Duncan Bowie on Russian rule
Occupation by David Lewis published by Hurst
This is the first book to study the occupation by Russia of south-Eastern Ukraine. Given that the author, an Exeter University professor who had previously written on Putin’s authoritarianism, could not visit either the occupied territories or Russia, the study is well researched using published Russian and Ukrainian documents, interviews with exiled residents and social media sources.
Unlike much writing on the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, it is non-partisan. Rather than focusing on the progress of the war, which has been widely covered in other studies and in daily journalistic accounts, Lewis focusses on the governance of the occupation – the institutional structures, the violence of the occupiers, their propaganda, and the economy.
The incorporation of the occupied territories into the Russian state is complete, with education at all levels transferred to the Russian system and Ukrainian businesses transferred to Russian ownership, and the property abandoned by Ukrainians taken over by those who had stayed. What is perhaps most significant about the study is that the author analyses the degree of collaboration by Russophile Ukrainians, who, either out of affiliation or opportunism, benefited from the occupation, taking official positions which they would not have won under the previous Ukrainian regime. Others collaborated as the only means of survival as a Russian passport was necessary to access any state services.
From this perspective, nearly all residents of the occupied territories were in breach of Ukrainian laws on collaboration with the enemy. When Ukraine recaptured the city of Kherson, such collaborators were convicted and given lengthy prison sentences. This is likely to be a significant factor in negotiating any peace settlement.
What should also be recognised is that a significant number of officials in South Eastern Ukraine were more sympathetic to Russia than to the Ukrainian nationalists in the west of the country, and not opposed to the Russian occupation and the Russification that followed. Much of the current literature fails to recognise the historic divisions within Ukrainian society and the nostalgia amongst the older population of the relatively poor and industrialised southeastern Ukraine for the Soviet times. In this context, it is also worth referring to a book published in 2023- Ukraine’s Unnamed war – Before the Russian Invasion of 2022, by Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll and to a volume published in 2019 by Paul D’Anieri – Ukraine and Russia, which provides a sound bipartisan study of the relationship between the two countries from the breakup of the Soviet Union to the secession/occupation of Crimea and Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014.