A Very Expensive Poison (27 page)

Over the coming weeks and months, Putin would describe the uprising in Ukraine as a ‘fascist coup’. According to the Kremlin, dark right-wing forces seized power in Kiev, with the support of the US and European
governments. In turn, Putin said, Moscow was forced to ‘protect’ Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority from nationalist, ‘neo-Nazi’ attack.

As it turned out, the real coup took place not in Kiev but in Crimea. A week after Yanukovych’s exit, masked gunmen seized the regional parliament building in Simferopol, Crimea’s regional capital. Some of the gunmen were the same Berkut snipers responsible for shooting dead protesters on the streets of Kiev, now fleeing arrest. Others were Russian special forces. A vote of deputies took place while men with Kalashnikovs guarded the entrance. Sergey Aksyonov, a pro-Russian politician whose party won a paltry 4 per cent of the vote in 2010, became Crimea’s PM.

Meanwhile, Russian troops seized key installations. They encircled garrisons of Ukrainian soldiers, leaving them little choice but to surrender. Putin initially denied that these mysterious armed individuals – nicknamed ‘polite little green men’ – were undercover Russian forces. He later admitted that he’d been lying to the international community all along. A hastily arranged ‘referendum’ confirmed Crimea’s secession from Ukraine. In March, Putin annexed the territory.

The immediate big losers were Crimea’s Tartars. The Tartars – whose claim to the peninsula long pre-dates Russia’s – snubbed the referendum and supported Kiev. Russia’s state media promptly cast them as pro-Ukrainian fifth columnists. The Kremlin banned the Tartar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev from Crimean territory; young Tartars began disappearing and turning up dead. It was
depressing and familiar stuff: the modern persecution of an ethnic group deported by Stalin.

The threat to Crimea from ‘neo-Nazis’ was a Kremlin fiction, a rationale for a Crimea invasion plan cooked up long before. The far right did play a role in the Kiev uprising – but a minor one. The movement against Yanukovych was broad-based. It involved all sections of society. There were nationalists and liberals, socialists and libertarians, atheists and believers. There were workers from the provinces, as well as IT geeks from Kiev more at home with MacBooks than Molotovs.

The protesters who died were a diverse bunch. The first was an ethnic Armenian; another Russian. One was Joseph Schilling, a 61-year-old builder from western Ukraine, who was shot in the head by a sniper while standing beneath the neoclassical October Palace. Schilling was one of 102 civilians who perished. He was Jewish. The main synagogue in Kiev is a few hundred metres from the Maidan. It was untouched. Ukraine’s chief rabbi, Moshe Reuven Azman, told me there was no evidence of an anti-Semitic backlash.

In the days after the revolution, the far right camped out at the bottom of the Maidan in the four-star Hotel Dnipro. This was the headquarters of Pravy Sektor. Pravy Sektor – ‘Right Sector’ – was an ultra-nationalist organisation. Its deputy leader, Andriy Tarasenko, refused to talk in Russian – universally understood in Ukraine. Speaking in Ukrainian, which I struggled to understand, he said his party didn’t want to be involved in post-revolutionary parliamentary politics.
Was he a fascist? ‘Putin is the fascist. He’s the occupier,’ he replied.

I arrived in Kiev as Russian troops swarmed over Crimea. I took a taxi out to the city’s high-rise suburbs to meet Olexiy Haran, a professor of politics and a member of the Maidan’s organising committee. Haran looked exhausted and strung out. He was a prominent opponent of the Yanukovych regime. It had been a scary few months. The professor took a hammer with him to protests on the Maidan, as well as an orange helmet and a gas mask.

A group of academics, including Haran, had signed a letter complaining of a ‘dangerous tendency’ to distort what happened during the revolution. Reports exaggerating the role of ultra-nationalist actors ended up serving ‘Russian imperialism’, they said. Haran expressed frustration that the Kremlin’s ‘fascist’ trope had taken root in some western minds. ‘I’ve had liberal Harvard professors asking me about this. We are talking traditional Russian propaganda,’ he told me.

The fast-moving events of the previous three months had been about ‘national liberation’, he argued – a movement against corruption and in favour of decency and the rule of law. Those who took part formed a confusing mosaic. They had different backgrounds and motivations. The protesters turned violent only in response to increasing police ferocity and the radicalisation of Yanukovych’s regime, the professor said.

In May 2014, Petro Poroshenko, a self-made businessman who owned a chocolate factory in Russia, won
Ukraine’s presidential election. Poroshenko was an early Maidan supporter who stood on the barricades. Intelligent, decent, and with an increasingly haunted appearance in office, Poroshenko was probably the best candidate for the job. Pravy Sektor, meanwhile, failed to emerge as a serious political force. Its leader Dmytro Yarosh got 0.7 per cent of the vote.

There was a better critique of Ukraine’s new pro-western leaders: that they came from the same political class that had failed Ukraine before. The oligarchs, the country’s shadow rulers, still controlled huge chunks of the economy and its industrial assets. Meanwhile, the Russian-speaking east of the country – Yanukovych’s heartland – was under-represented. His former ruling Party of Regions disavowed its leader and went into opposition.

The mood in eastern Ukraine after the events on the Maidan was, broadly speaking, hostile to Kiev. As one protester told me: Yanukovych may have been a crook, but he was
our
crook. There was overwhelming support for greater autonomy. There was also backing for Russian to be given the status of an official state language. However, educated Ukrainians in Donetsk welcomed Yanukovych’s demise. Opinion polls taken before the president’s flight indicated that the separatists were a minority. Some 26 per cent in the east supported union with Russia.

In Donetsk’s main square – its statue of Lenin a stroll away from a branch of McDonald’s – the communists held regular anti-Kiev rallies. Most communist
supporters were pensioners. There were further pro-Russian demonstrations in the city’s main boulevard. They ended in front of the now-occupied administration building, its balcony adorned with Russian and Donbas flags. A sound system pumped out a string of schmaltzy Russian disco numbers.

Those who took to the streets expressed frustration – at the new government in Kiev, which they believed to be illegal, and at the failures of the Ukrainian state since 1991. Most expressed nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Many were unemployed or in low-paid jobs, I discovered. There was admiration for Russia, which, judging from the shiny version presented by Russian state media, looked like a prosperous and well-run state. Several insisted that those who took part in the Maidan were drug addicts or CIA agents, a claim made repeatedly by Yanukovych’s TV channels.

Still, this didn’t quite feel like a revolution. The crowds outside the occupied Donetsk HQ were often sparse. There were counter-rallies by pro-Ukrainian groups waving blue and yellow flags. The city’s football team, Shakhtar Donetsk, played in a stadium built for the Euro 2012 championship by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, a close ally of Yanukovych’s. Shakhtar’s hardcore supporters – ultras – opposed Russia. During the last match of the season several hundred of them jumped up and down in Ukrainian colours and sang: ‘Putin is a prick.’

By April, however, outside forces were coordinating what Moscow dubbed ‘the Russian spring’.

Previously, separatism had attracted little electoral support here. Now, it got a pseudo-historical makeover. Putin made reference to Novorossiya – or New Russia – a ‘country’ encompassing Ukraine’s eight Russian-speaking regions or
oblasts
, stretching in a southern and eastern arc as far as Odessa and the breakaway Moldovan territory of Transnistria. Novorossiya was a made-up entity. Nevertheless, the flag of ‘Novorossiya’ soon hung from rebel buildings.

The new government’s control over events was slipping away. I watched as a crowd of 300 pro-Russian activists marched through Donetsk, ripping down Ukrainian flags. They seized the city’s TV station, a neo-classical Stalinist building in the east of the city. Masked youths armed with baseball bats ran up the DNR flag from the roof; three men in balaclavas and armed with Kalashnikovs supervised.

The station’s director, Oleg Dzholos, emerged from the building, shaken. He said the separatists had brought with them a technician from Moscow. The technician switched off Ukrainian broadcasts and replaced them with Rossiya 24. The Russian state channel frequently denounces Ukraine’s leaders as ‘fascists’ and runs montages of them with the Nazis. The capture of the TV tower was part of an unfolding plan: to shut out information critical of Moscow and to replace it with Kremlin propaganda.

The suspicion was that the Kremlin – and in particular its main military intelligence directorate, the GRU – was choreographing the takeover of eastern Ukraine. It was making use of three groups: veterans with military
experience of the Soviet war in Afghanistan; members of sports clubs; and local mafia networks. Pro-Ukrainian activists said that Russia had recruited numerous agents inside the local police and security forces.

The DNR’s new ‘defence minister’ was Igor Strelkov, a Russian citizen and GRU colonel. His real family name was Girkin. Strelkov was a veteran of conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia and Transnistria who would become a cult figure in Russia. In Crimea, he supervised the Russian military invasion. He advised Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed PM. In early April, Strelkov left Crimea for Donbas. He was going to start a war.

Strelkov later told Russian media he crossed the Russian–Ukrainian border with a squad of Russian special forces officers. His group included fifty-two undercover soldiers. They seized Slavyansk and in the days that followed kick-started the occupations of municipal buildings. ‘It was me who pulled the trigger of war,’ Strelkov told the
Zavtra
newspaper. Strelkov said that without his ‘decisive’ contribution the pro-Russian uprising in Donetsk would have fizzled out – as it did in the cities of Kharkiv and Odessa.

The response from Europe to the major crisis unfolding on its eastern border was feeble and unconvincing. Putin’s land grab in Crimea was the first formal annexation of territory in Europe since 1945. By spring 2014 it was clear that Russia was laying the ground for a full-scale military conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk. Money, heavy weaponry, intelligence, political support and soldiers – some
disguised as ‘volunteers’, some from regular Russian army units – were flowing into the new DNR and LNR.

There were two possible scenarios. One, the Kremlin might seek to annex these regions, as with Crimea. Two, it might establish puppet enclaves, controlled by Moscow. These pseudo-statelets would be similar to other disputed regions already occupied by Russian forces. They included Transnistria, where Russian troops had been stationed since the 1990s, and the breakaway Georgian micro-territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Putin’s aims were uncertain. Perhaps the president didn’t know himself. They went beyond territorial gain. They must have included undermining the pro-western government in Kiev and embroiling it in a debilitating on-off war. Analysts used the term ‘frozen’ to describe unresolved post-Soviet conflicts. But frozen wasn’t the right word here. Rather, Moscow could turn the temperature up or down in the Donbas, depending on political need. There could be diplomacy and ceasefires; military offensives and covert actions; or both at the same time.

The crisis was a fundamental challenge to Europe’s security order. This system – with the exception of the war in former Yugoslavia – had kept the peace for almost seventy years. Its principles were partnership and international law. In 1994, the US, UK and Russia had guaranteed Ukraine’s international borders. All parties signed a treaty, the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine agreed to give up its stockpile of nuclear weapons, at the time the world’s third largest. In exchange it got security assurances, worthless ones.

Russia was turning the clock back – to an era of great powers and spheres of influence. Its foreign-policy officials floated the idea of holding a second Congress of Vienna – in effect, a new carve-up of Europe. (At the first one, back in 1815, Europe’s victorious nations met to decide the fate of the continent following the defeat of Napoleonic France.)

This plan built on Medvedev’s 2008 comments that Russia had ‘privileged interests’ in its post-Soviet ‘near abroad’. In effect, this meant that Moscow believed it had the right to veto the security and foreign policy of neighbouring states. In particular, it was entitled to prevent them from joining Nato. The Russian government viewed Nato as an implacably hostile and encircling force.

Putin had never thought much of Ukraine’s sovereignty. According to Poland’s former foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, cited in leaked US diplomatic cables, Russia’s president described Ukraine as a ‘cobbled together country’ with 6 million Russians in it. Now, it appeared, Moscow regarded its neighbour as sub-sovereign. It was to be treated as a rebellious colony or misbehaving province – like Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, where tanks met anti-Soviet uprisings.

According to Putin’s new Crimea doctrine, Russia was entitled to ‘protect’ ethnic Russians wherever they were. The collapse of the Soviet Union had stranded large numbers of them outside the formal boundaries of the Russian Federation – in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Moldova and northern Kazakhstan. Putin wasn’t Hitler, whatever cartoons on the Maidan might say. But his
apparent project to redeem left-behind Russians was reminiscent of Adolf’s own ‘co-ethnic’ policy, used to justify Germany’s
Anschluss
of Austria and seizure of the Sudetenland.

The doctrine raised the question: where next?

The answer came in autumn 2015 when Moscow launched a series of air strikes in Syria. The ostensible target was Islamic State terrorists. In reality, those bombed were less extreme groups fighting against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.