Donbas beyond Political Myths: Revisiting the Entangled History of a European Border Region until its Time Collapse 2014 into Separatist Violence and the Outbreak of Russia’s War against Ukraine

Readers time-travel to the palimpsest past of Donneččyna and Luhanščyna chronicled on the ‘periphery’ of Europe’s eastern steppe’s frontier. It is a historic host of diverse cultural entanglements, imperial legacies, migration-, refuge- and trade-highways, polyethnic contact-zones, religions and (a)synchronous everyday practices, but also brute forms of hegemonic rivalries, power-asymmetries, epistemic violence, identity contestations, memory-erasures, social-engineering and authority-abuses self-legitimised via paradigms like modernisation, internationalism and classless utopia. De-centring towards nuanced palettes of experiences and re-affirming their historical inseparability from Ukraine’s inclusively demotic nation-building, the dissertation voices polyphonic narratives contrary to stereotypes vested in the byname Donbas(s) (the Donetsʹ (coal) basin) – a geological signifier ridden by imperialist colonial-extractivist semantics echoing clichés like old industrial heartland and Russian stronghold.

The red thread contrasts history to Russo-irredentist political manipulation weaponizing the following myths: the elusive ‘Novorossiia’ from the militarist-expansionist vocabulary of the Tsarist Empire imitating Old-Greek might, first-settler status and a ‘Third Rome’ Orthodox civilizing mission; the ephemeral about two-month paper-statehood of the ‘Donets’k–Kryvyĭ Rih Socialist-Republic’ as a 1918-secessionist Bolshevik ‘special operation’ against Ukraine’s emancipation-fight; the antemurale- and martyrium-matrix of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ translating old enemy images, collective traumas and aggrandized glories into the present; sui generis coal-arteria and heroic-labour distorted portrays of a re-imagined Soviet ‘Golden Age’ offering deceptive cognitive escapes from the ‘rust belt’ reality in social anomy under a patronal power-monopoly of political-business elites and latter humanitarian crisis under Russian occupation; the big-lie mythomoteur of ‘East Slavic Unity’ under alleged Russian ethnogenesis-supremacy and eternal manifest destiny of ‘protecting’ kindred peoples from ‘foreign intrigues’ by the collective ‘West’ and Ukrainian ultra-nationalism. Extending the project’s trajectory, the focus shifts towards tracing post-Soviet destabilization by outweighing internal and exogenic factors behind the regional 2014’ time collapse into the limbo of protracted war. Challenging the ‘civil conflict’ hypotheses, the context-analysis repudiates claims forwarding identity rifts, socioeconomic mobilisation, state failure or/and historically primordial cleavages. Findings indicate the key role of Russia in terms of: attempted revolt within the whole Ukraine’s South-East; incursions by army units and Kremlin-dependent paramilitaries; information warfare; weaponry-deliveries; indoctrination, sustenance, partial export of and superior control over local/transborder conflict entrepreneurs; cross-border shelling plus long-term institutional infiltration, geoeconomic blackmail, misused intelligence loopholes and anti-Ukrainian international discreditation. Auxiliary emphasis rests on passivity/co-optation of key elites utilising civil unrest-dramaturgy for securing/enhancing their power but eventually losing leverage over Kremlin-primed dynamics. Insights stress the inadequate international community-response to Russia’s aggression morphing 8 years later into full-scale assaults. Results reflect the need for methodological de-imperialising, terminological contextualising/innovation, considering (post-/de-)colonial situations, reforming  knowledge-production and revising political-geographic constructs in the East European Studies, alongside with respect for Ukraine’s cultural and historical agency and support against the ‘Russian World’s’ atavist expansionism, primitive geopolitics, cynic polit-technologies and genocidal terror.