Seize the City, Undo the State

In Seize the City, Undo the State, Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the Ukraine-Russia conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--in the Donbas region as well as Kharkiv and Odesa. Through numerous interviews with conflict participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the most densely urbanized regions but failed elsewhere. A fine-grained analysis of the origins of the wider war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency.