Don’t believe Donbasification

Kate Truska writes:

I come from Sloviansk, in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

For anyone who has followed Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, the name will probably be familiar. Sloviansk was where armed men led by Russian citizen and former FSB officer Igor Girkin seized government buildings in April 2014, and where one of the first major battles of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine unfolded.

And yet, more than twelve years later, I still regularly encounter versions of the same story: “that something happened in Donbas in 2014 because the people there were fundamentally different from the rest of Ukraine; that Ukraine somehow fractured naturally between a Russian-speaking East and a Ukrainian-speaking West; that an internal conflict erupted and Russia subsequently became involved.”

For somebody from the region, it is difficult to overstate how profoundly misleading that narrative is.

The reality is that Putin exaggerated minor differences to cause resentment and justify his invasion.

In a piece published by Estonia’s Delfi under the striking headline A warning to Estonia: You too can be turned into a Donbas — so learn from us, Vlad describes Donbasification as something much more sophisticated than separatism. It is the deliberate construction of an enemy-made regional identity inside another country: taking real regional characteristics, layering mythology, propaganda and historical distortion over them, exaggerating genuine differences, suppressing inconvenient history, and eventually presenting the resulting artificial identity as evidence that the territory never properly belonged within the nation at all — and using that manufactured division against the state itself.

Sounds like the exact strategy that Te Pati Maori seem to advocate!

On 1 December 1991, Ukrainians were asked directly whether they supported an independent Ukraine. Every administrative region of the country voted yes.

Nationally, support exceeded 90 percent. In Donetsk oblast, 83.90 percent voted for Ukrainian independence. In Luhansk oblast, 83.86 percent did the same. Crimea and Sevastopol returned majorities for Ukrainian independence too.

That referendum is extraordinarily inconvenient for the mythology subsequently built around Ukraine’s East. When people there were actually asked which country they wanted to belong to, the answer was Ukraine.

Before this was, Ukranian and Russians were brothers and cousins, not foes and fatalities.