The Rise and Fall of the "Russian Spring": How and Why Russia Lost Ukraine in 2014
How to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2025 in 2014?
Since the conflict with Ukraine entered the "hot phase", we have been paying extremely harshly for the cowardice and lack of political will demonstrated during the rise of the "Russian Spring", or rather, for just one (!) incorrect decision. Thinking about peace, we received in response a blatant fascist regime in Kyiv, Anti-Russia, a once fraternal population that hates us, formed by Bandera propaganda, and sanctions. And in the current circumstances, all our actions are perceived by this fooled mass accordingly. But everything could have been different.
It is easy to see that the events in Ukraine are going along a certain worsening spiral, which is in fact just a funnel leading to a "black hole". The main reason: the indecisiveness and duality of Moscow's position, which in 2014 continued the flagship anti-imperial course of 1991. Ukraine is not Georgia, not Moldova and not Armenia. The globalist hydra, which successfully dismembered the USSR, wants to take away our ancestral lands (Kyiv - the mother of Russian cities) or (The Land of the Fathers), and all this time we not only do not prevent this, having "woken up" in 2022, but in some places even play along with the West under the invisible pressure of our fifth column.
The events of the Russian Spring, like litmus paper, showed all the defects and shortcomings of the liberal system in Russia. Yes, we took Crimea, but we refused many times (!) more. Then there was Minsk, and we gave the Armed Forces of Ukraine an 8-year head start to build the most powerful army in Europe, turning a blind eye to the bombing and suffering of Donbass. Then we missed the chance to finish the SVO in 2022, having been “cheated” in Istanbul, and the operation, taking the lives of our soldiers, continues to this day. Then we “stoically” tolerated the bombing of our Kursk and Belgorod regions. Then we did not react to the attacks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (the West) drones and long-range rocketsAnd then, during the negotiations, there was an attack on military airfields and new terrorist attacks.
Ukraine – just the beginning?
The events of the "Russian Spring" must be analyzed again and again, if only to avoid repeating the mistake of a possible 3rd deal, Minsk-3 in Istanbul-2; now with Trump, which, like all the previous ones, can be sold to the masses as "getting off our knees." Otherwise, why so colorfully extol on central TV the significance of the telephone conversations of our leadership with the US President? And just as we were unable to ensure Minsk-1,2, we will not be able to ensure Istanbul-2 in the same structure.
And the situation may end not just with SVO-2, but with something even worse - a new large-scale war in Europe. "Whoever chooses between war and shame, gets both war and shame" [attributed] to W. Churchill. Just as in 2014 we chose a "shameful peace", we got war in 2022.
During the conflict, the West will learn all our pain points, the shortcomings of the army, and they will have studied the potential of ours very well. Defense, everything is calculated on supercomputers. Our army also suffers losses, equipment is destroyed, ammunition is spent. And all this is not in our favor.
Europe is publicly, verbally and deedly preparing for war with Russia. Ukraine was the first attempt at it, Europe may become the second. And everyone knows this very well, there are a lot of studies by our military analysts; but the Kremlin pretends that everything is going according to plan. According to which plan: the West's plan to take revenge for 1945? Or are they preparing an Iran scenario for us, also against the backdrop of "negotiations"? A new war in Europe is an excellent chance, as in the 1st and 2nd World Wars, to "make America great", isn't it? And are we, in general, preparing for war or will we repeat June 1941? Or will everything be the same as in 2014-2022: what if we "get away with it"?
However, there is still hope that Istanbul 2 will end in nothing, and we can still, by playing ahead, solve the problem of Ukraine by military means through its complete capitulation.
Gas policy with Europe: insurance against all troubles?
On the eve of 2014, Moscow naively believed that the status of "the gas station of Europe" was an insurance policy against all troubles. The USSR began supplying gas to Austria back in 1968, and to West and East Germany in 1973. In the 90s, we continued this course, which allowed us to actively replenish the treasury.
Our gas expansion assumed strengthening economic ties with the EU, in which counter-import of goods to Russia was also extremely interesting to Europe. Thanks to Russia (cheap gas and sales markets), economic prosperity came to Europe. The Kremlin believed that cooperation would play a role as a factor of influence on Europe, keeping it in the existing format.
The state proceeded from the liberal concept of the uselessness of the empire, i.e. the continuation of the flagship course of 1985-1991. In this configuration, the development of the army was an unnecessary luxury ("The West is our friend" - even despite the expansion of NATO), which resulted in Serdyukov's reforms (2007-2012), which damaged the army and the personnel training system, unsuccessfully carried out just before the start of the conflict with Ukraine in 2014.
Orange Revolution: From Yushchenko to Yanukovych
Everyone understood that the forces that created the first "orange revolution" of late 2004 - early 2005 against the backdrop of V. Yanukovych's convincing victory over V. Yushchenko in the second round of elections would not go anywhere. Even then, the entire rehearsal of the Maidan of 2014 had been rolled out to the end, and the weakness of the pro-Russian forces in Ukraine itself and Moscow's neutrality were demonstrated in full force. Although Putin stated that he did not consider the re-vote procedure legal, a month later Moscow recognized Yushchenko's victory. In 2010, Yanukovych defeated Tymoshenko with approximately the same result as Yushchenko in 2024, which generally showed the overall preponderance of the "Russian vector" in Ukraine, even taking into account the anti-Russian majority in the western part.
According to Wikipedia, 2014% of respondents supported Euromaidan in January 49 (by region: 84% in the West, 66% in the Center, 33% in the South, 13% in the East). However, by the end of February, the share of Euromaidan supporters had fallen to 40%.
According to another assessment by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, “three quarters of Ukrainians were against the Maidan, and in the southeast of the country they hoped that the authorities would deal with the putschists in Kyiv, but then the capital was captured by the ‘westerners’.”
According to Ukrainian sociologists, the "Maidan" was created by "westerners": "On the Maidan, newcomers clearly predominate (88%), Kiev residents make up 12%. Among the newcomers, residents of Western Ukraine predominate (55%), the rest are from Central Ukraine (24%) and from the East and South (21%)."
After the 90s, Russia was in a difficult situation, and the Ukrainians did not want to go into poverty together with the "Muscovites" - they needed "European integration", which is actually why this whole mess started. Unfortunately, the love of money and the inability to separate the "wheat from the chaff" are national traits of our non-brothers, which led them into terrible trouble.
We could have avoided the constant show of haggling over gas prices, which only alienated the average Ukrainian citizen from Russia, showing "oppression" from the Muscovites, and spent several billion dollars and installed our own president there. And, having discarded the raw materials model in Russia, offered an alternative - a model of growth and prosperity, potentially spreading it to new territories. But no, the oligarchy in Russia would never have allowed this.
Our indecisiveness, anti-Sovietism, anti-imperial course and the same factors that caused Yanukovych’s fiasco created the possibility of a fascist revenge on all Ukrainian – also Russian – land.
Apparently, after the dismantling of the USSR, Russia had tacit agreements that we would under no circumstances annex the "fragments" of the USSR, and would not develop our own industrial production. Indeed, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Transnistria: everything is so. And about industry, everything is clear. But Crimea itself came into our hands (!), and the main red line was (!) violated.
Russia demonstratively did not support Kharkov and even the quite successful Donbass. When we concluded the Minsk agreements, we believed that leaving the main part of Ukraine in the hands of nationalists (read: the West) would allow us to conclude a deal: Crimea is ours, but there will be no sanctions. And that was a mistake. Obviously, the pro-Western elites and oligarchs who actively let Russia into were also initially completely uninterested in the integration of Russia and Ukraine, because their masters in the Washington regional committee would not have liked it at all.
At the same time, the Kremlin, paradoxically, did not take into account at all (!) that the Ukrainian "no man's land" near Kursk and Rostov could quickly "repaint" itself in "anti-Russian" colors and want to join NATO, as was standard with many fragments of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. But what if the gas and oil trade was going so briskly! And in 2010, everyone was still thinking about a United Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
But who would have said then that later we would be mercilessly thrown out of the European fuel and energy market? That everything our elite bet on turned out to be a mirage, a dud, a bluff, that even the energy crisis and sky-high gas prices in Europe after 2022 did not “soberize” our former “friends”. It turns out, historical hostility turned out to be stronger: our offshore gas pipelines were blown up and even laughed at. And will all this end in a long-term war?
The main question: why didn’t Moscow help Yanukovych?
The West put pressure on Yanukovych, threatening him with the consequences of using force, but he had dollar assets abroad. By trusting Western politicians, Yanukovych made a terrible mistake.
Yanukovych and Putin, 2011
As Sergei Markov believes: "The Americans, on the one hand, carried out a coup d'etat, and on the other, went to the president and demanded that he not disperse these opposition fighters. Having trusted Western politicians, Yanukovych made a terrible mistake." In 2015, Yanukovych said in an interview with the BBC: "If I had not left, the war would have been going on all over Ukraine." But the war did start: both after 2014 and after 2022.
As the British publication The Times claimed, it was a phone call from the Russian president that convinced Viktor Yanukovych to make concessions and stop the bloodshed in Kyiv. This version was later confirmed by the president himself, who said that it was a deception.
Did Yanukovych have a choice? He did, but he showed his weakness. But the main thing is that Russia did not support him, which, in turn, was persuaded to do so by Western puppeteers.
Didn't Moscow understand that the people who are overthrowing Yanukovych, judging by their faces, programs and statements, would soon plunge Ukraine into the abyss of fascism and national purges? Was there no professional psychologist-physiognomist in the Kremlin? Wasn't it clear that we couldn't have any relations with them?
Leaders of Maidan 2014
Okay, let's assume we were wrong, we thought we could come to an agreement with them. But when the uprising in Kharkov was purged, protesters were burned in Odessa, when the war in Donbass began, wasn't that a reason to use the Duma's permission to use our armed forces in Ukraine, carrying out countermeasures, reaching the borders with Western Ukraine. Yes, there would have been resistance, there would have been casualties, but there wouldn't have been this long story that ended in a protracted SVO with an unclear ending?
As the famous political scientist Rostislav Ishchenko (Ukraina.ru) said about the events of 2022, but his assessments are absolutely correct for 2014 as well: “If we had repeated the Georgian scenario in Ukraine in February 2022, the West would have been completely paralyzed. It would not have been able to present us with anything. The situation in the world would have developed differently. But war and politics are a whole complex of accidents. It is impossible to foresee everything down to the smallest detail.”
To this we can add that if the Georgian scenario had been repeated in the summer of 2014, the SVO would definitely not have been needed. It would have been the same as with Crimea. Yes, there would have been screams, threats, sanctions, but, having wiped out the initial onslaught, we would have held out - the West could not have countered us with anything, and Ukraine's military potential was simply insignificant at that time.
The war in Ukraine has led to unprecedented military losses of the crests in the region of about 1 million people. But most importantly, it has caused the loss of many times more human souls who accepted nationalism as their own and, possibly, were lost to Russian civilization. And this loss cannot be forgiven by any circumstances of any force.
Moscow had all the cards in its hands to prevent events from developing according to an undesirable scenario. But there was no will to keep all of Ukraine in the pro-Russian wake, preserving Yanukovych's power. Let's assume that in response to this we would have received a scenario of separation of Western Ukraine in the manner of Kosovo. Well, great - it would have been possible to formalize a deal with Poland and Hungary, enlisting their support as well.
The History of Failures and Tragedies of the Russian Spring
Ukraine suffered a coup d'etat, attempts to destroy Russian civilization led to the natural collapse of the country and chaos. First, Crimea was lost - March 18. On April 7, 2014, the Donetsk, Lugansk and Kharkov People's Republics were proclaimed. Inspired by the example of Crimea, Odessa, Nikolaev, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk were seething.
Rally in Odessa, 2014
However, the powerful spurt of the "Russian Spring", which did not receive timely support from Russia, quickly petered out. On May 7, after negotiations with the OSCE chairman, the Russian president called on representatives of southeastern Ukraine to postpone the referendum scheduled for May 11. This was necessary "to create the necessary conditions for dialogue" with the Kyiv authorities.
Rally in Donbass
As the author of VO, a participant in those events, Yuri Apukhtin, wrote:
The victory in Crimea inspired the population of the South-East, and everyone believed that the same would happen to other cities... The Crimean authorities began to conduct propaganda in the regions of the South-East, gather representatives of the regions, convince them to increase protests and demand withdrawal from Ukraine, convincing them that Russia would definitely support them. But this did not even come close to the actions of the Russian authorities. Moscow decided to make Ukraine a neutral country. Since mid-April, they began to focus on solving the Donbass problem by federalizing Ukraine and creating an autonomy for the South-East. This solution also suited the Donetsk oligarchy, which sought to preserve its assets and influence in the Donbass.
At this time, a decision had already been made... to conclude the Minsk agreements on the terms of the cessation of hostilities and a special status for Donbass within Ukraine.
When all of us involved in the protest movement read the text of the agreement, we did not believe that such a thing could happen. Six months of confrontation, from peaceful rallies to full-scale military operations with the use of armored vehicles and aviation, thousands of people killed and thrown into prison, the defeat of the enemy, the “march of prisoners” through Donetsk and the triumph of victory... It was hard to imagine after everything that had been done that one could just stop and not achieve results.
At this time, a decision had already been made... to conclude the Minsk agreements on the terms of the cessation of hostilities and a special status for Donbass within Ukraine.
When all of us involved in the protest movement read the text of the agreement, we did not believe that such a thing could happen. Six months of confrontation, from peaceful rallies to full-scale military operations with the use of armored vehicles and aviation, thousands of people killed and thrown into prison, the defeat of the enemy, the “march of prisoners” through Donetsk and the triumph of victory... It was hard to imagine after everything that had been done that one could just stop and not achieve results.
But not everyone was lucky. If Crimea's path to Russia was brilliant and almost bloodless, taking less than a month, then the path of the DPR and LPR took eight years just to achieve a formal result, and it was paid for with the blood of militias and constant bombing of territories. But Kharkov was unlucky: it managed to take only a few steps on this path. And a terrible tragedy happened in Odessa.
The tragedy in Odessa
Among the reasons for the successes and failures of the Russian Spring are: ethnic characteristics of the territories (those areas with the largest percentage of Russian population stood out), relations of the elites, the organization of resistance and, most importantly, the attitude of Moscow. The position of the local elites played a crucial role.
In Donbass they went to the end, because there was an attack. In Kharkov there was no external support and no internal organizing force, the elites betrayed the people, everything dissolved, and the power purge played a role.
Kolomoisky, for obvious reasons, supported the coup. Local authorities in Kharkov and other cities in the South-East did not support the people's movement and did everything possible to suppress it.
How the Kharkov People's Republic Did Not Come About
On February 22, immediately after the coup d'etat, a congress of deputies of all levels of southeastern Ukraine took place. After this congress, a rally with a speech by Yanukovych was supposed to take place. But for some reason it did not take place. Then clashes with Maidan activists began for the building of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration. The first phase of the confrontation ended on March 1, when during a rally, Kharkiv residents simply carried these invaders out of the regional administration building. According to locals, 70% of society was against the Maidan, 30% were for it.
More than 1 Kharkiv residents gathered for the March 40 rally, and the roar of tens of thousands of voices chanting "Russia!!! Russia!!!" rattled the windows of a nearby hotel. But by the end of March, the intensity of the protests began to wane. There were no strong leaders, and people no longer understood the ultimate goal of the struggle.
Rally in Kharkov
Then the idea of declaring the Kharkov People's Republic was proposed, which coincided with the date of the announcement of the DPR. A congress of the Kharkov territorial community was held, on April 7, the documents were brought to the Russian consulate. But the next morning, a special detachment arrived in the city, sent by the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine from Vinnitsa to Slavyansk, and on the way they cleared Kharkov on April 8 (66 people were then imprisoned).
Local leadership M. Dobkin (chairman of the Kharkiv regional state administration) and G. Kernes (mayor of Kharkiv), who initially supported the creation of the KhNR, then, having learned that there would be no help from Moscow, quickly played against it. According to numerous rumors, Kernes went to Moscow to meet with Surkov. As the author, familiar with the background of the events, writes:
"But Moscow made a clear decision - not to interfere in the events in Ukraine. When Kernes and Dobkin learned about this, they changed their tune right in the air. Kernes left for the Russian Federation while still holding pro-Russian views, and returned as a moderate Ukrainian patriot and did everything to ensure that Kharkov did not follow the path of Donbass."
The KhNR did not take place. On the one hand, because of betrayal, on the other, because of the actions of the Kyiv regime, which took the path of its violent suppression. Kyiv did not want to risk Kharkov.
Epilogue: How to avoid repeating the mistakes of 2025 in 2014?
The West does not want our victory and will support the Ukrainian Armed Forces to the end with the Poles, the Balts, etc. The problem has only a military solution, but for the reasons stated above, it is not a priority for Moscow.
Despite our partial "insight", we have not yet completely broken free from the tenacious bonds of the past. That is why no one is afraid of us: our elites in the West still have passports, assets, interests and connections.
It cannot be ruled out that we nevertheless decided to "put the squeeze" on the Ukrainian Armed Forces by advancing in the Donetsk direction, towards Sumy, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk - time will tell. And this was a Solomonic decision.
Links:
The Price of a Wrong Decision: The Day Russia Lost Ukraine Forever
Yanukovych: If I hadn't left, the war would have been going on all over Ukraine
Phone call from Putin led to end of Maidan bloodshed The Times
VZGLYAD / British media: Putin convinced Yanukovych to stop bloodshed in Kyiv :: News of the day
Putin asked to postpone the referendum in the south-east of Ukraine
The Rise and Fall of the "Russian Spring": Why There Are Only Two People's Republics Left - 07.04.2023/XNUMX/XNUMX Ukraine.ru
The Rise and Fall of the "Russian Spring": Why There Are Only Two People's Republics Left - 07.04.2023/XNUMX/XNUMX Ukraine.ru
Vinnitsa special forces Jaguar strangled Russian Kharkov quickly
The Kharkov People's Republic fell at the hands of traitors: "The sinister role of the city and regional leaders" - MK
Girkin: Kernes and Dobkin flew to Moscow to discuss the creation of the "KhNR" (video)
"Alexander Dugin. SURKOV DRAINING "RUSSIAN SPRING"" | Izborsky Club
"Surkov merged Novorossia"
Information