In this presentation, Dr. Melnyk will evaluate the key parameters of the anti-government insurrection in Eastern Ukraine during the spring and summer of 2014. He will argue that the insurgency was to a considerable degree an indigenous movement-which, however, was invariably influenced by Russian state and non-state actors. Specifically, to forestall the defeat of the insurgency, the Russian government supported the rebels with weapons, intelligence, and personnel, and eventually launched a direct military intervention. In the process, Russia transformed the asymmetrical decentralized insurrection into a conventional war, in which it assumed control over local warlords who had heretofore operated as part of numerous armed units, with different visions of the political order and the territory over which they staked sovereignty claims.
Dr. Oleksandr Melnyk is a Bayduza Post-doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. He completed his Ph.D. in history at the University of Toronto and is the author of several articles on various aspects of Soviet and Ukrainian history during the Second World War. He is currently working on a project about the war and state-making and state-breaking in the Ukrainian-Russian ethnic borderlands from 2014 to the present.