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  3. Ukraine's Unnamed War
  • Cited by 26
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2023
Print publication year:
2023
Online ISBN:
9781009052924
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009052924
Subjects:
Russian and East European Government, Politics and Policy, Politics and International Relations, Comparative Politics
Information

Book description

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a 'civil war' in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. The book explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decisionmakers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively 'Ukrainian' polity. Drawing on Ukrainian documentary sources, this concise book explains these important developments to a non-specialist readership.

Reviews

‘The ‘unnamed war’ in this brilliantly argued, comprehensively researched, and historically accurate book began as a civil war within Ukraine primarily fought between factions of what Russia has long imagined as their world. From this perspective, Arel’s and Driscoll’s analytic model reveals missed opportunities for a fragile peace that might have avoided Russia’s imperialist invasion, where we can now envision only an endless war of attrition.’

David D. Laitin - Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

‘Contrary to explanations that emphasize the foreign origins of the war in Ukraine, Arel and Driscoll understand it instead through a logic of escalating violence, rooting it in significant part in domestic Ukrainian political dynamics. In doing so, they bring to light new aspects of the war and Moscow’s miscalculations leading up to its full-scale invasion in February 2022.’

Mark R. Beissinger - Henry W. Putnam Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University

‘It is impossible to fully comprehend the onset and course of the full-scale Ukraine-Russia war that began with the Russian invasion in February 2022 without understanding the politics and violence that preceded it. Using a strategic action model as a guide, Arel and Driscoll’s Ukraine’s Unnamed War provides the definitive account of the Ukraine-Russia conflict from 2013–2021. Eschewing overgeneralization and writing with a style accessible to non-specialists, the authors show, in detail, how the decisions, agency, and identity of local Ukrainian actors prevented a political solution and developed the conditions that would spark a major conventional war in Europe.’

Roger Petersen - Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

‘In the heat of the devastating war in Ukraine, Arel and Driscoll have given us a cool and courageous account of the complex and fraught prehistory of Putin's invasion. Their argument is the most compelling account of how a civil war in a divided country turned into a hot war between two neighbouring states.’

Ronald Grigor Suny - William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, The University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History, The University of Chicago

‘This is no ‘instant book’ churned out to provide urgently needed information, though it certainly contains important facts, but rather a substantive study reflecting long-term research on Ukraine and the surrounding region. … Recommended.’

T. P. Johnson Source: Choice

‘This book makes a significant academic contribution to shaping a political vision of postwar Ukraine based on intra-Ukrainian compromise. Although the main readership, according to the authors, is a non-specialist audience, I would recommend this insightful theoretically and empirically rich book mainly to policymakers and researchers interested in Ukrainian politics, identity and memory politics, studies of nationalism, post-Soviet studies and other relevant fields.’

Yana Volkova Source: Europe-Asia Studies

‘Arel and Driscoll have written a book that is invaluable for both its insights into the war in Ukraine itself as well as the applicability of its theories and concepts to other recent conflicts where the lines between civil and international war are so often blurred.’

Douglas J. Cremer Source: The European Legacy

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