Could this be the moment Ukraine finally turns the corner?
It also increasingly looks like the shooting part of the war in eastern Ukraine might finally be over. After the deaths of at least 8,000 people, the Minsk cease-fire seems to be holding. Talk on the ground in the self-declared Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics has turned from independence and even expansion to the conditions for reintegration into Ukraine. Just as significantly, Russian officials also seem ready to move past an unwinnable war and re-engage with the West while moving on to Syria.
The experience of war, observers agree, has changed Ukraine in profound ways. This is not the same country as before the revolution, either in its boundaries or its population. Some observers even claim that President Putin has inadvertently become a great nation-builder in Ukraine, prompting a country that had been deeply divided to develop a unified Ukrainian identity and a solid pro-Western majority.
But what is the reality on the ground across Ukraine? To find out, we are conducting a series of cross-sectional and panel surveys in Ukraine. We began our surveys in December 2012, before the revolution, and completed a second round in August 2015.
Our initial results are not very encouraging. While we found some evidence of changing identities, the deep divides that marked Ukraine after the Orange Revolution of 2004-5 are still very much in evidence.
To examine this, we follow the standard approach of breaking down our results into the four “macro-regions” of Ukraine: west, south, center and east. We couldn’t survey the breakaway territories of eastern Ukraine, including its largest city, Donetsk, since those are not under government control. We make no claims about those areas and eliminate Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea from our analysis. Instead, we focus on the remainder of eastern Ukraine, comparing opinion in the same localities in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia and Kharkiv regions that we surveyed in 2012.
1. Have the revolution and the Russian war given Ukraine a stronger national identity?
Yes, there’s some evidence that this is true.
In 2012, we asked respondents across Ukraine what country was their “homeland.” Almost all respondents in the west of the country said Ukraine was their homeland (92 percent). Numbers were lower in the central provinces, and considerably lower in the south and the non-Donbas east, where more than a quarter of respondents gave other answers.
By 2015, however, more people in each region now gave Ukraine as their homeland. The regions’ national identities had become somewhat more similar than different.
2. Are Ukrainians uniting around one national language?
Sort of. More of them (not a lot, but some) say they’re more often speaking Ukrainian, and fewer say they’re speaking only Russian. This is potentially important in a country that consists of a mostly Russian-speaking east that has traditionally favored closer ties to Russia and a predominantly Ukrainian-speaking west, where the levels of Ukrainian nationalism are much higher.
But there are meaningful differences by region.
Western Ukraine was already speaking Ukrainian, almost exclusively, and there’s been no change there. But in central Ukraine, the proportion of people who reported speaking mostly Ukrainian at home increased from 55 percent in 2012 to 63 percent in 2015.
In the non-Donbas east, fewer people say they’re mainly speaking Russian: the proportion who say they do fell from 62 percent to 55 percent.
But interestingly, there was no corresponding increase in those who spoke primarily Ukrainian; in fact, that share actually dropped slightly, from 20 percent to 17 percent.
It would be an exaggeration to say that this language shift suggests a massive surge in Ukrainian identity, but the gap between Ukraine’s west and the rest of the country is narrowing.
3. Have Ukrainians changed how they view the rest of the world?
Somewhat, but not radically.
Attitudes to Russia have hardened across the board. That’s reduced the striking pre-Maidan differences between the west and the rest of the country. In 2012, only westerners were clearly opposed to a proposed customs union with Russia and Belarus. By 2015, overwhelming majorities in the west and center and large pluralities in the east and south shared that view.
However, significant minorities in the south (33 percent) and the east (23 percent) still favor union with Russia. Almost no one in the west does (3 percent).
But there is considerably less agreement about joining Western institutions like the European Union or NATO.
In 2012, there was minority support for E.U. membership in the east and the south, with more enthusiasm from the center and west. By 2015, the west and center were more supportive, but attitudes hadn’t changed in the south and east.
Here, at least, the revolution and war seem to have increased rather than decreased the differences between east and west.
The country’s just as divided about NATO membership. In western Ukraine, support for joining NATO has almost doubled since late 2012; in central Ukraine, it’s grown more than fourfold. While support has also doubled in the south and east, that doesn’t mean much; support was pretty low in 2012. Only a fifth of people in the non-Donbas east and south say they support of joining NATO; more than half are opposed.
4. Do Ukrainians want to use military force against Russia?
Here’s where we find a lot of differences among the regions. While 70 percent of respondents in the west of the country want military force used to reintegrate the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, that drops to only 47 percent in the center, 40 percent in the south and 28 percent in the east.
The regions also have very different attitudes toward the military draft that the government instituted in an effort to build its standing army up from 6,000 battle-ready troops to a target of 250,000.
There have been stories of draft dodging in the news before, but our data suggest very weak support for it, particularly in those regions closest to the front.
In the west, 59 percent support a draft, compared to 38 percent in the center, 26 percent in the south and only 23 percent in the east. Even in the supportive west, some 81 percent of respondents described concerns about the draft as being common, a proportion very similar to that reported in other regions.
So here’s the takeaway.
What these data show is that, despite the talk of a new Ukrainian nation, there are still sharp and profound divides between regions – and remember, this doesn’t include the breakaway territories, just those that remain subject to Kiev.
Ukraine’s earlier revolution, the Orange Revolution in 2004, foundered precisely on the new regime’s inability to bridge the concerns of Ukraine’s different regions and forge a common agenda out of a disparate coalition. The Orange government was never able to gain support from the populous, industrial eastern regions and truly unite the country.
The lesson of our survey is that the current revolution has, so far, also failed to bridge Ukraine’s deep regional divides, making the job of creating a new national identity and of implementing major reforms extremely difficult.
Grigore Pop-Eleches is an associate professor of politics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and author of From Economic Crisis to Reform: IMF Programs in Latin America and Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press 2009).
Graeme Robertson is an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes: Managing Dissent in Post-Communist Russia (Cambridge University Press: 2011).
