Just as the Crimean crisis began to ebb, attention shifted
to Ukraine’s south-east. The Crimean events provoked what is sometimes called
the ‘Russian spring’, an outburst of Russian self-expression in Ukraine, but
just like the ‘Arab Spring’, it soon turned into the deepest midwinter. On 1
March a 7,000-strong crowd gathered in the central square in Donetsk carrying
Russian flags and the flag of a hitherto unknown organisation known as the
‘Donetsk Republic’. There were further demonstrations across cities in eastern
Ukraine, warning against attack by radical nationalists from Kiev but more
immediately fearing that their language and other rights would be abrogated.
The movement was fired by alarmist reports in the Russian and regional media, which
for weeks had been condemning the radicalisation of the Maidan. The protests,
with justification, were suspected of being sponsored in part by Yanukovych,
especially since his network of mayors and officialdom remained in place, yet
it also had deep local roots. While the degree of separatist feeling in the
region is contested, the rebellion gradually turned into a full-scale war.
Ukraine’s domestic contradictions have been internationalised, with Russia
supporting the insurgents on the one side, while the Western powers have lined
up in support of the Ukrainian authorities. Instead of snatching Crimea and
withdrawing to allow the storm to pass, Russia has been sucked into a new and
far more intense conflict, drawing upon it the wrath of the West.
THE DONBAS RISES
The ‘other’ Ukraine sought to be part of the dialogue about
what it means to be Ukrainian. A poll by the Pew Research Center in May 2014
found that 70 per cent of eastern Ukrainians wanted to keep the country intact,
including 58 per cent of Russian-speakers, although they expressed plenty of
grievances against Kiev, including the over-centralised state that took all tax
revenues before redistributing them to the regions. Both Donetsk and Lugansk
were heavily subsidised by Kiev, receiving far more from the budget than they
contributed, to keep the loss-making mines and mills working. Nevertheless, the
Donbas represented the country’s economic powerhouse, accounting for 16 per
cent of GDP and 27 per cent of industrial production.
Above all, some 60 per cent of Donetsk residents feared
‘Banderovtsy’ and 50 per cent dreaded the Kiev authorities, while 71 per cent
of Donetsk and 60 per cent of Lugansk residents believed that the Maidan events
represented an armed coup organised by the opposition and the West. Majorities
in other regions in the south-east agreed that the protests were an uprising
‘against the corruption and tyranny of the Yanukovych dictatorship’. Gessen
describes how one future rebel in the east was shocked to see how
young men in masks and the insignia of old Ukrainian fascist
movements attacked riot police [in the Maidan] – some of them from the Donetsk
area – with Molotov cocktails. He saw governors in the western provinces pulled
out of their offices and roughed up by furious crowds. It seemed that the
country was descending into chaos. When he heard a rumour that some of the
young men from Maidan were headed for Donetsk, he believed it.
Any simplistic division of the country into a nationalistic
west, a ‘pro-Russian’ east and a patriotic centre does not begin to capture the
complex pattern of responses to the breakdown of Ukrainian statehood. What is
clear is that a new relationship was required with the Donbas, but it was not
forthcoming. The Ukrainian parliament’s attempt to remove Russian as a second
regional language was blocked, but the damage was done. As one respondent
noted: ‘Is there any other country on earth where a language understood by 100%
of the population is not a language of state?’
A grass-roots protest movement welled up throughout March
2014, clearly enjoying popular support. Whereas the Maidan protesters were
‘middle class and nationalistic’, the anti-Maidan movement in the Donbas was
‘lower class and anti-oligarchic (and Russian nationalist)’. When the acting minister
of the interior, Avakov, visited Donetsk in mid-March, ‘he met with civic
leaders, but most of all he met with the football ultras, and demanded that
they arm themselves and prepare for battle against the pro-Russian forces in
the city’. The ultras are hard-core football fans whose far-right views and
violent hooliganism were now turned in support of the Kiev regime, as was seen
in Odessa on 2 May, and their terrace chant of ‘Putin khuilo!’ (‘Putin is a
dickhead!’) was repeated on 14 June by the acting foreign minister, Andriy
Deshchytsia, when the Russian embassy in Kiev was besieged by an angry mob.
Fighter jets flew low over the pro-Donbas protests, and it appeared that ‘from
the very start, Kiev had been prepared to use force’. On 10 March the former
governor of Kharkov, Mikhail Dobkin, was arrested on charges of leading a
separatist movement. From 6 April insurgents occupied government buildings in
Donetsk, Gorlovka and Kramatorsk. In Kharkov on 8 April some 70 anti-Maidan
protesters were arrested and faced politically charged trials, and this was
enough to pre-empt further action in Ukraine’s second city. In the Donbas,
however, the insurgency continued to spread. These were not the professional
‘little green men’ seen earlier in Crimea, but ramshackle forces made up
overwhelmingly in the first instance by local volunteers. However, on 12 April
the administration, police and other buildings in Slavyansk were occupied by
what appeared to be highly trained professional armed forces without insignia.
As Gessen puts it: ‘At that moment, what had been a people’s uprising turned
into an armed revolt, and some would say a covert invasion.’
One of the first acts of the insurgents was to take over
regional television stations to restore the broadcast of Russian television,
cut by order of the central authorities in many regions on 11 March. The
insurgents set up checkpoints and established an armed presence in the major
towns. Supporters of federalisation refused to recognise the legitimacy of the
new Ukrainian authorities and called on the government to allow referendums
similar to the one in Crimea. In Donetsk protesters occupied the regional
administration buildings and on 7 April proclaimed the Donetsk People’s
Republic (DPR), and next door a Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) was formed on
27 April. The ‘people’s governor’ of Lugansk, Valery Bolotov, announced the
formation of the Donetsk People’s Army, whose leader soon became Igor Girkin,
whose nom de guerre is Strelkov (‘the shooter’). A former colonel in the
Russian army (some accounts say he served in the main intelligence directorate,
the GRU, of the General Staff), he fought in Chechnya, in Transnistria and with
the Serbs in Bosnia, and was one of the leaders of the takeover in Crimea. He
came to the Donbas in May with around two dozen men but soon built up one of
the most formidable rebel units of some 2,000 men. He later claimed to have
been ‘the one who pulled the trigger on this war’. The Donbas was in revolt,
and on 24 May the two entities established a de jure union known as the
‘Novorossiya Republic’. They sought to capitalise on the emotional power of the
concept.
Avakov accused Moscow and the ousted president Yanukovych of
‘ordering and paying for another wave of separatist turmoil in the country’s
east’. Using his characteristic form of communication, his Facebook page, he
insisted that ‘a firm approach will be used against all who attack government
buildings, law enforcement officers and other citizens’. The storming of
government offices in the west of the country in the final months of
Yanukovych’s rule was considered something entirely different – part of the
revolutionary surge in support of monist nationalism – whereas now the
‘anti-Maidan’ insurgency using the same tactics in support of pluralism was
called a terrorist movement. In mid-April the Ukrainian security service (SBU)
took control of what was called the ‘anti-terrorist operation’ (ATO) – the
constitution allows only this designation for an internal counter-insurgency
operation, although that does not render the designation any less forbidding.
Government forces re-established control over several major towns, including
Mariupol, Kirovsk and Yampol, and the insurgency in the end was limited to
parts of the Donbas.
The leadership of the insurgency was a motley crew. They
included Denys Pushilin, one of the organisers of the MMM pyramid scheme in
Donetsk in the 1990s, while Nikolai Solntsev, a technologist at a
meat-processing plant, became the DPR’s ideology minister. Most leaders were blue-collar
workers with limited outside experience. They drew on the experience of Crimea
to plan their actions and were deeply imbued with Soviet values, looking to
Russia to provide support for their alternative to Maidan-style Europeanism.
This applied in particular to Girkin, who soon became one of the most effective
rebel commanders in the Donbas. In mid-May he assumed command of all insurgent
forces and called on Russia to intervene. It is far from clear how much direct
control Moscow could exert over a man who described himself as a monarchist and
condemned the USSR and the post-Communist Kremlin authorities. His hobby was
dressing up in costume to re-enact historical battles, part of the Russian
paramilitary subculture, and he now donned a real uniform and proved himself a
ruthless and capable guerrilla leader until he ‘disappeared’ in August.
The OSCE had created a ‘special monitoring mission’ to the
region in March, but on 25 April a group of seven foreign military monitors
from the OSCE and five Ukrainian military observers were detained in Slavyansk.
The ‘people’s mayor’ of the city offered to swap the observers in exchange for
the release of his supporters detained by the Kiev authorities. Russia, as an
OSCE member, condemned the capture, and soon after the observers were released.
On 28 April the shooting of Gennady Kernes, the pro-Kiev mayor of Kharkov,
Ukraine’s second city, demonstrated how far events in the east were spiralling
out of control. Kernes had opposed the Maidan, but he reversed his position
following Yanukovych’s ouster, and he was wounded shortly afterwards.
The conflict became a struggle between west and east
Ukraine, with endless shades between. The physical and rhetorical violence of
the Maidan was generalised to the rest of the country. The language of the Kiev
forces is quite shocking in its brutality. Already in March, in a conversation
about Putin, probably recorded by Russian intelligence, Tymoshenko declared:
‘I’m willing to take a Kalashnikov and shoot the bastard in the head.’ The
Orangist demonisation of Putin soon entered the bloodstream of discourse in the
Western world, poisoning sensible discussion. Tymoshenko was equally
bloodthirsty in her condemnation of the insurgency in the east and no less
extreme in her evaluation of the larger geopolitical situation: ‘Putin is
attempting to uproot the world’s security system, established as a result of
[the]
Second World War, and turn the global[…] order into chaos. Redrawing
world maps by wars, mass murders and blood is becoming his Mein Kampf.’ The new
Kiev authorities were fighting for their survival, but their ‘Orange’ vision of
Ukraine was rejected by the insurgents in the Donbas and, in part, by Moscow.
Anger and resentment would be laid down for generations.
The ferocity of the ATO can in part be explained by the view
of many in western Ukraine that the people of the Donbas were not ‘real
Ukrainians’, but Russians who had come to replace those who had died in the
Holodomor and to staff the industrialisation of the region from the 1930s. They
were often denigrated by monists as lacking intellect and ‘national identity’,
and could thus be considered a Russian incubus that needed to be cut out to
ensure the healthy development of the Ukrainian nation. When asked in a famous
YouTube interview ‘What should we do now with the 8 million Russians that
stayed in Ukraine? They are outcasts?’ Tymoshenko responded: ‘They must be
killed with nuclear weapons.’ To which the man answered: ‘I won’t argue with
you here because what happened is absolutely unacceptable.’ This reflected the
restitutive model of Ukrainian statehood with a vengeance, the idea that there
was some Platonic ideal statehood to which the country should return. Where the
actual population differed from the ideal, it was to be subject to special
measures to bring it into conformity with the ideologically appropriate format.
When Putin in his Direct Line session of 17 April brought up
the notion of Novorossiya, it was not clear what he had in mind. His assessment
of the situation was vivid and clear:
Regarding the question of what should come first: a
constitutional referendum followed by elections, or elections first to
stabilise the situation and then a referendum. The essential issue is how to
ensure the legitimate rights and interests of ethnic Russians and
Russian-speakers in the south-east of Ukraine. I would like to remind you that
what was called Novorossiya [New Russia] back in the tsarist days – Kharkov,
Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine back
then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet
government. Why? Who knows. They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great
in a series of well-known wars. The centre of that territory was Novorossiisk,
so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various
reasons, but the people remained. Today, they live in Ukraine, and they should
be full citizens of their country. That’s what this is all about.
Was this a reference to his comment to US President George
W. Bush in Bucharest in 2008 that ‘Ukraine is not really a state’, and thus a
call for the dismemberment of the country? Novorossiya was a special tsarist
administrative arrangement for a broad swath of territory running along the Black
Sea as far as Moldova, and its incorporation into the new Ukrainian SSR in 1922
was as controversial then as it has once again become now. Or was it simply an
attempt to stress that Ukraine was made up of many traditions, and thus a call
to give institutional form to pluralism, diversity and different identities?
Either way, it galvanised those who sought to exploit Ukrainian state weakness
for their own ends.
The extent of Moscow’s materiel and personnel support is far
from clear. A welter of volunteers spilled across the border, drawn from the
old opposition that had fought against Yeltsin in 1993, Cossack groups, Chechen
militants, and a range of Russian nationalist and neo-Soviet imperialists. The
danger, as with volunteer militants in Syria, is that these battle-hardened and
radicalised fighters would gain experience and then ‘blow back’ into Russia,
and potentially pose a threat to Putin himself if he failed to meet their
expectations about supporting the rebellion in Ukraine. In his 17 April Direct
Line programme he noted:
Refusing to see that something was badly wrong in the
Ukrainian state and to start a dialogue, the government threatened to use
military force and even sent tanks and aircraft against civilians. It was one
more serious crime committed by the current Kiev rulers.
In this broadcast Putin acknowledged that the ‘green men’ in
Crimea were in fact Russian forces.
Separatist aspirations were not supported by the majority of
the population, and the insurgents rejected the ‘separatist’ label, while the
mainstream Western view that the insurgency consisted of ‘terrorists’ backed by
Moscow is equally false. A well-known survey by the Kyiv International
Institute of Sociology (KIIS) from 29 April to 11 May 2014 revealed that only
20–30 per cent of the population of the Donbas supported outright separatism,
slightly fewer supported Kiev, while about half were in the middle. Various
types of autonomy were supported by 54 per cent, but in the Donbas only 8 per
cent favoured independence, 23 per cent supported joining Russia, while a
further 23 per cent favoured greater autonomy within Ukraine. The majority of
the insurgent leadership came from the Donbas, with some from other regions of
Ukraine, including Crimea. This demonstrates that there was no overwhelming
desire to leave Ukraine, but it also shows a high level of alienation. Serhiy
Kudelia’s study confirms this finding, arguing that despite Western accusations
that the insurgency was provoked and sponsored by Russia, it was in fact
‘primarily a homegrown phenomenon’: ‘political factors – state fragmentation,
violent regime change, and the government’s low coercive capacity – combined
with popular emotions specific to the region – resentment and fear – played a
crucial role in launching the armed secessionist movement there’. It would take
skilful political management to bring these people back into the fold of
Ukrainian state-building. Instead, aspirations for federalism were considered
tantamount to separatism, provoking military action and a devastating civil
war.
The insurgents announced a referendum on the
self-determination of the Donbas for 11 May. On 7 May Putin urged the
referendums to be postponed, but they went ahead anyway with a very simple
wording: ‘Do you support the creation of the Donetsk People’s Republic?’ and a
similar question in Lugansk. Turnout in both regions was reported to be 75 per
cent, with 89 and 96 per cent, respectively, voting for independence. Neither
Kiev nor the West recognised the ballot as legitimate, with Poroshenko
resolutely condemning the vote, although Firtash on 12 May argued that
federalisation was the only acceptable option and that Ukraine should be a
neutral state, and he personally was ready to step in to act as an intermediary
between Russia and Ukraine. The vote can at best be taken as indicative of
widespread ‘separatist’ sentiment at that time and should be tempered by the
results of opinion surveys which, as noted, show a strong commitment to
Ukrainian integrity. Nevertheless, the high level of dissatisfaction among the
Blues is hardly surprising since for the second time in a decade a leadership
that reflected their concerns was removed in contentious circumstances. On this
occasion the interim administration formed after 22 February lacked representation
from the Donbas and propounded a virulently monist ideology. This certainly
does not justify armed rebellion, but helps explain the logic of developments.
The agreement between the DPR and the LPR establishing
Novorossiya on 24 May was a propaganda move designed to rally support within
Ukraine and volunteers from Russia proper. This was accompanied by accusations
that Russia was massing a 40,000-strong army on its western border, ready for a
possible invasion, and that Russian undercover operatives were fomenting the
occupations and blockade. The troops were ordered back and forth to follow the
various diplomatic contortions, while NATO and Western leaders repeatedly
claimed that Russia had invaded or was on the verge of doing so, a crying of
wolf that in the end rather discredited them. Instead, Russia trained and
filtered in some genuine volunteers, as well as regular forces as ‘advisors’, a
category well known from the early stages of US interventions, and only in
August did Russian ‘volunteer’ paratroopers apparently take part in regular
battles. The insurgents came to be dubbed ‘pro-Russian separatists’, and while
this may be accurate for some of them, the rebellion reflected broader concern
about the lack of constitutional and political defence for their way of life
and historical economic and cultural links with Russia.
The pluralists in the Donbas and other Russophone regions
seized the opportunity to institutionalise their long-term aspirations for
Russian to be made a second state language and for genuine power-sharing of the
regions in a more federal state. This was a quite legitimate democratic
aspiration, and could have transformed the agenda of the Maidan into a
genuinely national movement. The interim government in Kiev was resistant to such
a broadening, given its deep roots in the monist tradition. At the same time,
the pluralists in the Donbas and more widely in ‘Novorossiya’ lacked democratic
and civil-society organisational capacity. The years of polarisation and
corruption had deeply eroded the bases of civic activism. The PoR had become
little more than a claque of the Yanukovych regime, and was deeply
factionalised between the various oligarchs. It was discredited and in disarray
following Yanukovych’s ouster. The CPU remained a bastion of neo-Soviet
sentiment, winning some 13 per cent of the vote in the 2012 parliamentary
election, but was largely discredited because of its failure to condemn
Yanukovych’s excesses. All that was left were a few individual politicians who
could give voice to pluralist sentiments, while oligarchs like Akhmetov hedged
their bets. Firtash added his voice in support of the pluralists, but, isolated
in Vienna, he was unable to bolster the cause of compromise.
Although it became axiomatic in much of the West that the
insurgency was financed and sponsored by Russia, evidence of this before August
is far from conclusive. The provenance of the insurgents who emerged in April
2014 to take over administrative buildings in Slavyansk, Kramatorsk and Donetsk
is unclear, but they were certainly not the ‘little green men’ who had operated
so effectively and clinically in taking over Crimea. The story of Artur
Gasparyan, an Armenian from Spitak, is a moving tale of how he volunteered to
fight for the resistance in Ukraine and was given assistance and training in
Russia by shadowy organisations and then transferred to the Donbas. He was part
of the chaotic attempt to take over Prokofiev International Airport in Donetsk
on 26 May. The fighters simply did not believe that the Ukrainian military
would bomb the gleaming new terminal, built for the Euro 2012 football
championship, and hence left their anti-aircraft missiles back at base. In
their chaotic flight one of the trucks was destroyed by ‘friendly fire’. After
several weeks Gasparyan was transferred back to Russia and home. Asked why he,
an Armenian, volunteered, he stated: ‘I don’t consider Russia a foreign
country. I have the mentality of a Soviet person. My grandfathers fought for
the Soviet Union and I am fighting for it.’
There is no more controversial issue than the extent to
which Russia was implicated in inciting and supporting the insurgency. What is
incontrovertible is that two elements developed in parallel: a genuine regional
revolt adopting the tactics of the Maidan against the ‘Ukrainising’ and
anti-Russian policies pursued by the Kiev authorities; and the strategic
political considerations of Moscow, which exploited the insurgency to exercise
leverage against the Kiev government to achieve defined goals – above all a
degree of regional devolution, initially called federalisation – as well as to
ensure that the strategic neutrality of the country was maintained. These
goals, as well as the establishment of Russian as a second state language, may
well have been in the best interests of Ukraine itself, but the method was
catastrophic for the region and the country. Russia may well have stirred the
pot at the beginning, and thereafter held regular consultations with resistance
leaders, but the scale of its initial materiel support was greatly exaggerated
by the Kiev government and its Western supporters. Moscow did allow a stream of
volunteers to join the resistance, and some military equipment found its way
across the border. But a constant refrain of the resistance movement was the
lack of supplies and support; they repeatedly called on Russia to be more
assertive in its backing, including direct military intervention, although this
would only ever be a desperate measure. Moscow had learned the lessons of
Afghanistan and the West’s own ill-advised interventions in that country, Iraq
and Libya. Nevertheless, already in April NATO foreign ministers announced that
they would suspend practical cooperation and military ties with Russia because
of its actions in Ukraine, while once again (as in August 2008) the NATO–Russia
Council proved itself to be useless.
PEACE AND WAR
A meeting in Geneva between Ukraine, Russia, the US and the
EU on 17 April sought to start a process of ‘de-escalation’, the term used in
this crisis to try to create an ‘off-ramp’ from the internationalised civil
conflict. The brief joint statement by the countries involved called for
‘initial concrete steps to de-escalate tensions and restore security for all
citizens’, and stipulated a number of measures:
All sides must refrain from any violence, intimidation or
provocative actions. The participants strongly condemned and rejected all
expressions of extremism, racism and religious intolerance, including
anti-semitism.
All illegal armed groups must be disarmed; all illegally
seized buildings must be returned to legitimate owners; all illegally occupied
streets, squares and other public places in Ukrainian cities and towns must be
vacated.
Amnesty will be granted to protestors and to those who have
left buildings and other public places and surrendered weapons, with the
exception of those found guilty of capital crimes.
It was agreed that the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission
should play a leading role in assisting Ukrainian authorities and local
communities in the immediate implementation of these de-escalation measures
wherever they are needed most, beginning in the coming days. The U.S., E.U. and
Russia commit to support this mission, including by providing monitors.
The announced constitutional process will be inclusive,
transparent and accountable. It will include the immediate establishment of a
broad national dialogue, with outreach to all of Ukraine’s regions and
political constituencies, and allow for the consideration of public comments
and proposed amendments.
The participants underlined the importance of economic and
financial stability in Ukraine and would be ready to discuss additional support
as the above steps are implemented.
The onus was placed on the Ukrainians to take the
initiative, with the international community to assist in the implementation of
the de-escalation measures. The signatories agreed that that all armed
formations should be disbanded, but it was not clear who would be able to do
this, or the scope of the provision – would it include the armed battalions
spawned by the Maidan? While the Western powers held Russia responsible for
controlling the insurgents in the east and getting them to leave occupied
buildings and installations, as we have seen they were mostly not under the direct
control of a single authority. The situation was exacerbated by the lack of
eastern representation at Geneva. Moscow’s attempts to get the supporters for
regional autonomy invited had been blocked by Kiev, but now the eastern
insurgents were held responsible for fulfilling decisions in whose adoption
they were not involved.
The Geneva deal was ignored by both sides, although its
principles were to be at the core of all subsequent ceasefires. On 5 May,
government forces attacked checkpoints around Slavyansk, with the two sides
exchanging mortar fire, and the insurgents were able to down a helicopter using
a hand-held air-defence system. On 9 May government forces using tanks and
heavy weaponry retook the interior ministry building in Mariupol, in which at least
seven ‘separatists’ were killed and 40 wounded. In another action in Mariupol
on 16 May insurgents attacked a local military base. The insurgents had taken
over Prokofiev International Airport in Donetsk on 26 May, but in a ferocious
counter-attack it was retaken by government forces, at great cost in lives and
damage. On 28 May insurgents in Slavyansk shot down a military helicopter,
killing all 14 servicemen on board, and on 14 June in Lugansk insurgents shot
down a Ukrainian military aircraft, killing all 49 servicemen on board (of whom
nine were crew). And so the fighting went on. Both sides were subject to
international humanitarian law (the laws of war), and both sides egregiously
disregarded them, above all in targeting civilian populations, using
disproportionate force, not respecting the rights of journalists and abusing
the rights of prisoners. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is a signatory party to the
Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, with the mandate to
try people suspected of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, so it
would take a UN Security Council referral to activate an investigation.
