Thread by @bmilakovsky

Last week @leonidragozin retweeted my piece and a debate started in his mentions about "civil war" in #Ukraine vs. #Russia'n invasion. There's a lot of bad faith around that debate but exploring it can open up a few of the themes from my piece. THREAD
opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine…

In 2014 RU couldn't create separatist war in #Donbas out of whole cloth. Was possible because millions of east UA citizens were alienated from post-Maidan government, a minority radically so. Was no common touchstone to understand revolution's causes, events of its final days. 2/

Radical flange of this social group was organizing for armed protest, w/ significant (not universal) moral support in Donbas society. @scrawnya has demonstrated how they jockeyed for Kremlin support w/ help of ideological entrepreneurs like RU mercenary Igor Girkin-Strelkov. 3/

That's a very real indigenous civil conflict. But what next? It is just that RU slipped them some automatics and artillery pieces to continue their struggle. It armed them like a small European army, subsuming them totally into its martial and political power structures. 4/

The 'militiamen' (opolchentsi) for all intents+purposes became an auxiliary of the Russian army. And they did most of the fighting/dying in Donbas, alongside RU "volunteers" and officers who *made the whole thing possible*. 5/

It's really matter of degrees+scale for me. Many civil wars have foreign arms+"advisors." But RU's absorption of Donbas separatists into its military command structure fundamentally changed nature of conflict. RU stepped in 2 achieve goals indigenous uprising never could have. 6/

A few times the mask fell completely (Ilovaisk, Debaltseve, Luhansk outskirts) and RU army operated openly. But these weren't discrete interventions, as I saw some suggesting. These were moments when stakes were too high to maintain ruse of 'militia'-led military operations. 7/

And yet... within this remained a rift that carries all the implications of a civil war for Ukraine. One of the tragedies of the last 9 years was how Russia's invasion tangled that civil rift up with Kremlin geopolitical ambitions for all of Ukraine. 8/

For some people, like my colleague Enrique Menendez (born in Bakhmut despite name) the Minsk process really was longshot hope for path to reintegration of Donetsk, Luhansk. But the whole process was so weighted with the geopolitical expectations and fears of Moscow and Kyiv...9/

...that the real need to find a state framework acceptable to the alienated core of the 'republics' was impossible. And as @SporrerWolfgang has argued Moscow's obfuscation of Ukraine-level aspirations beneath Donbas minutiae meant its core demands never got openly hashed out. 10/

So the process was abortive, unable to either be a platform for cold-blooded and open negotiations about how much sovereignty UA would yield for peace, or detailed, inclusive negotiations to facilitate reintegration after a brutal social rift. 11/

I think that muddle grew out of unenlightening debate about "civil war vs. invasion." The unsatisfying but most truthful to me classification is "invasion that usually needs to be treated that way, but in some political aspects/processes should be treated like a civil war." END