Identity Constructions and State Building in Occupied Ukraine: 2014-2022
Creators: name: Kalandarov, Artur
Publisher: name: Stanford Digital Repository
Year: 2024
Subjects: Donbas
Ukraine
Russia
Russian Federation
Moscow
Kyiv
State-Building
Identity
War
DNR
LNR
DPR
LPR
National Indifference
Topic Modelling
Propaganda
Donetsk
Lugansk

description: Attempts to develop an ideological foundation for the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) began almost as soon as the territory was seized by separatists and the Russian army. Despite a rapid acquisition of local media organizations and repression of independent journalists, local elites struggled to define the political and social characteristics of the new statelets. The first three years of independence were marked by varying degrees of Russian involvement in Donetsk and Luhansk’s political messaging and political identities ranging from Novorosiia and the Don Cossack Republic to a new Donetsk-Krivoi Rog Republic and Malorossiia. These localized constructed communities reflected earlier unsuccessful identity-building efforts. Recent analyses of the Donbas have noted the lack of scholarship on state-building efforts in the DNR and LNR territories.  This project addresses this by assessing attempts by governing elites to develop local identities through state media. Supplemented by existing scholarship, the primary raw data used in this study are the texts of local print and online media in Donetsk and Luhansk.  This analysis focuses on how political elites have sought to shape perceptions of national identity. 

Chapter 1 of this paper provides a historical overview of the Donbas and Russo-Ukrainian relations in the 21st century. It discusses the origin and evolution of the Russian World concept and evaluates Russian information operations in the Donbas in the first year of the war in eastern Ukraine. Whereas Crimea was fully incorporated into the Russian Federation, Donetsk and Luhansk were the first areas Moscow sought a nation-building effort that relied on the Russian World ideology. Chapter 2 of this paper argues that separatist leaders contemplated several distinct political identities in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in the first three years after the territories were seized. Each of these identities were promoted across state media in turn. All were ultimately discarded, because of factional infighting and the local populations’ lack of a favorable response to the identity messaging. I rely upon prior dynamic topic modelling textual analysis of local media and a review of primary and secondary sources to analyze these processes. For the theoretical approach to this analysis, I employ the concept of “national indifference,” popularized by Tahra Zahra, to explain the local dynamics likely at play in the Donbas, both before and since 2014. Dynamic topic modelling textual analysis has not been applied to the Donbas’ local media in the period after 2017. As a result, Chapter 3 assesses the results of my own textual analysis of local press from 2018-2022. Topic models based on the text of over 60,000 local media articles in the occupied Donbas suggest several important trends in Russian state-building efforts. After 2017, there were no significant attempts at creating new regional identities or reviving historical ones. In their place were standard Russian World narratives of a declining West and values-driven, powerful Russian Federation. These narratives superseded local news content even in local papers. In contrast to 2014-2017, 2018-2022 saw DNR and LNR leaders focus on maintaining authority and preventing infighting, as opposed to constructing new identities. The topic models suggest Moscow took on a more active role in propagandizing the need for the DNR and LNR to join with Russia from 2018-2022.