by Tim Judah
I asked a final question about Dugin and whether Purgin would regard him as a kind of ideologist of the DNR. The answer was “No.” He knew him personally, and “I can’t say I completely follow his theories but nevertheless I take my hat off to him because he is a remarkable person in the intellectual field. There aren’t many people like him in the world.”
In Kiev, the end of the Maidan revolution was greeted with relief and by many of course with jubilation. However, while there was a respite for the people of Kiev, the end of one chapter in the Ukrainian drama was followed instantly by the beginning of a new one. Protests began in Crimea, the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine and the only one with an ethnic Russian majority, and armed men seized the autonomous region’s parliament and other buildings. A referendum on union with Russia was held on March 16, 2014, though what proportion of Crimea’s population, which was 58 percent Russian, 24 percent Ukrainian and 12 percent Crimean Tatar, actually voted is unknown—unless you believe the “official” figures of more than 80 percent for Crimea and the city of Sebastopol, which is a separate jurisdiction. Those who opposed the break with Ukraine did not vote. The referendum was illegal under Ukrainian law and there was no pretense of this being a real exercise in democracy. Even if the majority of Crimeans were indeed in favor of reuniting with Russia, pro-Ukrainians were keeping a low profile and several Tatar activists were murdered or disappeared. There was no debate on the issue as, for example, there had been in Scotland for years before it voted against independence.
Within a month of the flight of Yanukovych from Kiev on the night of February 21, 2014, Vladimir Putin signed a decree making Crimea a part of Russia. In the past he had accepted that the peninsula, which had become part of Soviet Ukraine in 1954 when it made little difference to anyone, was an undisputed part of Ukraine. Now Putin compared it to overwhelmingly Albanian-inhabited Kosovo, which had broken away from Serbia and declared independence in 2008. Most Western countries recognized it but Russia did not. The comparison was spurious, since Russians had not been oppressed in Crimea as Albanians had been in Serbia, and polls had showed that the majority of the population of Crimea had since independence been in favor of staying part of Ukraine. If the opportunistic seizure of Crimea had rather been characterized as revenge for NATO’s seventy-eight-day bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999, which the then enfeebled Russia had been unable to prevent, that might have been closer to the mark. It was a forceful way of saying “Russia is back.” Like all such moves in politics, it set off a train of wholly unexpected events—though the same could be said of Yanukovych’s balking at signing the EU deal the previous November.
Putin did what he did because he could. He had some 25,000 regular Russian troops there as part of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, whose presence had been secured by treaty, and he used them in a semi-covert way, only later confessing that they had been deployed. He had been rattled by protests against him during the winter of 2011–12, and this move, backed by the info-war against the “fascist junta” of Ukraine, sent his popularity ratings shooting sky high again. Only one deputy in the 450-seat Russian Duma or parliament, Ilya Ponomaryov, voted against the annexation and he soon went into exile.
Just before this the Verkhovna Rada made a cardinal error. It voted to pass a law to downgrade the official status of the Russian language. This was immediately vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, but the damage was done. It frightened many Russian speakers and gave Putin and the “anti-Maidan” and pro-Russian constituency just what they needed in terms of “proof” of their claims that neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists had taken over.
Why the Ukrainians did not use their military—some of whom defected—in Crimea to fight back is not hard to fathom. The government feared that if they gave the orders to fight, this might not just prompt a crushing defeat in Crimea but trigger a full-scale invasion. In retrospect maybe that was a mistake. As Oleh Shamshur, a former ambassador to the U.S. who then went on to represent his country in Paris, said: “If a hooligan meets no resistance he is emboldened. We should have fought and resisted.”
More than a year later, as the May holidays approached, long lines of traffic waited to cross over into Crimea from the Ukrainian mainland, where once there was no border. Foreigners who needed a visa for Russia could not enter unless they had one. People crossing on foot were getting across relatively quickly, those in cars waited for hours and trucks were waiting for days. People blamed both sides for the delays, saying that one day the Ukrainians slowed things down and the next day it was the Russians. Lines of trenches had been dug on the Ukrainian side. Three roads lead to Crimea and all of them from Ukraine; Russia has no land connection to the peninsula. Along one, at the Kalanchak checkpoint, is the main canal supplying Crimea and especially its agriculture. What remained at the bottom of it, now that the flow had been turned off by the Ukrainians, were just stagnant pools and sandbanks. All of Crimea’s infrastructure is integrated with Ukraine’s, which was one of the reasons why Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to Ukraine and not, as Russian legend would have it, because he was drunk.
Pedestrians waiting at the Kalanchak checkpoint to cross into Russian-annexed Crimea. May 2015.
Thinking back on it, it could have been a lyrical scene from an old art house movie. The soft breeze had scattered cherry blossom on the pile of earth that had been dug for the grave of the boy who was about to be buried. From the cemetery we could see for kilometers across the valley and the rolling green hills. Men from the village militia pointed to the horizon and said that their enemies were “over there” somewhere. And then the funeral party came walking up the path from the village.
At their head was a man carrying a cross. Behind him, mixed in with family and friends in the procession, some men carried the lid of the coffin. Then came the pallbearers. For the last time, the spring sun warmed the face of Aleksandr Lubenets, who looked as though he was asleep. He was twenty-one and in a few weeks, his father Vladimir told me, it would have been his birthday. “He was very cheerful. He loved life. And then some bastard decided to end it. They shot him in the back.”
Aleksandr, and two of his mates from the village of Khrestysche, on the outskirts of Sloviansk, decided to investigate something. They were part of the local rebel militia, which had been manning the barricades there for the past few weeks. What exactly happened is unclear. Yevgeniy, the commander of Aleksandr’s group, said “he wanted to be hero.” They ran into Ukrainian soldiers or police and that was the end of it. As Aleksandr was buried, five uniformed men fired their Kalashnikovs into the air over the grave in salute.
Aleksandr died on April 24, 2014. On the same day Volodymyr Rybak, who was forty-two, was buried. A policeman turned local councillor, he remonstrated with rebels when they put up the rebel flag in his hometown of Gorlovka. A few days later he and a man later identified as a student from Kiev were found in a river near Sloviansk. Rybak’s corpse showed signs of torture. When his body had been tossed into the river it had been weighted down with a bag of sand. As mourners came to pay their respects, Elena, his widow, sat by his open coffin stroking his face. Makeup had been applied to the wounds on his head.
Elena Rybak, widow of murdered politician Volodymyr Rybak, strokes his face before he is buried. Gorlovka, April 2014.
The war had started and Aleksandr and Volodymyr were among the first to die. That is why their names are remembered, why journalists wrote about them and why they are recorded here. After that, those who died became a statistic to everyone but their families and friends. Individual names and faces gave way to the torrent of numbers.
Since the seizure of Crimea the conflict has proceeded in fits and starts. The war in the east began on the pro-Russian side in a mood of euphoria. The oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk would be snapped off, followed by Kharkiv and then all the other regions, including Odessa, up to the Romanian border in Bessarabia. No secret was made by the separatist side that this was their intention. The flag of No
vorossiya would fly all the way from Lugansk to Izmail on the Danube, before being replaced with that of Russia. Just before the May 11, 2014, separatist referendum in Sloviansk, an A4 sheet setting out what it was all about was pasted to the walls. It explained that the Donetsk People’s Republic had to become independent before it joined Russia, because the region could not be incorporated into Russia as long as it was “still part of the territory of another country.”
As soon as Crimea was taken the campaign began in the east. Key buildings were seized, one by one, by armed men. Exactly how this operation was coordinated will be for historians to lay bare, but it was clear to almost everyone that this was not something that could be done without the involvement of the Russian security services. Putin denied this was the case, but he had denied that Russian troops were involved in the takeover of Crimea and later had admitted it, and they were decorated with a specially struck medal.
At first Ukrainian authority seemed to evaporate and the Ukrainian military appeared uncertain what to do and how to react. There were good reasons for this. Since independence in 1991, the armed forces had been starved of funds. Almost the entire defense budget had gone on paying (poor) salaries and there was little left over for modern weapons and training. It was not as though Ukraine did not make arms either. In the period 2009–13 it was the eighth-largest arms exporter in the world, responsible for 3 percent of global sales, though a good proportion of this went to Russia. It was simply that with money being stolen and siphoned off, the military could not afford the modern stuff, which the country’s arms manufacturers exported. Some of the top ranks of the military also had an extremely close relationship with their Russian counterparts. One of the consequences of the breakup of the Soviet Union was that brothers and friends now found themselves as senior officers in armies which, all of a sudden, had become enemies. The result of all this was an army with only a few thousand combat-ready troops with very low morale. I discussed this with a senior intelligence official, who began by talking about the police, claiming they had been turned into a “racketeering organization” for their bosses in the regions and in Kiev. Since independence, he said, Ukraine had claimed to have “an intelligence service, counterintelligence and an army, but it was all just a façade.” In an apposite phrase, Tetiana Sylina, a well-known Kiev journalist, summed up the reason for this: Ukrainian politicians had a “bulimic” appetite for corruption. The security source drew parallels with African countries.
In the wake of the Maidan revolution several things happened on the Ukrainian side. In the first weeks after the flight of President Yanukovych, there was such chaos that few were really in proper control. This was why it was possible for Crimea to be taken so easily and why it was then wrongly assumed in Moscow that the east and the south would fall just as easily into their lap. But now, dozens of militias began to spring up on the Ukrainian side, the kernel being men who had fought on the Maidan. At the same time a plan to set up a National Guard was put into place. Igor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful oligarchs, who was appointed governor of Dnipropetrovsk after the revolution, put up money to pay for some of them. The problem was that at the beginning this led to anarchy on the battlefield, which provided a window of opportunity for the anti-Maidan, pro-Russian rebels. With at least some Russian direction and help, including from leaders like Igor Strelkov in Sloviansk and some of the first DNR commanders who were from Russia, not locals, the rebels were able to take territory quickly, given that there was initially no real resistance. When I asked the security service source who was in charge of the volunteers on the Ukrainian side, he said bluntly, “Nobody.”
Quite apart from there being no credible force to oppose the rebels and Russia, no one had any real idea what to do. The reason for this was simple, said the intelligence source. A few years back he and his colleagues had written a paper on a possible Russian threat, which they argued could happen after the Sochi Olympics of 2014. Extraordinarily these ended on February 23, a few hours after the flight of Yanukovych from Kiev. However, when they wrote the report it had all seemed like a far-fetched “intellectual game.” He said, “In my soul, I did not believe we would fight with Russia.” So, no one ever made any preparations for any such conflict in any possible variation of it. For this reason much of Ukraine’s threadbare army was positioned in ways which reflected its old Cold War Soviet background, i.e., prepared, albeit barely, to fight a war on its western flanks—not its eastern ones.
I talked with Ihor Smeshko, a former intelligence chief, who in October 2014 was appointed head of the president’s Intelligence Committee. Ukraine had no proper modern military intelligence-gathering capacity, logistics, command and control and so on, he said. The volunteer battalions were run on an “amateur level” and this was leading to defeats on the battlefield; it was necessary for Ukraine to reorganize and regroup its military. Warming to his theme of the chaotic military situation, Smeshko explained that he thought what was happening made it clear that Putin did not understand Ukraine. The nature of the volunteer militias was a big problem, but they were also a modern reversion to Ukrainian Cossack roots. Russia had a different tradition. Historically the heartlands of Ukraine were populated by free farmers and warriors. The Russian tradition was that of “total rule,” he said, that of “God, Tsar and Motherland,” but the Ukrainian one was that of “God, Freedom, Family and Motherland. For centuries we did not have a tsar.” Putin’s problem was to persist in believing, as he said, when Crimea was annexed: “We are not just close neighbors, we are essentially, as I have said more than once, a single people.” In other words, he could not bring himself to see that what might have been true long ago (and many Ukrainians would disagree even with that) was no longer true now for most Ukrainians, and by starting what he had done he was making it even less true than it was before. By turning millions of hitherto friendly Ukrainians into enemies, Putin might have won Crimea, but the cost was losing Ukraine.
The first phase of the war lasted until July 2014. Russian military support was most likely relatively limited because a lot of help, as opposed to a small amount of targeted operational help, was not actually needed. But now Ukraine’s chaotic mix of volunteer battalions and armed forces began to retake territory. The towns of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka and Krasnoarmeysk were reclaimed and briefly it looked as though the Ukrainian advance was unstoppable. But, having whipped the Russian media and people into a frenzy about the new Nazis of Kiev, Putin could hardly let the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics collapse. Russian regular soldiers crossed the border to halt the Ukrainian advance. Russia denied its troops were fighting, but captured men spoke about it, and in the wake of the murder on February 27, 2015, of Boris Nemtsov, the Russian opposition politician, a report he had been working on detailing how Russian military help was organized was released. The report also concurred with the commonsense rather than conspiracy theory view that the crash on July 17, 2014, of a Malaysian airliner over rebel territory at the cost of 298 lives was almost certainly the result of it being shot down by a Russian-supplied BUK anti-aircraft missile system when the rebels and possibly Russian officers mistook it for a Ukrainian aircraft.
The turning point at this juncture in the war came at Ilovaysk, a small, nondescript town forty-five minutes’ drive southeast of Donetsk. In the first week of August units from three Ukrainian volunteer militias and the police attempted to take it back from rebel control. The town was heavily shelled, but the rebels were never driven out and held on to part of it. Then, with help from elsewhere such as Donetsk—though “not Russia,” claimed implausibly Commander Givi, the head of rebel forces there—a major several-pronged offensive began on August 28 to drive the Ukrainians out. By September 1 it was all over. The Nemtsov report claimed that to that date some 170 Russian regular soldiers, as opposed to volunteers, had died, and a large proportion of them died in and around Ilovaysk.
The Ukrainians collapsed when men from one volunteer battalion unilateral
ly pulled out, which was typical of this period of no proper command and control. The leaders of the men trapped in the town, where they had commandeered the school as their base, now thought they had done a deal to gain free passage out of town. But the thirty-four-year-old Commander Givi, whose real name is Mikhail Tolstykh, and who worked in a rope factory before the war, said that there had been no agreement because these were militias and not men from Ukraine’s regular armed forces. “We don’t know who they are,” he said, claiming their numbers had been boosted by foreigners including Czechs, Hungarians and “niggers.” He had arrived at his HQ in a big, smart car with music blasting; in the back, some of his men cradled their guns in their laps with the muzzles sticking out of the windows. They had every reason to be upbeat. They had inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Ukrainians.
On a twenty-six-kilometer stretch of road from the village of Novokaterinivka to Ilovaysk, I counted the remains of sixty-eight military vehicles, tanks, armored personnel carriers, pickups, buses and trucks. It had been a turkey shoot. These vehicles were, of course, only the ones I could see. Those which were not destroyed were now in the hands of the rebels.
In Novokaterinivka itself, a man hung from a high power cable onto which he was flung when his armored vehicle had been hit. If someone had written that scene into the script of a movie, it would have been cut for being unrealistic. At one ambush site two fresh graves marked with crosses made of sticks indicated that the dead had been buried by their vehicles at the side of the road. On the main street of Novokaterinivka, locals posed for pictures by destroyed vehicles and cars which were jacked up with logs because undamaged wheels had been unscrewed and looted. Rebel soldiers high on the drug of victory said they were “cleaning up,” looking for remaining Ukrainians who had fled into the fields and were still there. Stranded in the middle of a field just outside the village, you could see one vehicle, which had made a futile attempt to escape by veering off the road. Later the Ukrainian authorities were to report that 459 men died in Ilovaysk and another 478 were injured.