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Separatists

Tagsdisinformation tacticintervention pretextimperial narrativewar justification

Also writtenseparatismthe separatist label

EquivalentsRUсепаратисты

Definition

Section titled “Definition”

“Separatists” is the label Russia attaches to the armed groups and puppet statelets it manufactures, arms, and directs inside its neighbours — so that a war waged by Russia can be presented as an internal quarrel between a government and its own rebellious region. The word performs a sleight of hand: it relocates agency from Moscow to a supposedly homegrown movement, recasting invasion and occupation as someone else’s civil conflict in which Russia is merely a concerned bystander or “peacekeeper.”

This dictionary catalogues “separatist” as a propaganda term, not a neutral description. Genuine separatism exists in the world; what Russia labels “separatism” in Abkhazia, the Tskhinvali region, Transnistria and the Donbas is something else — a Kremlin instrument, sustained by Russian weapons, money, troops and command, whose purpose is to keep a neighbouring state weak, divided, and out of reach of the West.

Origin and history

Section titled “Origin and history”

The technique draws on the Soviet legacy of ethnic engineering — drawing internal borders and seeding autonomous units that could later be activated as pressure points. As the USSR collapsed, Moscow turned that inheritance into a foreign-policy method. Across the 1990s it backed armed campaigns in newly independent states and then froze them in place, producing the cluster of unrecognised entities analysts call “frozen conflicts”: Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region in Georgia, and (in a related form) Nagorno-Karabakh.1

The pattern is consistent enough to be called a playbook. Russia identifies a minority or a region, amplifies a grievance, and claims a duty to protect Russian speakers or Compatriots Abroad; it arms and stiffens a local proxy force; it intervenes militarily “to stop the bloodshed”; and it then installs itself as the indispensable mediator and “peacekeeper,” leaving troops behind and an unresolved conflict it alone can switch on or off. The frozen conflict is the product — cheaper than annexation, and a permanent veto on the target state’s sovereignty and its path toward NATO or the EU.12

Function in propaganda

Section titled “Function in propaganda”

The “separatist” frame is used to:

  • disguise aggression as internal conflict, so that a Russian war becomes a “civil war” and the aggressor disappears from the story;
  • manufacture deniability, letting Moscow arm and command a force while claiming it is merely sympathetic to the locals’ aspirations (the “we’re not there” posture later perfected with the “little green men”);
  • cast Russia as neutral arbiter, converting the invader into a “peacekeeper” and mediator whose troops must stay (see Peace Enforcement Operation);
  • borrow the language of self-determination, dressing a Kremlin land-grab in the vocabulary of oppressed minorities seeking freedom;
  • freeze the target in place, using the unresolved conflict as a standing instrument to block Western integration and punish any drift toward the EU or NATO.

The reality the label hides is Russian agency. Where there is genuine local sentiment, Moscow does not represent it so much as capture and weaponise it; where there is little, it can be manufactured. In every case the decisive variables — arms, command, money, recognition, and the troops that hold the line — are Russian.

In focus: Georgia

Section titled “In focus: Georgia”

Georgia is the clearest demonstration. In the early 1990s Russian-backed Apsuan proxy forces and North Caucasian fighters drove the Georgian population out of Abkhazia, culminating in the fall of Sokhumi and the genocide of its Georgian inhabitants (see Liberation of Sokhumi); a parallel proxy conflict entrenched a Russian-controlled enclave in the Tskhinvali region. Both were then frozen, with Russian “peacekeepers” guaranteeing the status quo. In 2008 Russia fought a full-scale war it branded a Peace Enforcement Operation, then recognised the two entities as “independent states” — the EU’s fact-finding mission later examined the conflict and its pretexts.3 The “separatist” framing had done its work: an occupation rebranded as two peoples’ bid for freedom.

In focus: Moldova — Transnistria

Section titled “In focus: Moldova — Transnistria”

Moldova shows the proxy mechanism almost in laboratory form. When Moldova moved away from Moscow as the USSR dissolved, a “separatist” entity — the self-declared “Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic” (Transnistria) — was carved out along the Dniester. In the 1992 war the Russian 14th Army, stationed on Moldovan soil, armed and trained the proxy forces and then intervened directly to decide the outcome.4 Three decades on, Russian troops (the Operational Group of Russian Forces) remain, guarding a vast Soviet-era arms depot and freezing the conflict in Russia’s favour — a permanent lever over Moldova’s sovereignty and its European course.45 A separate pressure point was cultivated in Gagauzia. The “separatists” of Transnistria have never been viable without the Russian army at their back.

In focus: Ukraine — from “separatists” to open war

Section titled “In focus: Ukraine — from “separatists” to open war”

Ukraine is where the label was stretched until it broke. After the 2014 Revolution of Dignity turned Ukraine toward Europe, Russia seized Crimea with unmarked troops — the “little green men” Moscow first denied and later admitted were Russian soldiers — and engineered “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk. The Kremlin called the fighters “separatists” and the war a Ukrainian “civil war,” while supplying the command, weapons, and regular forces that sustained them, and pairing the story with the fiction of a Genocide in Donbas and the imperial dream of Novorossiya.

The 2022 full-scale invasion exposed the framing retroactively. By recognising the “republics” and then invading openly in their name — and by absorbing them through sham annexation — Russia confirmed that the “separatists” had always been its instrument, not an independent movement. The Special Military Operation was the “separatist” euphemism abandoned once it was no longer useful.

Why it matters

Section titled “Why it matters”

“Separatists” matters because it is the device that lets Russia wage war while denying it is at war. By relocating responsibility onto a local proxy, the label defeats accountability, splits the target state, invites Russian “peacekeepers” who never leave, and freezes a conflict Moscow can reignite at will. It has cost hundreds of thousands of people their homes — Georgians expelled from Abkhazia, Moldovans from Transnistria, Ukrainians from the Donbas — under a word that erased who did it to them.

Recognising the term is what connects the cases. The same playbook ran in Sokhumi in 1993, on the Dniester in 1992, and in the Donbas in 2014; the 2022 invasion of Ukraine simply dropped the disguise. Reading “separatist” as a Kremlin label rather than a neutral fact is what makes the pattern — and the next instance of it — visible in advance.

Naming it accurately

Section titled “Naming it accurately”

See also

Section titled “See also”

Sources

Section titled “Sources”

Footnotes

Section titled “Footnotes”

  1. On the recurring “playbook” — grievance, proxy force, intervention, frozen conflict, permanent leverage — across Transnistria, Abkhazia, the Tskhinvali region and Nagorno-Karabakh: “The Separatist Playbook: Frozen Conflicts in Russia’s Near Abroad,” Jason Institute (2022); and Sabine Fischer (ed.), Not Frozen!, SWP (2016). ↩ ↩2

  2. On frozen conflicts as a cheaper-than-annexation tool of controlled instability that blocks Western integration: Fischer, Not Frozen! (2016). ↩

  3. On Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia, branded a “peace enforcement operation,” and the subsequent recognition of the two entities: Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (Tagliavini report), 2009. ↩

  4. On the Russian 14th Army’s arming and training of Transnistrian proxy forces and its direct intervention in the 1992 war: “14th Army involvement in Transnistria” / OSCE conflict documentation. ↩ ↩2

  5. On the continuing presence of the Operational Group of Russian Forces guarding the Cobasna arms depot and freezing the conflict: Carnegie Endowment, “Transdniestria, Moldova, and Russia’s War in Ukraine” (2022). ↩