Who Goes to a (Proxy) War? The Long Shadow of the USSR Collapse and the Enrollment in the Donbas War by Russian Citizens

Talk by Nikita Zakharov (University of Freiburg) as part of the Research Seminar Series of the IOS Economics Department.

What explains citizens' volunteering for combat in a proxy war? We examine the case of Russian involvement in the 2014 Donbas War and hypothesize that ressentiment caused by the hardships experienced during the collapse of the Soviet Union have become instrumental in the decision to join the fighting on the side of separatists. We test our hypothesis by employing two novel measures for voluntary involvement in the war: regional excess mortality due to external causes in the year of the onset of the war and geospatial distribution of subscriptions to the social media forum dedicated to the recruitment of volunteers to the conflict. We find that both outcomes are strongly associated with the intensity of hardships experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union as measured by the increase in the death rate of the local population. To validate our measure of historical grievances, we use data from a public opinion survey conducted by the Levada Center to show that these grievances were more commonly reported in regions that experienced higher mortality in the early 1990s.