by Tim Judah
Even though Biletsky had been in prison, Patriot members were extremely active. Once protests began on the Maidan against Yanukovych in November 2014, its members started to play an active role, and it was one of the organizations which was to form part of the umbrella of far-right groups called Right Sector. Here they found themselves increasingly in combat with two old enemies. One was the Berkut, the riot police, with whom as nationalist soccer “Ultras” they had frequently clashed, and the other was fellow eastern nationalist groups such as Oplot. The latter was not a Ukrainian nationalist organization but a Russian one based on a sports-cum-fight club in Kharkiv which operated in the same political-cum-underground business circles as Patriot of Ukraine. Just as Patriot members now flocked to the fight in Kiev, its members did so too, but as part of government-sponsored so-called titushki groups who were recruited to join in fights against the Maidan activists. Meanwhile, a good part of the Berkut were sent from the east because they could be trusted by Yanukovych, while those from other regions of the country could not.
As soon as Yanukovych fled and Biletsky was released from Kharkiv jail, the first thing Patriot did was to attack and seize the Oplot HQ in the city. The police did not intervene, recalled Dyachenko. Then on March 15, Oplot counterattacked and attempted to seize the HQ of Patriot of Ukraine. “There were about fifty people inside who were attacked by a hundred Oplot guys, who even had guns. Our guys tried to fight with Molotov cocktails and stones,” and what Dyachenko called cryptically “the classic means of the Maidan,” by which he meant clubs and shields. “The Oplot guys were surprised to see we were ready to fight and retreated.” By this time Crimea had already been annexed by Russia and, said Dyachenko, it was evident that Ukraine now faced a war. In Crimea, Russian troops had operated undercover, or rather without identifying themselves as such, and garnered the nickname of “little green men.” “It was clear to everyone that afterward ‘green men’ would appear in Kharkiv, Donetsk and Odessa and so on. So, Patriot of Ukraine announced the creation of its own ‘men in black’ at the end of March.” They had few guns, he said, only some of which had come to them after police stations had been attacked by Maidan activists in Lviv. “Some guys took hunting rifles.”
Kharkiv was a big prize for the pro-Russian separatists, and a proportion of the population sympathized with them. But Gennady Kernes, the mayor, who had close relations with both Yanukovych and Oplot, sensed that the city was not about to be lost to Ukraine. He switched sides. Patriot of Ukraine and Oplot continued to clash and, in this increasingly lawless situation with the police standing aside until they knew who would win, Patriot activists began kidnapping those they suspected of separatism and handing them over to the police, according to Dyachenko—who then released them. Patriot was increasingly part of what was becoming a war, as was Oplot, which played a key role in seizing the official buildings in Donetsk. Here, where they were led by Alexander Zakharchenko, a former mining electrician—or market cheese salesman, according to other sources—they were more successful than in Kharkiv, where they and other groups were to fail.
As the police and security services were demoralized, uncertain what to do and in the east contained many sympathetic to the separatists, Patriot of Ukraine and other groups began to fill a gap. They were determined and not scared to fight. This was the beginning of the period of the so-called battalions, which were independent militias, doing the job of the army and police. Some got money from oligarchs such as Dnipropetrovsk’s Igor Kolomoisky, and some were in effect controlled by him. On May 5, said Dyachenko, the interim minister of interior, Arsen Avakov, registered them as a volunteer battalion and two days later airlifted them down to Mariupol, which pro-Russian groups were trying to seize. Avakov knew exactly whom he was dealing with. He was an economist, businessman and politician from Kharkiv and had been governor of the oblast from 2005 to 2010.
In Mariupol the “men in black” fought the pro-Russians but complained that, unlike them, they did not have enough weapons. They assumed their new name, the Azov Battalion, as Mariupol is on the Sea of Azov, and from November 2014 they became part of Ukraine’s National Guard. In August 2014 they had defended the city as the rebels, with Russian help, pushed along the coast toward it, playing an important role in halting their advance and thus gained a reputation as good fighters. The battalion acquired a building and the government began to supply it with heavy weapons and other equipment. On the other side of the line, something similar happened to Oplot. From the same humble beginnings, it had become important. Its unit grew into one of the main separatist military battalions, and Zakharchenko was appointed as leader of the DNR in August 2014. Biletsky meanwhile cooperated closely with the Fatherland Front, the post-Maidan party of Arseniy Yatseniuk, who became prime minister after the revolution, and which counted Avakov and Parubiy as leading members. Biletsky did not join the party, however, and was elected to Parliament in October as an independent.
Outside the Azov canteen I wanted to take a picture of its flag, but there was no wind so it hung limply. I asked Dyachenko about the issue of its Wolfsangel-style symbol and said that in the West—let alone in Russia—this and the neo-Nazi views of some of its members were a real problem for Ukraine. Dyachenko gave me the party line, albeit saying in an aside to Liliia, who was translating for me: “That is what they told me to say.” The main goal of Russian propaganda was to show them as neo-Nazis because Russian propaganda “can’t say that Ukrainian people are fighting against Russian occupation, so they make it up and say they are fighting fascists.” About the neo-Nazi views of some who had spoken to the press, he said: “I admit there are some fighters with those taboos from past years and they have radical views, but we cannot turn down people who want to fight for Ukraine.” He added that the battalion did not “screen requests” to join based on ideology. Azov propagated a “healthy Ukrainian nationalism but, if some of our fighters have their own views, we won’t dictate anything to them.” And he added: “We are fighting against neo-Nazism and chauvinism.”
As for the infamous symbol, he said unconvincingly: “We have been told it resembles a symbol of the Third Reich, but it appeared at the beginning of the 1990s when there was no Internet.” As to the question of the harm it did Ukraine, he replied:
We have to fight and throw out the occupiers, not look good for Russian propaganda. According to Russian propaganda, we should throw out our blue and yellow [Ukrainian] flag. Twenty Azov fighters gave their lives for that symbol and we are not going to change it because of Russian propaganda! We are here to stop Bolshevism advancing toward Europe and we are here for a free Europe.
And if and when the Azov Battalion succeed—what then? Dyachenko’s answer sounded rather humdrum and traditionally conservative more than anything. He talked of Polish economic shock therapy and large families, and grumbled that “gay marriage is obviously negative. We stand for the traditional family.” He also spoke of his admiration for Alain de Benoist, the French far-right philosopher, whom I was beginning to realize had fans on both sides of the line.
It is undeniable that, on the Ukrainian side of the war, some politicians and some organizations have their roots in the far right. It is a fact that is used against the country in the info-war, and the negative effect of this in the West is something which many Ukrainians don’t understand. Certain individuals whose political roots go back to the far right have become important in the post-Maidan era, but voters have eschewed extremism more than those in many other European countries. The reason why some individuals and organizations like Azov have been able to flourish is because they are made up of or led by highly motivated figures with a background in groups who were not afraid of violence and especially were not afraid to resort to it during the Maidan period. It is also worth noting that since independence, these individuals and groups had warned that Russia was a threat. Because of their unpalatable political background, their general xenophobia and their devotion to neo-Nazi-style symbolism, this part of their mess
age was lost in the cacophony. However, there is another issue which historians will debate: to what extent did they contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy? The lionizing of Stepan Bandera and the flying of his red and black flag, especially during the Maidan revolution, did much to alarm and even embitter those in Ukraine whose fathers and grandfathers had fought in the Red Army against his movement. It gave valuable political ammunition to Ukraine’s enemies, and they use it to good effect. The main blame for the Ukrainian war must lie with Vladimir Putin—but such things did not help Ukraine.
At the entrance to the battalion’s canteen, a table was completely covered in colorful children’s drawings and letters. All over Ukraine classes of children are churning them out and they are arriving in bulk to decorate concrete-block checkpoints and frontline positions. The one I picked up read:
Dear Friend
Hello. I am sending a big hello to you from the south of our state, from Odessa. Be brave, stay brave and know we are supporting you and we believe in you. Victory will be ours.
Pupil of Year 7.
Dymitro Mandichenko
Odessa
I went looking for the Serbs. I wanted to write about Balkan fighters who, now their own wars were over, were fighting in foreign ones. Serbs have been fighting for the rebels and Croats for the Ukrainians. Divided only by the fact of being Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats, they seemed to agree about most things. These fighters hate the European Union, NATO and America and think they are fighting a good Christian fight. They are often connected to small extreme nationalist groups. Sometimes they send one another greetings. To their Serb “friends” a couple of Croats said, “Hope to see you soon!” via YouTube. They were off to Mariupol to join the Azov Battalion.
The Serbs were lying low though. One group had kidnapped a couple from another group with whom they were in conflict. They taped material around the head of one and a blindfold on the other, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Serbian flag and the motto: “Serbian Honor.” Then they triumphantly posted the picture on Facebook. A source in Donetsk suggested I call Erwan Castel, a French volunteer, who might know where they were. He told me he was in a café by the bus station.
When I arrived Castel said that the Serbs (who had kidnapped the others) had indeed just been there, but had left. Anyway, they were, he indicated with a spiraling gesture of his hand, completely drunk. He was not going to give me their numbers. But Castel himself has an interesting story to tell. While few non-Russians have come to fight in Donbass—one reliable estimate in March 2015 put the total number who had passed through on each side at 300—the reason Castel had come to Donetsk tells us much about those Westerners who admire Putin.
Castel had arrived only a few days earlier but, he told me, he had been meaning to come for a long time. Unfortunately, his father had recently died and he had had obligations to discharge before he could travel. And he had, in fact, traveled a very long way. The fifty-one-year-old had, in an earlier chapter of his life, been a French military intelligence officer, but for many years now he had lived in French Guyana, taking people on tours of the Amazon rainforest. When he had not been under the forest canopy he had been following world affairs and had begun to develop an interest in what was happening in Ukraine. He was convinced that the U.S. and the European Union had orchestrated a coup d’état in Kiev with the Maidan revolution in order to install NATO bases in Ukraine. Now, however, in the face of heroic resistance by the people of Donbass against an openly neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, the U.S. and the EU in his view were in retreat and the world order was on the point of change. Today we were witnessing the violent collapse of the liberal system led by the U.S. and the New World Order, he told me. “As a Russian proverb says, ‘When a monster drowns it makes the biggest waves.’ ”
As he talked he showed me things on his computer such as the blog he had set up in 2014 called Soutien à la rébellion du Donbass (“Support for the Donbass Rebellion”). Its Facebook page had 9,378 members and was tagged: “Anti-globalization movement” and “Novorossiya.” A younger French volunteer sat in silence at the other end of the table. Castel zipped from what had happened in Kosovo in 1999 to theories about CIA-supported Western NGOs aiming to destabilize the former Soviet republics. I was introduced to the concept of “Thalassocracies,” which are “empires of the sea” as the British empire had apparently been and which contrasted with the Russian empire, and then to the geopolitical concept of the evil U.S. seeing the “road to Tehran” leading through Damascus and the “road to Moscow” leading through Kiev. He whipped open his computer again and we looked at maps of NATO in 1990 and in 2009, by which time it included all the former central and east European Warsaw Pact nations, the Baltic states, Croatia and Albania. “Who is the aggressor?” he demanded. “Who is on the offensive? They are at the door of Russia and Russia has no strategic depth. Riga is only 150 kilometers from St. Petersburg. So, Russia is in a defensive posture. It is not a threat.” The government in Kiev “is not Ukrainian. It is a slave of the U.S., and all decisions are,” at which point he picked up his phone and spoke into it: “Hello, Obama, what do we do?” The U.S., he explained, wanted the containment of Russia, to control its frontiers and see the departure of its Black Sea fleet from Crimea. But American plans were being thwarted.
Russia, he said, had no troops in Ukraine, and lies to the contrary had to be stopped. Russia only wanted no NATO on its borders and an economy open to east and west. Castel claimed hackers had discovered that 1,037 Poles and Americans had been killed fighting in Ukraine but these deaths were being hidden. He talked approvingly of Alexander Dugin and his Eurasian vision for Europe and of Alain de Benoist and his ideas about a Europe in which emerging identities such as those of Catalonia, Flanders and presumably Donbass played a new role as the old order collapsed.
Sitting in French Guyana poring over his computer night after night, Castel had clearly become obsessed with Ukraine. He collaborated with others to “prove” that the anti-Maidan activists who had died in the infamous fire in Odessa on May 2, 2014, had been killed in a conspiracy, and not because both sides had thrown Molotov cocktails at one another and the anti-Maidan activists had been trapped inside the building. He was excited. The old world was collapsing, the oppressed were rising up against the evil empire—America—and he had come to play his small role in ushering in the age of revolution. “I want to participate,” he said. “It is important for the Russian and Slavic worlds to see that there are people who support them.”
For Castel, the rebel Donbass cause is a noble crusade, which he has joined with the zeal of those foreigners who once flocked to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Everything he told me and believes about Ukraine has been said by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, but anything that counters this narrative is regarded as Western propaganda serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex. What he believes is widely believed in Russia, of course, because it is the party line followed by most of the media. However, millions of Westerners also share all or some of his beliefs. They are the point where the worldview of the extreme right in the West meets that of the extreme left. This is why among the foreigners fighting for the rebels in Ukraine there are modern-day fascists ranged alongside extreme leftists who believe they are participating in a new and glorious communist revolution. In this ideological confusion communist flags fly alongside ones depicting Christ. There is no inkling that maybe Putin believes in none of this and in one thing only: power.
A few weeks later Erwan posted on his blog that he had been offline for two weeks because he had been on a reconnaissance mission. He discussed how the militias of the two would-be republics were being turned into conventional armies and were an example to the peoples of Europe who wanted to liberate themselves from American hegemony.
In the spring of 2015, a year after the war began, the UNHCR, the arm of the United Nations tasked with caring for refugees, estimated that 1.25 million people from Donbass were displaced withi
n Ukraine and 822,700 had fled abroad, mostly, but not only, to Russia. This meant that from the area held by the two separatist republics in which some 4.5 million had lived before the war, more than 2 million had left. Whatever happens, many, if not most, of them will never go back, especially if the conflict drags on or freezes in such a way that the region remains what it has already become, one with little real functioning economy.
Four of those who left are from the Yemchenko family, whom I first met before they fled.
On April 17, 2014, Olena Yemchenko came to the last pro-Ukrainian rally in Donetsk. She was forty-three years old, born in Taganrog in Russia, of mixed Russian and Ukrainian background and had lived in Donetsk since the age of seven. Some 2,000 turned up to the rally, which was guarded by serried ranks of black-clad riot police. I told Olena that I thought this was not an impressive turnout for such a big city, but she said she was very happy that so many had come because all day, rumors had been coursing through social media that the rally would be attacked by separatists, so many had been too frightened to come. At a clash between pro-Ukrainians and pro-Russians in March, one pro-Ukrainian had been killed.