Russia's 2014 operations in Crimea and Donbas were launched simultaneously rather than sequentially, but the Donbas effort quickly unraveled because Moscow attempted to manufacture a grassroots uprising based on a fundamental misreading of what the Maidan revolution actually was, Michael Kofman has argued.
Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, outlined the mechanics of Russia's failed attempt in a conversation with Kennan Institute director Michael Kimmage, as "Hvylya" reports.
The Crimea operation was a direct covert military action, "clearly planned in advance" and executed efficiently, Kofman said. The Donbas operation was different - and far messier. Russian special services, intelligence operatives, some special forces, and various other actors were deployed to foster breakaway republics. The effort involved busing in people, recruiting local petty elites, and eventually moving individuals from Crimea to eastern Ukraine.
The core problem, according to Kofman, was that Russian elites interpreted the Maidan as "something that's engineered by elites and engineered by Western elites" and then attempted to create their own version. "You can't copy a thing that doesn't exist," Kofman said. The Maidan was not orchestrated by Western intelligence - it was a genuine popular uprising. Moscow's attempt at an artificial counterpart failed precisely because there was no template to replicate.
Few remember that Moscow's ambitions extended well beyond Donetsk and Luhansk. There was an early attempt to create a Kharkiv people's republic that was shut down by the local governor, and a similar effort in Odesa also failed. The Donbas operations eventually required direct Russian military intervention by August 2014 as the Ukrainian military campaign gained momentum.
This misreading of Ukrainian society, Kofman argued, reflected a deeper structural flaw in Russian thinking. Moscow approached Ukraine as a country whose politics were entirely elite-driven, where any popular movement had to be the product of foreign manipulation. That assumption blinded Russian planners to the genuine social forces at work - and ensured that every tool they deployed in eastern Ukraine would miss its target.
Also read: 110 Sabotage Acts in Three Years: PISM Exposes the Scale of Russia's Shadow War in Europe.