In Wartime

by Tim Judah

  A colleague told me that nearby two Ukrainian soldiers jumped out onto the road and stopped his car. They looked about eighteen, he said, had been hiding in a field of sunflowers and were wide-eyed as though they had not slept for days. When they saw a car taped up with the letters “TV,” which are used to signify that there are journalists in it, they took their chance. They begged him and his colleagues for a lift and then for food and water. At the same time the Ukrainian media began to carry stories of stragglers limping in to safe territory. More than 500 Ukrainians were reported to have been captured here. One, who was released, called Sergey, said that the men who captured him told him they were Russian regular soldiers. “They told us they had arrived two weeks earlier. They were very young.”

  At the same time as this was happening, the rebels, again almost certainly with Russian help, most likely from the other side of the border, were clearing Ukrainian forces who were still on their side of the frontier with Russia. Along the border there were empty, shelled positions. To the south, on the Sea of Azov, the situation had also changed drastically. On August 27 the border crossing to Russia was taken by the rebels after it had been shelled with a few mortars and the Ukrainians there, with far less firepower, fled. They fled the nearby town of Novoazovsk too. On August 30 a group of twenty people with their arms stretched up to heaven by the main checkpoint on the eastern outskirts of Mariupol prayed for peace and for the protection of the city while volunteers assembled to dig trenches. It seemed more than likely that a major offensive on the city would start soon. And it made sense. Mariupol is the port for Donetsk and this part of the east, and a major steel city in its own right. With it, the rebel region might have some prospect of eventual economic viability. But, quite apart from that, if Mariupol fell, Russia could begin to make the push to create a land corridor all the way to Crimea, with which it had no connection by land. It is no wonder then that President Poroshenko agreed to a ceasefire in Minsk on September 5. But Russia too was hurting. Its economy was beginning to feel the effects of sanctions imposed by Western countries.

  A group prays for peace on the outskirts of Mariupol. August 2014.

  The ceasefire began to falter seriously, however, in December and collapsed completely in the new year. At the same time Ukraine’s forces were slowly growing more organized. Gradually the militias were being absorbed into a proper command and control structure and Ukrainian soldiers were becoming more effective. They were also digging in around Mariupol. The rebels, however, wanted them out of two places in particular—Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, through which local roads and railways run. The airport, named for the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), who was born nearby, was gleaming and new, having been among those rebuilt for the 2012 Euro soccer championships. By the time the Ukrainians were expelled from it, on January 21, 2015, it was mostly rubble. A new ceasefire was agreed, with a starting date of February 15, but the rebels, even with Russian military help, were unable to push the Ukrainians out until February 18. The airport and Debaltseve were certainly defeats for the Ukrainians, but the fact that it took the rebels and the Russians months to achieve these victories demonstrated two things: first, that the Ukrainians were no longer disorganized and that their military was getting stronger by the day; and secondly, that the rebels and the Russians were reaching the limits of what they could do unless there was a lot more help from Russia. This in turn risked triggering new sanctions and probably individual Western countries moving to give Ukraine the modern lethal weaponry—for example, the targeting systems—it was asking for.

  With so many people leaving the rebel territories, logic dictated that more Russians, either volunteers, troops on contract (to disguise the fact that they were regulars) or just regulars, would be needed simply to hold the rebel territories, let alone to expand them. In other words, the expansive fantasy of a Novorossiya all the way to Bessarabia had collapsed and was being replaced with the uncomfortable reality of a frozen conflict, similar to Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. From Putin’s point of view, it must have seemed if not exactly glorious, still a useful outcome furthering his aim of trying to prevent Ukraine from becoming an attractive country, with a stable democracy which could both serve as an example to Russians and also have a serious prospect of eventual NATO and EU accession. For the people of the rebel territories their prospect was simply one of poverty and no hope of a better future. In the center of Donetsk life continued with superficial normality, but shops, banks and offices were closed and in many places sporadic fighting continued. For everyone here, life was in limbo.

  One place where fighting continued was Adminposiolok, a badly shattered rebel-held suburb of Donetsk, close to the airport. While the Ukrainians had indeed lost it, they were only a kilometer or two away. Adminposiolok was an eerie place, almost entirely empty of people. All of a sudden Ivan Tokarev, aged seventy-eight, arrived on his bike to do some cleaning in his apartment in a large residential block. Every single apartment in the front of the building facing the Ukrainian lines had been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. His was in decent shape, however, because it was at the back. He showed me a hole in the floor of one apartment in which a shell or rocket had fallen, blowing up the flat of his son below. No one lived there anymore. His son had gone to Russia. Ivan and his wife, who had moved to a safer part of town, did not want to join them, he said, because while it might be fine for a month or two, then everyone would start arguing, so it was “better to die here.”

  Azov Battalion insignia. Mariupol, March 2015.

  The Azov Battalion, based in Mariupol, the Ukrainian-controlled port on the Sea of Azov, is small. According to Major Andrey Dyachenko, its twenty-eight-year-old spokesman, when the battalion was founded in May 2014 it had some sixty men but ten months later it had “more than a thousand.” That is a tiny proportion of the 60,000 men under arms actively fighting for Ukraine out of a total number of 250,000 in the armed forces, but judging by the publicity they have garnered for themselves in innumerable news reports, you might be forgiven for thinking that there were 100,000 of them. As Russian officials and the Russian media have accused the post-Maidan revolution governments in Kiev of being neo-Nazis and fascists, the Azov Battalion is perfect camera fodder, its members parading around with their neo-Nazi-style flag and symbols. If they were not invented and paid for by a secret Russian department of misinformation, then those in charge of directing Russian propaganda must have been thanking their lucky stars that they came along all by themselves.

  In terms of winning the war for global public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the charge of Ukrainian neo-Nazism, fascism and extreme nationalism all combine to make Ukraine’s Achilles’ heel. Small elements of truth have painted, and allowed the Russian media and their Western fellow travelers to paint, an utterly distorted picture of the whole. In the general election of October 2014 Ukraine’s far-right parties flopped. In electoral terms they are insignificant compared to their strength in Hungary, France or Italy, for example. And yet, many Westerners do not see this. Many also do not see that much of the Russian propaganda aimed at depicting Ukraine as a kind of Third Reich reincarnated is a sort of displacement activity. It is, after all, Russia which is in the grip of nationalistic euphoria and whose once nascent democracy has died as people rally round its one and only unchallenged leader.

  Ukraine’s problem, however, is that there are indeed real unpleasant elements that give its enemies the opportunity to exaggerate their significance. All European countries have the same extremists, but the issue of their existence is not a neuralgic political one because they are not fighting wars. Also, when it comes to the Azov Battalion, for example, its political antecedents mean that it has friends in high places and because it is a volunteer unit, its members are highly motivated and it garners support because it is successful. This in turn means that it receives more publicity than its numbers justify.

  In its canteen we collected soup and bre
ad. Behind us three men were talking in thickly accented English. The Azov Battalion is the one which foreigners, especially those affiliated with far-right and neo-Nazi groups from Croatia to Scandinavia, come to fight for. Just like the volunteers on the other side of the line, they are a mix of adventurers and true believers.

  The Azov Battalion, or rather Patriot of Ukraine, the political movement it sprang from, was founded in 2005 according to spokesman Dyachenko. Its leader was, and is, the thirty-six-year-old Andrey Biletsky, and it began in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, which proved, said Dyachenko, that it was untrue “that Ukrainian nationalism comes only from the west.” From the beginning, members of the organization had believed “that Ukraine would have to fight for its independence…In 1991 Ukraine gained its independence for geopolitical reasons, without blood or fighting, but historically we know that nothing comes for free. Even though our parents did not take up arms to fight for independence, now we have to do it.”

  Before the war, said Dyachenko, the view of Patriot of Ukraine was that since independence not only had the country’s new army been undermined, but Ukraine’s youth too had been virtually emasculated by being brought up with computers and video games and not thinking about protecting the country, including taking up arms if necessary. So, he said:

  We did some military training. This was mostly in the summer because most of the youth who came were at school or university students. We would go to the Carpathians or Crimea, to the countryside, and we set up camp. We used fake guns—we did not have real guns—we dreamed of them, but we did not have them! We also encouraged young people to give up bad habits and do sports and so we had a lot of winners in sport, for example in tae kwon do and boxing.

  Dyachenko joined in 2011. He was studying for a doctorate in history and the subject was related to Andriy Melnyk, the leader of the wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose followers had, between 1941 and 1944, been involved in a bloody conflict with Stepan Bandera.

  Given that Patriot of Ukraine was an eastern Ukrainian organization and existed in part in the same political and peripheral subculture as Andrei Purgin’s Donetsk Republic, which was also founded in 2005 and carrying out paramilitary training, I asked if Dyachenko had known about it. “We didn’t just know about them,” he snorted, “they were our biggest enemies!”

  We knew about their books and presentations and separatist exhibitions, and sometimes we tried to disrupt their meetings. They put up their tent and handed out separatist books, so we would come and take them away and tear them up. They tried to do the same to us but we were stronger. Ninety percent of our members were fit young men and girls, but theirs were mostly pensioners nostalgic for the Soviet Union. They could not beat us physically!

  Despite their apparent physical prowess, work for hardcore Ukrainian nationalists seems to have been just as tough as it was for Donetsk Republic and other pro-Russian fringe movements in the east. “The people of the region were not really into politics,” admitted Dyachenko. “They seemed apolitical. It was home, work and family for them, and now we have to pay for this with a destroyed Donbass and all the consequences of that.”

  When Dyachenko said that Patriot of Ukraine was founded in 2005, he was only telling half the story. Its history is rather longer and more complicated and it is intimately bound up with that of the development of the far-right in Ukraine.

  The story began in October 1991 when the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) was formed in Lviv. This tiny extreme nationalist organization had its roots in three even tinier parties. One was led by Oleh Tyahnybok, a medical student, and another by a young man called Andriy Parubiy. According to Anton Shekhovtsov, an academic who has followed the far right in Ukraine, the new party wanted a national and social revolution and believed Russia to be the cause of all Ukraine’s ills. For its symbol, it adopted a Wolfsangel or “Wolf’s Hook.” In 2011 Shekhovtsov wrote:

  Although its original meaning was not associated with National Socialism, the Wolfsangel—due to its employment by several SS Divisions—had become a symbol of many post-war European and neo-Nazi organizations. The SNPU modified the symbol by mirroring it (just as they seemed to mirror “National Socialism”), so that it looked like a letter “N” with a vertical line “|” in the middle of the letter. According to the SNPU’s leaders, the symbol meant “the Idea of the Nation.” The nation as such was—and still is—seen by the party’s ideologists as a “community of blood and spirit.”

  By the time Shekhovtsov was writing, the SNPU was no more. It had been a fringe political group with no electoral success. Tyahnybok, however, had been elected to Parliament in 2002, though not on an SNPU ticket but on that of the party of Viktor Yushchenko, who would become president in the wake of the Orange Revolution of 2004. It was during this period that the SNPU, which had been establishing contacts abroad, notably with France’s National Front and Austria’s Freedom Party, decided that to emulate their success they should clean up their act. In 2004 it changed its name to Svoboda or “Freedom” and dropped the Wolfsangel. It also disbanded its paramilitary “guard unit,” formed by Parubiy in 1996, which was called Patriot of Ukraine. They and their predecessor organization loved nothing more than parading in black uniforms by torchlight. According to Shekhovtsov, the SNPU also “recruited skinheads and football hooligans.” When Svoboda dissolved it, he says in a footnote to his 2011 examination of the far right, the Kharkiv branch of Patriot of Ukraine “refused to disband and renewed its membership in 2005.” And, if it had not been for the war, it would have remained a footnote.

  Meanwhile, in the west of Ukraine, the new Svoboda began to make advances in local elections and finally, in the October 2012 general election, it made its big national breakthrough, becoming the fourth-largest party in Parliament. It gained 10.44 percent of the vote and won thirty-seven seats out of 450. It had not been a smooth and easy progression, though. In 2004, for example, just after the founding of Svoboda, Tyahnybok made a speech which was to dog him for years in his quest for respectability. Eulogizing a commander of the UPA, the wartime insurgents, and using insulting epithets for Russians and Jews, he said:

  The enemy came and took their [UPA’s] Ukraine. But they [UPA fighters] were not afraid; likewise we must not be afraid. They took their automatic guns on their necks and went into the woods. They got them ready and fought against the Moskali, Germans, Zhydy, and other scum, who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state! And therefore our task—for every one of you: the young, the old, the gray-headed and the youthful—we must defend our native land!

  Rising to his theme, Tyahnybok then told the crowd that they were the people the moskal’s’ko-zhydivska’ka mafia who ruled Ukraine feared the most. A case for inciting racial hatred against him was opened but then was dropped for lack of evidence, but he was expelled from Yuschenko’s parliamentary group. Tyahnybok and the party continued to stoke xenophobia and hatred, especially toward anything Russian. After its breakthrough in 2012 the party briefly became a significant voice, but many of its voters then were not particularly nationalist as opposed to just fed up with everyone else. Tyahnybok emerged as one of three prominent leaders of the Maidan revolution, and in the October 2014 general election his vote collapsed. The party failed to pass the 5 percent threshold to enter Parliament, and Svoboda evaporated as a political force. Tyahnybok had lost his touch. In the party’s western heartlands, elected local councillors had by now gained a reputation for being as corrupt as everyone else had been.

  Meanwhile, the trajectory of Patriot of Ukraine, which was led by Biletsky, a former history student in Kharkiv, was utterly different. It subsisted on the margins of politics. In 2012, though, it suddenly came to international attention. In the run-up to the UEFA 2012 championship, soccer fans in places such as Kharkiv came under a Western spotlight. Chris Rogers, a reporter for Britain’s BBC Panorama program did an investigation into the racist chanting of Ukrainian soccer fans and witnessed some 2,000 Metalist Kharkiv f
ans making Nazi salutes and shouting “Sieg Heil!” He then met a man called Vadym who took him to a fans’ bar which Rogers described as a “shrine to far-right extremism” decorated with swastikas, “white power” symbols and where there also seemed to be “an unhealthy obsession with Nazi Germany.” Vadym denied they were Nazis, however. Then we learn that he is a recruiter for Patriot of Ukraine and see a video allegedly of the group rounding up what we are told are illegal immigrants, who look Vietnamese, whom human rights groups noted in 2010 were among Patriot’s targets. Then Vadym says: “One race, one nation, one fatherland.” Patriot had to be ready, he explained, for civil war. “Of course nobody wants to have some war…but we must be prepared for everything.” Next Rogers was taken with what he described as soccer hooligans to see them being trained in knife-fighting techniques in a wood. He tells us that he has seen videos showing hundreds turning up for such events, but now there are only a handful. We watch them fighting with wooden knives. Then one masked recruit says: “We are learning to shoot and we are learning tactical combat and well military preparation, and we can take all this fight training onto the streets. I can also add, because my face is hidden, that these skills have already been used on the streets, and not just once.”

  At the time it was natural for a foreign journalist to interpret this in the context of what it might mean for black and Asian soccer fans. There was no reason to be interested in what else groups like this might be up to, such as a lucrative sideline in being available for hire in gangland and business turf wars, or what then would have seemed obscure battles with similar pro-Russian groups. It was for these reasons, however, that the authorities were taking an interest in Patriot of Ukraine, just as they were in Donetsk Republic. In fact these problems had begun to come to a head the year before the football championships came to Ukraine. In 2011 three Patriot members were arrested in a case relating to an alleged attempt to blow up a statue of Lenin. In Kharkiv, Patriot members were arrested and charged with attempted murder, and there was an attempt to murder Biletsky, who was then arrested himself and held in detention though not convicted of anything. He was released by act of Parliament, along with Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister, on February 24, 2014, just after the flight of President Viktor Yanukovych.