerate it to this day’. Following the recognition of Poroshenko’s legitimacy, the army
found the commander-in-chief, and they began to carry out his orders. In late April or early May they did not fight against us. They went out to serve in positions and looked in all directions in order to join the winner.
On 17 May, Girkin posted a now removed video online, where he despaired over lack of local support for separatism. While claiming that there was no lack of arms and ammunition, he could not find even a thousand willing to fight for his cause.
Poroshenko assumed office on 7 June. Although he took a hard line against separatists, he also reached out a hand to Russia, and sought to de-escalate violence by unilateral ceasefires. With Russia recognizing the elections, fear of Yanukovych’s return evaporated. And although the Ukrainian state and army had initially been too weak to oppose the annexation of Crimea, it was now getting stronger. During the presidential campaign, Poroshenko had pledged to bring the conflict to a quick end. When elected, he declared that he would ‘try to win the trust of those who didn’t vote for me’ but ruled out any negotiations with separatists. When he promised to end the war ‘in hours’, the means were bound to be violent.
Poroshenko’s summer offensive was a major escalation of the conflict. Although government forces had arrived near Sloviansk in mid-April, they only numbered 300. It was soon understood that ‘it was a military operation, not just restoring civil order […]. Sloviansk operation became the first massive military operation when we proceeded from using light weapons to using heavy ammunition’. Even after receiving reinforcements from volunteer battalions and a National Guard brigade, they were afraid of entering the city, instead encircling it. This unwillingness to enter urban areas led to what in Donbas was seen as the main form of escalation by the army: seemingly indiscriminate shelling of rebel-held areas. Although denied by virtually everyone interviewed, the perception alone polarized the relationship between the citizens who remained in Donbas and the government.
After holding Sloviansk for almost three months, Girkin and the separatists fled the city on 5 July. Dismayed by the lack of Russian intervention and facing defeat, Alexander Borodai, the Russian Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, threatened Russia with massive flows of civilian refugees if more support was not provided.
Russia, the bringer of war
Although researchers disagree regarding the extent of Russian participation in the War in Donbas, one thing is certain: As separatist forces found themselves at the verge of collapse in mid-August due to the Ukrainian summer offensive, Russian denials of intervention became unsustainable. As Ukrainian forces attempted to encircle separatists by separating them from Russia and the people’s republics from each other, Russian artillery began pounding them from across the border. The attacks were accurate and devastating, but Ukrainians were strictly forbidden to respond. Seeing no other way to defend themselves, some Ukrainian units crossed the border to Russia.
Another important part of Russian intervention came in the form of channeling volunteers and providing arms, training, and other assistance to separatists. This support no doubt helped the separatists to keep up with — if not occasionally outmatch — Ukrainian forces. For instance, when faced with Ukrainian airpower, separatists countered with portable surface-to-air missiles, which by June had downed several Ukrainian aircraft. They soon denied most use of airpower altogether. The war’s greatest over-reaction took place on 17 July, when a Malaysian airlines passenger plane was shot down over Ukraine. This serves as a prime example of how control of force and hence escalation remains an issue with non-state groups. With evidence pointing to Russian involvement, the deaths of 298 passengers and crew members led to international condemnation.
Although this condemnation limited Russian escalation, it did not prevent it. Russian regular units participated in the main engagement of the war in Ilovaisk in August, where Ukrainian forces were surrounded and, when they tried to withdraw, shot at. Multiple sources claim that withdrawal was agreed upon between Ukrainians and Russians but that the agreement saw that Ukrainians should leave behind their equipment, which they did not do. Other accounts suggest that this agreement only concerned Ukrainian regulars but not the volunteer battalions. Hated by their enemies, who saw them as unrelenting and aggressive, it is understandable that they saw surrendering as risky. As the Ukrainian columns began withdrawing as originally planned, they came under devastating fire. Poroshenko’s government immediately sued for a cease-fire. As Freedman notes, Ukraine needed a respite after suffering hundreds killed and captured and losing 65 percent of its military equipment. Yet he also notes that the provisions of the cease-fire were rejected out of hand by the separatists, who continued to expand their territory. To make matters worse, the Russians who had early on led the separatists had been replaced by Ukrainians, who appeared to be more aggressive but less capable. Although the ceasefire began on 4-5 September, it had limited impact.
It is important to note that several European allies warned the Ukrainian government about the Minsk Protocol. By signing the document, Ukraine would accept the Russian framing of the events. It was the Ukrainian government who pushed these countries to accept the agreement, although it is fair to note that the same countries had earlier advised Ukraine to de-escalate the situation, lest it turn into war. This constitutes the main political limitation to all actors involved: No one wanted a formal declaration of war.
Since the signing of the Minsk Agreement, Russia’s official position has been that the situation in Donbas could only be resolved through its implementation. This bound both Ukraine and the separatists, who had to relinquish hopes of Russian annexation. Following Minsk, separatist territorial conquests would result in increased Russian expenditure, and Matsuzato suggests that the later battles were useful for shortening the front line, as well as making it more stable.
These battles in early February 2015 nevertheless coincided with what appeared to be a dead end in the peace process. The most intense combat was witnessed at Donetsk airport and the transport hub of Debaltseve. Ukrainian forces were defeated in both engagements. The concentration of separatist forces in Debaltseve nevertheless helped Ukrainians to score a victory in Shyrokyne, from where the separatists had shelled the city of Mariupol. Further Ukrainian offensives were thought futile. As several volunteers explain the situation, by late summer 2014, Russian military formations across the border made sure that when Ukrainians pushed too hard, the Russians simply pushed back. As a result, there was little the Ukrainians could do. The signing of the Minsk II package on 12 February did not stop the fighting in Debaltseve itself, which continued until its Ukrainian defenders withdrew and surrendered on 18 February.
Although these defeats were great, they were the results of long struggles instead of collapse, as in Ilovaisk six months earlier. This suggests that the Ukrainian forces had become stronger and better organized. Their opponents struggled to do more without overt Russian help, which was not forthcoming due to the reasonable expectation of Western intervention. Both countries are, after all, strongly ‘encouraged’ by European countries and the United States to abide by the Minsk Agreement and hence to refrain from violent escalation. In what must be taken as de-escalation, by subscribing to Minsk, Russia recognized Ukrainian territorial integrity, and in 2015 even the separatists officially reduced their territorial claims.
Observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the agreement to withdraw heavy weapons from front lines have since served to limit escalation on both sides. Fighting has become a steady grind that continues to cause casualties on both sides. For instance, in 2017 the mission observed 441,336 violations of the ceasefire; 4,065 observations of weapons in violation of Minsk withdrawal lines; and 2,422 impediments to fulfill the observation mandate. Although a decision to end the ATO subjected the war under the Armed Forces in 2017, the war will likely continue as long as public opinion is in favor. The people thus continue to play a major role in the escalation — and de-escalation — of the war.
Conclusions: Why a conventional war?
The initial unwillingness of the Ukrainian army to use force in Crimea and against non-uniformed targets in Donbas may well have encouraged the separatists to escalate the situation. This in turn prodded the volunteers to take to arms. Yet by early 2015, a unit of the Azov volunteer battalion was pinned down by incoming small-caliber mortar fire in Shyrokyne. Suddenly, they witnessed two huge but harmless geysers of water in the nearby Sea of Azov. One of the Azovites was puzzled by the event. Either the adversaries could not shoot, or they missed on purpose. Three years later, the volunteer unexpectedly encountered a Russian volunteer artillerist, who had fought with the separatists in Shyrokyne. The artillerist explained that it was common to shoot the opening barrages to the side of enemy forces in populated areas to give civilians an opportunity to seek shelter. After this, fire could be retargeted more accurately. As the fire against the Azov unit likely came from a 240 mm mortar, there was no shelter in Shyrokyne that could have withstood a direct hit. Resultingly, the fire was never redirected.
Despite the evidence of repeated shelling of populated areas that may have lacked an enemy presence, both sides felt the need to avoid civilian casualties. Even in the main battle in and around Ilovaisk, the United Nations could only account for no more than 36 civilian deaths during a three-week period of fighting. Most fighting was similarly conducted in populated areas with divided political loyalties; the fighting concentrated on the rather traditional military task of controlling territory. Although there were benefits in making the opponent do so, killing civilians did not serve a positive strategic purpose in this task. According to Matsuzato, there was even a ‘silent gentlemen’s agreement’ regarding lines that should not be crossed. In January 2015, the Armed Forces of Ukraine caused civilian casualties by shelling a central district of Donetsk City. Considered unacceptable by separatists, the separatists sought to re-establish limits to the use of force through an artillery attack on eastern parts of the government-controlled Mariupol. These examples suggest a more complicated picture than the assumption that non-state actors would gain from escalating and ‘over-reacting’.
The chronology of escalation from Maidan to the Russian intervention illustrates a gradually escalating conflict. The Ukrainian belligerents fought the war in a conventional manner, with escalation largely assuming a symmetrical tit-for-tat shape. Admittedly, from the start the War in Donbas was a limited affair. Many of these limits came from material deficits. At the start of the conflict in spring 2014, the Ukrainian state appeared paralyzed, and the conflict became one between people. As the downing of the MH-17 airliner illustrates, increased state support from Kyiv to the volunteers and from Moscow to the separatists played an important enabling role in further escalation. Yet neither Ukraine nor Russia nor the international community wanted war. Reminiscent to the Cold War political setting, this restricted escalation. Even in the War in Donbas, nuclear weapons remained the ultimate disincentive for escalation. Pragmatic reasons — not least the recognition that Ukraine was the weaker party in a conflict where international opinion played a role — also mattered.
Yet none of these factors explains why escalation took the form it did in the early conflict fought between people-in-arms — for instance, in the narrative concerning Shyrokyne or in absence of any mass violence, such as ethnic cleansing against civilians. Narratives not only illustrate symmetry on the tactical level but more importantly how belligerents on both sides adhered to the same military norms, reminiscent of shared beliefs and role models: Combatants should wear uniforms, fight openly, and make efforts to limit unnecessary suffering. The emphasis on referendums and elections shows that shared norms regarding statehood were held even by competing elites. Ultimately, all these notions existed within a broader cultural context shared by the belligerents, who for instance engaged in inventing tradition, drawing from the civil war and early modern Cossacks ‘to make sense of their activities’. Considering that it is perceptions of difference and threat that generally lead to crossing thresholds of what is normal in war, it was the similarity of the belligerents that helped to maintain the symmetrical and limited escalation between them.
The state was the main reference point for all Ukrainian actors involved. Despite widespread criticism of the government among Maidan activists and volunteers alike, the emphasis was always on reforming and supplementing, not abolishing, the state. For the decision makers in Kyiv, the pressure to maintain statehood highlighted the importance of international recognition and legitimacy. The oft-used antithesis of Ukraine became Somalia, a failed state. Especially for government officials, Somalia meant collapse of law and order, and for patriots the undoing of both the nation and the state. As the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine summarized the situation, ‘Everything had to and was done within the law […] the world was watching us, and we had to prove that Ukraine wasn’t Somali[a]’. Acting like the Taliban — outside Western conventions of war — would only have proved that Russian propaganda was true. The stakes were nothing less than existential. As the provisional head of the Presidential Administration put it, ‘We didn’t want the chaos of 1917-1918 to return. It was clear once this red line was crossed, there will be no way of getting our country, our state, back’. Preventing escalation and countering Russian propaganda thus demanded that the government had to control the volunteers, which it ultimately did through integrating them into the state apparatus as paramilitary forces. The need for state control was even recognized by several volunteer battalion fighters, who described themselves critically as ‘privateers’ and ‘bandits’. The separatists in turn saw statehood not only as a necessary first step to secession but a central tenet of their identity. As Borodai noted, ‘The Russian people are a state-forming nation. For them, statehood is an essential feature’. This normative assumption about the primacy of the state was echoed by those on the Ukrainian side, with one volunteer battalion member explaining that ‘We are warriors with Western mentality. We are part of Western culture and civilization’. While marking difference to Borodai and his “Eastern” identity, this volunteer too emphasized a similar primacy of the state.
Constant references to domestic and international normative and legal frameworks helped to narrow down the available courses of action during the conflict. Ideas about war and warfare predated the conflict through a weekly pre-conscription training in high school even for those who had dodged conscription, but who after Maidan mobilized out of their own initiative. Perhaps more important sources of ideas came from history and popular culture, including the video games volunteers often referred to when trying to make sense of their experiences of war. The volunteer battalions replicated familiar military functions. Some early volunteers even wore badges that identified themselves as members of the armed forces. This implied that they were performing traditional tasks typically associated with the state and in the familiar way in which these tasks were performed. They were clearly affected by global norms of conventional war. These norms contributed to the way Ukraine later revived ideas of mass, reserves, and hardware and why their opponents followed suit. The matching norms held by belligerents contributed to a rather conventional conflict and escalation by narrowing down the available courses of using force.
Nevertheless, the limited nature of the war conflicted with deeply held expectations about war. This concerns two issues in particular. First, the Clausewitzian understanding of people’s war as ‘a defensive popular insurrection against foreign power’ connected to absolute war fell well short of reality. Despite much ado about the emergence of a true ‘people’s army’ in Ukraine, the reintroduction of conscription on 1 May 2014 resulted in massive draft dodging and protests. That only part of the people fought the war served to limit the inherent potential of a people’s war. Secondly, although the government was perceived to lack a strategy in the war, its control of the war effort soon limited opportunities for aggressive soldiering. Not unlike in Eric Leed’s account of volunteers in the First World War, even a century later these conflicts between expectations and reality resulted in disillusionment. With many ardent fighters viewing the War in Donbas as Sitzkrieg — a phony war — waged by politicians for private instead of national interests, they saw little point in risking their lives after the government-signed cease-fires turned a small-scale war of movement into a greater but immobile trench war.
The conflict in Donbas illustrates the importance of normative frameworks in explaining the use of force and patterns of escalation and de-escalation. Unlike what is expected with non-state actors in comparative cases, following the violence at Maidan escalation largely assumed a conventional gradually escalating pattern. As in many other conflicts where people-in-arms play a dominant role, even in Ukraine the belligerents came from the same cultural context and fought the war according to shared conventions. This kind of more fine-grained cultural explanation that emphasizes value systems — and not the crude binary division into ‘regular’ or ‘irregular’, or from a Western normative perspective, ‘conventional’ or ‘unconventional’ actors — provides a more nuanced understanding of use of force and escalation.