Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022

Arel and Driscoll offer a meticulous and nuanced account of the developments in Ukraine that preceded the Russian invasion of 2022. After the antigovernment Maidan revolution in 2014 in Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved to annex Crimea in a bloodless operation enabled by the popular local rejection of the Maidan revolution and by the defection of Crimean elites to the Russian state. Events were quite different in the eastern region of Donbas. There, opposition to the Maidan revolt sparked violent insurgency in the streets, but the local elites chose not to break with the Ukrainian government. Initially, the Russian role in the conflict was limited to information warfare. (The Kremlin only got involved militarily several months later.) Populations were also divided elsewhere in eastern Ukraine, precipitating bloody conflict. At the root of this violence, the authors emphasize, was not Russian aggression, as is commonly believed in the West, but real divisions between those Ukrainians who aligned with Ukraine and those who aligned with Russia. At that stage, the authors claim, the current war might have been avoided. Several months after the beginning of the civil conflict, Russia began direct military intervention but never admitted to it, which was one reason European attempts to mediate were stymied. Another was Ukraine’s steadfast refusal to grant electoral legitimacy to its de facto breakaway territories in eastern Donbas. After a six-year stalemate, Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.