Abstract
The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, why do those at the top of the power hierarchy in the pre-war period leave the rebel-controlled territories while mid-level officials are individually co-opted into the rebel political institutions? The argument is that rebels may co-opt not entire pre-existing institutions but selected individuals from these institutions, presumably mid-level officials with the experience of running the administrative affairs, into the new patronage system built by rebels. That claim will be tested against the pre-existing political and government institutions in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces dominated by the Party of Regions in the pre-war period.
Keywords
Introduction
Why were the pre-war local leaders in Eastern Ukraine forced to go while the mid-level political and government officials have been co-opted into the rebel political institutions? In general, political power in Ukraine, and pre-war Donbas in particular, was firmly held by the Party of Regions (“Partiya rehioniv,” PR), formed by Donetsk tycoons and organized crime groups in the late 1990s.
A radical twist of events toppled Yanukovych’s regime, followed by the Kremlin’s instigation and management of the rebellion in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. It resulted in the creation of two buffer para-states under Russian patronage—the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), with their political institutions seeking to legitimize their control over large parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
Once PR’s power monopoly crumbled in 2014, the local officials in Donbas faced the question of whether to stay or go. In many cases, the rebels solved this dilemma for them and forced the top officials to go. On the other hand, the emerging rebel groups had weak embeddedness in the local political and social context. There were no pro-Russian militant groups or organizations prior to 2014. The Russian-backed rebels had no experience with administrative affairs.
The structure of this article is as follows. First, it discusses the problem of subjugated co-optation of pre-existing institutions in rebel governance, referring to the institutions that provide certain public goods and the practices of rule that insurgents adopt. 1 The next section is dedicated to the author’s contribution to the debate on co-optation into rebel governance, followed by data collection methods and empirical findings discussed in the last section.
Pre-Existing Structures in Rebel Governance
This work draws on the literature on rebel and de facto states’ political institutions. While violent rebel behavior has received substantial attention in recent years, 2 some key aspects of rebel governance, such as strategies of co-optation into rebel governance, have been understudied in the extant literature. 3 Rebel groups seek to acquire domestic and external legitimacy and engage in a wide range of governance practices, including setting up executive, legislative, and judicial branches; hospitals; schools; banks; or social security networks. 4
Recent scholarship has made significant advances in the understanding of rebel governance, especially as it pertains to service provision. 5 As rebels gain organizational sophistication or conquer territory, they must make decisions about how to contend with civilians in their milieu. Because rebels compete with the state not only for military power but also for political authority and legitimacy, they must find ways to entice civilian cooperation and compliance while preventing defection. 6
The literature views rebel governance through the prism of activities aimed at implementing collectively binding rules and providing public goods in rebel-held territory. 7 Studies of rebel rule mainly seek to explain public goods provision in rebel-held territory and the processes through which redistributive rebel activities impact conflict outcomes, such as duration, termination, post-war democratization, or civilian victimization. 8 Scholars also discuss the reasons for providing governance and the inclusivity of such governance. 9 However, the act of “governing” observed across rebel-controlled territories goes beyond redistribution/public goods provision and involves a broader array of institutional practices. 10
Rebels intending to create effective governance need qualified personnel for the performance of governmental functions to provide other public goods beyond security. 11 When rebels gain territory, they form a “territorially based anti-state” with its own core areas and administrative units. Once rebels control a territory, they are incentivized to establish governing institutions and effectively become a competitive alternative governing actor to the existing state. 12 Rebels regularly engage in a variety of governance activities and create formal structures of rebel civil administration. Rebel leaders must often tap into and even co-opt pre-existing institutions and networks of power, which are themselves the direct product of the pre-conflict relationship between the incumbent state and local political actors. 13
The rebel political institutions are the range of structures and practices, both formal and informal, that rebels develop as part of a broader governance arrangement to interact with the civilian population and other unarmed actors, such as parliaments, political parties, and civilian councils, or they could depart from institutional forms commonly found in sovereign nation-states. The rebel leaders and groups frequently develop a wide variety of political institutions, including political wings, resistance councils, elected parliaments, civilian forums, and local governing authorities. Those political institutions vary considerably both across and within rebel organizations. 14
Rebels must interact and engage with pre-existing networks and institutions. One of the options, co-optation, implies a substantive role for pre-war civilian institutions in the governance of the population. Subjugated co-optation makes the leaders of the pre-existing institutions fall under the hierarchy of rebel political leadership. The leaders, subjugated by the new rules, are expected to adhere to a set of parameters established by the rebel group. Rebels benefit from the pre-legitimated sources of the subjugated leaders’ authority to maintain control and collaborate with co-opted leaders to achieve mutually desirable political goals. 15
Theorizing Individual Co-Optation from the Pre-Existing Institutions in Eastern Ukraine
Mampilly and Stewart’s theory of rebel political-institutional development brings important theoretical insight to the discussion of rebel political institutions. On the other hand, there is still ample space for innovative contributions. The authors talk about subjugated co-optation, which means that co-opted institutions and their leaders are subjugated to the rebel group’s command. Subjugation entails the rebels establishing clear parameters and guidelines within which civilians can operate. 16
What I try to demonstrate through the case of the Russian-managed rebellion in Eastern Ukraine is that subjugated co-optation is not collective but individual. Mampilly and Stewart consider the pre-existing political institutions as a unitary collective actor, which is co-opted, transformed, or abolished in the rebel-controlled territory as a single whole, including the leaders of such institutions. In Eastern Ukraine, however, entire political institutions have not been co-opted, but only their low-level and mid-level officials and/or members of the pre-existing patronage networks.
That’s why I prefer to discuss individual co-optation. New rebel elites establish clear parameters and guidelines for the officials, but this does not explain mutually beneficial individual co-optation. Individual co-optation occurs when rebels integrate experienced personnel from pre-existing patronage systems into the new patronage system to increase the capabilities of rebel state-building efforts and the domestic legitimacy of the new rebel elites. Rebels integrate such people through the selective incentives of social mobility.
Subjugation and individual co-optation do not compete; they complement each other. Subjugation is the set of rules enforced by the new rebel elite, or their patrons, which co-opted individuals from the pre-existent patronage networks must follow. All individual co-optations unfold according to the rules established by the new rebel elites or their foreign patron because the retention or replacement of pre-existing elites depends on the decisions of the new rebel authorities. The pre-existing elites remain in place only if they want to stay and if the new rebel elites need them. Individual co-optation better answers the question of why pre-war local leaders leave the rebel-controlled territories (or are forced to leave), while many mid-ranked officials from the pre-existing patronage networks are co-opted into the new rebel patronage network. These people have experience and are supposedly more dependent on the rebels due to their presumable lack of ties to the incumbent government, economic independence, and maneuvering space.
The effort to settle scores with pre-existing local patrons can create a governance vacuum that rebels cannot fill without the assistance of the mid-ranked officials. Individual co-optation has the potential to be mutually beneficial because former subordinates of the local patrons might be interested in replacing them at the top of the rebel governance institutions by offering their services to the new rebel elites. The new rebel elites often need to convince the population to stay and defend the entity. For that, they need experienced administrators who can help the rebels to offer public services to the population. 17
The new rebel elites provide selective incentives in the form of career promotion and easier access to local resources in exchange for the mid-range officials’ loyalty and support. The benefits for the rebels may stem from the experience of the former officials in local administration affairs. The rebels get more professionalization and legitimacy, especially in cases of where rebels are inexperienced and weakly embedded in the local society. 18
This work introduces the argument that the individual co-optation of pre-existing mid-level officials is linked to selective incentives in rebel governance through the perspective of social mobility. Many mid-officials worked in the same institutions before the rebellion and were promoted to a higher position by the new rebel elites. Such symbiotic relations between pre-existing mid-level officials and new rebel elites, who promote them within the new rebel institutions, are different from seemingly similar cases.
The Bolsheviks, for instance, used tsarist officials to run administrative affairs after the revolution in 1917. For the new rulers, this was arguably a temporary emergency measure to compensate for the lack of competent personnel. However, in Eastern Ukraine it seems to be a durable form of co-optation, as we can see during the last eight years since 2014. When the rebels lack experienced administrators and have weak social embeddedness in the local society, individual co-optation is an inseparable part of building new patronage networks in the rebel governance systems.
Individual co-optation is linked to another gap in the literature, which is the concept of selective incentives. Selective incentives motivate individuals to participate in the rebellion in two ways. First, rebel group leaders provide benefits to individuals as immediate private rewards, apart from the collective benefits that a victory might provide. Second, private goods are distributed explicitly as a reward for participation. Non-participants do not receive these extra benefits, although they can still take advantage of collective benefits at the end of the rebellion if it is successful. 19
In the literature, selective incentives are used by the rebel leaders or their foreign patrons to overcome the collective action problem and recruit rebel fighters who are ready and willing to bear the high costs of rebellion, including death on the battlefield. However, I argue that it is possible to extend the application of selective incentives to individual co-optation of the officials from pre-existing institutions.
I apply the concept of individual co-optation to the Russian-managed rebellion in Eastern Ukraine. With the onset of the rebellion, officials of the pre-existing institutions faced the challenge of preserving their grip on power and economic assets when their control over the region began to crumble. The local elites, who assisted in fanning the conflict in its early stage, were increasingly reluctant to give the rebellion legitimacy by proclaiming the incumbent government illegitimate. In the end, power was taken from them by Russia’s rebel proxies. 20 Once the local patrons were removed, individually co-opted mid-level officials filled the governance gap and sold their experience in administrative affairs to the rebels.
Individual co-optation from pre-existing institutions is not strictly limited to the case of the Russia-managed rebellion in Eastern Ukraine. It has a more general application and external validity. It can be detected, for instance, during the decolonization process when rebel groups transitioning into the governments of newly independent countries had to rely on the experience of mid-level African officials after the rebels had removed the top colonial rulers. For example, during the Guinea-Bissau War of Independence, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) did not hesitate to co-opt African personnel who had served the Portuguese in building the institutions of governance. 21
Case Selection and Data Collection
The conflict in Donbas is a case where neither local elites nor political party bosses led the rebellion, unlike many other rebellions in the post-Soviet region, former Yugoslavia, or other parts of the world. Local elites from the pre-existing political institutions regularly lead rebels in a confrontation with the government, sometimes supported by foreign patrons. 22 The situation in Donbas was different, as the pre-existing ruling party officials hoped to use public discontent in both provinces to exert pressure on the central government, but were sidelined as marginalized locals and it was imported Russian nationalists who made up the rebel groups under Russian patronage. 23
PR opened a window of opportunity for Russia to incite large-scale insurgent violence against the incumbent government after Yanukovych’s regime was toppled. The local leaders in Donbas enabled the protests and helped fuel their escalation, even if they did not directly lead them and received no benefits. 24
My units of research are top of the local power hierarchy, such as leading PR party officials and those mid-level party and government officials in the cities who became ministers, prime ministers, and their deputies from December 2014 until May 2022 in the rebel “governments.” As well as the biographies of pre-conflict government and party officials, I also analyzed short biographies of ten mayors of the largest cities occupied by rebel proxies and fifty-four ministers, deputy prime ministers, and prime ministers in both “people’s republics” from fall 2014 to 2022 (see Table 2). I chose the most important sectors, such as internal affairs, emergency situations, state security, justice, economic development, finance, transport, coal and energy, and foreign affairs.
In addition, I conducted fifteen semi-structured interviews with local experts from the Donetsk and Luhansk Provinces in Russian and Ukrainian between August 2018 and May 2020. All the interviews were anonymized so as not to compromise the identity of the interviewees. The central question asked was how local officials, who had exercised power as a part of the ruling system, responded to events out of their control with the onset of the anti-Ukrainian rebellion. The sampling of the respondents mainly focused on local representatives of civil society who had lived in Donbas until the start of the armed conflict: political analysts, bloggers, academics, journalists, local politicians, nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers, and others. My gatekeepers recommended these people during my long-standing research in Ukraine. When I refer to interviews, the respondents’ positions are provided at the end of the article.
Case studies based in conflict zones pose significant challenges. The data are often relatively limited, and their accuracy is not always beyond doubt. 25 However, the interviews were taken several years after the most intense fighting. More and more information became evident about the rebellion and could be verified. Respondents were not in danger during the interviews, as all the respondents live either in the government-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces or in Kyiv. Therefore, the respondents were not threatened by retribution. The triangulation I used to mitigate the potential biases of the respondents relied on collecting observations from different sources of the same type (interviewing various participants) and collecting observations across different types of sources from both sides of the conflict.
The information provided has been checked and compared with data from other respondents, secondary empirical literature, and media sources, although the accuracy of newspaper sources can often be difficult to assess. 26 I have not privileged any individual source or type of source in terms of weighing the evidence they provided but used a mix of sources as a way of mitigating potential biases. 27 The text relies on secondary interview data given the obvious reluctance of pre-conflict government and party officials to share their views and evaluate their activities truthfully.
Before proceeding to the empirical part, framing the local political and government institutions is crucial for better clarification of the situation. I count the following local most powerful party and government officials as the highest-ranking leaders of the pre-existing institutions: leading figures of the political-oligarchic network around Rinat Akhmetov and Viktor Yanukovych, consisting of the PR regional leaders, heads of the regional administrations, parliamentary deputies elected in single-member districts, mayors of the several largest cities (Donetsk, Makiivka, Horlivka, Yenakiieve, Luhansk, Alchevsk, Stakhanov/Kadiivka), and regional heads of the law-enforcement forces (Security Service of Ukraine [Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrayiny, SBU] Police Forces). Mid-level officials are deputy heads of the offices mentioned above, heads of the regional and city administration departments, directors of the law-enforcement and emergency services, structural departments and their deputies, officials in the courts and prosecutor offices, and regional and city deputies from the PR.
The Pre-Existing Political Order in Donetsk and Luhansk Provinces
The formation of local political institutions under rebel control does not begin from a tabula rasa. Before the outbreak of conflict, governments have already established administrative offices, judiciary systems, and police forces to allocate goods and resources, adjudicate disputes, execute laws, and surveil the population. 28 The PR was the dominant political subject in Donbas. It emerged from a rent-seeking nexus of the Donbas-based former Communist Party machines, local nomenklatura network, and the region’s largest financial-industrial groups. 29 The PR was the public face of the Donbas elite, which captured political power in the whole country with the election of their patron Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s fourth president, in 2010.
PR’s domination on the local level was total. PR officials dominated the regional, city, and district councils in Donbas. By 2014, 106 out of 124 members in the Luhansk regional legislature belonged to the PR, and 168 out of 180 members represented the party in Donetsk. The remaining seats were filled by Communist Party legislators. Regional executives appointed by the central government were only approved if they were from the PR. The party achieved its success by replicating Russia’s centralized power vertical. Party membership became the only means of social mobility in Donetsk and Luhansk and provided political protection for local businesses. Everyone from regional oligarchs to school principals belonged to the party. 30
The PR started to disintegrate right after Yanukovych’s regime was toppled in February 2014. The party denounced Yanukovych after he fled from Kyiv, blaming him for the murder of protesters, and parliament voted to remove him from power. The first to leave the PR were those from regions other than Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea, the party’s three regional strongholds. In the next several months, the PR faction shrunk to half of its size, while its popularity slumped in eastern and southern Ukraine. Division within the party undermined its discipline. 31
Regional councils in both provinces had stopped working in March 2014. The Luhansk regional council and its apparatus ceased to exist after recognizing the central government in Ukraine as illegitimate and helping to legitimize pro-Russian secessionists. The Donetsk regional council moved to Mariupol, controlled by the Ukrainian state, as a kind of “regional council in exile” without any powers, which were transferred to the Civil-Military Administration appointed by Kyiv. 32 Civil-Military administrations are temporary local government units created by the law “On the civil-military administrations” from February 2015. City and district councils in the occupied territories have not been elected since 2014. Their powers have been transferred to the “city administrations” appointed by the rebel leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk. The same is the case with mayors whom the Russia-controlled rebel administrations appoint.
The Set of Pre-Existing Officials—Cutting Off the Head and Expelling the Local Patrons
The local patrons connected to Yanukovych’s family or patronage network of Donetsk-based wealthiest oligarch Rinat Akhmetov fled Donetsk province immediately after unseating the former president or with the onset of the rebellion in April–May 2014. PR officials holding the highest political positions in Donetsk and Luhansk fled or were forced to leave by armed militants in 2014. The highest-ranking party and government officials had to give way to Donbas’ new “rulers.”
The PR boss in Donetsk province, the young parliamentary deputy Mykola Levchenko, originally intended to use marginalized secessionist radicals for bargaining with Kyiv, but he was afraid to push the situation to the extreme. 33 Levchenko demanded in May 2014 an immediate end to the government’s “anti-terror” operations against pro-Russia armed groups and the start of “peace negotiations.” 34 In summer 2014, he left for Moscow. Another anti-government organizer who tried to exploit radicals in Donetsk, was the secretary of Donetsk City Council, Serhiy Bohachev, who later in summer 2014 fled to Russia after he was ousted from Donetsk by the rebels.
Former Komsomol officials centered around Oleksandr Yefremov, the leader of the PR parliamentary faction, had controlled the patronage system in Luhansk since the late 1990s. With the onset of the rebellion, Yefremov went to Kyiv, where he was arrested for his involvement in anti-Ukrainian activities. The rest of the Luhansk party bosses (Pristiuk, Holenko, Tkachenko, Lozovskyi, Kravchenko, and others) fled first to Kyiv and even balloted in parliamentary elections in October 2014, but the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) started to investigate their role in the secessionist mobilization of the local population during spring 2014. Most of them decided to flee from Ukraine, mostly to Russia. Only one member of this close circle around Yefremov, Mykola Zaporozhtsev, stayed in Luhansk in the seat of LNR deputy. 35
Mayors of the largest cities under occupation, such as Donetsk, Makiivka, Horlivka, Yenakiieve, Shakhtarsk (Donetsk Province), Luhansk, Alchevsk, Stakhanov, Sverdlovsk, and Antratsyt (Luhansk province), left their posts, mostly in July–August 2014 after some time trying to be neutral. Some of them assisted the rebels with administrative affairs, but that dual power was an interim solution. The rebels were happy to eventually eliminate them as “unreliable” elements, symbolizing the rule of the Ukrainian state and blocking their access to the spoils of local governance. The only mayor who stayed in the rebel-held territory, and even continued in her career under the new rebel administration, was Marina Filippova, former mayor of Krasny Luch and now advisor to the LNR head, Leonid Pasechnik. In 2014, she was held in custody during a stand-off between different Cossack gangs, who came to Krasny Luch from Russia and robbed her of her possessions.
Igor Girkin, Russian former intelligence officer, who started the war by occupying Sloviansk in April 2014, disliked the situation in Donetsk after he retreated from Sloviansk in early July 2014, when he found out that in Donetsk power was split between rebels and official political institutions. The Donetsk mayor Oleksandr Lukyanchenko was ousted from the “Donetsk People’s Republic” in the same month. 36 Some mayors were held as hostages or for ransom by rebels such as Yevhen Klep in Horlivka. The mayor of Antratsyt, Vyacheslav Salita, died in a Kharkiv hospital in August 2014 as a consequence of kidnapping and torture by Cossack gangs that had been terrorizing the town since May 2014. 37
PR parliamentary deputies from single-member districts in rebel-controlled enclaves fled to (or stayed in) Ukraine. The PR had twenty-one deputies elected in Donetsk province and eleven in Luhansk province in single-member districts after the 2012 parliamentary elections in rebel-occupied and non-occupied parts of the provinces. 38 The seat in the national parliament in Kyiv is considered to be a far more prestigious job than engagement in local politics.
Many of the PR deputies had been physically present in Kyiv during the political turmoil in Donbas. Rumors circulated that some of them, Ihor Shkiria (Horlivka, Toretsk), Volodymyr Struk (Luhansk), Vitalii Bort (Makiivka), Volodymyr Chub (Alchevsk), or Vladislav Lukianov (Khartsyzk, Shakhtarsk), to name a few, overtly or covertly supported the rebellion and the May 2014 referendum on secession from Ukraine. 39
They presumably understood their lack of prospects in the “people’s republics” and decided not to dirty themselves by open collaboration with pro-Russian rebels. The deputies who played with the idea of the federalization of Ukraine and pro-Russian initiatives stayed either in Kyiv or in Russia (and occupied Crimea). In contrast, the rest just stayed out of the rebellion, trying to continue their political careers in Ukraine, mostly in the PR successor political parties. Only a few of them were investigated by Ukrainian state organs for their activities in 2014, and all were acquitted by the Ukrainian courts.
The only PR deputy who stayed in rebel-held territories, and actively and openly participated in the anti-Ukrainian rebellion, was Aleksandr Bobkov. He led the PR party structures in Donetsk (2004–2010) and became a deputy in 2012. Bobkov and his close collaborator Andrei Orlov, former PR parliamentary deputy in 2006–2012, organized and financially supported the rebellion. Bobkov sponsored the prominent rebel group Bulwark (“Oplot”) led by the DNR head Aleksandr Zakharchenko, and the International Brigade “Pyatnashka” comprised mostly of foreign fighters from the post-Soviet region. However, Bobkov’s political influence remained circumscribed within the DNR. 40 Unconfirmed rumors circulated that he might become DNR head in 2014 and then, again, in 2018 after Zakharchenko’s assassination. 41
The Set of New Officials—Individual Co-Optation of the Mid-Ranked Officials
The so-called “people’s republics” in Donbas emulate the functions of the sovereign states. Officially, they have a parliament (“People’s Council”), government (“Council of Ministers”), and illusory elections. Political parties are forbidden, and only political movements sanctioned by Kremlin and their rebel proxies can participate. The first so-called “People’s Councils” were formed in April 2014. At that moment, they controlled only several government buildings under occupation in Donetsk and Luhansk.
In summer 2014, “governments” were led by Moscow spin doctors Aleksandr Borodai (Donetsk) and Marat Bashirov (Luhansk). Their control did not extend beyond the respective cities they sat in, and they had weak authority among the rebel commanders controlling other parts of the provinces. The consolidation process of the rebel governance under the Russian patronage started in November–December 2014 after the first so-called elections and the physical removal of the loosely controlled rebel commanders. 42
None of the heads of the rebel administrations, Aleksandr Zakharchenko (2014–2018) and Denis Pushilin (since 2018) in DNR, or Igor Plotnitsky (2014–2017) and Leonid Pasechnik (since 2017) in LNR, had been top officials in the pre-existing political and government institutions. Pasechnik had worked as an SBU officer in Stakhanov/Kadiivka. Pushilin was the manager in the Russian pyramid scheme business, Zakharchenko was allegedly a mining engineer or small entrepreneur, and Plotnitsky worked for the regional department of the Inspectorate for the Protection of Consumer Rights.
The biographies of the mayors of the larger cities under rebel control (Donetsk, Horlivka, Makiivka, Yenakiieve, Luhansk, Alchevsk, Stakhanov/Kadiivka) show their local roots in the low-ranked bureaucracy without any political influence (see Table 1). Many deputy mayors from the PR became rebel-appointed mayors, such as Natalia Pyatkova in Alchevsk or Manolis Pilavov in Luhansk.
Mayors Appointed by the Rebel Administration in the Largest Rebel-Controlled Cities
Source: TSN.ua, “Kontrrazvedka rasskazala o FSBshnike, kotoryi upravlyaet pytochnoi ‘LNR,’” 19 September 2019, https://tsn.ua/ru/ato/kontrrazvedka-rasskazala-o-fsbshnike-kotoryy-upravlyaet-pytochnoy-lnr-1413738.html; A. Chernov, “‘Kadry’ reshayut. Ministry ‘LNR’—kto oni?” Informator Media, 20 March 2015, https://informator.media/archives/92507; Espreso TV, “‘Ministramy’ v LNR staly chynovnyky Yefremova ta Kravchenka,” 27 November 2014, https://espreso.tv/article/2014/11/27/quotministramyquot_v_lnr_staly_chynovnyky_yefremova_ta_kravchenka; Insider, “Chto oznachaet luganskiy bunt: V LNR idet borba za finansovye potok iot postavok uglya v Ukrainu,” 23 October 2015, http://www.theinsider.ua/business/562a193af2b76/; Y. Bogdanov, “Pro somnitelnykh biznesmenov ‘LNR,’” Antikor, 24 May 2016, https://antikor.com.ua/articles/43230-pro_somniteljnyh_biznesmenov_lnr; Novosti Donbassa, “Strelkov ugrozhal raspravitsia s Lukianchenko ‘po zakonam voennogo vremeni,’” 26 November 2014, https://novosti.dn.ua/news/221366-strelkov-ugrozhal-raspravytsya-s-lukyanchenko-po-zakonam-voennogo-vremeny; Yadotsent, “Deputatskaya rotatsiya,” Livejournal, 4 October 2015, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/761241.html; Yadotsent, “Novenkie chleny rukovodstva DNR,” Livejournal, 12 September 2018, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/1076618.html; Yadotsent, “Novenkie kadry,” Livejournal, 18 January 2019, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/1110362.html; LB.ua, U “DNR” vbyly stavlenyka Kurchenka na choli “minenerho,” 10 November 2015, https://lb.ua/news/2015/11/10/320543_dnr_ubili_stavlennika_kurchenko.html; Gorlovka.ua, “TOP-20 samykh bogatykh rukovoditelei ‘DNR’ i ‘LNR,’” 29 November 2015, https://gorlovka.ua/rating/rating/65/participant/417/.
Note: Mid-level officials of the pre-existing political and government institutions are emphasized in italics.
Law-Enforcement and Security Services in the Rebel Administrations (State Security and Internal Affairs)
The backbone of the new rebel law-enforcement and security services has been formed either by former Ukrainian police or by SBU officers who defected from the Ukrainian state institutions and joined the rebel administration. Several former Ukrainian police and SBU officers made it to ministerial posts in DNR/LNR. They mostly staffed the so-called state security, internal affairs, and justice sectors. The so-called Ministry for Emergency Situations command is entirely staffed by mid-level defectors from analogous Ukrainian state institutions. 43
According to various sources, levels of police and SBU defection to the rebels were high, depending on the individual departments. According to a former Donetsk police officer and commander of the pro-Ukrainian voluntary militia, the overall defection rate of the police forces in Donetsk was around 30 percent (with the highest numbers among anti-riot police, traffic police, and the department for combating organized crime), 30 percent continued to serve in Ukrainian-controlled territories, while 40 percent left the police altogether. 44 In total, several thousand police and SBU officers defected to the rebels.
In February 2015, Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs officially dismissed from service in Donetsk province around six thousand police officers who had stayed in the occupied territories and were suspected of defection to the rebels. Some of the most important institutions have been directly controlled by Moscow, such as the Ministry of State Security (Ministerstvo gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti, MGB). This structure is copied from the Russia’s Federal Security Service (Federalnaya sluzhba bezopasnosti, FSB) and is strictly controlled by the FSB headquarters in Moscow. MGB is basically an FSB department in the rebel-controlled territories, enforcing the loyalty of the civilian population and the rebel administration to the Kremlin. 45
Security affairs in DNR have been outsourced by Moscow to experienced cadres from secessionist Transnistria, who were no longer welcome in the breakaway region after a leadership change there in 2011. Vladimir Antyufeyev, a former minister of state security in Transnistria during 1992–2011, became the first deputy prime minister responsible for the security bloc (July–September 2014). His lieutenants, Oleg Bereza and Andrei Pinchuk, Antyufeyev’s deputy minister in Transnistria, were appointed “ministers” of interior and security. 46 The MGB in Luhansk was formed by Leonid Pasechnik, former SBU lieutenant colonel, who became the head of LNR in 2017.
The “Ministerial” Sectors in the Rebel Administrations
The ministries of DNR and LNR are also led by people with experience in the pre-war state and political structures as mid-level officials. Out of fifty-four DNR/LNR selected ministers (see Table 2), deputy prime ministers, and prime ministers in 2014–2021, twenty-three could be classified as mid-level officials of the pre-existing state institutions (42.6%), eighteen (33.3%) as middle-class specialists (doctors, university workers, lawyers, engineers, private entrepreneurs), and seven (13%) as low-level officials (low-ranked employees in the prosecutor’s office, state notary, low-ranked police officers, etc.). However, many middle-class specialists, such as deans and rectors of the local universities, or heads of the hospitals, were also mid-level players in the local patronage networks and had to be members of the PR to retain their posts. High officials from sectors such as education or medical services have been recruited from the lower levels of these pre-existing structures, eager to serve the rebel elites within the new patronage system. It means that teachers and administrative workers at universities and colleges are recruited into the ministry of education. People working in different positions in hospitals and medical services are recruited to the health ministry. To have a more representative sample, some ministries, which are not included in Table 1, are analyzed in more detail in the following part of the work (health, education). In general, DNR and LNR have had around twenty ministries in their so-called governments from July to August 2014.
Ministers of DNR and LNR since November–December during 2014–2021
Source: TSN.ua, “Kontrrazvedka rasskazala o FSBshnike, kotoryi upravlyaet pytochnoi ‘LNR,’” 19 September 2019, https://tsn.ua/ru/ato/kontrrazvedka-rasskazala-o-fsbshnike-kotoryy-upravlyaet-pytochnoy-lnr-1413738.html; A. Chernov, “‘Kadry’ reshayut. Ministry ‘LNR’—kto oni?” Informator Media, 20 March 2015, https://informator.media/archives/92507; Espreso TV, “‘Ministramy’ v LNR staly chynovnyky Yefremova ta Kravchenka,” 27 November 2014, https://espreso.tv/article/2014/11/27/quotministramyquot_v_lnr_staly_chynovnyky_yefremova_ta_kravchenka; Insider, “Chto oznachaet luganskiy bunt: V LNR idet borba za finansovye potok iot postavok uglya v Ukrainu,” 23 October 2015, http://www.theinsider.ua/business/562a193af2b76/; Y. Bogdanov, “Pro somnitelnykh biznesmenov ‘LNR,’” Antikor, 24 May 2016, https://antikor.com.ua/articles/43230-pro_somniteljnyh_biznesmenov_lnr; Novosti Donbassa, “Strelkov ugrozhal raspravitsia s Lukianchenko ‘po zakonam voennogo vremeni,’” 26 November 2014, https://novosti.dn.ua/news/221366-strelkov-ugrozhal-raspravytsya-s-lukyanchenko-po-zakonam-voennogo-vremeny; Yadotsent, “Deputatskaya rotatsiya,” Livejournal, 4 October 2015, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/761241.html; Yadotsent, “Novenkie chleny rukovodstva DNR,” Livejournal, 12 September 2018, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/1076618.html; Yadotsent, “Novenkie kadry,” Livejournal, 18 January 2019, https://yadocent.livejournal.com/1110362.html; LB.ua, “U ‘DNR’ vbyly stavlenyka Kurchenka na choli ‘minenerho,’” 10 November 2015, https://lb.ua/news/2015/11/10/320543_dnr_ubili_stavlennika_kurchenko.html; Gorlovka.ua, “TOP-20 samykh bogatykh rukovoditelei ‘DNR’ i ‘LNR,’” 29 November 2015, https://gorlovka.ua/rating/rating/65/participant/417/.
Note: Mid-level officials of the pre-existing political and government institutions are emphasized in italics.
Foreign affairs
The first self-proclaimed LNR “foreign minister” had been the Communist Party’s first secretary in Rubizhne, Nellia Zadiraka, who joined the rebel political “movement” “Mir Luganshchine” as a deputy. In 2017, Vladimir Deinego became new “foreign minister” and a negotiator in the Trilateral Contact Group in the name of the LNR. 47 The other representative of the LNR in the Trilateral Contact Group was PR regional deputy Rodion Miroshnik, pre-war director of the regional television and broadcast company LOT, who also became an advisor to the LNR head Leonid Pasechnik. 48 Deinego is a former PR councilman from Alchevsk, who organized and instigated secessionist anti-Ukrainian sentiments in the town in spring 2014. His counterpart in DNR is Natalia Nikonorova, who worked as assistant to the former PR deputy Svyatoslav Piskun.
Education
The first DNR minister for education in 2014–2015 was Igor Kostenok, who worked previously at the Donetsk State University of Management. 49 His successor in 2015–2018, Larisa Polyakova, also worked before the war at the Donetsk State University of Management. 50 The next education minister (2018–2019), Evgeniy Gorokhov, headed the Donbas National Academy of Construction and Architecture from 1991. 51 The current education minister (as of May 2022), Mikhail Kushakov, headed the T.G. Shevchenko Transnistrian State University in 2002–2015, where he was, according to some Ukrainian sources, sent by the Russian secret services. He moved to DNR in 2015, where he became deputy minister and, in 2019, minister of education of the DNR. 52
A similar situation can be observed in LNR, where education minister Lesya Lapteva previously worked in an elementary school in Krasnodon and was forced to flee to Russia in 2015 with her deputy minister Tarasyuk due to accusations of embezzlement of humanitarian aid to students. 53 Her successor, Valentina Tkachenko, had been a rector of the Luhansk National Agrarian University in 1996–2019. Sergey Tsemkalo, education minister from 2017 to 2021, worked in the Education Department at Luhansk City Council prior to 2014. 54 His successor, Andrey Lustenko, is the former head of the Sociology Department and, with the onset of the war, vice-rector of the Luhansk National University. 55
Health
The health minister in DNR, Aleksandr Oprishchenko (2016–2018, since 2020), was previously the director of the trauma center in Donetsk. 56 Olga Dolgoshapko, health minister in 2018–2020 and now advisor to the DNR’s head Pushilin for medical issues, worked for over thirty years as a gynecologist in the Donetsk Regional Center of Maternity and Childhood Protection, and when the rebellion started, she headed the First Military Hospital. 57 The health minister in LNR, Natalia Pashchenko, is a cardiologist by profession who was previously responsible for the “State cardiology program” subsequently becoming a deputy minister. 58
“Parliaments”
The parliamentary speakers in both “people’s republics” have political experience from pre-existing patronage networks as well as many deputies from only the approved political movements that were allowed to participate in the “elections”—Donetsk Republic (“Donetskaya respublika”) and Free Donbas (“Svobodnyi Donbass”) in DNR; Peace to Luhansk Region (“Mir Luganshchine”) and Luhansk Economic Union (“Luganskiy ekonomicheskiy soyuz”) in LNR. The DNR’s parliamentary speaker since 2018 is the former Communist Party deputy in the Ukrainian parliament Vladimir Bidevka. When the riots started in Donetsk in March–April 2014, Bidevka sat in Kyiv and supported the moves of the new Ukrainian government. However, after the Communist Party did not enter the Ukrainian parliament in October 2014, Bidevka returned to Donetsk to be politically active and enjoy the spoils of the so-called DNR becoming the parliamentary speaker. In LNR, the former local leader of the PR’s youth organization (“Young Regions”), Denis Miroshnichenko, was appointed to the post of LNR parliamentary speaker in December 2017. 59
Why Did Pre-War Local Leaders Leave the Rebel Territories While Mid-Level Officials Were Co-Opted in the Rebel Governance Structures?
The case of Eastern Ukraine demonstrates that local pre-war political leaders may leave rebel territories for several reasons. The most salient reason has probably been the lack of personal security and prospects for their political and economic advancement. Local patrons were no longer in control of the local political and economic affairs. They had to deal with armed and unpredictable rebels holding bottom-up grievances toward pre-war leaders, and eager to build their own patronage system to replace the pre-existing one. For that reason, the rebels hoped to get rid not only of the Ukrainian central authorities but also of the local leaders affiliated with the PR’s patronage network. 60
The new rebel elites had seemingly competing incentives regarding the pre-existing structures. On the one hand, the new rebel elites wanted to install their own people—to ensure loyalty and to reward those who fought for them—but on the other hand they had to ensure functioning governance and provision of public services. Therefore, it was arguably easier to replace those in political positions than those in more technical positions (people running public services). The top pre-war political leaders were at the head of the patronage system that the new rebel elites replaced with their own. The new rebel elites gave the previously mid-level officials selective material incentives under the condition that they would not try to disrupt this newly built patronage system.
The new rebel elites’ patronage networks had to be protected from the strong pre-existing actors, who were expelled or decided to flee. Most of the rebel leaders were politically insignificant individuals and marginals who suddenly became the new political elite. After seizing power, these new rebel elites adopted the same system of patronage that had allowed the PR to sustain its dominance in the Donbas for nearly a decade. As mentioned above, almost none of the previous leaders of the region were able to keep power in the region’s newly established “people’s republics.” A new rebel elite had been born. 61
The reign of Aleksandr Zakharchenko, DNR leader in 2014–2018, was characterized by mass expropriations of businesses and property. Gradually, Zakharchenko and his right-hand man Alexander Timofeyev (“Tashkent”) took control of the illegal coal and metals trade, contraband, and other get-rich-quick enterprises. 62 The Revenue Ministry, led by Timofeyev, was infamous for sending armed emissaries to demand taxes and even ownership from companies. Zakharchenko’s Donetsk “People’s Republic” also controlled dozens of industrial enterprises, the bulk of which was seized in March 2017, following the economic blockade imposed by Ukraine. 63 The situation in LNR under Igor Plotnitsky and his successor Leonid Pasechnik has been pretty much the same.
Individual co-optation is also a tool to increase the necessary internal legitimacy by creating effective state-like structures that enable them to defend their territory and provide basic public services. 64 Mid-level officials were not wealthy oligarchs or local patrons. Nor did they have any political or business connections to the central government in Kyiv. This facilitated their easy co-optation into the new rebel administration. The top officials in the regional executive and legislative institutions impeded the rebels from creating their patronage networks, while mid-range experienced officials assisted the rebels in reinforcing their governance and replacing the old patronage system with the new one.
The other decisive factor was the policy of the external patron. The first objective of the Russian destabilization tactics of rebel violence was the physical removal from power of the local party officials. 65 Moscow wanted to get rid of the pre-existing patronage system because local patrons could disrupt Russian policy in Donbas. Local leaders did not intend to secede from Ukraine, unlike the rebels, and were prone to strike a deal with the incumbent government because the war was bad for their business. However, the rebel administration is entirely subordinated to Moscow. 66 Even the top rebel leaders such as Zakharchenko or Plotnitsky and their successors, Pushilin and Pasechnik, are nothing more than figureheads.
The other issue related to the role of the external patron is whether the Donbas case is a rebellion or occupation by foreign power. I argue that it is something in the middle. Both entities, DNR and LNR, are politically, economically, and militarily dependent on the Russian state, which sent its own people as handlers to the rebel military forces and political administration. 67 Meanwhile, Moscow views the leaders of both “people’s republics” as expendable and may drop them at any time. Their role is very circumscribed. The rest of the rebel administration handles mostly technical issues. On the other hand, Moscow left the domestic space—relations between the rebel officials within the administration—unsupervised. 68 In a word, Moscow lets the top rebels create their own patronage systems on the ground as long as they are loyal and obedient.
The individual co-optation of mid-level officials has been mutually beneficial—the rebels did not have enough experienced cadres to administer the occupied territories, and the officials were more loyal than the old patrons. Lower positions in the pre-existing patronage networks, constrained economic resources, and social capital made them more dependent on the rebels and better integrated into the new patronage system. Lack of direct contact with the incumbent government of the parent state narrows down the choices of those officials who have nowhere else to go to reboot their careers.
Mid-level officials, whose resources and networks are confined to rebel territory, would have nothing to gain by leaving and hypothetically a lot to gain by replacing the departing elites. Improving their personal situation is presumably the predominant selective incentive for mid-level officials in their co-optation into the new patronage system of the rebel administration. Meanwhile, top officials from the pre-existing institutions could “afford” to flee from the rebel enclaves due to their larger political, social, and economic capital and networks, which allowed them to run their affairs and develop their contacts and businesses from the relative safety of Kyiv or Moscow. The empirical data suggest that the strategy of the new rebel elites was to specifically target mid-level administrators who were part of the pre-existing patronage system but lacked sufficient resources to hypothetically prevent the new rebel elites, and foreign patron, from pursuing their goals.
Rebel leaders at the top of the newly built patronage system did not have experience in political or administrative work. They needed to co-opt these people to assist them in governing the occupied territories. 69 For instance, several deputy mayors replaced mayors, their former superiors in Luhansk and Alchevsk. 70 Former PR officials work as advisors of the LNR head Leonid Pasechnik and represent the self-declared republics in the Minsk Peace Negotiations. More than half of the current mayors and heads of districts in DNR are former mid-level officials from the local state institutions. 71
The new rebel elites do not have to co-opt just anybody to staff offices. Considering the rapidly deteriorating socioeconomic conditions, there have arguably been many contenders for high-office positions. The new rebel elites can pick the most loyal or the most closely linked to the new patronage system. The power ministries have been clearly prioritized as they command armed people and are “entitled” to grab a larger share of the spoils. Anna Matveeva 72 has noted that governance in both “people’s republics” became dominated by bureaucratic routine and the influence of security agencies.
Conclusion
Most party officials from the disintegrating pre-war PR took a neutral position with the outbreak of the rebellion in 2014. Their passivity could be explained by worries about their personal security, although in some cases their position resembled tacit support more than strict neutrality. The Russian-backed insurgency was not part of the “old” party officials’ plan to retain their patronage system after the toppling of Yanukovych’s regime.
The highest-ranking officials of the pre-existing patronage system fled from rebel-held territories either to places under the incumbent government’s control or to Russia. Most of the experienced and high-ranking party officials fled either to Kyiv or to Moscow in 2014, or first to Kyiv and then to Moscow. In summer 2014, the situation had become unbearable for most mayors and other high-ranking officials in the cities ruled by various rebel groups despite their proclaimed neutrality or even support for the rebels.
The PR finally disintegrated in September 2014 and did not participate in the Ukrainian parliamentary elections in October 2014. The PR electoral stronghold stayed out of the control of the Ukrainian state. Ratings of the PR shrunk to about 2 percent at that time. 73 It seemed that the PR and other political structures associated with Yanukovych’s regime had no political future, but they have been reborn under new brands. Many ex-PR party officials from occupied and non-occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces carry on their political careers in Kyiv despite fanning the anti-Ukrainian rebellion in 2014.
The rebellion opened a window of opportunity for some ex-PR party mid-level officials in Donbas, who decided to stay and offer their experience to the rebel administration. They became mayors of the largest cities under occupation (Donetsk, Luhansk, Horlivka, Stakhanov, and others), represented the “people’s republics” in the Minsk negotiations and became deputies in both Donetsk and Luhansk “parliaments,” keeping considerable control over trade unions, propaganda machinery, and other aspects of rebel governance. They found their place in the new rebel patronage system.
Whereas the subjugated co-optation of entire pre-existing institutions introduced by Mampilly and Stewart 74 makes the leaders of the pre-existing institutions fall under the hierarchy of rebel political leadership, individual co-optation makes the leaders of the pre-existing institutions leave the rebel-controlled territories to be replaced by their former subordinates within the new patronage network. Those replacements are eager to take over their former bosses’ positions and collaborate with rebel rulers to achieve desirable political goals.
The case of Eastern Ukraine confirms that rebels co-opt individuals from these pre-existing institutions, preferring the mid-ranked officials of the local political hierarchy with experience of running local administration. These officials, confined to rebel territory, have been provided with selective incentives enabling them to improve their personal situation as they became part of the new rebel patronage system in exchange for enhancing the state-building capabilities and domestic legitimacy of the rebel administration.
Footnotes
Interviews Cited
Interview 1, Head of NGO Ukrainian People’s Council of Donetsk and Luhansk Provinces (UNRDL), March 2019 Kyiv.
Interview 3, Donetsk journalist and blogger, August 2019, Kyiv.
Interview 4, Participant in Euromaidan self-defense group in Donetsk, August 2019, Kyiv.
Interview 5, Writer and political activist living in Donetsk until 2014, August 2019, Kyiv.
Interview 6, Chairman of volunteer organization SOS-Vostok from Luhansk, August 2019, Kyiv.
Interview 7, Journalist from Luhansk, March 2019, Kyiv.
Interview 8, Donetsk-born Investigative journalist living in Kyiv since 2000s, March 2020, Kyiv.
Interview 9, Luhansk journalist held in custody by pro-Russian rebels, Kyiv, August 2019.
Interview 10, Journalist from Horlivka. Online communication, October 2019.
Interview 14, Independent trade union activist from Sverdlovsk. March 2020, Kyiv.
Interview 18, Former city deputy in Alchevsk, Online communication, November 2019.
Interview 21, Former Ombudsman Office worker, Online call, April 2019.
Interview 22, Journalist from Alchevsk, Online communication, November 2019.
Interview 25, Blogger and journalist from Sverdlovsk, Phone call, January 2019.
Interview 27, Journalist from Luhansk, Online communication, June 2019.
Funding
Research on this article was supported by a grant provided by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic entitled Fratricidal Defection: How Blood Revenge Shaped Anti-Jihadist Mobilization (21-14872S).
