In his speech announcing plans to recognize the self-styled People’s Republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, Vladimir Putin seemed concerned to emphasize his “humanitarian” intentions. Asserting that Ukraine is a “Bolshevik” construct without a “tradition of statehood,” the Russian president moreover accused what he called the “regime” in Kiev of “taking a path of violence, bloodshed, and lawlessness,” recognizing “only military solutions to the Donbas issue.” Even as Putin sent Russian tanks into the Donbas, he insisted that these were really “peacekeepers.”

This raises the question of how far Russians believe that Putin is coming to the aid of oppressed minorities — and how far these latter themselves want such “humanitarian protection.” If Western audiences take for granted that the Kremlin is the sole aggressor, popular attitudes in Russia seem more contradictory — also because of Western governments’ actions and their use, by Putin, in building up a narrative of external threat. Yet today, it remains unclear whether his government has really rallied popular support for an out-and-out war with Ukraine.

Gerard Toal is author of Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus. He and his colleagues have polled the populations of south-eastern Ukraine, Donbas, and Crimea about their views of the dispute and their conditions thirty years since the fall of the USSR. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about the roots of the conflict, public opinion in the border regions, and the Putin government’s agenda.