Politically vulnerable leaders have long used military conflict as a tactic to curb domestic opposition. In doing so, such leaders hope to foster national cohesion and to mobilize public support by demonstrating foreign policy competence. These tactics distract attention from domestic problems while scapegoating foreign adversaries.
Scholars and policymakers have understood this phenomenon largely on a theoretical basis, as there is a paucity of empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. The challenges for gathering such data are many, from determining the mechanism at play (scapegoating, rally-round-the-flag, and gambling for resurrection), to designing an empirical strategy that accurately reflects the effects of the applicable mechanism(s), and to selecting which disputes to study.
To address this challenge, the authors begin with the premise that existing crises are most effective for leaders with diversionary motives, as it is less costly to escalate an existing conflict than to start a new one. This premise informs the authors’ model of a regime that employs diversionary tactics to counter citizen rebellion, including both conventional war, which suppresses domestic opposition, and diversionary escalation by proxy war, which manipulates citizen information through state propaganda. Proxy wars are an effective diversionary tactic for two types of regimes: those on the verge of being overthrown, and those that would survive otherwise but nonetheless face significant opposition. The authors’ model also incorporates the effects of unreliable (often state-run) news sources.
The authors study the Russian-led military escalation in eastern Ukraine, or Donbas, for the empirical evidence to support their theoretical argument. Donbas includes Donetsk and Luhansk, two regions of eastern Ukraine where (pro-)Russian forces are active. The authors focus on the period from April 2015–February 2022, when Russian-backed separatist strife morphed into a broader Russian-led proxy war in eastern Ukraine. Conflict flared repeatedly throughout those seven years, with over 14,000 lives lost and no ground gained on either side. (Russia would eventually invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022.)
To conduct their empirical analysis, the authors employ a newly assembled dataset of 1.87 million ceasefire violations in Donbas (see accompanying map). Each recorded violation contains information on the location, target, source, and tactic of a ceasefire violation. The authors pair this new data with granular information on anti-regime protests in Russia to document evidence of diversionary Russian escalation. Further, an analysis of government-controlled and (nominally) independent press sources reveals that that opposition protests in Russia correspond with increasingly extreme and vitriolic media coverage of the conflict in Ukraine. This was a deliberate strategy to justify the proxy conflict, divert attention from domestic political issues, and build mass support for Russian-backed escalation in Ukraine.
This work offers four contributions to ongoing research on the use of military conflict to curb domestic opposition:
- The authors’ emphasis on escalation highlights how leaders capitalize on opportunities for diversion by engaging in belligerence within ongoing crises, offering new empirical support for theoretical investigations.
- While existing theories assume that leaders choose between diversion and domestic repression, this work shows how autocrats employ diversionary escalation to complement domestic responses to unrest. In Russia, Vladimir Putin’s regime responded to opposition protest with diversionary belligerence, repression, and disinformation in tandem.
- This is the first study to demonstrate how great powers can manipulate proxy conflicts for diversionary ends. Shifting attention to the dynamics of the Donbas conflict helps illuminate the origins of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the extensive violence that occurred prior to the invasion.
- Finally, this work introduces a large, highly detailed dataset of combat in eastern Ukraine, which should prove valuable to scholars of conflict, mediation, and peacekeeping, and to specialists on the former Soviet Union.
By studying military action in the Donbas in the seven years prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this work reinforces the diversionary violence literature by empirically revealing how long-standing, territorial contests are often selected as the targets to heighten citizen responsiveness and approval of the conflict. These results are suggestive of a pattern of diversionary behavior by proxy, a novel finding at the intersection of the diversionary violence and proxy warfare literature.