Matters on the ground developed quickly in July–August 2014. The initial academic focus was firmly on the geopolitics of Russia’s ‘deniable’ intervention into the so-called Ukraine crisis (Allison Citation2014), and on its broader security ramifications for the West (Biersack & O’Lear Citation2014 Kotkin Citation2016 Moravcsik Citation2016 Treisman Citation2016 Raik Citation2019). Since April 2014, the ongoing, albeit undeclared, Russo–Ukrainian war has already generated a weighty amount of academic research and policy advocacy (Maiorova Citation2017 Ash et al. I n the early spring of 2014, following the violent collapse of the government of President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv, and the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, Moscow-backed militants began seizing regional government buildings and local police stations across eastern Ukraine.
