Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine

Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Serhiy Kudelia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 344 pp., cloth $99, paperback $29.95, eBook $20.99.

In Seize the City, Undo the State, Serhiy Kudelia provides an empirically rich, nuanced, and theoretically informed analysis of the takeover by Russia-backed separatists of large swaths of the Donbas region of Ukraine. Kudelia shows that beginning in April 2014, when separatists began seizing administrative buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, both local participation and Russian intervention were necessary to launch the insurgency. Where local separatists were absent, territory remained in the hands of the Ukrainian government. Where Russia did not support insurgents, Ukrainian forces were able to regain control. This pattern lasted until the Russian army intervened directly in August 2014 and seized significant parts of both regions.

The book asks three broad questions. First, “How did a heavily urbanized and industrialized region with over six million inhabitants quickly fall under control of a handful of militants?” (p. 3). Second, What explains the variation in outcomes of insurgent efforts to take over Ukrainian cities? Third, What role did Russia play in the process?

Kudelia posits a two-step model to answer the first two questions. Separatist insurgencies must complete two tasks to triumph. First, the “state-founding” phase requires establishing coercive control over a territory. Second, the “state-building” phase requires establishing the ability to administer the territory. Where the first was not achieved, there was no chance to achieve the second, and where the second was not achieved, the first could be reversed relatively easily. The case of Mariupol illustrates the argument: Insurgents quickly established coercive control, but they never managed to control the governing apparatus. When Ukrainian forces regrouped and returned, the insurgents were quickly defeated.

The book traces the events and the factors driving them in very fine detail, drawing on interviews Kudelia conducted in the region along with extensive reference to primary and secondary sources in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. The book makes three theoretical contributions: First, it treats external and internal sources of insurgency as linked from the outset, rather than occurring sequentially. Second, it shows “how urban density enables the spread of an insurgent campaign” (p. 3). Third, it posits that the variation in governance models under insurgent rule helps explain the variation in outcomes. While seeking to extend our theoretical understanding, the book prizes empirical richness over parsimony. The theoretical arguments emerge from the empirical work, rather than the other way around.

After the fall of the Yanukovych government on February 22, 2014, state authority attenuated, especially in eastern Ukraine, as the organs of force were unable or unwilling to resist challenges to the state’s integrity. In these conditions, it took only a relatively small number of well-organized militants to seize control of police headquarters and city halls, establishing coercive control. Variation in the success of this first step is explained largely by the presence or absence either of authorities loyal to the Kyiv government or of determined progovernment activists.

Geographic factors are also significant, and the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the geography of urban insurgency. Kudelia shows that local leaders who had been closely tied to ousted president Viktor Yanukovych had more reason to fear for their positions under the new Kyiv regime. This made Yanukovych’s home turf in the Donbas much more susceptible to insurgent takeover than regions where Yanukovych and his Party of Regions had been less dominant. Moreover, Kudelia looks in granular detail at the geography of the cities involved, showing that where key buildings were located near one another, it was easier for insurgents to hold them, while the relative proximity of many small cities to each other facilitated spreading insurgency from one city to the next. These findings point to important limits to the standard view that insurgencies are more successful in rural areas.

On the third question, that of Russia’s role, Kudelia notes that the existing literature on intervention in civil wars tends to focus on external intervention in ongoing insurgencies “rather than an attempt to promote or organize one” (p. 52). Kudelia’s findings will inevitably be contrasted with those of Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll’s excellent Ukraine’s Unnamed War, which likely came out too late for Kudelia to address directly, and which sees Russia as supporting a preexisting Ukrainian insurgency, rather than fomenting it.

Kudelia carefully but definitively concludes that Russian support was decisive not only for sustaining the insurgency but also for its initiation: “I identify the initial phase of the armed conflict in Donbas as a foreign-led insurgency campaign” (p. 51). He argues that “Russian intervention . . . helped to solve three central problems of the separatist movement in Donbas: coordination, organization, and mobilization” (p. 26). Among other things, “Russian mercenaries and undercover agents possessed crucial organizational and military skills to turn protest actions into an armed insurgency” (p. 26).

Kudelia’s two-step model helps show why this dispute is hard to solve if one focuses only on monocausal relationships. One can assert either that Russia’s intervention was crucial or that it was insufficient without the participation of Ukrainian actors. Both arguments, Kudelia shows, are true. Where Russian support was not extended, as in Kharkiv and Odesa, takeovers failed. By itself, however, Russian intervention did not create the insurgency. “The limited intervention of small mercenary groups led by Russian agents would have failed to put the region, entirely or even partially, under separatist control had they failed to mobilize a larger insurgent campaign” (p. 25).

Before long, even with Russian support, the insurgency was on the brink of defeat. The Kyiv government launched its “anti-terrorist operation” in May, and by August, “Ukrainian forces cleared over two-thirds of the territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts” (p. 12). Then, the regular Russian army intervened. Kudelia’s analysis essentially concludes with this turning point. Once the Ukrainian and then Russian armies got involved, the fighting between them, rather than the factors that Kudelia analyzes, determined the line of control that was codified in the Minsk agreements and which remained largely unchanged until 2022.

While the focus on coercive control over territory is clearly Weberian, Kudelia says less about the legitimacy of that coercion, which is important to Weber and shows up in Kudelia’s narrative, as when he writes: “Once the state authority in Ukraine imploded, town councils and mayors in Donbas became the last remaining institutions residents of the region still viewed as legitimate” (p. 31). Perceptions of the relative legitimacy of the insurgents vs. the new authorities in Kyiv played an important role in gaining consent in the early days of the insurgency. One insurgent tactic was to have civilians obstruct the movements of pro-Ukraine forces. This worked because it was considered illegitimate to use force against protestors, as shown by the outrage over repression of the protests that began in November 2013. A more systematic discussion of the legitimacy of various actors would have strengthened the analysis.

Overall, Seize the City, Undo the State masterfully integrates an impressive amount of primary material and a range of theoretical problems. Although Russia’s 2014 gambit failed to become self-sustaining, Kudelia speculates that the ease with which the insurgency was sparked might have convinced Vladimir Putin that Ukraine could be taken at low cost in 2022. Ironically, he points out, the impact of the 2014 invasion drove changes in Ukraine that negated that hope. The book makes a significant contribution to our thinking about how insurgencies start and are sustained, and especially to how domestic and international factors interact in this process.

—Paul D’Anieri

Paul D’Anieri is professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside. He is author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and several other books and articles on Ukraine-Russia relations; most recently, “Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me: Security Guarantees, Commitment Problems and the Problem of Peace through Victory in Ukraine” (International Negotiation, 2025).