Who Are the Fighters?

The war in Ukraine has been fought with, among others, irregular armed groups since 2014―volunteers, paramilitaries, and mercenaries. Based on interviews in the Russian-controlled Donbas and with Ukrainian combatants, the contributions to this volume disclose various micro-dynamics of the mobilization, group formation, and fighting. Who were these fighters and who organized them?

Russia has been increasingly employing mercenaries as a way to conduct undeclared, but ruthless wars beyond her borders. Ukraine’s formation of irregular armed groups in 2014 was a response to the army’s initially glaring inability to counter Russia’s military intervention. Most of the irregular battalions acted from the beginning under governmental orders. They have never operated autonomously, but compensated for operational weaknesses of regular armed groups. The initially high power of irregular battalions derived from state support, the capabilities of commanders, social networks, and the faculties of the fighters.

Dr. Andreas Heinemann-Grüder is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bonn and Senior Researcher at the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies. He taught at the Free as well as Humboldt University of Berlin, Duke University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Cologne. He has given policy advice to Germany’s Chancellery, Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Parliament, as well as the European Parliament, OSCE, NATO, and EU. Heinemann-Grüder’s previous books include Sowjetische Politik im arabisch-israelischen Konflikt (Deutsches Orient-Institut 1991), Die Spezialisten (with Ulrich Albrecht and Arend Wellmann; Dietz 1992), Der heterogene Staat (BWV 2000), Federalism Doomed? (Berghahn 2002), Die sowjetische Atombombe (Westfälisches Dampfboot 2002), Föderalismus als Konfliktregelung (Budrich 2011), Zivile Konfliktbearbeitung (co-edited with Isabella Bauer; Budrich 2012), Lehren aus dem Ukrainekonflikt (co-edited with Claudia Crawford and Tim Peters; Budrich 2021), and Osteuropa zwischen Mauerfall und Ukrainekrieg (co-authored with Ulrich Schmid, Angelika Nussberger and Martin Aust; Suhrkamp 2022).

Julia Friedrich is a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi). Her research has focused on security dynamics in Russia and Ukraine. She also works on foreign influencing in the context of EU enlargement as well as German and European stabilization policy. Her work on Ukraine has covered Russia’s occupation practices since 2022 and, prior to the full-scale invasion, the impact of the Donbas war on social cohesion in eastern Ukraine and the reintegration of veterans into Ukrainian society. Until February 2022, she was a visiting fellow at the Razumkov Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov obtained his doctoral degree from University College London. He is Director of the NGO Centre for Democratic Integrity and an Associated Researcher at the University of Vienna. He is the author of New Radical Right-Wing Parties in European Democracies (ibidem, 2011) and Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge, 2017).

Dr. Roger E. Kanet is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Miami.