It has looked like civil war in Ukraine, yet most Ukrainians don’t want any such thing, as shown by the 25 May election results. And pro-Russian separatists in the east mostly want to return to their old Soviet life.

A saying usually misattributed to Trotsky, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” describes the Ukrainian conflict, which now has almost all the elements needed for a civil war: well-armed rival sides, opposing views of national history and destiny, and a foreign instigator and sponsor for eastern Urkaine’s separatists — Russia. Yet it lacks the critical ingredient of an appetite for fight among many of the population.

Most Ukrainians are doing their best to go about their business and, whatever their views, say they see Russians and Ukrainians as brotherly nations and do not want a war. In the presidential election of 25 May there was high voter turnout everywhere — except in the east, where pro-Russian separatists blocked polling stations — and Ukrainians gave a commanding victory to confectionary magnate Petro Poroshenko, with 54% of the votes. The Russian government said it would respect the will of Ukrainian voters and expressed its readiness to cooperate with the new administration in Kiev.

But it remains to be seen if Poroshenko’s election will help curb the violence. The pro-Russian separatists’ acts of intimidation, which prevented most people in the Donetsk region from voting (only 16% of registered voters cast ballots), and brazen attacks that have left dozens dead in recent weeks — including an all-out assault against the Donetsk airport, which they seized a day after the election — demonstrate that they are intent on undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Before the latest escalation of violence, a pro-Russian militant in Slovyansk told me: “We are fighting for peace”. He had no name and no face (it was hidden behind the balaclava under his helmet), and he stood by a checkpoint on a road in this industrial city in eastern Ukraine. Soviet and Russian flags fluttered beside those of the People’s Republic of Donetsk (PRD), the self-styled state the pro-Russian militants are trying to carve for themselves in the Donbass region; their flag was Russian, with the double-headed eagle, and the white stripe replaced by black to represent Donetsk’s black earth.

“They want war”, the balaclava-ed militant said, pointing to two Ukrainian military helicopters overflying Slovyansk. He was crammed into a too-tight uniform and had a shrill, childish voice. I suddenly thought of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which the brutal leader of the rebel children turns out to be puny, and very young. The effect was the same at every barricade and checkpoint in Mariupol, Donetsk and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine: whenever the militants took off their balaclavas or surgical masks, their power to frighten went. Most were young unemployed; the rest were underpaid workers in steel mills or heavy industry factories across Ukraine’s rustbelt.

They lacked the bearing of the other masked men, in tidier, unmarked uniforms, standing near at checkpoints, whose jaded confidence with weapons as they checked IDs was the result of training. All these said to strangers was “no comment”. They looked like the masked “green men” who overran Ukrainian military bases in Crimea after the Russian annexation. Russia says it has not deployed men in eastern Ukraine, but it said it had not sent troops to Crimea until President Vladimir Putin admitted that the masked men in unmarked uniforms were Russian soldiers.

Even some of those deployed in Crimea were surprised to find out where they were, according to Larisa Mamchur, wife of Ukrainian air force colonel Yuliy Mamchur, commander of the Belbek air base near Simferopol at the time of the Russian takeover. “They thought they were being deployed somewhere along the border within Russia. They were stunned to learn they were in Crimea.”

The old manual of warfare

The use of forces in unmarked uniforms belonged to the old manual of warfare east of the Danube. “The massive Chinese contingent in the Korean War was, for example, supposed to be made up of ‘volunteers’ and the Soviets never admitted that their pilots were flying the fighters on the North Korean side,” said Dr Philip Towle, reader in international relations at Cambridge University. “The device is quite useful as a signal that the side sponsoring the volunteers wants to keep the conflict limited even if it is transparent.”

The Russians employed a much older toolbox for taking the Crimea, following the same script they used when they first annexed the peninsula in 1783 after conquering it from the Tatars, who “had little defence against Russia’s policy of political and religious infiltration,” British historian Orlando Figes wrote in his account of the Crimean War in the 1850s (1).

While it is too early to say if signs that Russia is now seeking to deescalate the Ukrainian conflict will prove true, Putin’s conciliatory remarks after Poroshenko’s victory in the election as well as his earlier calls to separatists to call off their referendums, and the apparent pullback of troops from areas near the border, may be indicating that Russia has little to gain from further instability in Ukraine.

After months of just paying lip service to Ukraine’s unity, the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, has made public his strong support of territorial integrity, saying the prospects of a viable independent state in the east are nil (2). Foundry employees and miners who work for him have come out in the streets in Mariupol and elsewhere to evict pro-Russian separatists. So far, however, that has not proved enough to prevent violence.

Just before the election, on 22 May, a dawn attack on a checkpoint in eastern Ukraine left at least 14 soldiers dead, the worst loss of life for government forces so far. Heavily armed militants of uncertain allegiance (there are signs that the separatists are not fully coordinated) attacked the checkpoint in the Volnovakha area not far from Donetsk; three other attacks were reported that night in eastern Ukraine.

Yanukovitch connection

Before Ukraine began antiterrorist operations in Donetsk, pro-Russian separatists in balaclavas wielding sticks walked outside the barricades of the soviet, as the regional administration is known: separatists had occupied the building, Some pro-Russian activists are probably on the payroll of former president Viktor Yanukovych, as are some of the local police forces in eastern Ukraine, according to Nikolai Tokarsky, deputy of the Donetsk regional council and editor of one the biggest regional newspapers, Mariupol’s Priazovsky Rabochy. Tokarsky said they are acting on Yanukovych’s behalf, with the Kremlin’s blessing.

Inside the soviet, there was a group of masked men, and the walls were decorated with Orthodox icons and Donetsk flags. “The organs of government in Kiev are run by nationalists and ultranationalists,” said a man who identified himself as the PRD’s press secretary, though he declined to give his name or any other details. He did say: “They [Russia] are not giving us weapons or money, we only get moral support,” and claimed that taking over the building had been easy because they police had been with the separatists. (Tokarsky pointed out that the police and other local government organs still responded to Yanukovych, which explained why public buildings were so easily occupied by separatists.)

The PRD press secretary said Yanukovych, whose picture was everywhere in public buildings occupied by pro-Russian separatists, was the legitimate president, deposed in a “putsch”. The press secretary’s sidekick said he was Viktor Nyechayevsky, and he was handling crisis management inside the building. (His day job was copy editor at an undisclosed Internet firm.) “There are no three nations: Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are all Russia,” he said, adding that eastern Ukraine had “always” been part of Russia. “Culturally, economically and geographically, the Donbass is Russia.”

The true extent of separatist feeling in the East is hard to assess. The general apathy in major cities of the Donbass region attests to discontent with mismanagement and corruption in Kiev, but does not necessarily reflect secessionism (3). The unrecognised referendums on 11 May held by pro-Russian militants in Donetsk and Lugansk attracted mostly those voters who supported independence from Kiev or joining Russia, so they may not accurately indicate overall separatist feelings. According to a Pew Research Center survey after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, 70% in Ukraine’s east said their country should remain united, compared with 93% in the west and 77% for the national average.

Pro-Russian separatist pockets are stronger where nostalgia for the Soviet Union is high, according to Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies, a thinktank in Moscow. Prominent displays of Soviet insignia in separatist checkpoints and strongholds corroborate this.

If the architecture where we live helps define our identity, then it is not surprising that pro-Russian militancy has found fertile ground in Donetsk, Lugansk and other cities in the east, dominated by statues of Lenin. The Soviet Union is alive in all but name in places like Slovyansk — the scene of some of the worst fighting — where factory ownership may have been transferred from the state to oligarchs, but where welcome signs are decorated with the order of Lenin, murals use revolutionary iconography and workers in the black berets and leather jackets fashionable in the USSR in the 1970s file into metallurgical plants with chimneys that spit smoke.

In Mariupol, a masked pro-Russian in civilian clothes was embarrassed to admit that he had encountered no hostility by Kiev’s interim government towards Russian speakers, a key argument Russia uses against the Ukrainian government. He said he was upset at “fascists” who had been toppling Lenin’s statues, although he was not a Communist: “Lenin is part of our history, they are against our history.”

Outside the barricades at the municipal council of Mariupol — which has now been cleared of separatists — a small pro-Russian group of pensioners and unemployed men and women idled. Inside a tiny tent, a woman handed out leaflets, and said: “When we lived in the Soviet Union we all had one language,” presumably meaning Russian. Two other middle-aged woman recited the blessings of the bygone era: “Schools were free and so was medical attention, we had free vacations every year... even housing was free.” I asked one of them about freedom in the Soviet era. “We lived under Communism and nobody knew anything better than it. Then again, nobody understood Communism.”

Trauma of losing an empire

The Ukrainian crisis is a delayed aftershock of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin once called the dissolution of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Together with his dismissal of Ukraine as a “quasi-state” that was called “New Russia” in the Tsarist empire, it is evident that his policy is a push to reconstitute the USSR (4). The dissolution of the Soviet Union lacked the legitimacy of a popular uprising or revolution that ratified its collapse. It was the result of a withering economy and a brittle, weakened state unable to stand the strains of the reforms that its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, intended to use to revitalise it. That’s why some workers and pensioners, raised in the dour yet reassuring predictability of a state that dispensed work, apartments and vacations, perceive its disappearance as a natural disaster rather than an expression of popular will.

Anders Åslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, sees other reasons for Putin’s actions in Ukraine. “It is much more like Hitler’s policy when he declared war on Poland... This is the linguistic nationalism that Hitler pursued in Poland but Putin is dressing it up in Russian imperial terms, calling Ukraine Novorossiya (the Russian name for New Russia). He is afraid of democratisation in Ukraine because that compromises his power. His big international project, the Eurasian project, has failed, so he is going for the expansion of the Russian Federation and is exploiting nationalism... Putin is running into a dead end but he can cause a lot of collateral damage before going down.”

Boris Makarenko, chairman of the board at the Center for Political Technologies, said: “If anybody in Russia’s backyard followed the western model and succeeded, the soft power of that would be unpleasant for the Russian ruling classes.” Yet Makarenko sees a deeper reason for Kremlin policies: “A partial explanation of Russia’s actions is the trauma of losing an empire. France suffered the trauma of losing Algeria, and Russia is not immune to the pain of losing much vaster expanses.”

A more accurate description of Russia’s conduct in Ukraine may be found in an analysis from the earliest days of the cold war. “[The Kremlin’s] precepts are fortified by the lessons of Russian history: of centuries of obscure battles between nomadic forces over the stretches of a vast unfortified plain,” wrote US diplomat George Kennan in an article that developed the conceptual framework for the West’s policy of containment of the Soviet Union (5). “[The Kremlin’s] political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal. ... The main thing is that there should always be pressure, increasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal.”