between the Ukrainian Armed Forces and two Russian-backed breakaway territories, Donetsk and Luhansk. The conflict, which has claimed more than 14,000 lives since the outbreak of war in 2014, is now at risk of going down in history as a prologue to the full-scale offensive unleashed by the Kremlin last year.

Anna Arutunyan’s Hybrid Warriors: Proxies, Freelancers and Moscow’s Struggle For Ukraine offers an in-depth account of the first days of Russia’s covert invasion of Ukraine in 2014 that, as the title suggests, was carried out by a murky medley of state and non-state actors. Arutunyan examines the motivations of the ragtag bands of militias, the oligarchs that funded them, and the officials in Moscow who, at turns, fueled the fighting and struggled to impose order amid the chaos. What becomes apparent is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is no master strategist. The picture that emerges is of a Kremlin plagued by decision paralysis, paranoia, and poor intelligence. This, in turn, sheds new light on the roots of today’s war.
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In the aptly titled first section of the book, “How a Bunch of Guys Started a War…,” Arutunyan introduces us to the figures—some Russian, some "Ukrainian—who sought to seize a moment in 2014 as the ghosts of imperialism, grievance, and separatism were awakened by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the wider political upheaval in Ukraine. In that country, a popular uprising had removed the country’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, and ushered in a new era of ambitious reforms.

Two of the principal architects of the first days of the war in the Donbas were Konstantin Malofeyev—a devout Orthodox oligarch enamored of the history of the Russian Empire who provided the money—and Igor Girkin, a wiry former member of the Russian security services who provided the muscle. The two men have long been thought of as in receipt of ideas and orders handed down from Russian officials to allow for a veneer of plausible deniability, but as Arutunyan demonstrates, they were equally proactive in pushing their own ideas up the chain as well.

In April 2014, Girkin led 52 men over the Russian border and into the Donbas, where they linked up with local armed groups. By the beginning of May, Arutunyan writes, “miners, truck drivers, an assortment of local pensioners and shady businessmen, and an army of local and Russian adventure-seekers had set up their own pretend governments with flags, parliaments, defense ministries, militias, declarations of independence and even proto-constitutions.”

As in other breakaway regions in the former Soviet Union, Russian geopolitical entrepreneurs, and later the Kremlin, were able to exploit local grievances in the Donbas. This was Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where many regarded with suspicion the democratic revolution that was being led from Kyiv and set the country on a firmly pro-European course. The first phase of the conflict “was thus as much civil as it was geopolitical,” Arutunyan writes, “as much fueled by local divisions as it was by Moscow’s meddling.”

Arutunyan’s interviews with local separatists from 2014 underscore the complex nature of identity in the borderlands of the former Soviet Union and should serve as a word of caution for those who casually talk about the prospects for the disintegration of Russia in the wake of the current war. In the opening chapter, we are introduced to Dima and Sasha, the former a Ukrainian citizen, the latter a Russian, who both took up arms to fight for Girkin on the front lines against the Ukrainian army. “They came to feel that they, Russians, were being told they were somehow inferior, that they had no place in the new Ukrainian nation,” she writes."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/12/the-other-ukraine-war-crimea-invasion-2014-putin/