Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine's 'East/West' divide.

Why did the Kremlin fail to rely on the 'soft power' to secure its interests in Ukraine and instead opt for the military invasion? At the same time, why did the Kremlin believe that Russia could achieve its goals with relatively limited forces in the course of a rapid regime-change 'special operation'? These questions pose a puzzle for the two main arguments that dominate the vast literature on Ukrainian regionalism, which either present a largely symmetrical 'East/West' regional cleavage or question the salience and even the existence of any such cleavage in favor of a more fluid local diversity that the ascendant Ukrainian civic identity has ultimately encompassed. Instead, the article argues that Ukraine's 'regional' cleavage could be understood as a nationally specific articulation of the class conflict common to many post-Soviet countries in the context of hegemony crisis. This perspective can better explain the disparate capacity of Ukraine's 'pro-Western' and 'pro-Russian' political camps to universalize the particular class interests standing behind them and support them through civic mobilization, the rationale behind the original plan of the Russian invasion, and the reactions of supposedly 'pro-Russian' Ukrainian elites and regular citizens to its failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]