Why did fighting break out in eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014?
The fighting in eastern Ukraine or, to be precise, in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces combines features of a covert foreign invasion with those of a civil conflict. Accordingly, it has both external and internal causes, even if these happen to be closely connected.
On the one hand, Ukraine's powerful neighbor and former imperial master, Russia, refuses to accept the political order that has emerged in Ukraine after the 2014 Maidan victory. Russia's position is not surprising, because President Vladimir Putin's regime has fought for many years to keep Ukraine in Russia's economic and political orbit. It was the threat of Russian economic sanctions that forced the fateful decision of the Yanukovych administration to reject a political and trade agreement with the European Union in November 2013, starting the revolution. The Russian state-run media have portrayed the Maidan as pro-Western and pro-Nazi at the same time, a curious combination necessitated by Russia's idiosyncratic self-image as an anti-Western great power that was the principal victor of World War II. However, Russia similarly took the side of the old regime in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005, which the Russian media also presented as a Western conspiracy. More generally, such a stand reflects Russia's difficulty in coming to terms with its own post-imperial complex and the “loss" of Ukraine—as painful an issue for many Russians today as it was in 1918 and 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence after the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, respectively.
An increasingly important component in the ideology of the Putin regime is Russia’s alleged right to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers abroad. The latter are citizens of other countries who could be of non-Russian ethnic background but who identified with Russian culture when their present-day nation-states were part of the Soviet Union.
Both of these categories are imprecise and can serve as a convenient human-rights cover for imperial-restoration policies. The Russian authorities justified their annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014 by the need to protect their “compatriots,” thus defined, from the threat of a Western-supported coup in Ukraine. Similarly, the official Russian line on the conflict in the Donbas (i.e., the Donets Basin, an industrial region on the Russian border comprising Donetsk and Luhansk provinces) is that ethnic Russians and Russian speakers are fighting to protect their cultural rights. However, the armed conflict there would not have started without the Crimean precedent and other encouraging signals from Moscow, as well as the weapons and military personnel coming from Russia. It became clear very quickly that the “volunteers" from Russia comprised a significant proportion of the separatist rebels and that many of their leaders were also Russian citizens, who had come to Ukraine only recently. By the summer of 2014, evidence had mounted of the transfer of heavy weapons from the Russian army to the rebels. Reports were also coming in about regular Russian army units covertly shelling Ukrainian positions from across the border and even operating on Ukrainian territory. All this amounted to Russia's undeclared involvement in the conflict.Yet it is undeniable that native inhabitants of the Donbas are also present among the separatist rebels. It is not that the volunteers from Russia are fighting on behalf of the locals totally without the latter's support. Rather, it is that the idea of “greater Russia" appeals to both the Russian nationalist newcomers and some part of the local population. A significant proportion of both local and outside fighters can also be classified as mercenaries in that they are being paid to fight. At the same time, however, opinion polls in the Donbas both before and after the start of fighting never showed majority support for separation from Ukraine; indeed, unlike in the Crimea, ethnic Ukrainians constitute the majority population in the Donbas.
Still, the prolonged conflict there has roots in both the region's cultural identity and recently instilled fears. Rather than being a “Russian" region of Ukraine, the Donbas is a “Soviet" industrial region, uncertain of its place in the new Ukraine. Originally migrants from Russia or Ukrainian peasants assimilated by Russophone factory life, Donbas workers identified with the glory of their Soviet- built but now inefficient mines and smokestack industries. For nearly a decade marked by its political domination in the Donbas, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions strengthened its hold over voters by fueling their anxieties about the “nationalists" in Ukraine's west potentially encroaching on the region's Russophone cultural space. After the victory of the Maidan, it was relatively easy for the local political elite to stir discontent in the Donbas. The victorious revolutionaries provided perfect pretexts with their misguided attempts to abolish a language law seen as protecting Russian as a regional language and abortive symbolical “occupations” of some administrative buildings in the east. A violent clash in the southern city of Odesa (not in the Donbas) between young radicals from both camps served as ultimate proof that “the nationalists were coming." The anti-Maidan hysteria in the Russian media, which were still influential in eastern Ukraine, and the hope that a Crimean-style incorporation into Russia would immediately increase living standards added to the explosive cocktail.
Still, it took the covert and eventually overt involvement of Russian political advisors and the military to translate the tensions in the Donbas into a violent conflict and, soon, a hybrid war blending irregular and conventional warfare.