The Washington Post: What people in southeast Ukraine really think of Novorossiya

The Washington Post published a big article describing the situation in the South-East of Ukraine. We present here the excerpts from this article.

Our comparative project funded by the U.S. National Science Foundationexamines post-Maidan attitudes in Ukraine, as well as in Crimea now annexed to Russia, and in the Russian-supported de facto states of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.  In December 2014, we organized simultaneous public opinion surveys in these regions and surveyed in 6 of the 8 oblasts of southeast Ukraine (hereafter SE6). We judged it impossible to do reliable survey work in war afflicted Donetsk and Luhansk, instead contracting with the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) to administer a randomized face-to-face survey to 2003 persons in Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv. We asked a series of questions about Novorossiya.

The first was whether respondents thought Novorossiya was a myth or historic fact. Implicitly this is a question that sought to get at whether they viewed the newly hyped imaginary as legitimate or not. Over half (52 percent) of the SE6 sample deem it a myth but 24 percent considered it a ‘historic fact’ with a further 22 percent giving a ‘hard to say’ response.  (Much higher ratios, about three-quarters, in Crimea and in the Russian-backed de facto republics view it as a historic fact). To determine whether seeing Novorossiya as “historic fact’ might be an endorsement of separatism, we asked directly if the concept could be the basis for separatism of the sub-sample of 970 in the SE6 who saw it in these terms or who gave a ‘hard to say’ answer to the myth-or-fact question.  Only 14 percent of this sub-sample agreed with this possibility but importantly 38 percent choose ‘hard to say’ indicating that the question was likely a sensitive one for them. Endorsing or considering the basis for separatism, we should appreciate, is profoundly politically incorrect in most contexts where a legitimate government remains in firm control.

We then posed a question to respondents about the use of the Novorossiya moniker giving them two declarative choices as well as the usual ‘hard to say’ and refuse options: (i) “it is Russian political technology to break up Ukraine” or (ii) “it is the manifestation of the fight of the population of southeast Ukraine for independence.” Only 18 percent in SE6 were willing to choose this latter option (for the graph comparison to Crimea see our earlier post here). Barely over half the population (51 percent) in SE6 viewed Novorossiya as Russian political technology, in effect a geopolitical scam manufactured by Russian power circles. This split opinion is hardly a resounding affirmation of the worldview of Kiev and many Western observers, suggesting the term and its genealogy resonated with some even if they did not say so explicitly.

Some oblasts in southeast Ukraine are deeply divided, and we should acknowledge that. Indeed, we can identify four distinct zones in contested Ukraine today: annexed Crimea, rebel held Donbas, the divided oblasts of Kharkiv and Odesa, and the rest which are fairly solidly pro-Ukraine. A profound economic and legitimacy crisis is still unfolding in Ukraine and likely to place even greater stress on its institutions and people. Majority sentiment in Crimea is deeply alienated from Ukraine, and supportive of its annexation by Russia irrespective of legality.

Greater Novorossiya may be dead but a lesser Novorossiya lives on in the form of the Russian dependencies DPR and LPR. These appear to be fashioning themselves as de facto states, though they are very distinct from the other post-Soviet de facto states we have studied in depth. While some speculate about a deal ‘giving up’ Novorossiya for acknowledgement of Crimea’s annexation, the grim reality is that there is no easy territorial fix to the multiple crises afflicting Ukraine. They were a long time in the making and they will take a long time to resolve.

Gerard Toal