Ukraine's outpost: Dnipropetrovsk and the Russian-Ukrainian War

Abstract

This is the first book to analyse the Russian-Ukrainian war from a regional perspective considering the role played by the Dnipropetrovsk region as the country’s forpost (outpost) in Russia’s war against Ukraine. In the Soviet Union, Dnipropetrovsk was a closed city due to its large military industrial complex, and it was the world’s biggest producer of nuclear missiles. This book analyses how a city that was once the pride of Soviet power became a bastion of Ukrainian patriotism in the face of Russian military aggression in 2014 and thereafter. Led by Jewish-Ukrainian Russian speakers, the city of Dnipro and the region of Dnipropetrovsk prevented the spread of the Kremlin’s so-called ‘New Russia’ project beyond the Donbas into the heart of Ukraine. This pathbreaking study challenges Russian disinformation and Western stereotypes of Ukraine which portray it as a regionally divided country with the military conflict as a ‘civil war’ between Russian and Ukrainian speakers.