What Does Arming an Insurgency in Ukraine Mean?

Alexandra Stark co-wrote an article in Lawfare about what the proxy wars literature tells us about arming Ukraine.

The conversation about arming a Ukrainian insurgency has tended to muddle concepts, including the distinctions between intrastate and interstate wars, and between providing security assistance to governments versus sponsorship of rebels. These may sound like pedantic academic distinctions, but they carry a lot of meaning for policymakers: Supporting and arming a sovereign government is conceptually and practically different from arming an insurgency, in terms of international norms as well as how that support proceeds in practice. Characterizing U.S., British, or NATO and European Union countries’ military assistance to Ukraine as “funneling weapons to kill Russians” obfuscates how this aid is authorized and supported by national legislation and provides poor comparative benchmarks with previous instances of covert and deniable sponsorship of armed non-state actors as proxies.    

The debate regarding arming a hypothetical insurgency in Ukraine would benefit from clear definitions. The academic literature, and for that matter international law, draws a conceptual distinction between interstate and intrastate wars. But the literature also demonstrates that these concepts sometimes overlap and that intrastate wars don’t occur in a vacuum; it is helpful to think about “civil war as international politics by other means.” Russia’s war in Ukraine is both an interstate war between two governments, Russia and Ukraine, and an intrastate war between the Ukrainian government and Russia-supported separatists in the breakaway regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. And because the war sits at the intersection of these two types of conflict, it has met the definitional requirements and thresholds of an internationalized civil war, namely a conflict in which at least one of the parties is supported with troops from an external state. This means that findings about interstate or intrastate wars—how intervention affects the dynamics or duration of a war, for example, or the sustainability of peace afterward—don’t necessarily apply.

Neither of us knows how Russia’s war in Ukraine will end, or even where it is most likely to go next. Looking at the predictions made by experts on Russia and military operations, however, there are two broad scenarios that would conceptually change the debate about providing material support to Ukrainian forces. Academic research suggests there are important, policy-relevant differences between whether Ukraine is occupied and insurgents wage a civil war against a Russia-imposed government or conflict continues in contested spaces against the backdrop of a tense cease-fire or stalemate.