“Les Miserables”: Comparative Biographies of Ukrainian and “Novorossiyan” Commanders

Why Fight? The Combatant Careers of the Anti‐Kyiv Fighters in the Donbas War1

“…Our results demonstrate that the current literature on the Donbas war fails to acknowledge the participation of some important groups of combatants on the anti-Kyiv side and simplifies the explanation of the involvement of others (e.g., Malyarenko and Galbreath 2016;Mikheieva 2018;Mitrokhin 2015;Oleksy and Studenna-Skrukwa 2019;Scherbak et al 2016). First, it does not pay enough attention to the substantial group of anti-Kyiv combatants who were well-off Donbass residents and, thus, misinterprets the motives of Donbas residents in the exclusive terms of economic deprivation.…”

“…Their social connections, which were established or strengthened during their active participation in the prewar events, facilitated the transition, while the decision to join armed groups was supported both by their family members and the community in general. Economic factors also played a role in evolving localists' decisions to join the war, although not in a direct way, as suggested by the existing literature (e.g., Mitrokhin 2015;Scherbak et al 2016). The majority of localists were permanently employed at the time they joined armed groups, and leaving their jobs actually meant losing income.…”

“…Often, they reduce an explanation of the anti-Kyiv combatant mobilization to their economic incentives and their ideological affinity. The economic incentives include local elites' attempts to maintain their control over the region by investing resources into anti-Kyiv paramilitary units; economic losses in industrial Donbas towns exposed to trade shocks with Russia, which reduced the costs of rebellion and the efforts of poor and uneducated members of the local population to make their living via raids and pillages (Malyarenko and Galbreath 2016;Mikheieva 2018;Mitrokhin 2015;Oleksy and Studenna-Skrukwa 2019;Scherbak et al 2016;Wilson 2016;Zhukov 2015). Ideological affinity usually features a desire of right-wing activists-exploited by the Kremlin-to defend ethnically Russian people in the fight between the "Russian world" and the West (Malyarenko and Galbreath 2016;Matveeva 2016;Mitrokhin 2015;Oleksy and Studenna-Skrukwa 2019;Wilson 2016).…”

“…The local identity they referred to (e.g., "my home" and "my land") was narrow and individualized. Far from being war entrepreneurs for whom the war was a "window of opportunity" (Scherbak et al 2016), disrupted outcasts appear to be more like the "reluctant guerillas" in Viterna's (2006) classification of El Salvadorian female combatants who joined the fight because they did not have enough resources to escape the crisis.…”