ANALYSIS
Eighteen months into what is now a war of attrition, Ukraine’s leadership remains committed to liberating all territory currently occupied by the Russian military. That includes parts of the eastern Donbas, whose villages have been depopulated and infrastructure destroyed after nearly a decade of war – if we date the origins of the conflict not to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 but to the start of the separatist rebellion in 2014.
Political scientist Alexander Motyl, an expert on Russia and Ukraine at Rutgers University-Newark, once argued that because the Donbas was one of the most pro-Russian parts of the country with an economy in ruins, it made more sense for Kyiv to simply cede the region to Russia.
“The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010,” Mr. Motyl wrote in Foreign Policy in 2019.
If Ukraine would have been better off without the Donbas then, then why not now? Does it make sense to expend thousands of lives trying to regain part of the country Ukraine could do without? In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Motyl explains why he no longer believes Ukraine should let the Donbas fall into Russia’s column.
“I was working on the assumption that Russia would not pursue a full-scale war against Ukraine. I didn’t even think that Russia would engage in a military incursion to expand its control over the Donbas… Everything changed on Feb. 24, 2022… Given the aggressive designs that Russia has on these territories and on Ukraine more generally, [ceding the Donbas to Russia] doesn’t make any sense,” Mr. Motyl said. He added that any negotiations to end the war likely will prove fruitless as long as Russian President Vladimir Putin is in power.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
