Authors

Discussion

Since 2014, informal militias and charities crowdfunding military supplies have been central to the Ukrainian war effort. Militias strengthened the Armed Forces of Ukraine in their operations in Donbas, while military charities supplied everything from food to light weapons, making up for deficient army logistics. This informal economy of war created densely interconnected civic networks linking combatant groups with political parties, Western-funded NGOs, and state institutions, while also giving them a degree of autonomy form the state. By late 2021, even the most anti-government, right-wing networks of volunteer fighters and activists were tightly integrated with Ukrainian political elites and various branches of the executive. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has galvanized these networks anew. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with Donbas war veterans and activists, and social network analysis of a new database of connections among key players in the political economy of war since February 2022. It explores the role of the informal war economy in the formation of new alliances between armed groups and political patrons, parties and movements on the right since 2014, and analyzes their changing relationship to different parts of the Ukrainian state.