Imagining Reintegration: Territorial Reunification of Crimea and Eastern Donbas

• In Event: The Transformation of Language and Nation in Wartime Ukraine

Abstract

If Ukraine regains its 1991 borders, how will it govern them? The Ukrainian government’s stated military goal is the total reintegration of all territories internationally recognized as belonging to Ukraine and under Russian control, both those lost in 2014 (Crimea and DNR/LNR) and 2022 (Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and more of Donbas). While the debate about whether that is military or diplomatically feasible is ongoing, the premise of the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023 was that probability of total Ukrainian territorial recovery is not zero. This warrants theoretical reflection on the consequences of Ukrainian territorial reunification for local populations. How might territories under effective Russian control for a decade be re-integrated into the Ukrainian polity? We discuss four models from the comparative literature on territorial recovery: population transfers (e.g., Nagorno-Karabakh 2023), arrangements with a clear status hierarchy, denying the premise of minority rights (e.g., Hong Kong or contemporary Kurdish Iraq), gradual cultural assimilation (e.g., Alsace-Lorraine), or territorial autonomy (Crimea 1992-2014, and the premise of the Minsk Accords). We note that the “lost since 2014” territories differ from the “lost since 2022” territories not only by the length of time that the former have been cut off from Ukrainian media and schools, but also by original identity makeup (the concentration of self-declared Russians according to censuses/surveys). Additionally, unlike in 2022, the resident territorial population in 2014 was divided on the legitimacy of Russian military intervention.

Authors

• Dominique Arel, U of Ottawa (Canada)

• Jesse Driscoll, UC San Diego