Table Of ContentUkraine’s Unnamed War
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of
2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and
Eastern Donbas a “civil war” in order to claim non-involvement. This
flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science
literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political
solution was found between 2015 and 2022. The book explains how
Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control
and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little
resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decisionmakers misunderstood the
attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and
also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine
into a more cohesively “Ukrainian” polity. Drawing on Ukrainian doc-
umentary sources, this concise book explains these important develop-
ments to a non-specialist readership.
dominique arel is Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of
Ottawa. His publications include Rebounding Identities: The Politics of
Identity in Russia and Ukraine (co-edited with Blair A. Ruble, 2006).
He organizes the Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Ukraine and is
Director of the Annual ASN World Convention at Columbia University.
jesse driscoll is an associate professor of political science at the School
of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego.
His publications include Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet
States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (2021).
Ukraine’s Unnamed War
Before the Russian Invasion of 2022
Dominique Arel
University of Ottawa
jesse Driscoll
University of California San Diego
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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781316511497
DOI: 10.1017/9781009052924
© Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
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place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
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Contents
List of Figures page vi
List of Maps vii
List of Tables viii
Acknowledgments ix
1 A War Within the “Russian World” 1
2 A Theory of War Onset in Post-Soviet Eurasia 23
3 Before Maidan 46
4 Regime Change (Maidan) 67
5 Irredentist Annexation (Crimea) 100
6 “The Russian Spring” (Eastern Ukraine) 121
7 The War and Russian Intervention (Donbas) 145
8 A Frozen Conflict Thaws 171
Appendix A: Formalizing a Story of Strategic Ukrainian
Adaptation 198
Appendix B: Formalizing a Story of Why Putin Chose War 211
References 214
Index 264
v
Figures
8.1 Civilian and military deaths in Donbas by year page 176
A.1 The order of play if M = N (coordinated sedition) 201
A.2 The order of play if M < N (no coordinated sedition) 203
A.3 Payoffs by strategy and rank-orderings
of strategies by actor 205
A.4 Reminder of parameter definitions (formal cheat sheet) 210
B.1 Bargaining over Ukraine 212
vi
Maps
3.1 Self-identified Russians as a percentage
of oblast population page 61
4.1 Party of Regions single-member districts,
February 19, 2014 94
4.2 Party of Regions single-member districts,
February 20, 2014 94
4.3 Party of Regions single-member districts,
February 21, 2014 94
6.1 East–West variation in views of post-Maidan
regime legitimacy 123
8.1 Birthplaces of Ukrainian military dead per capita
by raion 186
vii
Tables
2.1 Analytic narrative structure page 39
4.1 The narratives diverge 97
5.1 Defections from Ukraine’s state security services 115
viii
Acknowledgments
Co-authoring is difficult. Our collegial relationship and our friend-
ship, tested by the fire of war, is much stronger than it was before col-
laboration. We wrangled over every sentence, but the result is a book
that we are both proud of, and that neither of us could have written
alone. Lennon and McCartney.
The book would not have seen daylight without the valiant and
dynamic assistance of a team of research assistants associated with
the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa over many
years. Oleksandr Melnyk (PhD, University of Toronto) was the main
researcher during the Donbas war in 2014 until his return to Ukraine.
(After four months under Russian occupation in Kherson oblast in
2022, he safely returned to Canada.) Chair doctoral students were
central to the effort: Natalia Stepaniuk, who graduated in 2018, and
the “new generation” of Alexandra Wishart, Bertrand de Franqueville,
and Anna Vozna, from 2019 on. Iuliia Skubytska, who had taken part
in a Ukraine Summer School co-sponsored by the Chair, became a
key researcher from Kharkiv and Kyiv. Anastasia Llewellyn became
our invaluable copy editor. On the Driscoll side, surveys with mili-
tia members and coding of social media data were facilitated by the
extraordinary work of Ganna Grebennikova, who led a hardworking
team comprised of Oleksandr Keniz, Alex Sabadan, Yulia Nagirniak,
Iryna Sheremeta, Kateryna Zablotska, Olena Valsiuk, and Christinia
Parandii. Iulia Wilson coded the birthplaces of Ukrainian martyrs used
to produce Figure 6.1. We must also acknowledge the hard work of
Alexandr Karkepov, whose nimble mind assisted in the initial transla-
tion/transliteration process for Twitter data coding in real time during
the fall of 2014 – the work that generated the Danyliw paper which
began the Driscoll–Arel collaboration.
We owe an incalculable gratitude to the numerous Ukrainian schol-
ars, researchers, interviewees, subjects, and citizens who contributed
to this book. Arel has been building ties with Ukraine for decades,
ix
x Acknowledgments
in large part thanks to the networks developed through the Annual
Danyliw Seminar held between 2005 and 2019 on the University of
Ottawa campus (and resuming in 2022 after a COVID pause). He
acquired more-than-a-lifetime of debts and acknowledgments, but a
few names bear mention: Jars Balan, Anna Colin Lebedev, Mayhill
Fowler, Alexandra Goujon, John Paul Himka, the late Valery Khmelko,
Serhiy Kudelia, Daria Mattingly, Alti and Berel Rodal, Oxana Shevel,
Ioulia Shukan, Lucan Way, and Yuri Zhukov. Driscoll visited Ukraine
for the first time in 2014 and, with help from Arel, was lucky enough
to make early contact with KIIS, a number of extraordinary Kyiv-
Mohyla students, and especially Volodymyr Ishchenko, whose gener-
osity and integrity continue to humble us.
Different chapters of the book benefitted from collegial feedback
at the University of California San Diego – too many to list, but we
will mention a few. Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay, Phil Roeder, and Rex
Douglass were generous with supporting comments to an early paper
(joint with Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld) analyzing Russian-language
behaviors inside Ukraine, affirming that we were going after a big
question with the right sample. Amelia Glaser and Peter Gourevitch
assisted in hosting Slava Vakarchuk at UCSD midway through the
book writing, providing a memorable morale boost. Nico Ravenilla,
hearing this book’s argument for the first time, pierced the conver-
sation with the question “what institutions did Russian-speakers in
Ukraine build to coordinate lobbying efforts and what happened to
those institutions after Crimea” – an offhand clarifying comment
that cemented our book’s chapter structure two weeks later. We bor-
rowed confidence from Craig McIntosh and Ron Suny (at Michigan) –
exemplary empiricists from different disciplinary traditions – who
saw maturing versions of the argument and assessed the big story as
Russia’s soft power weakness.
Barbara Walter and Roger Petersen are the two senior scholars
that provided the most important mid-book encouragement. Walter’s
advice was that very few people want to read game theory. Petersen
was forceful in his insistence that the theory chapter be written in
plain language, taking aim at big questions and not allowing ourselves
to get side-tracked with minutiae (whether game-theoretic or con-
structivist). Once the game theory was gated in the Appendix, we still
spent months trying to get the presentation right in a way that might
be pleasing to technical and nonspecialist audiences. In this we were
