Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine's ‘East/West’ divide

Why did the Kremlin fail to rely on the ‘soft power’ to secure its interests in Ukraine and instead opt for the military invasion? At the same time, why did the Kremlin believe that Russia could achieve its goals with relatively limited forces in the course of a rapid regime-change ‘special operation’? These questions pose a puzzle for the two main arguments that dominate the vast literature on Ukrainian regionalism, which either present a largely symmetrical ‘East/West’ regional cleavage or question the salience and even the existence of any such cleavage in favor of a more fluid local diversity that the ascendant Ukrainian civic identity has ultimately encompassed. Instead, the article argues that Ukraine's ‘regional’ cleavage could be understood as a nationally specific articulation of the class conflict common to many post-Soviet countries in the context of hegemony crisis. This perspective can better explain the disparate capacity of Ukraine's ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-Russian’ political camps to universalize the particular class interests standing behind them and support them through civic mobilization, the rationale behind the original plan of the Russian invasion, and the reactions of supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian elites and regular citizens to its failure.

On October 21, 2021, four months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Vladimir Putin gave another speech at the Valdai Club (Zasedanie diskussionnogo kluba ‘Valdai’ 2021 ) – a Russian think tank that is important primarily as a venue for Putin's meetings with international experts. The speech has been widely discussed mainly for its conservative messages and as one of the first attempts at a relatively coherent articulation of Putin's worldview (e.g. Cheng 2021; Robinson 2021). However, a part of the Q&A after the talk is more noteworthy in the present context. Mykhailo Pohrebinskyi, a veteran Ukrainian pundit, referred to Putin's notorious article on the history of Ukraine-Russia relations (Putin 2021), reiterated his points about Ukraine's sliding towards NATO and turning it into a dangerous ‘Anti-Russia,’ and asked Putin what he is going to do about this when some leaders of Ukraine's anti-Western opposition, like Viktor Medvedchuk, whom Pehrebinskyi had consulted for many years, are persecuted by Volodymyr Zelenskyi on a dubious legal basis (Burdyga 2022; Shuster 2022). In response, Putin articulates one of the critical disbalances in Ukrainian politics from his perspective:

The Ukrainian leaders Putin had in mind were Leonid Kuchma (who won in 1994), Viktor Yanukovych (who won in 2010), and the incumbent president Volodymyr Zelenskyi (since 2019). Their electoral support was skewed toward voters in the supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ southern and eastern regions, and they won against candidates with more ‘pro-Western’/nationalist rhetoric who mobilized votes in the western and central regions of Ukraine. Whatever Putin's goal was – to prevent NATO's eastward expansion or military threat from strengthening Ukraine, or to destroy ‘anti-Russian’ Ukraine and impose the ‘one and the same people’ identity, or to avert the export of revolution to Russia and allied neighbors, to name only the most commonly discussed reasons for the full-scale invasion in 2022 – the escalation of repression against the ‘pro-Russian’ politicians and media in 2021,¹ which Putin called ‘an absolutely evident purge of the political field’ in Ukraine (Shuster 2022), could lead to his conviction that no Russia-friendly force would be able to enter the Ukrainian government and, even if winning the elections, would once again probably align with the pro-Western course because of the pressure of the nationalist public (see also Zhegulev 2023). The cost–benefit balance for Putin changed: he could no longer expect to achieve his goals by regaining positions in Ukraine's domestic politics, which made the risky endeavor of a military operation a more attractive option to ‘break the deadlock,’ as he perceived it.

Two elements were essential for Putin's calculus. On the one hand, the Kremlin could not secure its interests by relying on a ‘soft power’ in Ukraine (particularly, the political mobilization of the ‘pro-Russian’ camp). On the other hand, the decision to rely on the ‘hard power’ of the invasion was based on a plan of a quick ‘special operation’ with tolerable economic and political costs that was supposed to deal with the ‘aggressive nationalist minority’ by only a limited military force (Zabrodskyi et al.2022). These facts pose a puzzle for the two main arguments that dominate the vast literature on Ukrainian regionalism, which either present a largely symmetrical ‘East/West’ regional cleavage or question the salience and even the existence of any such cleavage in favor of a more fluid local diversity that the ascendant Ukrainian civic identity has ultimately encompassed. The first argument does not explain the political weakness of the ‘Eastern’ camp; the second argument does not explain the constitution of polarized Ukrainian politics. Furthermore, these arguments would struggle to explain either the rationale behind the original invasion plan or the reactions of supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian elites and regular citizens to its failure.

In what follows, I discuss the problems that the Russian invasion posed for the main arguments in the debate on Ukrainian regionalism and outline an alternative approach that may provide a better answer to these puzzles by analyzing Ukraine's ‘regional’ polarization as a nationally-specific articulation of the class conflict common to many post-Soviet countries in the context of hegemony crisis.

In the fragment quoted above, Putin mentions two oppositions. The first refers to the regional divergence of political attitudes and voting patterns, superficially captured by the opposition of the largely ‘pro-Russian’ southern and eastern Ukrainian regions to the largely ‘pro-Western’ western and central Ukraine. The second refers more to the unequal capacity for civic mobilization, pitting the ‘silent majority’ against the ‘aggressive nationalist minority.’ In Putin's interpretation, these oppositions were largely overlapping and presented for him a political problem, which he decided to solve with military means, initially expected to be limited. In turn, all of this together presents problems (although of a different kind) for the main arguments in a scholarly debate on Ukrainian regionalism.

For one group of scholars, the regional cleavage in Ukrainian politics stems from some kind of binary conflict in the Ukrainian society. For example, it has been analyzed as a proxy for the distribution of ethnolinguistic groups’ within Ukraine (e.g. Barrington 2021, 6) or as a manifestation of the enduring regional political cultures (Katchanovski 2006), or of the opposing nation-building projects (Riabchuk 2015; Sakwa 2016). In any case, the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ sides of the cleavage are understood as variations within the same category and are largely symmetrical.

The opposing approach challenged the essentialization of Ukraine's ‘East’ and ‘West,’ arguing that the political cleavage conceals a much more complex, fluid, and dynamic diversity on the social level. Instead of the ‘two,’ there are ‘twenty-two Ukraines,’ as suggested by Yaroslav Hrytsak (2002), one of the most prominent Ukrainian historians. Ukraine may have polarized regionalist politics, but it does not reflect and represent the stable and clearly defined regions, except for Galicia and, perhaps, Donbass (Hrytsak 2019). Thus, Ukrainian regionalism did not reflect the pre-existing regions or any of the ethnonational or cultural differences or conflicts within the broader Ukrainian society that lay behind the regional distributions, but is merely a social construction instrumentalized in the interests of competing groups of Ukrainian elites and also those of the Kremlin. This claim has often been complemented by the argument about the rise of Ukrainian civic identity, amplified by the Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2014 and the threat from Russia since then, which has overcome the ‘East/West’ divide to the extent that it ever existed. The stunning electoral success and anti-polarization rhetoric of Volodymyr Zelenskyi in 2019, as well as the unifying tendencies within Ukrainian society in response to the Russian invasion in 2022, are read as the culmination of this trend (e.g. Onuch and Hale 2023).²

How do these arguments compare to the events that unfolded with the decision to launch the Russian invasion and the failure of its initial plan? The Kremlin could not rely on ‘soft power’ to achieve its goals in Ukraine because Russia-friendly politicians in Ukraine could not draw on civic mobilization and sustained political participation from the supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ side of the regional cleavage. In contrast, the ‘pro-Western’ side was able to compensate for its electoral defeats with extraparliamentary mobilization and a stronger civil society aligned with the interests of the Western elites. On the other hand, the fact that only a minority of Ukrainians, even in the southern and eastern regions, initially collaborated with the invaders (Kudelia 2022; Milakovsky 2022) may not necessarily call into question the existence of the regional cleavage per se but rather the articulation of its ‘Eastern’ side as ‘pro-Russian.’ This, however, leaves unanswered what exactly Ukraine's ‘Eastern’ political camp stood for if not ‘pro-Russianness.’

At the same time, the problems encountered by the argument about largely symmetrical ‘two Ukraines’ after the invasion do not vindicate the opposing argument, which questions the significance or even the existence of the cleavage in favor of the rising civic identity. First of all, it is necessary to explain the polarization in Ukrainian politics, which was already evident in the 1990s and persisted at least until the elections of Zelenskyi in 2019.³ Even if the ‘East/West’ political cleavage does not directly represent the actual regional diversity of Ukraine, it is necessary to explain why the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ on the ground were translated into precisely ‘two Ukraines’ on the political level and not into ‘three,’ ‘five,’ or ‘ten Ukraines.’ The ‘two Ukraines’ approach can plausibly explain the translation of the social conflicts arising from national, ethnolinguistic, or cultural differences into the two camps at the political level, for example through a mechanism of partisan sorting (Levendusky 2010). By questioning the reality of the aforementioned conflicts, the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ argument leaves unexplained what kind of binary conflict lies behind the polarization of post-Soviet Ukrainian politics, why it was given an ideological articulation related to geopolitical and national identity issues captured in the ‘East/West’ opposition, and, if it was a result of elite instrumentalization, why the agenda of the ‘Western’ camp advanced much more than that of the ‘Eastern’ one. As a result, the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ approach may effectively collapse into the teleological nation-building narrative of ‘one Ukraine,’ politically represented by the ‘Western’ camp, and which prevailed over the ‘Eastern’ camp, representing nothing in the Ukrainian society but the legacy of subjugation to Russia and its imperial ambitions.

Secondly, when the initial Russian invasion plan failed, many attributed this outcome to the broad resistance of the Ukrainian population, which Putin underestimated because of his imperial hubris and Russian intelligence failures (e.g. Miller and Belton 2022; Shevel 2022). However, to conclude from this that it was a powerful corroboration of the strength of Ukrainian civic identity overcoming all internal divisions may confuse cause and effect based on a hasty and incomplete understanding of the military developments in the first days of the invasion.

A more careful military analysis of the first stage of the invasion, which, by necessity, starts coming out later, shows that the original Russian plan could have succeeded even despite the fact that the initial Ukrainian collaboration was relatively low and popular resistance was relatively strong. In particular, the widely cited reports of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), based among other sources on the operational data from the Ukrainian General Staff and military intelligence, as well as captured copies of orders to Russian units, reconstruct the initial invasion plan as premised primarily on internal destabilization, then paralysis of the Ukrainian central government and Armed Forces to be achieved after a rapid decapitation of the Ukrainian state (Watling et al.2023; Zabrodskyi et al.2022). The results of the surveys commissioned by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in Ukraine as late as February 2022 showed a largely apathetic and pessimistic Ukrainian population that distrusted its politicians, political parties, and most state institutions (with the partial exception of Zelenskyi and the military), with these trends manifesting themselves significantly more in the southern and eastern regions (Reynolds and Watling 2022).⁴ On the eve of the invasion, Zelenskyi entered an escalating conflict with most of the powerful elite groups in Ukrainian politics, including not only the ‘pro-Russian’ elites, but also the leader of the ‘pro-Western’ opposition Petro Poroshenko and the richest Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov (Ishchenko 2022a, 34). However, the internal destabilization precondition had not been fully achieved by the end of February. After the Russians did not manage to take control of the government quarters in Kyiv and arrest or assassinate the Ukrainian leadership in the first three days of the invasion,⁵ the fiasco was compounded by proceeding to the next stages of the original plan despite the failure of the previous stages. The cascade of mistakes was exacerbated by the poor preparation of the Russian armed forces at the tactical level for the invasion, the institutional culture of the Russian security apparatus, and the top-down, command-driven process inherent to a personalistic, authoritarian Putin regime (Watling et al.2023: 13, 17; Zabrodskyi et al.2022). RUSI analysts emphasize that

In other words, the success of the Russian plan depended more on the rapid disorganization of the centralized resistance in Ukraine and less on the supposed weakness of the decentralized resistance or the collaboration of the Ukrainian elites and population.⁶ The failure of the original invasion plan corroborates the weakness of Russian state institutions rather than the strength of the preceding consolidation of Ukrainian society. The spectacular fiasco of the initial plan accounts for the unifying surge among Ukrainians around the state rather than the other way around.⁷ On the contrary, a successful Russian coup in Kyiv would likely have significantly affected the level of resistance and collaboration, as well as the perceptions of Ukrainians, who may have ended up more polarized by the invasion. After all, the Russians established effective control over the quickly occupied southern Ukrainian regions, even despite a lack of majority support among the population and significant armed resistance, mostly by small groups of professionals supported by the surviving Ukrainian state (Watling et al.2023, 23, 30).

In sum, the ‘two Ukraines’ approach fails to account for the profound civic asymmetry of the ‘East/West’ cleavage, while the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ approach leaves unexplained the polarization of Ukrainian politics between the two camps. The first approach does not explain the dynamics of the ‘Eastern’ reactions to the full-scale Russian invasion, while the second approach would leave only an irrationalist explanation for its initial plan (e.g. Putin's delusions), which does not fit well with the principal reasons for its failure. In the section below, I briefly sketch an alternative approach to Ukraine's regionalism that may better account for these puzzles.

I argue that the Ukrainian ‘East/West’ cleavage is better understood as a nationally-specific articulation of the class conflict common to many post-Soviet states. I claim that there was a social conflict behind Ukraine's political polarization, but it was class based, it went beyond Ukraine, and it was profoundly asymmetrical. This argument builds on a Gramscian analysis of the hegemony crisis of the post-Soviet ruling class, which lacked any ideological, traditional, or religious sources of legitimacy for the wealth and power it acquired in the process of the collapse of Soviet institutions and remained incapable of political, moral, and intellectual leadership over subaltern classes.

Understanding Ukraine's regional cleavage in the post-Soviet context requires looking beyond the party and electoral politics to the major episodes of transgressive contention.⁸ An important reason for the polarization of Ukrainian politics into party blocs, which mobilized a considerable and, in the 2000s, roughly equal electoral support, but distributed disproportionately in Ukraine's ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ regions, was the failure of attempts to consolidate an authoritarian regime in Ukraine (Way 2015). In Russia and Belarus, for example, the stronger authoritarian regimes could deprive the political opportunities and promptly repress the political forces similar to the Ukrainian ‘Western’ camp. In the 2000–2010s, the authoritarian consolidation in Ukraine was precluded by the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions of 2004 and 2014, which were simultaneously the transgressive contention between the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ camps. Notably, they bore important similarities to the most massive protests and revolutions in the post-Soviet countries, particularly in terms of the main opposition between personalistic autocrats, typically linked to ‘oligarchic’ cronies, and middle-class civil societies, often allied with dissenting elements within the elites who benefited from the revolution's success. This opposition was typically articulated as a struggle for ‘democracy’ and against ‘corruption,’ but also often framed geopolitically as a ‘pro-Western’ choice.⁹ Importantly, we find these similarities not only in countries like Moldova, which have similar cleavages with an ethnic dimension (Katchanovski 2006; Way 2015), but also in monoethnic countries consolidated by a post-genocidal identity, such as Armenia, and, crucially, within Russia itself. This means that behind Ukraine's ‘East/West’ cleavage there may lie a more fundamental conflict that is common to the post-Soviet space and cannot be reduced to a ‘postcolonial’ legacy of Russian domination.

The most fundamental common process for the region was the collapse of state socialism and the rise of a particular type of capitalists that dominated the ruling classes in most post-Soviet countries unless they got an early promise of EU integration (Havrylyshyn 2006). Here I build on the Weberian concept of political capitalism as applied to post-communist political economies, notably by Iván Szelényi and Branko Milanović (Milanović 2019; Szelényi and Mihályi 2019). Political capitalists could be defined as the fraction of the capitalist class whose main competitive advantage is derived from selective benefits from the state,¹⁰ unlike capitalists whose advantage is rooted in technological innovations or a particularly cheap labor force (Ishchenko 2022c). Political capitalists are not unique to the post-Soviet countries, but they occupied such a prominent position in the post-Soviet ruling class precisely because of the immense capital accumulated under state socialism, which was opened up to predatory private exploitation during the centrifugal collapse of Soviet institutions, in the process of literally ‘stealing the state’ (Solnick 1998).

The dynamics of political capitalism, where the state selective benefits play a crucial role in appropriating the commanding heights of the economy and squeezing the ‘insider rent’ (Dzarasov 2013), structures a series of zero-sum conflicts within the political capitalist class as well as between political capitalists, on the one side, and transnational capital and the professional middle class, on the other side. First, the conflict within the political capitalist class over control of selective state benefits is poorly institutionalized in post-Soviet politics; access to them often depends on personal and informal relationships with particular officials and parties in power. This creates considerable risks of losing a large share of the assets and income in the event of shifts in the balance of power between the political capitalist fractions within the political regime. Post-Soviet authoritarian leaders (when they consolidated power) could only mitigate the conflict between political capitalists by Caesarist balancing and repression of dissenting fractions, but they have not yet institutionalized a political structure that reflects the interests of the ruling class as a whole and that would survive and reproduce after the leader's death or retirement.¹¹ Second, although post-Soviet political capitalists are often interested in international markets because of the narrowness of domestic markets, and also because they need to hedge the risks of shifting balances of power in political regimes and weak private property institutions, and to move capital abroad while underinvesting at home, they are also profoundly interested in state sovereignty, which is necessary for exclusive control over the selective state benefits, on which they are fundamentally dependent. This sets the stage for conflict with transnational capital, which is generally interested in reducing any protectionist measures for local capital and, in particular, in ‘transparency’ that minimizes the hidden ‘shadow’ costs of investment, which, on the other hand, can become a competitive advantage for political capitalists and even a necessity to protect the property through various opaque forms of ‘defensive ownership’ (Bratsis 2003; Earle et al.2022). Third, domestic underinvestment sets up a conflict between the political capitalists and the professional middle class, much of which is excluded from political capitalism and for whom Western integration becomes the most plausible alternative for raising incomes, building careers, and increasing political influence. These zero-sum conflicts between the various elite classes or their fractions against the ruling fraction of political capitalists typically coalesced in the post-Soviet countries into a binary contradiction ideologically articulated as the fight against ‘corruption’ and for ‘democracy’ – the claims against the illegitimate exploitation of public resources in the interests of a narrow group of people who usurp state power for this purpose.

Notably, the particular grievances of the subaltern classes, especially workers, are subsumed in this conflict, lack independent ideological articulation and political representation. Deindustrialization pushes a fraction of workers into Western labor markets, and they tend to ally themselves with the professional middle classes. Another fraction of workers who retained their jobs in industries geared to the post-Soviet market (e.g. the heavy machinery sector) and in typically underfunded public institutions became dependent on patronage relationships with owners, management, and state bureaucracy (Gorbach 2019).

Understanding the Ukrainian ‘East/West’ cleavage as a nationally specific articulation of the post-Soviet conflict between the ruling fraction of political capitalists, on the one hand, and the professional middle classes allied with transnational capital and joined by dissenting fractions of political capitalists, on the other, allows us to explain some drastic civic and ideological asymmetries between the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps in Ukraine. Ideologically, the ‘East/West’ cleavage was not an articulation of the two opposite directions of development, e.g. ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-Russian,’ as more or less similarly attractive alternatives, although with their advantages and disadvantages. Ukraine's economic integration with the West would have damaged a significant section of Ukrainian subaltern classes, at least as of the mid-2010s (Kravchuk et al.2016; Zhukov 2016), and Ukraine did not even receive any real offer of EU or NATO membership, at least until Russia's invasion. Nevertheless, the ‘West’ represented a direction of development, even if unevenly beneficial and partially delusional, in comparison to which the Russian alternative (e.g. the Eurasian Union) was much weaker as a modernizing development project (Molchanov 2018). The post-Soviet ruling class's hegemony crisis manifested itself, particularly, in the profound weakness of the Russian soft power in the region. It has been defensive rather than offensive, micro-targeting those segments of the public already sympathetic to Russia rather than attracting new supporters, and relying primarily on discourses about the past (e.g. victory over the Nazis in WWII) rather than an attractive vision of a common future (Laruelle 2021). Russian soft power has typically relied on patron-client relationships that allowed Russian and Ukrainian intermediaries between the Kremlin and the Ukrainian grassroots to extract corruption rents, rather than fostering civic and political institutions to articulate interests and mobilize broad segments of the Ukrainian public in line with Russian goals (Bogomolov and Lytvynenko 2012).

The intensification of polarization through mutual otherness between the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps should be understood in the context of the asymmetrical deficiency of their ideological offers – the ‘East’ stood primarily for post-Soviet stagnation in favor of preserving the dominance of the political capitalists, while the ‘West’ offered a development that was questionably realistic and fraught with risks for a large section of Ukrainian workers. Ukrainian ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps could not mobilize strong majorities with positive programs of alternative ways of development. Instead, they relied primarily on the construction of the regionalized and ethnicized threats: the threat of ‘fascism’ from Western Ukraine, especially Galicia, and political turmoil undermining ‘stability’ as used by the ‘Eastern’ camp; the threat of perpetuating unbearable stagnation blamed in part on Eastern Ukraine, especially Donbass, because of the ‘Sovietized’ and ‘Russified’ people who allegedly lacked civic qualities and were easily manipulated by ‘corrupt’ elites (Baysha 2018; Zhuravlev and Ishchenko 2020). The repertoire of the threat construction was expanded by geopolitics: the threat to Ukrainian sovereignty and culture either from Russia (obviously intensified since 2014 but the ‘Western’ camp started to articulate it much earlier, cf. D’Anieri 2019) or from the West in the form of the ‘external management’ (vneshnee upravlenie) and liberal values as articulated by the ‘Eastern’ camp since the Euromaidan revolution.

The Party of Regions united most fractions of Ukrainian political capitalists in the 2000s and served as an important political coordination mechanism for their ruling bloc up until it was defeated in the Euromaidan revolution. However, their alignment with the ‘Eastern’ camp and the convergence of their politics with the Kremlin's interests and narratives was not the result of a commitment to a ‘pro-Russian’ ideology, nor a reflection of the ‘pro-Russian’ attitudes of their voters, but of the homology of class positions in the post-Soviet political economy and the threat posed to them by Western integration in the interests of the professional middle class and transnational capital. For short-term and opportunistic goals, the leaders of the ‘Eastern’ camp could instrumentalize the narratives of the ‘Western’ camp, for example, if they believed it would help them to win elections (re-election of Leonid Kuchma in 1999 and the EU Association Agreement for Viktor Yanukovych, which abandoning triggered the Euromaidan revolution). Changing camps (sometimes more than once) during their political careers was the rule, not the exception. The most prominent ‘pro-Western’ and ‘pro-Russian’ leaders in the immediate pre-invasion years – Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk, respectively – started their political careers in the 1990s from opposite camps and covertly cooperated with each other since 2014 (Burdyga 2022; Naiiem 2013).

However, even though both camps instrumentalized the regionalized and ethnicized threats, often for short-term purposes, the ‘Western’ camp was more successful in advancing its positive agenda in the long term. Notably, the ‘pro-Russian’ developments in Ukraine were usually soon halted even when they were relatively more popular and supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ forces controlled the government – the puzzle that Putin lamented at the Valdai discussion. This resulted from an asymmetry in the political development of the class alliances standing behind both camps in their capacity to universalize their particular interests and support them through civic mobilization. The ‘Western’ camp could rely on a network of professional NGOs – think tanks, media, and advocacy organizations – typically supported by Western donors; a broader activist community capable of regular, albeit small-scale, mobilizations apart from the rare massive protest events such as the maidan revolutions; intellectual circles, magazines, and some of Ukraine's best universities.¹² On the contrary, the ‘Eastern’ civil society was much thinner. Domestic underinvestment by the political capitalists limited the potential development of the loyal middle class that some authoritarian regimes manage to foster (Rosenfeld 2021). Instead of activists, non-profits, intellectuals, and aligned segments of the public sphere, the ‘Eastern’ political capitalists relied on patron-clientelist electoral machines, pundits on payrolls, and TV propaganda. This could be enough to win elections in the short term, but not to universalize their particular interests in a long-term vision of national development. Both camps had their radical wings, but the ‘Western’ one was on the rise, while the ‘Eastern’ one was in decline. Since the late 2000s, Ukrainian radical nationalists have benefited from the disappointment with moderate ‘Western’ parties after the Orange Revolution and Viktor Yushchenko's nationalist turn in the last years of his rule; the radicalization of the Euromaidan revolution, and the threat from Russia have expanded their legitimacy and capacity for street politics and violence, despite poor electoral performance (Colborne 2022; Ishchenko 2011, 2020, 2014, 2018b; Katchanovski 2020). On the contrary, the mobilization capacity of the ‘pro-Russian’ radical wing was already diminishing before Euromaidan. The Communist-successor left, first and foremost the Communist Party of Ukraine, became a minor partner of the ‘Eastern’ political capitalists, with the party tightly controlled by the patronage group of the leadership, which prevented either a reform or a radicalization of the party (Ishchenko 2023c). Since 2014, the communists have lost their most militant organizations in Crimea and Donbass and have been suppressed under the decommunization law. Finally, the ‘Eastern’ camp could not counter the maidan revolutions with comparable countermobilization. 16–19 percent participated in the protests or actively supported the Orange and Euromaidan revolutions, as opposed to only one-two percent who participated in pro-Yanukovych or Anti-Maidan mobilizations in 2004 and 2014, although the Ukrainian society was narrowly divided in the surveys at those times (Beissinger 2022: 280, 285). As a result, the ‘Eastern’ camp could only rely on the passive support of a fraction of the subaltern classes. Anything that could be called civil society for the ‘Eastern’ camp did not match its ‘Western’ counterpart in its capacity to elaborate an alternative project of Ukrainian national development that would universalize the interests of the political capitalists and back it up with sustained political participation and massive civic mobilization.

However, although the class alliance standing behind the ‘Western’ camp has developed politically further than the ‘Eastern,’ it had not overcome the hegemony crisis (at least before the full-scale invasion). The ‘Western’ camp's relative strength to advance its political agenda came not from political, moral, and intellectual leadership over the majority of the Ukrainian society. The ‘Western’ civil society did not expand the organized representation of the subaltern classes’ interests in the public sphere and politics. This was particularly evident in the continued weakness of Ukrainian labor unions (Gorbach 2019). Membership in Ukraine's civil society organizations in general remained very low by global standards and even in comparison with neighboring Central and Eastern European countries (Foa and Ekiert 2017: 426). According to surveys conducted continuously since 1994 by the Institute of Sociology of Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences, an astonishingly stable figure of no more than 20 percent of Ukrainian citizens reported to be members of any kind of civic or political organization (Gatskov and Gatskova 2020: 134; Ishchenko 2017: 216–218). Scholars arguing for the empowerment of Ukrainian civil society since the Euromaidan revolution point to the expansion of volunteer engagement in civic activities – typically informal, driven by charismatic personalities, and focused on resisting the immediate threat to the country (Oleinik 2018) – while noting that this does not translate into growth in formal membership in civil society organizations (e.g. Zarembo and Martin 2023). Active participation in civil society organizations tends to be more stable, long-term, regular, and accountable than informal volunteering (Gatskov and Gatskova 2020: 134). Therefore, the avoidance of forming or joining civil society organizations, which is typical of Ukrainian volunteerism, means that the largely event-driven and informal Ukrainian civil society has not carried out one of the fundamental processes of hegemony functioning related to the articulation of social groups’ interests and their representation in the public sphere and politics. Instead, a very narrow layer of middle-class NGO professionals spoke on behalf of ‘the Ukrainian civil society’ and, by extension, the entire nation, appropriating the legitimacy created by the maidan revolutions and poorly institutionalized informal volunteerism to push a neoliberal-nationalist agenda often not supported by the majority of Ukrainian citizens (Ishchenko and Zhuravlev 2021; Lutsevych 2013: 4–7). In particular, Kovalenko and Brik (2021) found a significant divergence between the political attitudes of Ukraine's civil society and Ukraine's society at large. The surveys found that some of the crucial reforms and policies strongly promoted by the pro-Western NGOs, e.g. in public health or the land market, nationalizing policies in historical memory, joining NATO, and cooperation with the IMF, did not enjoy the support of the majority of Ukrainian citizens at least before the full-scale invasion (Baysha 2022; Ishchenko 2023a; Kasianov 2021: 134–135; Zhuravlev and Ishchenko 2020).¹³ The fact that both Poroshenko's and Zelenskyi's governments lost their initially high levels of support despite implementing some essential parts of the ‘Western’ camp's agenda manifested the reproduction of the hegemony crisis, which was reflected in the pre-invasion surveys. In sum, while the ‘Western’ civil society proved to be relatively strong in pushing its agenda,¹⁴ it did not function as a public representation of the broader social groups of Ukrainian society.

The growing civic identity and even growing support for the ‘Western’ direction of Ukraine's development that are reported by the scholars standing behind the ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ argument (e.g. Onuch and Hale 2023) did not mean that the majority of Ukrainians identified themselves with the particular class interests of the ‘Western’ camp and their specific political agendas. The argument that posits the largely symmetrical ‘two Ukraines’ cleavage would have difficulty explaining why the dissatisfaction with post-Euromaidan developments has manifested itself in such weak resistance from the ‘Eastern’ part of the divide. The argument outlined in this section explains the dynamics of Ukraine's ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps from the perspective of an asymmetrical conflict between elite class alliances. They had disparate political capacities; however, both struggled to overcome the post-Soviet hegemony crisis.

The article argued that the Russian invasion posed various problems for the two main positions in the debate over Ukrainian regionalism. The argument about the largely symmetrical cleavage between the ‘two Ukraines’ along ethnolinguistic, national identity, or cultural lines would have difficulty explaining why the sides of this cleavage were so asymmetrical in their political capacity to universalize their particular interests and support them through civic mobilization, so that the ‘Eastern’ side could not provide the ground for a more effective Russian ‘soft power.’ Nor does this argument explain why most of the supposedly ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian elites and ordinary citizens did not side with Russia. The opposite argument, that the regional cleavage does not reflect any conflict within the broader Ukrainian society and is essentially an instrumentalized myth that masks a diverse and fluid reality of ‘twenty-two Ukraines’ on the social level, struggles to explain the very constitution of the ethnicized and geopoliticized polarization in Ukrainian politics. This argument also fails to explain the rationale for the original plan of a quick ‘military operation’ with only limited forces, and tends to reduce it to the delusions of the Russian decision-maker(s) who miscalculated the scale of Ukrainian resistance, although this is not the primary reason for the failure of the original plan, as a more careful military analysis of the first days of the invasion shows. The article outlined an alternative approach that understands the Ukrainian ‘regional’ cleavage as a nationally specific articulation of the class conflict between the ruling bloc of political capitalists and an alliance of the professional middle class and transnational capital, joined by dissenting fractions of political capitalists, in the context of post-Soviet hegemony crisis and that is common to many countries in the region. Let us summarize how this perspective provides some better answers to the puzzles that the Russian invasion posed for the Ukrainian regionalism debate.

Ethnonational grievances and geopolitical rivalry contributed to the nationally specific articulation of the post-Soviet class conflict in Ukraine, but only as a way of framing the mutual threats that the opposing sides of the conflict used against each other precisely because they failed to mobilize majorities around a positive development program in the context of the hegemony crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union: one side offered more stagnation than development (‘Eastern’), while the other proposed a modernizing development that would nonetheless harm a large section of the Ukrainian working class, and which until recently was not backed by any real offer of Euroatlantic integration (‘Western’). This constituted the polarization of Ukrainian politics between the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps. However, the class alliances behind these camps were asymmetrical, and this had implications for their unequal political capacity. Domestic underinvestment and the inability of Ukrainian political capitalists to cultivate a loyal middle-class civil society resulted in a profound disparity in the capacity of the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ camps to universalize their particular interests and support them through civic mobilization. Although the supporters of the ‘Eastern’ camp were numerous in opinion polls and elections, they remained largely depoliticized and passive. The Euromaidan revolution and subsequent events of 2014 amplified class, political, and ideological asymmetries within Ukrainian civil society, reproducing and intensifying the hegemony crisis. The ‘Western’ civil society gained more opportunities and resources to advance its neoliberal and nationalist agenda, even for those policies that did not enjoy majority support. At the same time, the main political coordination mechanism of the ‘Eastern’ elites (the Party of Regions) was marginalized, its radical wing (the Communist-successor left) was repressed, the weak attraction of Russia was further undermined by the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass, and the possibilities for a significant civic countermobilization in support of the ‘Eastern’ camp were reduced to negligible levels.

The basis for the Russian ‘soft power’ was shrinking. In the years preceding the full-scale invasion, the ‘Eastern’ political camp failed to universalize a positive project of Ukraine's national development, so that it would be compatible with the Kremlin's interests (particularly, based on the implementation of the Minsk Accords), and support it with sustained and massive civic mobilization (see more on this in Ishchenko 2023b). The ‘Eastern’ camp could not defend itself when it came under escalating repression, even when the justifications for the repression were not popular among Ukrainians (Stavlennia Do Zaborony Kanaliv «112», «ZIK» і «NewsOne»: Rezultaty Telefonnoho Opytuvannia, Provedenoho 5-7 Liutoho 2021 Roku, 2021). The rationale of the original invasion plan was based primarily on the premises of destabilization and decapitation of the Ukrainian government, not on the overestimation of the extent of voluntary collaboration or, on the contrary, on the underestimation of the extent of decentralized resistance to the invaders. The decapitation and disorganization of the centralized resistance would greatly facilitate the Russians’ intended repression of the activist minority of the radical wing of the ‘Western’ camp (Watling et al.2023: 21). In making the final decision to invade, Putin overestimated the destabilizing impact of the real crisis tendencies in Ukrainian politics and society; moreover, the Russian military proceeded with the original plan despite the failure of its critical first stages. The fatal flaws in Russian military planning and Putin's allegedly personal overruling of Russian intelligence's recommendation to postpone the invasion until the conditions for destabilizing the Ukrainian government were met (Watling et al.2023: 12, 17) are also consistent with the argument presented in this article. Putin's Caesarism only tamed the centrifugal tendencies of the post-Soviet collapse and provided just a deficient conservative solution to the hegemony crisis without a fundamental modernization of governance and state institutions.

When the failure of the initial plan became evident in the first days, the overwhelming majority of the ‘Eastern’ elites – politicians and local officials, ‘oligarchs,’ or media stigmatized for years as ‘pro-Russian’ – refused to welcome the Russian invasion, and most explicitly supported Ukraine (Bereziuk 2023; Matuszak 2022). To the extent one can rely on the war-time polls, this is also true about their voters (e.g. Indeks Spryiniattia Rosiisko-Ukrainskoi Viiny: Rezultaty Telefonnoho Opytuvannia, Provedenoho 19-24 Travnia 2022 Roku, 2022). The analysis in this article suggests that, at least initially, this was less a process of conversion from a ‘pro-Russian’ to a ‘pro-Western’ or ‘pro-Ukrainian’ identity than a reaction of a predominantly opportunistic and non-ideological elite, together with a predominantly depoliticized and disoriented citizenry, responding to an immediate threat to their lives, families, homes, assets, and property. Their behavior might have been different if the original invasion plan had been successful, and should not be assumed retrospectively. Only later did some of them ideologize their political shift, and whether this shift is sustainable is uncertain. Notably, most Ukrainian political capitalists have dramatically lost their economic assets and political influence in the country; the key industrial property of some was taken over by the state on military and emergency grounds (e.g. Ihor Kolomoiskyi), and some were persecuted for collaborating with the Russians (Viacheslav Bohuslaiev) (Minakov 2022).

The future of the Ukrainian ‘East-West’ cleavage depends fundamentally on the outcome of the war. The failure of Russia's regime-change operation has consolidated Ukrainians against the existential threat. When the war is over, some of the old divisive issues may come to the fore again, amplified by the new divisions between those who stayed and fought, those who left as refugees, and those who collaborated in the formerly occupied territories. If Russia manages to maintain control over the parts of Ukrainian territory, the divergence in attitudes between the members of the formerly unified Ukrainian polity may increase, to the extent that the surveys conducted earlier in the former breakaway ‘people's republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk can be relied upon (e.g. Sasse and Lackner 2018). If the argument in this article is correct, overcoming the crisis of hegemony would require a radical change in Ukraine's political economy. Broadly speaking, it would require a sustainable growth model for Ukraine that would provide a material basis for a partial, but more than fleeting, alignment of the interests of the ruling and subaltern classes around long-term development prospects. The periods of intense great power rivalry could be conducive to the strengthening of hegemonies, especially through developmental states (Evans 2012). The rise of the ‘Asian Tigers’ would be the most recent shining example. If this would be a model to follow, it would be more likely under scenarios in which Russia continues to pose a major threat to the West, and the synergy of strong autonomous state bureaucracies and large conglomerates of local capital is established against the neoliberal ideologies and interests of the professional middle classes and transnational capital.

I would like to thank Oleg Zhuravlev, the editors of the special issue and the journal, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which helped me to improve my argument considerably.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).