It’s a topic that few are willing to talk about, but at some point – and especially if it is to get the victory it seeks – Ukraine will have to confront a looming problem: what to do with millions of its own citizens who currently have closer ties to Russia than they do to Ukraine.
President Volodymyr Zelensky has made it quite clear that Ukraine intends to reclaim all of its territory – that includes a large chunk of the Donbas region that pro-Russian separatists, aided by Russian troops, turned into unrecognised pseudo-states in 2014, and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed that March.
If this is a problem in areas liberated after less than a year of Russian occupation, how does Ukraine plan to reintegrate millions of people in the Donbas?
It’s one thing liberating territories that Russian troops only took last year when it deployed its entire war machine in a brutal and atrocious campaign to subjugate Ukraine – with its air force bombing cities and its regular troops slaughtering civilians.
But it’s a different story when it comes to the areas that seceded in 2014. Even though Ukraine, for understandable reasons, insists that first Crimea, and then Donetsk and Luhansk were occupied by Russian troops, in reality local separatists who were Ukrainian citizens played a central role in the conflict. In Crimea, pro-Russian protesters, aided by volunteers and special forces from Russia, installed a local Russian, Sergei Aksyonov as prime minister of the internal republic of Crimea. Then, with Russian guns and aided by the Kremlin, the new Crimean government held a referendum in which a majority voted to join Russia.
In Donetsk and Luhansk, the picture was murkier. There, encouraged by Russian officers and volunteers, local separatists took control of government buildings and declared independence, hoping that Russia would take them in. It didn’t. Instead, the Kremlin sent troops to ensure the separatist governments could survive, gradually taking control over their administrations and militias – all the while refusing to recognise them officially.
The so-called ‘Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics’ were legally a no man’s land, but de facto administered much like Russian provinces. In 2017, Ukraine established a blockade of the statelets, banning trade with them and ceasing to fund infrastructure there. The local administrations became more and more entrenched and, impoverished, the residents of these pseudo-states – nearly 3 million Ukrainian citizens (and over 5 million if you include Crimea) – went on with their lives as best as they could. That meant turning to Russian funding, Russian banks, Russian trade, and, increasingly, Russian passports. These areas have had nine years of Russian integration.
It is hard to gauge the political sympathies of an isolated population living under a brutally repressive regime. But figures from before Donetsk and Luhansk came under the control of pro-Russian separatists are telling. According to a poll conducted in April 2014 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, over 70 per cent of respondents in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine – where support for Russia was far less consolidated than it was in Crimea – considered the government in Kyiv illegitimate. While this does not mean automatic support for pro-Russian separatism, many in eastern Ukraine felt that no one but the Russian government really heard or represented them. ‘I don’t want to be called a separatist,’ a Russian-speaking Ukrainian citizen in Odessa told me in May 2014. ‘We don’t want to secede from Ukraine. But we hope that Russia won’t leave us to our sorrow.’
You might expect that years of Russian brutality has changed people’s minds. For a lot of people, it has. But for many people I’ve spoken to from east of the line of contact – when it was still possible to do so – the question becomes about what they can afford to do and who pays for their groceries.
Ambivalence about Russia was already evident even in the territories Ukraine liberated last autumn after less than a year of Russian occupation. According to the Washington Post, thousands of Russian sympathisers fled Kherson when the Ukrainian army liberated it in November. But thousands more remained, and Ukrainian authorities introduced stringent checkpoints where they questioned civilians – sometimes for days – about their potential collaboration. In Kharkiv, over 4,000 people fled back to Russia.
One explanation is not just Russian brainwashing, but legitimate fear. In March 2022, Ukraine introduced a law against collaborationists making any voluntary association with Russian forces punishable by up to 15 years in prison. But what exactly is voluntary in the long-entrenched separatist strongholds, where there hasn’t been an alternative to working with a Russia-backed administration for years? ‘This law is very unclear and people are very unhappy about it,’ a western NGO worker based in Kyiv told me, under conditions of anonymity due to the sensitivity of their work. ‘It’s a problem from the legal point of view, and in terms of people’s attitudes on the ground.’
The government has tried to avoid extreme punishments that could be exploited by Russian propaganda. But a law that in effect criminalises paying taxes in the place where you live will inevitably lead to abuses, according to Ukrainian lawyer Rostislav Kravets. ‘Any business conducted on occupied territories can be ruled collaborationist,’ he told Meduza.
If this is already a problem in territories liberated after less than a year of Russian occupation, how does Ukraine plan to reintegrate millions of people in the Donbas – and, if it ever comes to that, Crimea?
Ukraine has a Ministry for Integration that’s tasked with dealing with these issues – but so far it doesn’t seem to have a strategy. In one of its latest projects, it announced preparing personnel who would work to de-occupy Crimea – but not a word about the people who already live there. ‘Everyone is obsessed with victory, but no one knows what this victory is,’ said the NGO worker. ‘So we’re asking, let’s say you restore the 1991 borders, what are you going to do with these people?’
Few want to even have these conversations. It’s understandable that as he fights back against Russian forces, Zelensky’s government wants to avoid the subject. Even mentioning an amnesty for collaboration was taboo when I visited Kyiv in 2019, and it is especially so now. But without a strategy that addresses amnesty and integration, Ukraine will find itself battling not just Russian troops but its own citizens. A start would be having a frank conversation that includes the people it wants to talk to the least – the willing and unwilling collaborators – if Kyiv ever wants to reclaim them from Russia’s grip.
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