Since 2014 at least, observers of Moscow’s expansionist maneuvers, deceived by their poor knowledge of Ukraine and by Putin’s propaganda, have underestimated the Kremlin’s true objectives.
Jacob Hedenskog, Julia Kazdobina, Andreas Umland
December 27, 2024
On July 17, 2014, the world was shocked by the news of the crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight MH 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in eastern Ukraine. All passengers and crew on the Boeing 777 – 298 people in total, including 80 children – lost their lives. It was an exceptionally tragic event, but it was just one of many serious incidents that took place that year: in 2014, the biggest war in Europe since 1945 broke out in Ukraine, with Russia’s military escalation in Crimea and Donbas becoming more alarming each month.
The escalating tensions that would eventually erupt into war were initially triggered by Ukraine’s ambition, which had been evident since 2008, to formalize a closer relationship with the European Union. This desire would later materialize through an Association Agreement, which included a so-called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Although it was primarily concerned with economic aspects, the treaty – which was put in the works in 2012 and whose political provisions were signed in 2014 – was seen by Moscow as a threat to its desire to continue to exercise control over Ukraine and as a dangerous model for other former Soviet republics to follow.
Russia began the war in February 2014 with the armed occupation of Crimea by its regular troops. Then, in March, it annexed the peninsula. This was followed, in April 2014, by the incursion of Russian irregular troops – paramilitary adventurers, political extremists and Cossacks – into Donbas.
During May 2014, there was, among other things, a violent escalation of street clashes in Odesa, resulting in more than forty deaths. In June, a Ukrainian Il-76 transport plane was shot down as it approached Luhansk airport. All of the crew and soldiers on board, forty-nine people in total, lost their lives. Flight MH-17 was shot down in July. Finally, in mid-August, Russian regular troops began a full-blown invasion of eastern Ukraine.
For six months, there was a continuous succession of increasingly aggressive Russian military activity on Ukrainian soil and increasingly serious violations of international law in the heart of Europe. However, the West responded timidly, limiting itself to making political statements and introducing modest punitive measures. Only at the end of July 2014, immediately after Russia shot down flight MH-17, did the European Union adopt sectoral economic sanctions against Moscow.
These sanctions were announced on 29 July 2014, when the Ukrainian army was grappling with aggression in Donbas. At that time, the European Union did not see any urgent need to impose
further punitive measures, as it seemed that Kyiv would prevail in the clashes in eastern Ukraine by the end of the summer. When the EU introduced its first sectoral sanctions – which would remain the most severe measures adopted by the West until February 2022 – it was not yet foreseeable that the advance of Kyiv’s army in eastern Ukraine against irregular troops led by Moscow would instead be repelled a month later following the massive deployment of regular Russian troops in Donbas.
All of this clearly shows that this first round of Western sanctions had only an indirect relationship with Ukraine: the main reason for adopting these measures was the killing by Russia of many EU citizens (mostly Dutch) on the Malaysian Airlines flight of July 17, 2014, and not the indiscriminate violence that Russia had already used against Ukrainian citizens in the previous three months. That armed conflict would continue to simmer for more than seven years, resulting in thousands of Ukrainian victims. However, since no further massacres of Europeans or other foreigners occurred during that time, the West took very few additional measures in this regard.
Only after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022, did the West begin to realize that Russia is a “revisionist” state seeking to impose its vision of order and security on Europe. Indeed, President Vladimir Putin had already made his intentions clear in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, and on numerous other occasions. However, when Russia began its covert aggression against Ukraine in 2014, many in the West still believed that this was the result of a mutual misunderstanding and that Russia’s goals were limited. Only much later would it become clear to most people that this was not the case – and that this new situation therefore required measures different from those already tried in other interethnic conflicts.
Between 2014 and 2022, the Donbas war was often interpreted as an intra-Ukrainian conflict that could be resolved without taking into account the broader context of Russian foreign policy. These efforts not only proved futile, but also led to ever greater adventurism on the part of Moscow. But why did the West fail to correctly diagnose the situation for so long? And how important is it to take into account the lessons that failure taught us today?
INSUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPECIFICS OF THE COUNTRY
Before the start of that explicit Russian intrusion in Ukraine in 2014, Western journalists, analysts and scholars had been little or not aware of the considerable tensions between Moscow and Kyiv since Ukraine’s independence in 1991 and of Russia’s meddling in the neighboring country’s internal affairs. By the time Western journalists arrived in Ukraine in 2014 to cover what was happening, the situation was chaotic and very difficult to interpret for those who had only recently become “experts” on Ukraine. To many of them – and especially to reporters who had previously worked in Moscow – Russian narratives of the regional escalation in eastern and southern Ukraine seemed simple, understandable and sensible. At the time, there was still a clear lack of awareness internationally of Moscow’s hybrid methodology in its foreign relations. Ten years ago, few people understood the new Russian way of waging war, of which Ukraine was a testing ground and which had already been tried, at least in part, in Moldova and Georgia.
Attempts by Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans, as well as some particularly astute Western analysts, to explain Russia’s strategy were met with skepticism. To outside observers, their concerns seemed exaggerated and their arguments Manichean, if not downright conspiratorial.
Western reporters who had parachuted into eastern Ukraine in 2014, “parachuted” into a situation they knew little about, had witnessed pro-Russian protests and had mostly heard from pro-Russian Ukrainian citizens. They often failed to contextualize the events they were witnessing or to properly assess the extent of the pro-Russian sentiment that seemed so obvious to them there.
Some of the foreign observers could not even distinguish between residents of Donbas and “political tourists” from neighboring Russian oblasts who had crossed the border as adventurers or been bussed to Ukraine to participate in the “Russian Spring.” Some of Moscow’s agents in Donbas had moved to Ukraine from Russian-controlled but outside territories, such as Transnistria, making it harder to discern the extent of Russian involvement in an apparently local “rebellion.”
Pro-Ukrainian journalists and those in Donbas expressing anti-separatist political views faced explicit threats and physical violence from their opponents, who were often under orders from Moscow. Pro-Ukrainian locals were often prevented from speaking out publicly and thus remained invisible to visiting journalists. Between 2014 and 2021, many residents of eastern Ukraine who resisted the pro-Russian seizure of power were threatened, assaulted, kidnapped, seriously injured, or secretly killed by Russian irregular troops or local collaborators, many (if not all) of whom were encouraged, funded, or directed by the Kremlin. All of this paved the way for Russia’s eventual annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in September 2022.
LOOKING AT UKRAINE THROUGH A RUSSIAN LENS
Western media only increased their presence in Ukraine in late 2021, on the eve of the full-scale invasion. Before that, most reporting was done by Moscow-based correspondents who spoke only Russian. As Ukrainian journalist and media critic Otar Dovzhenko told Radio Liberty: “If you live in Russia and read Russian media, even if you are American, German or French, you start to look at what is happening in Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus with a little bit of Russian eyes.” The Washington Post opened a bureau in Ukraine in May 2022, with former Moscow correspondent Isabel Khurshudyan posted to the new post. The New York Times also opened a bureau in Kyiv in July 2022, bringing Andrew E. Kramer, who had lived in Russia for more than 15 years, to lead it. Kramer had worked in the Moscow bureau of the New York Times and had previously written biased articles about Ukraine.
Kramer’s lack of balance was evident, for example, in a February 2022 article that repeated in its title – Armed Nationalists in Ukraine Are a Threat Not Just to Russia – a formulation very much in line with official Kremlin propaganda, then and now. The content of that article, which was published two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion, was not – unlike the title – a rehash of Putin’s theses to justify the attack on Ukraine. However, Kramer pointed to the presence in Ukraine of “dozens of right-wing or nationalist groups that represent a powerful political force.”
The picture Kramer painted in that article distorted the Ukrainian party landscape in early 2022 and gave the Ukrainian radical right a disproportionate weight, following a line widely shared in Kremlin-influenced mass media. Probably, such an article would have been written differently – or not at all – if its author had lived in Kyiv rather than Moscow.
Over time, many observers have learned to be more critical of Russian narratives, but sometimes unconscious bias still operates in them. People tend to retain their initial interpretations. It takes time and effort to “unlearn” those narratives and explanations that Russian propaganda can continue to exploit.
SEPARATING FACT FROM FICTION
Signs of Russia’s direct involvement in many of the suspicious events in Donbas have been numerous since April 2014, if not earlier. Most Ukrainians intuitively understood from the first days of the alleged rebellion that something was amiss – that the war was started, directed, and financed by Russia. In contrast, it took the West a long time to identify, clarify, and verify the facts and to debunk the many lies that covered them.
In principle, a cautious approach to reporting from war zones is a wise choice, which helps to avoid making journalistic mistakes, spreading misinformation, and stirring up unnecessary emotion. Sometimes, however, this caution prevents correspondents and analysts from making much-needed assessments and interpretations in a timely manner. In any case, the slow reaction of Western observers to the events unfolding in southern and eastern Ukraine left a void that Moscow filled with disinformation, half-truths, and apologetic narratives, many of which, even now debunked, continue to circulate on social media and even in some traditional media.
The West’s reluctance to take a stand and act accordingly in 2014-21 had particularly unfortunate results with regard to the legal status and political nature of Russia’s two artificially created satellite states in the Donbas, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, acronyms for (from their Russian names) the DNR and LNR, respectively. The Ukrainian government had been claiming for years that the DNR and LNR did not exist as independent entities: indeed, from their creation until their dismantling in September 2022, these two pseudo-states were nothing more than puppet regimes operated by Russia.
However, it was only at the end of 2022, when the DNR and LNR had already disappeared as pseudo-independent entities, that the European Court of Human Rights officially confirmed that this was the case: in its ruling on the partial admissibility of the case concerning flight MH-17, the Court found that Russia had exercised effective control over the territories of the DNR and LNR since their creation in May 2014. Previously, for almost nine years, there had been opposing views on the true nature of the alleged “insurgency” in eastern Ukraine and the “People’s Republics”. In political and academic debates, as well as in any other public discussion, it was considered a controversial issue – and sometimes it still is.
THE WEST HAS A PROJECTIVE IMAGE OF RUSSIA
Many Western European politicians are guided by the paradigm of peaceful conflict resolution, born out of the post-World War II commitment to never again allow war and genocide in
Europe. For a long time, these same politicians had been convinced that Russia had learned the same lessons from World War II and had therefore continued to ignore the increasingly clear signs that Moscow was instead guided by different values. Russia’s ultimate goals and overall strategy remained unclear until early 2022.
This cognitive problem is the result of a fundamental, yet not fully recognized, gap between the Russian neo-imperial and the Western postcolonial perspectives. It also stems from a difference between Moscow’s international modus operandi and the Western strategic culture that has taken hold since the post-war era. The Russian modus operandi is agile, flexible, cynical, amoral, and goal-oriented; it also develops through trial and error. The Kremlin seeks out vulnerabilities that it can exploit to its advantage and prefers to carry out attacks that remain below the threshold that would trigger a retaliation, prolonging them as long as possible.
Western states and international organizations have tried to address the crises that have emerged from Russian actions on a case-by-case basis, prioritizing the “hottest” crisis scenario at the time. They have thus failed to adequately address Moscow’s grand design of flexible subversion or its broader strategy of chaos-creating “active measures,” or the various types of interventions that the KGB had developed. Initially, some foreign observers were even reluctant to acknowledge that Russia’s incursion into Donbas was a continuation of the annexation of Crimea. However, over the course of 2014, with new journalistic revelations and as Russian escalation became more apparent every week, it became increasingly obvious that the armed confrontation in eastern Ukraine had been started deliberately. It also became increasingly clear that one side was stoking the conflict in disguise. Nevertheless, until early 2022, there was still a widespread naive belief that Russia was continuing to wage war on eastern Ukraine in the context of an unfortunate clash between equally legitimate but divergent local interests, which should be resolved through joint negotiations, discussions and mediation.
RUSSIA MANIPULATES CONFLICT RESOLUTION SCENARIOS
Using tactics known as “reflexive control” and “controlled escalation,” the Russian leadership has used instrumental aggression through its proxies to impose its will on Ukraine and to spread its narrative about the conflict among Kyiv’s Western partners. Overt belligerent behavior has alternated with apparent de-escalations and feigned concessions to deceive Western politicians and diplomats into believing that a peaceful resolution to the conflict is still possible. For example, at Vladimir Putin’s request in the Russian upper house of parliament, in June 2014 the Federation Council withdrew the previous authorization, which had been granted to the president in March 2014, to use Russian troops in Ukraine. This move was intended to give the impression of a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
While entire units of the regular Russian ground forces would have entered Ukraine en masse in mid-August 2014 and would have continued to be secretly deployed in the Donbass thereafter, on the other hand the Novorossiya (New Russia) project, which was supposed to lead Moscow to take the entire south-east of Ukraine from Kyiv’s control, would have been suspended in October 2014. This change in the Kremlin’s rhetoric was perceived by many as a gesture of détente, but it was simply a tactical retreat by Moscow. The project would in fact be revived eight years later in
connection with the “special military operation” and is today pursued through a large-scale, undisguised deployment of regular Russian forces.
In Ukraine, as elsewhere, Russia’s participation in negotiating some kind of agreement with an adversary is often accompanied by a planned military escalation to exert maximum pressure on the interlocutor. In the summer of 2014 and the winter of 2014-2015, the Minsk agreements were preceded by massive incursions of regular Russian troops into Ukraine and assaults on Ukrainian troops in clear violation of what had already been agreed with Kyiv. During the talks, Moscow continued to offer reminders that it was always ready for aggression and new escalations. Before, during and after the negotiations, it continued to actively deploy both its regular and proxy forces – and would continue to do so, largely with impunity, until 2022. At the same time, Moscow maintained its full participation in the Normandy Format, the Trilateral Contact Group (Minsk process) and two special observer missions of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), thus fueling the illusion that a peaceful resolution was still possible.
Russia’s adoption of measured and, at times, limited aggression was not a sign of restraint. On the contrary, this tactic was designed by Moscow to pursue its own objectives while avoiding for as long as possible an explicit and massive military commitment that could have triggered retaliation.
Moscow’s apparently conciliatory moves and stalling tactics succeeded in deceiving many Western observers. The Kremlin’s zigzagging has long provided diplomats and observers who were superficially interested in the issue with the elements that allowed them to assert that a peaceful solution to the conflict was still possible. In the meantime, Russia has consolidated its control over the conquered territories and prepared its next moves.
SELF-DECEPTION CONTINUED AFTER THE FULL-SCALE INVASION
It was only after the full-scale invasion of February 24, 2022, that the West woke up, took decisive action, and imposed significant economic sanctions on Russia. Shortly thereafter, Western countries also began supplying Ukraine with heavy weapons. There would have been good reasons to do so back in 2014, when some Ukrainian territories were invaded and annexed by Russian regular and irregular troops. But the West, mistaking Russia’s limited use of force (trying not to cross the threshold beyond which retaliation would be unleashed) for restraint, instead limited itself to managing the escalation. And, as a result, the conflict only got worse. Worse still, some types of Western self-deception continued even after the full-scale invasion. For example, the 2022 Dutch trial of four fighters – three Russian citizens and one Ukrainian – who had participated in the Russian operation in Donbas that led to the downing of flight MH-17 a decade earlier, was an ambiguous proceeding. Dutch investigators, prosecutors, and the court did a good job of establishing the material details of that mass crime. However, the verdict then curiously placed responsibility on three paramilitary fighters rather than on the Russian military and state.
The court found that the “fighters of the Donetsk People’s Republic, including the three defendants,” could not “be considered part of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.” It also acknowledged that “the use of a Buk TELAR [missile system] […] requires a highly trained
crew,” and, moreover, “that the weapon cannot be easily deployed.” Nonetheless, the court decided to “consider it legally and conclusively proven that [Igor] Girkin [a former FSB officer who played, as an irregular fighter, a major role in Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and military attack on eastern Ukraine] was in a position to decide on the deployment and use of the Buk TELAR.” This was a bizarre conclusion, given that Girkin and the other paramilitary fighters were in no position to give orders to regular Russian soldiers operating the Buk system. The responsibility for the massacre of the 298 civilians on board flight MH-17 lies instead with the officers and generals of the Russian armed forces, as well as their commander in chief, Vladimir Putin. The small Russian or Ukrainian irregular adventurers present on the spot simply gave a hand to the Russian soldiers so that they could orient themselves in eastern Ukraine.
This example shows that it is important today to draw on the experience of the Russian war in Donbass in 2014-2022 and on the observation of Moscow’s behavior in other areas of the post-Soviet space in order to draw appropriate conclusions. It is strange that Russian and pro-Russian spokesmen who call for a rapid diplomatic solution are still taken seriously: it is Moscow that is expanding its occupation of Ukraine on a daily basis, when instead, if only it stopped doing so, it would immediately put an end to the war. The Russian pattern remains the same: Moscow continues to build and consolidate false historical narratives and then takes advantage of the social tensions that these narratives arouse in the countries where it spreads them. And it also takes advantage of the political moderation of these same countries. In the meantime, it carries out a “horizontal” escalation, thus avoiding provoking more resolute reactions.
CONCLUSIONS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
Those who argue that the Russian-Ukrainian war should be negotiated to a Minsk-style solution often do so on the assumption that there is still a stable equilibrium or status quo relationship that could be established through simple bargaining with Moscow. This idea, as we have explained above, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Kremlin’s mentality and policies. The roots of the ongoing conflict lie in the dictatorial and imperialist nature of the Russian regime, as well as its fundamental rejection of international law and the European Security Order. The reasons for the conflict are not the result of some unfortunate imbalance, diplomatic blunders or mutual misunderstandings, the correction of which can easily resolve the conflict. Instead, the war is determined by the specific ideology on which Putin’s power is based and structured.
This conclusion leads to the following suggestions for how one should proceed:
- The history of the escalation in Donbas, as we have explained it, and observations of other behaviors of Moscow in the post-Soviet space provide important lessons for the interpretation and resolution of the current large-scale Russian-Ukrainian war. Above all, the war must be universally understood and publicly labeled as the “Russia Problem” and not the “Ukrainian Crisis.” This challenge posed by Russia must be met and resolved as such.
- The West and other foreign observers must not be fooled by Moscow again and must not treat Russian diplomatic, political, social and military developments as if they were unrelated. The usefulness of classical instruments for achieving international peace – such as mediation, conflict
transformation and pacification – must be carefully weighed when dealing with a neo-imperialist expansionist war with genocidal elements.
- Based on the failed experiences of previous peacemaking attempts, and until meaningful negotiations with Russia can be started, the most urgent need is to provide military support to Ukraine. This should be done so that when peace talks begin, Kyiv can negotiate from a position of strength – unlike the Minsk negotiations of 2014-2015 or the Istanbul negotiations of 2022. Any future peace agreement for Eastern Europe should include serious security guarantees and powerful military deterrence, so that Russia cannot use a temporary respite to prepare for new aggression.
- More resources need to be devoted to studying Russia’s various strategies and tactics of subversion, corrosion, and expansion—both overtly destructive and covert, official and covert, military and nonmilitary—so that they can be exposed and we can learn how to address them. In addition to more effective protection mechanisms, Western countries and international organizations need to develop broad-based counterstrategies that go beyond protecting their societies from Russian and other hybrid threats. Western countries and international organizations should also actively counter the creators, producers, and distributors of false information, inflammatory discourse, and narratives that can lead to escalation. They should also develop more effective measures to defend themselves from malware, computer viruses, and so on.