Democracy in Donbas: Strengthening the Legitimacy of the Hybrid War Frontlines

The paper assesses the resilience of Ukrainian frontline state institutions in Donbas to hybrid threats in 2014-2022. In hybrid warfare, the opponent aims to undermine and weaken the legitimacy of the state institutions to win the war with only minimal use of conventional military force. Therefore, it is a crucial task for the state facing hybrid threats to ensure its institutional resilience and legitimacy. Hence, the research traces how the Ukrainian central and local governments have adapted local legislative institutions to the challenges of hybrid war. To do that, firstly, it analyses how the local governments in the frontline communities used their legislative power to strengthen the legitimacy of their institutions. Secondly, it looks at the legislative decisions of the Ukrainian central government aimed at adapting the institutional hierarchy to resist the hybrid threats. The paper presents a case study that looks at two towns from Luhansk and Donetsk regions in the 2014-2022 period. The research relies on the concepts of political legitimacy and hybrid warfare to assess their impact on institutional adaptability based on a case study. It uses the text analysis methods of topic modelling and word embedding to examine the changes in the legislative practices of local governments in Bakhmut and Lysychansk. It also presents an overview of the top-down institutional changes in Ukraine that took place after 2014 in response to the hybrid warfare. Eventually, it tests an assumption that in order to build resilience against hybrid threats, local democratic institutions prioritise decisions in the spheres of educational, cultural, and security policies to strengthen national identity, the safety of the community, and the government’s legitimacy. As a result, the paper contributes to the literature on institutionalism in the hybrid conflict context by presenting a longitudinal case study that empirically assesses the interplay between legitimacy and hybrid warfare.