Authors

Discussion

Since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war on the 24th of February 2022, historians, political scientists, and sociologists have produced an increased amount of scholarship to attempt to explain the causes of the war and why Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the twenty-first century, would decide to unleash a brutal, illegal, nineteenth-century-style invasion on its sovereign neighbour. Within political, historical and sociological scholarship, the dominant notion traces the causes of the war in Ukraine back to the “Ukraine Crisis”. Previous research has primarily focused on the EuroMaidan movement, the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas as a series of watershed events which drove the two countries into open hostilities, although nuances remain. Still, the common consensus is that the current conflict had its roots in 2014. However, this concept takes away from a recurring pattern of hybrid warfare tactics prior to this date. The theory of hybrid warfare, advocated by James Mattis and his more well-known co-author Frank Hoffman, demonstrated that traditional methods of warfare will no longer be the standard. Instead, modern conflicts will take on unconventional and nonlinear means. In his 2007 paper, 'Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Warfare,' Hoffman identified four key elements of hybrid warfare: (1) political, (2) economic, (3) cultural, and (4) moral. Therefore, when applied to the war in Ukraine, one will notice a pattern of the implementation of these tactics by the Russian state towards Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union and in some respects even earlier. Most notably following the tragic Chernobyl disaster, eventually leading to the Revolution on Granite in 1990, the economically tumultuous 1990s, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity 2013-2014. This article argues the war in Ukraine has a much greater timeline that goes beyond the events of 2014, albeit in alternate ways; henceforth, the Ukraine Crisis, is rather a phase of an old conflict rather than an isolated event or as a consequence of NATO-EU expansion. This article will use the Revolution on Granite of 1990, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and the Euromaidan protests of 2014 as case studies to analyse how Ukrainian civil society and the Ukrainian government have overcome the several attempts by Russia to undermine its sovereignty through the use of ideological strategies, economics and political manipulation. Although the roles of NATO and the EU will not be the primary focus, both organisations have played a significant role in the development of the conflict; however, the involvement of NATO and the EU as the cause of the conflict requires revision. This study covers Russo-Ukrainian relations from 1989-2014, from the Revolution of Granite to Crimean annexation and the war in Donbas as part of a broader, centuries-long conflict, needing a full book to cover this extensive history.