President Vladimir Putin made a late-night address

to Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine, titled “President of Russia

Vladimir Putin Appeals to Militia of Novorossiya”. It was posted on

kremlin.ru at 1:10 am Moscow time.

The Interpreter has a full translation of the text:

It

is obvious that the militia has achieved serious successes in

suppressing the operation of Kiev forces which constituted a mortal

danger for the population of the Donbass and which has already led to

enormous numbers of victims among the civilian population. As

a result of the militia’s actions, a large number of Ukrainian soldiers

who took part in the military operation not by their own will, but

fulfilling an order, have been encircled. I call on the

forces of the militia to open up a humanitarian corridor for Ukrainian

soldiers who have been surrounded, in order to prevent senseless

victims, and to allow them the opportunity to leave the area of combat

operations without hindrance, to reunite with their families, to return

to their mothers, wives and children, and to immediately provide medical

assistance to those wounded as a result of the military operation. The

Russian government, for its part, is ready to provide humanitarian

assistance to the population of the Donbass which is suffering from a

humanitarian disaster. Once again, I call on the

government of Ukraine to immediately case combat operations, to stop the

firing, to sit down at the negotiation table with representatives of

the Donbass, and to resolve all the accumulated problems in an

exclusively peaceful way.

What is “Novorossiya”?

The term

“Novorossiya” was trending on Moscow’s Twitter likely as a result of Putin’s late-night speech, and Western reporters scrambled to provide “explainers” of

“Novorossiya” — which can be more contradictory and confusing the more

accurate historical analysis you apply to it.

At its most

practical and current usage, “Novorossiya” (which is pronounced

Nova-RAWS-iya by the separatists themselves) simply means the

combination of the rival self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Lugansk People’s Republic” in a shaky

“Novorossiya” entity with an unelected parliament and the beginnings of a

state bureaucracy. These are the territories of Donetsk Region and Lugansk Region (or oblast) in Ukraine. (The original territory under Catherine the Great’s rule didn’t include Lugansk, however.)

The flag of “Novorossiya” may look like the old American Confederate flag, but actually was not inspired by it, and in fact comes from a version of the traditional St. Alexander’s Flag flown by the tsarist Russian Navy.

A more ambitious usage of “Novorossiya” (literally “New Russia”) as Russian ultranationalists have described it would mean an entity

made up out of parts of Ukraine and Moldova to make up a “republic” that

would be a constituent member of the Russian Federation, with a map

like this:

Sometimes

the separatists and their backers talk about how they would like total independence for

“Novorossiya” and went to great lengths to have Malaysia recognize them as a state in order to turn over the black box from the downed MH17. Formally, they declared independence from Kiev after their May 11 referendum on their status, and “people’s governor” Pavel Gubarev has talked about how Novorossiya would form its own separate relationship with the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. Sometimes they talk about a federative status with the

Russian Federation, but they envision it with more autonomy than

Russia’s current constituents actually have (ask the Siberians — or

better yet, the Chechens.)

Sometimes separatists and their

ultranationalist supporters in Moscow talk about reaching Kiev on tanks,

so they imagine taking all of Ukraine — or creating a renewed, utopian “Russian World”.

Putin doesn’t clarify which meaning of the term he is using, but he

has used it before, in April, in speaking of the annexation of the

Crimea and “eastern Ukraine.”

What’s

even more important than the territory invoked by this term is the

armed movement itself — Putin is legitimizing them as a victorious

force that can now in theory magnanimously move aside to allow hapless

Ukrainian soldiers to flee — as they have already been doing from the

battlefield.

It’s hard to know what might be going on behind the

scenes — yesterday both the Russian and Ukrainian general staffs met to

discuss border issues and exchange of POWs. Perhaps Putin is banking on

getting Russian POWs back if he allows Ukrainians to escape the

“kettle” of the separatists.

Also of note is that Putin describes the battles as a silovaya operatsiya,

and “operation of forces,” rather than “war,” and later speaks of a

“military operation”. The Ukrainians also speak of these battles as an

“anti-terrorist operation” (ATO) not “war,” although yesterday the

president announced a draft of able-bodied men to participate in the

ATO.

It remains to be seen how this will actually work out, but

the “Novorossiya militia” has just announced that it has agreed to create the

“humanitarian corridor.”