Eastern Ukraine Isn’t Really That Separatist by Leonid Bershidsky – Bloomberg
As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy consolidates power after his party gained a majority in parliament, there’s a sense in Europe that conditions might be ripe for productive talks on resolving the festering conflict in eastern Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron says there’ll be a France-Germany-Ukraine-Russia summit on the subject next month, the first since 2016. Meanwhile, John Bolton, national security adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, is asking Zelenskiy to take his time: the Europeans may not “have a solution that is readily apparent.”
As ever, the Europeans want the war to end on any terms acceptable to the parties, and the Americans are worried about any possible concessions to Russia. But all this activity around a possible resolution goes right over the heads of the most important stakeholders: The people of eastern Ukraine who live on both sides of the front line – a total of about 6.2 million people, of which about 3.7 million are in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, the DNR and LNR respectively.
The Berlin-based Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) has just published a report on how sentiment in both Ukrainian and separatist-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine has evolved in the last three years – coincidentally, the period without “Normandy format” meetings like the one Macron has announced. The report is based on in-person interviews with 1,200 residents of the Kyiv-controlled part of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and telephone interviews with 1,200 people in the unrecognized “people’s republics” kept alive by Russian support. In that, the survey is unique – few researchers dare conduct any kind of field work in the DNR and LNR…