Diabolical Suggestions: Disinformation and the Curious Scale of Nationalism in Ukrainian Geopolitical Fault-line Cities

ABSTRACT

During the past few years, research on conflict in cities has built valuable intellectual bridges across boundaries into numerous surrounding fields. One such area – the study of the spatiality of (dis/mis-)information – is an indispensable ingredient in the concept of the geopolitical fault-line city, the empirical solidity of which this article sets out to investigate using the case of two strategically crucial cities in Ukraine: Kharkiv and Dnipro. Two main questions are addressed: (1) Who places the blame for the Russo-Ukrainian war primarily on Russia? (2) Who would be ready to oppose a hypothetical Russian invasion of the city using non-violent methods? Because Russia is the party primarily responsible for the unfolding of armed conflict in Ukraine, the first question implicitly explores who it is that is least influenced by pro-Russian disinformation narratives, whereas the second question explores the central security implication of this particular situation. The article uses data from two sample surveys conducted in the case study cities in 2018 (n = ca. 1250 for each city), and reports its findings in amultivariate setting, aiming to contribute to the general literature on divided and contested cities, as well as to the more specific literature on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The results show that the categories of “Ukrainian” and “Russian” are of relatively little salience in the case study cities, contrary to the (now slowly fading) narrative of ethnic polarization that has been haunting many academic and especially media portrayals of Ukraine. What matters, instead, is self-identification as “European” or “Soviet”, imaginary supranational communities that are geopolitical at heart.

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers and Jonathan Rokem for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Funding from the Norwegian Research Council (NORRUSS project 287267, “Ukrainian Geopolitical Fault-line Cities: Urban Identity, Geopolitics and Urban Policy”) supported this work. The data collection effort was funded by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo via a Småforsk grant.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. The now quasi-illegal Communist Party of Ukraine played an important role in this respect in the 1990s, before the Party of Regions “robbed” it of its Soviet symbolic capital trump card in the early 2000s (Kuzio 2011).

2. Relatively speaking, of course. In Freedom House (2019) Freedom of the World Report, Ukraine is considered as being “partly free”, with largely free and fair elections pulling up the score, and corruption and poor governance weighing it down.

3. The choice of non-violent methods, rather than violent methods, is because they are more inclusive, at least in a Ukrainian context. In times of war, violent resistance is usually understood as being armed and, therefore, largely relevant for the relatively young male cohorts.

4. EU rather than NATO accession was preferred for sample size reasons: there are far more persons in Dnipro and Kharkiv who support joining the EU than there are persons who support joining NATO. However, both EU and NATO support are indicative of a pro-Western inclination.

5. The variable did not reveal any significant effects when tested on the model describing “readiness to resist a Russian occupation with nonviolent methods”. For parsimony, it was therefore excluded from this model.

6. Alternative views include those who place greater emphasis on domestic political and economic factors in Ukraine (eg Kudelia 2017; Zhukov 2016), but the view that Russia should be absolved from any responsibility is beyond the pale of academic discourse.

7. The most likely reason one would refuse to answer this question is if the preferred option is perceived as socially undesirable, which in this case would be not willing to resist the occupation using non-violent methods. Indeed, a quick crosstabulation with other relevant opinion variables confirms that refusals correlate with a range of opinions that are typically associated with pro-Russian leaning groups, e.g. that the Holodomor (Stalin’s orchestrated famine in the early 1930s) did not target Ukrainians intentionally and, most notably, that members of the LGBTIQ+ community should not have the same rights as the rest of the population. In fact, such opinions are even more strongly expressed among those who refused to answer the question than they are among those who openly declared that they would not be willing to resist an occupation non-violently, suggesting that refusals represent a more ideologically underpinned version of non-resistance.

8. In line with recommendations by Winship and Radbill (1994), I report the descriptive statistics for both weighted and unweighted samples, whereas the multivariate analysis results are reported for the unweighted sample only (The results of the analysis on the weighted datasets are similar in substance).

9. Many more interactions were tested, but few resulted significant. For parsimony, the model reports the two most theoretically motivated significant interactions (the interaction of Russian and Soviet self-identification and that between having a higher education and a good self-rated household economy).

10. Odds ratios (OR) are the probability of an outcome, such as income poverty, divided by the probability of that outcome not occurring, when exposed to a particular condition, such as higher education. An OR of more than 1 is interpreted as “greater probability” and an OR of under 1 represents lesser probability, all other variables being held constant.

11. Comparing regression coefficients from different surveys is somewhat controversial (Mood 2010). Nevertheless, because the surveys were conducted using the same sampling methods and questionnaire form, by the same organization, largely using the same fieldwork staff, and almost simultaneously, a case could be made that this in fact is one single data collection effort resulting in two separate but comparable datasets.

12. This might seem unexpected, but one should consider that most of the respondents do feel Kharkovian, whereas the few who do not may originate from or have lived in other parts of Ukraine where pro-Russian sentiment is generally weaker. In either case, a simple crosstabulation shows that among those who do not feel Kharkovian, supporters for EU and NATO accession are a majority, which contrasts with the picture in the city at large.

13. There is a surprising positive interaction effect between feeling Soviet and Russian, but it can probably be dismissed as fortuitous as it is strongly at odds with expectations and is just barely significant at the 5% level.

14. The greater pessimism in Dnipro might be related to the fact that the city and the surrounding oblast were much more exposed to the hottest periods of the Donbas war in 2014 and 2015, because of the number of Dniprovians among the war casualties, which was substantially higher than that of any other region, and because injured soldiers, as well as body bags, were a dominant sight in the city’s hospitals.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway [NORRUSS Project 287267, “Ukrainian Geopolitical Fault-line Cities: Urban Identity, Geopolitics and Urban Policy] and by the University of Oslo's Department of Sociology and Human Geography [Småforsk grant “Explorations in geopolitical fault-line cities„].