Internal Conflict or Hidden Aggression: Competing Accounts and Expert Assessments of the War in Ukraine’s Donbas.

Abstract

This article examines two issues – competing accounts of the military events in the Donbas and the Ukrainian experts’ opinion on the factors that led to the beginning of violence. The literature analysis reveals the existence of two competing discourses, clustering around the concepts of "civil war" and "hybrid war" and the so-called "pragmatic discourse", recognizing the presence of both phenomena at the same time. While the major challenge for the authors, who share the discourse of the internal conflict, is to adequately account for the Russia’s role in the war, the proponents of the "hybrid war" discourse underestimate the loss of Ukraine’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force during the period of revolutionary change of power. The second issue surveys the weight of the factors of the conflict in the assessments of Ukrainian experts. In this part, seven external and internal factors that were most visible in the literature in 2014-2016 are identified. These are: the state fragmentation, the sudden change of power in Kyiv, the consequences of the Soviet policy of Russification, the destructive impact of regional elites, Russia’s direct and indirect interference, the weakness of the organized Ukrainian groups and the loss of legitimacy of the new central government in the Donbas. Surveys conducted by pair comparisons in 2016 and 2017 demonstrate that most Ukrainian experts assign the largest weight to the Russia’s hidden aggression (15.2 percent) and the destructive role of local elites (13.2 percent) as primary factors behind the conflict, whereas most of their western counterparts look at this event through the prism of the civil war. Differences in the two perspectives, apparently, are not due to the facts, but to pre-existing images and ways of thinking, which influence the perception of these events.