Kolomoisky’s secret diplomacy: 2019-22

Last Friday I promised this week would go further into the array of elite factions teaming up against Zelensky. But despite the feeling of urgency, over the weekend my attention was dragged back to the past, to the pivotal years of 2020 and 2021. These were also my years in Ukraine I was most interested in politics.

Why did the full-scale war erupt in 2022? Nationalists generally claim that Russia was always planning to invade, and just used the Minsk agreements to give time to prepare. While the 2014-22 period certainly allowed Russia to sanction-proof its economy, it was also a period during which Ukraine’s army became far stronger and more integrated with NATO. Many on Russia’s side hence loudly regret that Russia didn’t fully intervene back in 2014, and instead spent ‘10 years in the Minsk dead-end’.

I don’t think that Minsk was simply a prelude to an inevitable war. Russia did want Minsk implemented, as did, of course, a significant, but very frightened, section of Ukrainian society. If Minsk had been implemented, Russia would not have had to go to war with Ukraine. NATO-integration would have become impossible through the reintegration of several million anti-NATO Ukrainian voters in the east. I wrote about this aspect of Minsk in my series on the topic, and Volodymyr Ishchenko analyzes it in his work.

So why 2022? On the one hand, the Russian government could simultaneously observe Ukraine’s descent into internal conflict, with Zelensky’s popularity falling and almost the entire political and business class uniting against him in late 2021. But how exactly did Zelensky’s 2019-2020 (and even some in 2021) attempts to come to an agreement with Russia fail?

I wrote a recent article about Zelensky’s various ill-fated, half-hearted attempts to go further in implementing the Minsk agreements and reintegrating the territories under control of the Donetsk/Lugansk People’s Republics. Today, I will be looking at the subterranean game beneath the more visible dialogue, and its echoes into the present.