Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression?How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over?The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State, Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa.Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere.Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed co