The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014

The start of the aggression

Russian aggression against Ukraine began in 2014, despite the fact that the country’s neutral status was enshrined in its legislation. In August 2014, sabotage-and-reconnaissance and company-and-battalion tactical groups of the Russian army invaded the territory of Ukraine.

Crimea: “referendum” or occupation

The core myth of this war is that Crimea supposedly “chose Russia itself” in a referendum. The facts say otherwise. The annexation of Crimea is illegal — this is not the assessment of one of the parties but the qualification of the UN General Assembly (Resolution 68/262 of 27 March 2014), and the occupation itself began on the night of 26–27 February 2014^[6]. No referendum was held in accordance with international law: what was staged under military occupation on 16 March 2014 was a survey of the population that, in the author’s words, “could be conducted even in your own apartment stairwell.” And references to the residents supposedly being “glad” prove nothing: under occupation a person does not speak freely — for saying otherwise one could lose everything, as the Crimean Tatars once did^[7].

The thesis that “Ukraine itself gave up Crimea because it did not fight” also fails to withstand scrutiny. The reason was not “unwillingness” but the circumstances: in early 2014 there was a lack of leadership and clear orders (instructions came down from above saying “don’t shoot, we haven’t sorted it out yet”); the Ukrainian garrison in Crimea numbered fewer than 10,000 — mostly local conscripts, some of whom went over to the Russian side — against roughly 20,000 Russian troops in Sevastopol plus the “little green men”^[8]. A full-scale battle in the cities would have cost enormous civilian casualties, so the troops were withdrawn precisely to prevent this. A forced retreat is not consent.

The geopolitical pretext — and its absurdity

One of the main Russian theses is that a supposed “geopolitical confrontation between the USA and Russia” automatically justifies military action on the territory of a third country^[1]. In the video dispute, Dribnytsya poses the obvious question: if this is really a quarrel between Moscow and Washington, why must it be “sorted out” precisely on the territory of Ukraine? This question receives no substantive answer^[2].

The “Novorossiya” project

Vladimir Putin tried to realize the “Novorossiya” project — an artificial unification of the south-eastern regions of Ukraine into a quasi-state entity under the Kremlin’s control. The real attempt took the form of “people’s republics”: the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa ones. None of them held out — the local population did not support the project, and “Novorossiya” never extended beyond the temporarily occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In the video, Dribnytsya directly calls this a failure^[3].

”Russian Donbas” — an anachronism

A separate pillar of the justifications is that the Donbas was supposedly “Russian from time immemorial.” This is an anachronism on two counts at once. First, the very name “Donbas” is industrial, not ethnic: it is the Donets coal-and-industrial basin, which began to take shape only at the beginning of the 19th century^[12]. As historian Nadiia Temirova clarifies, the term itself appeared in the first third of the 19th century — it was introduced by mining engineer Yevhraf Kovalevsky (who, incidentally, had Ukrainian roots) as an abbreviation of “Donets coal basin”^[16]. In other words, it is a geological-industrial category, not the name of an “age-old Russian land.”

And the industrial Donbas itself was an international project. The first deposits on an industrial scale began to be developed only in the second half of the 19th century: in 1869 the Welshman John Hughes founded a metallurgical plant and the settlement of Yuzivka — present-day Donetsk. By 1900, 13 metallurgical plants were already operating within the bounds of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and the Donbas supplied over 90% of all-Russian coal output^[19]. The industrial Donbas, on which the image of “Russian Donbas” rests, arose at the end of the 19th century as an international industrial project within the empire — and not as a “primordially Russian” land.

Second, before the 19th century there were simply no fixed borders here. The southern frontier of the Tsardom of Muscovy in the 17th century was the Belgorod defensive line (built from the 1630s) — a defensive belt against the raids of the Crimean Khanate; Belgorod was the southernmost line of Muscovy^[13]. The steppe beyond it was no-man’s-land, a territory controlled by no one in any proper sense: Cossack sabers reached it too, but it did not thereby become “Russian”^[14]. In the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (from 1648), Cossack wintering camps reached here; and the allegiance of a village was determined not by a line on a map but by whom it paid tribute to — the hetman or the Muscovite tsar^[15]. Borders in the modern sense — with border guards and barbed wire — began to take shape only in the 19th century^[14]. Projecting present-day ethnopolitical categories onto the 17th century is therefore a methodological sleight of hand on which the myth rests.

Third, it was not “Russians in general” who settled this steppe, but above all Cossacks. As Temirova shows, serf-bound Muscovy had no free population for the dangerous frontier, so Cossacks were taken into guard service; it was precisely Cossacks with their families who built and populated the first fortress-cities in the north of the region (including present-day Sloviansk, 1676), which guarded the salt works^[17]. The southern part is even more telling: until the destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775, the Azov-coast lands belonged to the Kalmius palanka of the Zaporizhian Host — an administrative unit of the Cossack state. And only after the palanka was abolished, in 1779, were about 30,000 Greeks expelled from Crimea brought here, while in the first quarter of the 19th century the region was swept by German (Mennonite) colonization — all of this already within the framework of an imperial policy of population replacement, not “age-old Russianness”^[18]. In other words, before the arrival of the empire the Donbas was a Cossack steppe, not a “Russian land.”

The context of military theory

In the video dispute, the author draws on a classic of military theory — the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. One of Clausewitz’s key principles: the aggressor always presents himself as peace-loving. This is not a rhetorical device but a functional requirement. It is advantageous for the aggressor that the victim offer no armed resistance — so he always calls to “reach an agreement,” to “stop the bloodshed,” to “find a compromise” — on his own terms.

This principle helps to correctly interpret the Kremlin’s calls for “peace” in Ukraine from 2014 onward: this is not a search for compromise but a tactical move to consolidate territories already seized.

”There is no war — there is mobilization”

A derivative technique of denial is the thesis “you have no war, you have mobilization.” In the video dispute, the author demonstrates its untenability: mobilization is one of the elements of war, and the fact that the war was not formally declared changes nothing^[4]. The history of Russia itself confirms this. Over the past hundred years it has declared mobilization three times: in 1914, which started the First World War; in 1941, when Stalin declared mobilization against Germany (the Soviet “Great Patriotic War”); and in 2022. The first two times turned into world wars^[5].

Why Russia attacked: revanchism, not NATO

A separate question is the real cause of the invasion. According to the analysis of historian Serhiy Gromenko, it is not “NATO expansion” but imperial revanchism — revenge for the defeats of the 1990s, when Russia failed to take Crimea solely because of internal troubles (the constitutional crisis of 1993, the war in Chechnya)^[11]. The model was the Russo-Georgian War of 2008: having seized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia, despite an economic collapse, consolidated politically, and Putin’s ratings soared; the same scheme was repeated for Crimea in 2014, plans for which had existed since at least 2008^[9].

Hence an important conclusion: this is not only Putin’s war. According to polls, 60–67% of Russians support it and believe they are waging war against the West, and do not regard Ukraine as a subject in its own right; a minority (about 15–25%) demands that it continue as a “holy war”^[10]. Putin’s personal responsibility is indisputable, but to reduce everything to him alone is mistaken: imperial power kept Russia for centuries from maturing into a political nation, and contemporary Russia, according to Gromenko, resembles a defeated but unreckoned-with Germany after the First World War^[11].

Why Crimea specifically: the trauma of the Russian consciousness

Gromenko separately explains why the revanchism fixates precisely on Crimea. The reason is not only military or economic but also “traumatic.” Without Crimea, Russian history de facto has no antiquity and no early Middle Ages — only a deep periphery remains. All the “great” ancient history — the Hellenic city-states, the Roman-Byzantine heritage — is geographically concentrated in Crimea, not in core Russia. That is why, each time Russia takes possession of Crimea — at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 20th, or now in the 21st — it “warms” the national pride of the “great Russian”^[20].

To this is added the myth of Sevastopol. For the past century and a half the city has been presented as a “city of Russian glory,” even though historically Russians suffered heavy defeats there — both in the Crimean War and in the Second World War. Gromenko calls this a paradox of collective psychiatry: the real defeats do not destroy the myth but on the contrary feed it^[21]. In other words, the Kremlin needs Crimea not as a territory but as the symbolic foundation of imperial identity — hence the urgency of the 2014 annexation.

Tellingly, the strategic inseparability of Crimea from Ukraine was understood by Ukrainian statesmen themselves — long before 2014. Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky wrote as early as 1919 that Ukraine could not exist without Crimea: it is a “torso without legs,” because whoever holds the peninsula will threaten Ukraine both in the Azov region and in Odesa, and it is impossible to fully develop the south without a Ukrainian Crimea^[22]. The 1918 negotiations of Skoropadsky’s government with the Crimean and Kuban regions are a separate story, to which Gromenko devoted a monograph.

What this means for history

The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014 became the first attempt since 1945 at a forcible redrawing of borders in Europe. Its full-scale continuation in 2022 confirmed that the “Novorossiya” project had not disappeared but had only been temporarily shelved.