Why Didn’t Ukraine Fight for Crimea? Evidence from Declassified National Security and Defense Council Proceedings

ABSTRACT

While the Russian decision to annex Crimea has been widely explored and debated, scholarship has largely overlooked the Ukrainian response. Why did the Ukrainian side refrain from escalating? I address this gap, leveraging recently declassified primary-source materials from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to provide an original explanation for the Ukrainian decision not to fight for the peninsula. I find evidence in favor of realist explanations, while domestic politics was largely absent in decision-makers’ discussions. Additionally, I find prospect theory to offer a compelling account for the Ukrainian decision. This article therefore explains why decision-makers were risk-averse despite the loss of Ukrainian territory.

Acknowledgements

The author expresses gratitude to Dimitry Gorenburg, Eric Grynaviski, Charles King, Henry Hale, Dylan Royce, two anonymous reviewers, and the organizers and participants of the Association of European Studies for the Caucasus’ Third Annual Convention (Odessa, Ukraine) for helpful feedback and advice throughout the research process. All errors remain my own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Martial law was defined in Ukrainian law as a “special legal regime that is imposed in Ukraine or in certain localities in the event of armed aggression or threat of attack, or danger to the state independence of Ukraine and its territorial integrity, and provides for the relevant state authorities, military command, and local governments the powers necessary for averting the threats and to ensure national security.” It would have subordinated rule to the military command under the acting president, curtailed civil liberties, and allowed for the state to temporarily seize property, institute compulsory labor and conscription, and control communication channels. While not a formal declaration of war, a martial law regime represents the mobilization of the country onto a war footing. The Ukrainian adjective “voennyǐ” literally means “war,” in a more direct sense than the conventional English “martial.” See Zakon Ukrainy (2000).

2. This is based on the commemorative medals awarded by the Russian Ministry of Defense to those involved, which has the operation dated from February 20. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented that the date was, in his view, the result of a “technical mistake” in the medals’ production. See Interfax (2018).

3. One exception is the 2017 RAND report by Kofman et al. (2017), which uses the document as a “credible source” (5) in its analysis of the annexation. Besides this, however, the only instances found by the author of the RNBO transcript being cited in research consisted of a footnote in Charap and Colton (2018) (chapter 3, footnote 34), and Hai–Nyzhnyk (2017). Neither of these focused on explaining the actual decision from the Ukrainian perspective, however.

4. Volodymyr Zamana, chief of the General Staff from 2012, was dismissed by Yanukovych on February 19, 2014. His replacement, Yuriy Ilyin, traveled to Crimea for negotiations on February 27 with the mayor of Sevastopol, Aleksei Chaly, before suspiciously being “hospitalized with a heart attack,” remaining in Crimea, and subsequently defecting. His replacement, Mykhailo Kutsyn, was appointed just hours before the RNBO meeting on February 28. See UNIAN, February 28, 2019; ITAR-TASS, February 28, 2014.

5. There is no evidence from the RNBO meeting, however, that Turchynov actually did “bluff” Naryshkin. The transcript does not show their actual conversation, only Turchynov’s summary to RNBO participants afterward. See Krym.Realii TV (2020); Gordon (2018).

6. Unfortunately, subsequent testimonies provide little clarification. In his testimony in February 2018, Ihor Tenyukh, for instance, retroactively claims to have “called for a large-scale military operation” in the RNBO meeting, but that it was Yulia Tymoshenko who then warned this would have led to a full-scale war (“Dopros Nalivaichenko, Teniukha i Tsimbaliuka. Stenograma zasedaniia” [Questioning of Nalyvaichenko, Tenyukh and Tsymbalyuk. Transcript] 2018). Yet he didn’t call for such an operation during the RNBO meeting and did not vote with Turchynov.

7. A Foreign Affairs expert poll revealed that respondents were strongly polarized with regard to geopolitical explanations. See Foreign Affairs, November 9, 2014.

8. Sevastopol is mentioned frequently in this speech, with Putin quipping that “I simply cannot imagine that we would travel to Sevastopol to meet with NATO troops.”

9. In Russian the same root is used for both events: ob”edinenie Germanii (German reunification), and prisoedinenie Kryma (the joining of Crimea).

10. The seminal article is Fearon (1994). While audience costs remain a contested area of international relations scholarship, especially on non-democracies, experimental work by Michael Tomz provides evidence that effects may be heightened for politically active citizens. This suggests that, given the situation in late February 2014, domestic politics should have been even more prominent for decision-makers. See Tomz (2007).

11. This does not mean that such factors were not important at all, simply that, in the context of deciding on the military response to the Russian annexation of Crimea, they were not prominent. In the context of the Ukrainian crisis, however, this decision was of huge significance.

12. Questionnaires are often used to assess these dispositions; high self-monitors tend to answer “true” to questions such as “I’m not always the person I appear to be” and “I may deceive people by being friendly when I really dislike them” (see Snyder 1974, 526; Snyder and Gangestad 1986, 125–39, cited in Yarhi-Milo 2018, 22). Ukrainian political analysts have similarly conducted psychological portraits of leading political figures. See Polittech (2009, 2012), Matveeva and Tiurdo (2014), Deutsche Welle (2014).

13. All permanent members of the RNBO were the same as on February 28, 2014, with the exception of Ihor Tenyukh, who had been dismissed.

14. In this aspect, too, Turchynov differed from the other members’ assessments, instead arguing that “we need to dispel the myth that Crimeans rose up against Ukraine,” claiming that “these aren’t Crimeans [rising up]” (RNBO, 24).

15. Dmitry Gorenburg (2019, 4) argues a similar case with regard to how Russia views the Baltics.

16. Interestingly, Yatsenyuk’s political career began as minister of the economy of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (2001–2003), so it is plausible that this experience shaped his strategic calculus. A later biographical sketch in Ukraïns′ka pravda says little about his tenure, except that it was notable that he had insisted on the use of Ukrainian as a working language in the ministry. See Leshchenko (2007).

17. This is corroborated by Kimitaka Matsuzato’s research on the Donbas uprising (2017, 185–88), in which the acting governor of Donetsk Oblast’, Serhii Taruta, stresses the excessive nature of Kyiv’s response in April 2014 and the RNBO members’ fear of further territorial losses.