ABSTRACT
This chapter will offer a brief introduction to the war in Ukraine, a conflict which is often misunderstood and misrepresented in Western sources. Based on around 30 semi-structured interviews with the war's participants, international observers, government officials, academics and experts, the author will attempt to deconstruct some of the war's most potent myths, namely its perception as a civil war between Kyiv's government and the “Russian” eastern regions of the country. In fact, the war was effectively imported into Ukraine by a non-state, oligarchic Russian intervention, which only at a later stage turned into a hybrid conflict with both Russian military and genuine Russian foreign fighters present on the front lines. This internationalization of an alleged civil war radically altered the conflict and subsequently paved the way for an environment which seemingly welcomed the arrival of a “NATO foreign legion” or “the Donbass International Brigades” on the battlefields.
