The Red Stix: Links and Articles - Appendix 1: GRU and Crimea - Eastern Ukraine Criminal Underworlds
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They were thinking far too small. Already it has become clear that the conflict in Ukraine is having an impact on not just the regional but the global underworld. As one Interpol analyst told me, "What's happening in Ukraine now matters to criminals from Bogotá to Beijing."
Crime, especially organized crime, has been at the heart of the events in Ukraine from the start. Many of the burly and well-armed "self-defense volunteers" who came out on the streets alongside the not-officially-Russian troops turned out to be local gangsters, and the governing elite there have close, long-term relations with organized crime. Likewise, in eastern Ukraine, criminals have been sworn in as members of local militias and even risen to senior ranks, while the police, long known for their corruption, are fighting alongside them.
Now Ukraine is beginning to shape crime around the rest of the planet.
While it was only to be expected that Crimea and eastern Ukraine might be integrated even more closely into the Russian organized crime networks, it looks as though Ukraine's gangsters are perversely stepping up their cooperation with their Russian counterparts even while Kiev fights a Moscow-backed insurgency.
Just as the Kremlin was setting up its new administration in newly annexed Crimea, so, too, were the big Moscow-based crime networks sending their smotryashchye—the term means a local overseer, but now also means, in effect, an ambassador—there to connect with local gangs. In part, they're interested in the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement of the massive inflow of federal development funds perhaps $4.5 billion this year alone—and the newly-announced casino complexes to be built near the resort city of Yalta. They're also looking to the Black Sea smuggling routes and the opportunity to make the Crimean port of Sevastopol the next big smuggling hub.
These days, the Ukrainian port of Odessa is the smugglers' haven of choice on the Black Sea. There's Afghan heroin coming through Russia and heading into Western Europe through Romania and Bulgaria, stolen cars coming north from Turkey, unlicensed Kalashnikovs heading into the Mediterranean, Moldovan women being trafficked into the Middle East, and a whole range of criminal commodities head out of Odessa Maritime Trade Port, along with its satellite facilities of Illichivsk and southern ports. Routes head both ways, though, and increasingly there is an inward flow of global illicit goods: Latin American cocaine (either for retransfer by sea or else to be trucked into Russia or Central Europe), women trafficked from Africa, even guns heading to the war zone.
The criminal authorities of Odessa, who have more than a nodding relationship with elements of the "upperworld" authorities, have done well on the back of this trade, charging a "tax" in return for letting their ports become nodes in the global criminal economy. But all of a sudden, they face potential competition in the form of Sevastopol. The Crimean port may currently be under embargo, but it has powerful potential advantages. The main criminal business through Odessa is on behalf, directly or indirectly, of the Russian networks; if they chose to switch their business, then perhaps two thirds of the city's smuggling would be lost. The Russian Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol, and military supply convoys—which are exempt from regular police and customs checks—are a cheap and secure way to transport illicit goods. Finally, the links between the gangsters and local political leaders are at least as close in Crimea as in Odessa. So, if the criminals of Sevastopol can establish reliable shipping routes and are willing to match or undercut Odessa's rates, we could see a major realignment of regional smuggling.
Continued below.
Why does it matter if the ships dock at Sevastopol rather than Odessa? Because if the former can offer lower transit costs and new routes, then not only does it mean the Crimeans can take over existing smuggling business, it also makes new ventures economically viable. For example, already, counterfeit cigarettes are being smuggled to northern Turkey, having been brought into Crimea on military supply ships. Perhaps most alarming are unconfirmed suggestions I have heard from Ukrainian intelligence services—admittedly hardly objective observers—that some oil illegally sold through Turkey by Islamic State militants in Syria might have been moved to Sevastopol's private Avlita docks for re-export.
The Ukraine conflict is also leading to increased organized crime in the rest of Ukraine proper. Protection racketeering, drug sales, even "raiding" (stealing property by presenting fake documents, backed by a bribed judge, thereby allegedly proving that the real owner signed away his rights or has unpaid debts) are all on the rise. To a large extent, this reflects a police force still in chaos (those who backed the old regime face charges and dismissal) and looming economic chaos. It is also a reflection of the country's endemic corruption: The international non-governmental organizationTransparency International ranks Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries in its Corruption Perception Index, and although the national parliament confirmed a new anti-corruption law in October, it will take years to make a difference.
And this isn't just a Ukrainian problem. Preliminary reports from European police and customs bodies also suggest increased smuggling into Europe, and not just of Ukrainian commodities. Latin American cocaine, Afghan heroin, and even cars stolen in Scandinavia are being re-exported through Ukraine into Greece and the Balkans. According to my sources in Moscow, there is also an eastward route bringing illicit goods into Russia. In September, for example, the police broke agunrunning ring that was spread across six regions of Russia and was caught in possession of 136 weapons, including a mortar and machine guns.
Most of this business again depends on the Russian crime networks. As a result, even ethnic Ukrainian criminals are now trying to forge closer strategic alliances with the Russians, even while their two countries are virtually at war. The Muscovites I spoke to on both sides of the law and order threshold pointed to such western Ukrainian nationalist strongholds as Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk as places where, suddenly, Russian gangster business is welcome. Of course, even as their gangsters are collaborating, Kiev and Moscow are scarcely talking—and any lingering police cooperation has essentially collapsed.
Where organized crime flourishes, so too do the shadowy financial businesses that launder their cash. Ukraine's financial sector is notoriously under-regulated and cozy with dubious customers, from the kleptocrats of the old elite (Prime Minister Yatsenyuk has claimed that $37 billion disappeared from the state's coffers during former President Yanukovych's four-year reign) to organized criminals. Still, relatively little international money has traditionally flowed into and through Ukraine's banks, not least because other jurisdictions such as Cyprus, Latvia, and Israel offer equal opportunities with greater efficiency.
However, these other laundries are beginning to become less appealing, not least as countries clean up their acts under international pressure. So just at the time when the world's criminals are looking for new places to clean their ill-gotten gains, Ukraine's are both desperate for business—the country's economy is tanking, having shrunk by 5 percnet over the past year—and increasingly connected to the Russians, the global illegal service providers par excellence. Already, I understand that a US intelligence analysis has suggested that they will be used not only covertly to allow Crimea's embargoed businesses and gangs to move their money in and out, but also to offer up their laundering services to the world. And the world seems to be interested: According to a US Drug Enforcement Administration analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, in September, a sizeable payment for Nigerian methamphetamine bound for Malaysia actually passed through Ukrainian banks.
As the varangians—slang for gangs from Moscow and European Russia—become increasingly strongly entrenched there, working with an array of local criminals, they bind Ukraine all the more tightly with the global underworld. Ukraine has all the resources and facilities of a modern, industrial nation, like ports and banks, but not the capacity to secure and control them. This kind of potential black hole is a priceless asset for the world's gangsters.
Of course, there is one last way the Ukrainian conflict could have a wider criminal impact. If Kiev is finally able to defeat the rebellion in the east, then what do the gangsters who fought for the rebellion do? Some of the most powerful might be able to cut deals with the government or find refuge in Russia, but Moscow shows no signs of wanting to incorporate hundreds of disgruntled and impoverished gun-happy thugs. If what happened after the 1990s civil wars in the Balkans is a guide—and many analysts think it will be—then they will seek to head into Europe and North America. There, they are most likely to turn to criminal activities that draw on their skills and experiences. One French prosecutor I spoke to called them "the next Albanians," referring to the violent and dangerous gangs, especially from Kosovo, that flowed into Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Europe in particular might find itself hard-pressed to respond. The Ukrainian authorities may well be willing to help, but they probably lack the ability to provide much usable intelligence. Meanwhile, the Russians, who probably have the best sense of who the fighters actually are, seem increasingly unlikely to provide any assistance. Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany's BKA, its equivalent of the FBI, recently complained that assistance from Moscow in dealing with Russian organized crime was drying up.
Forget tit-for-tat embargoes. One of the most effective responses to Western sanctions at the Kremlin's disposal may be to encourage the criminalization of Ukraine, and do nothing to help Europe and North America cope with the fallout.
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Gleb Garanich / ReutersLocal residents on bicycles flee from the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Firearms stores in the separatist-held city of Donetsk in east Ukraine stand empty, the guns that once lined the shelves now sold out or stolen at gunpoint.
"In a time of war, everyone wants a weapon. There are just none left to sell or even give away," said manager Alexander Lutsevich in the wood-paneled office of his downtown store.
The ousting of local authorities in east Ukraine by pro-Russian rebels, and a flood of weapons into the region, have led to a breakdown in law and order that further complicates Kiev's efforts to reassert control.
The rebels, who oppose the pro-Western authorities in Kiev, count on the local population for support, but some residents and local businesses are angry that the power vacuum is allowing criminals to thrive.
German wholesaler Metro became the biggest victim in May when rioters broke into the store and looted it after fighting around a nearby airport.
Pictures were posted on the Internet of people wheeling goods away on shopping carts and stories spread that looters had emptied the store's liquor section in a matter of hours.
Metro spokeswoman Olesya Olenytska said security concerns had prevented the company assessing damage at the store, which has been closed since May 26.
The leadership of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, or DNR, which describes its armed uprising in terms of democracy and self-determination, is aware of the dangers of being associated with lawlessness in parts of the region.
The rebels' regional prime minister, Alexander Borodai, has threatened to punish people who brought stolen goods from Metro to DNR headquarters as well as those extorting money from people and businesses in the name of the self-styled republic.
"In some residential areas of the Donetsk People's Republic, there are various gangs that are using the symbol of the DNR and my name to extort a 'tax' from individuals and businesses," he told reporters. "In fact, they haven't even the slightest thing to do with the DNR."
Days after the Metro incident, a group of heavily armed fighters arrived at rebel headquarters in Donetsk to clear the building of looters and stolen goods.
Ukraine's Interior Ministry has halted deliveries of commercial firearms to Donetsk, where the rebels have stripped police of their weapons. Deliveries have likewise been stopped to the neighboring rebellious region of Luhansk.
Lutsevich's Kiev-based company, IBIS, had sent its rifles and handguns back to company stockpiles.
"We had to do it so the temptation did not arise to come in and take them by force," he said.
Power Vacuum
The separatists rose up in east Ukraine in April following the overthrow of a president sympathetic to Moscow and after Russia's annexation of the Crimea peninsula.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is pressing ahead with a military campaign against the rebels after a ceasefire intended to give peace talks a chance expired.
Outside the city of Donetsk, people in rural areas have lived in grinding poverty for decades — a motive for some to take up arms against Kiev — but some fear crime now threatens to rob them of what little they have.
Manning a separatist checkpoint outside his hometown of Druzhkovka, former firefighter Stanislav, 52, rattles off a litany of lawlessness in recent weeks: a pharmacy robbed, a gas station held up, water pipes stolen.
"In times like these, criminals start coming out of the woodwork. We need someone to look out for security, some kind of order," he said.
In sleepy Druzhkovka, people say the new self-proclaimed leadership has brought with it the threat of increased crime, even though crime had long been a problem.
"These people, they are not just militants. Lots of people have got their hands on weapons and they act like they can do whatever they want," said Sarhan Avdev, a migrant from Azerbaijan working in a cobbler's store, as he hammered nails into a pair of women's sandals.
Inside a Unicredit bank branch, a woman who gave her name only as Tatyana said the violence had made it more difficult to restock cash machines, leaving long queues outside banks.
"If there is no authority, no one to answer to, people try to take advantage of the situation, steal, loot," she said standing next to a cash machine covered with a sheet of paper that read "No Money".
Gleb Garanich / Reuters
A member of a group of separatists shows drugs and syringes, which he said were taken from local residents, under a portrait of Soviet-era secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky, inside the office of a rebel commander who calls himself Vostok (East), in the town of Druzhkovka, Donetsk region.
Criminal Past
Donetsk has long had a reputation as a haven for criminals, especially in the first few years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, when organized crime was rampant and rival gangs fought for power and influence.
Donetsk province had more registered crimes than any other area of Ukraine, some 48,500 in 2012. It also had more people involved in organized crime than any other region and the murder rate far outstripped the rest of the country, according to the Ukrainian statistics office.
Slovyansk, a flashpoint for violence, was on one of the biggest drug-trafficking routes, said Albert Nikiforov, a former Donetsk police officer in charge of cracking organized crime.
The extreme wealth that came with the drug trade allowed crime bosses in eastern Ukraine to travel the globe in the 1990s buying up property and opening Swiss bank accounts, he said.
That was until former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who ruled the region as governor from 1997 to 2002 and later became president, imposed order on the crime world, finding a delicate balance between business and political interests.
Nikiforov said the recent violence had upset the balance: "Organized crime has been thrown into disarray by the events and all that's left are common criminals and looters."
The separatists accuse law enforcement officials of corruption and turning a blind eye to crime. One rebel commander who calls himself Vostok, or East, has, like other leaders, disarmed the local police.
He set up joint night patrols grouping officers in uniform and fighters who wander the streets in camouflage fatigues carrying assault rifles.
Sitting in his spartan office, a portrait of Soviet-era secret police chief Felix Dzerzhinsky gazing from the wall, Vostok said crime had dropped in the city since he took command.
But he added: "People have lost the understanding of what is permissible and what is not … Some cannot fight the temptation to take what is not theirs while they believe there is a lack of authority in the city."
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Separatists? Fascists? Disguised Russian special forces? Theories have multiplied to explain who exactly the armed men who have wrested control of parts of Donetsk, Luhansk (Lugansk in Russian), and other areas of eastern Ukraine from the Ukrainian state, cutting its residents off also from participation in the recent presidential elections. Very likely, martial law will follow in the region upon completion of the transfer of presidential powers to Ukraine’s newly elected leader, Petro Poroshenko. The separatist forces have clearly exposed the limits of Kiev’s capacity to govern, and in so doing they have acted in accordance with Russian state interests and swelled the waves of anti-state violence presently engulfing eastern and southern Ukraine.
But these facts alone do not mean that those armed men are simply Russian agents, or even Russian-trained militias. Instead, alongside Russia, the forces of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Lugansk People’s Republic” serve first and foremost what we call a mafia state.
The idea itself is not new. It gained currency particularly in reference to Russia in the wake of WikiLeaks, which disclosed the details of a January 2010 briefing by Spanish prosecutor José Grinda González—one of Europe’s top experts on organized crime—analyzing Russia as a “virtual mafia state.” One year later, British journalist Luke Harding published Mafia State, a memoir detailing the intimidation and Cold War spy-game-like scare tactics that he faced at the hands of Russian secret services while he was The Guardian’s bureau chief in Moscow, an assignment that ended when Russia denied him re-entry in 2011. In recent months, commentators have increasingly—and rightly—pointed out the need to think about Ukraine not just as a state, but also as the sum of its regions. Here the “mafia state” idea can help us to understand the events of recent months, especially the perverse phenomenon of the separatist militia-driven “people’s republics” of the Donbas. Even allowing for the distinctiveness of Soviet legal culture, “rule of law” as such was a myth in the Donbas even before the Soviet collapse. Combine might-trumps-right with the long-standing culture of anomie and graft classically described by Aleksandr Zinoviev as Homo Sovieticus, and you can see that the mafias and “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk have been decades in the making.
Inside the 11-Story Building That's Calling Itself the People's Republic of Donetsk
Writing for The New Republic more than a decade ago, Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin provocatively dubbed much of the post-Soviet space “Trashcanistan”—“a dreadful checkerboard of parasitic states and statelets, government-led extortion rackets and gangs in power, mass refugee camps, and shadow economies.” Instead of Communist Party nomenklatura calling the shots, a parallel power structure developed in the 1980s and 1990s in the form of a client system of black-market privateers and underworld bosses operating on a dramatic scale.
Welcome to the Donbas. The violence, political parasitism, and mafia life undergirding the region’s present chaos have been present since even before the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. This is how the Donbas and its neighboring Dnieper region have produced many of Ukraine’s wealthiest magnates and top national politicians, with the former group feeding the latter courtesy of post-Soviet Ukraine’s wealthiest citizen, Rinat Akhmetov; its former presidents Viktor Yanukovych and Leonid Kuchma; and even its Orange Revolution prime minister and—until recently—Yanukovych’s political prisoner, Yulia Tymoshenko.
At a time when the disintegrating Soviet Union made overnight oligarchs out of former nomenklaturain a process described by political scientist Steven L. Solnick as “stealing the state,” the Donbas’s magnates—some criminals already under Soviet law—prevented the rule of law from emerging in the Donbas and severely limited the formation of a civil society.
If you visit today's Donetsk, Luhansk, or Slovyansk, you can find parks, playgrounds, and cultural life. Sometimes, it is entirely possible to forget the violence that has become endemic to the region. Yet, for many in the Donbas, life is—and for decades has been—nasty, brutish, and short. Yanukovych’s electoral triumph in 2010 on the heels of the implosion of the Orange Revolution coalition papered over this state of affairs. Years before the Soviet Union collapsed, the Donbas was already a case study in failed governance, controlled by neither Kiev nor Moscow—in other words, part of Trashcanistan.
In the first decade of Ukrainian independence, the Donbas had the highest level of criminal activity in all of Ukraine. Between 1990 and 1993, total crime in the Donetsk region increased by 50 percent. In 1991 alone, the Donetsk police department fingered 2,186 criminal groups, which at that time had committed over 4,000 alleged crimes, including 33 murders, 212 robberies, 173 cases of extortion, and so on. Since 1991, the number of organized criminal groups identified by law enforcement agencies has increased steadily.
For those who grew up in post-Soviet Ukraine, Donbas was always whispered to be the place where anyone could fall victim to street shootings, where entrepreneurs refusing kickbacks to one or more local criminal groups could turn up dead. Fear in the 1990s was so widespread there that, even when official statistics reported a drop in criminal activity, harrowing anecdotes from the Donbas continued to preoccupy the whole of Ukraine.
In 2004, Oksana, one of the authors of this essay, interned for the prosecutor’s office in Kharkiv, about 180 miles from Donetsk. When she met a law student from Donetsk and found out that his parents ran a small grocery, she asked if it was safe to run a small business there. His answer: “No—but better than in the ’90s. Today, if you refuse to pay local mafias, sure, they threaten you, your family, your property; a year ago, our car was blown up when we turned a crime boss away. But seven years ago my whole family would have been killed off one by one.”
This past winter, a Fulbright Scholar from Donetsk, during a chat over coffee with Oksana, gave an example of the violence of everyday life in Donetsk. One day, she had interrupted her lecture at the local university in mid-sentence to order her students to lie flat on the floor. She had heard shooting just outside and was afraid that stray AK-47 bullets would come flying into the class. Apparently, this was no isolated occurrence.
Any Ukrainian who has either lived in the Donbas or had relatives or friends there can offer similar examples. More than anecdotes, they attest to how organized crime dominates the cultural and social life of the region. Since its founding, the city of Donetsk—chartered in 1869 by the New Russia Company of Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes—has historically been a site of transient industrial and mining labor. The Soviet Union added penal colonies into the mix. Between 1945 and 1955 alone, about 3.5 million people arrived from all over the Soviet Union in the Donetsk region to work in the mines and factories, many as prisoners. Despite Nikita Khrushchev’s celebrated Gulag amnesties in the mid-1950s, prisoner numbers for the Donbas actually grew when he was in power in Moscow.
Recently released convicts remaining in the area as workers became fodder for an emerging criminal industry based in late-night entertainment, gambling, and trafficking. The breakthrough 2006 exposéThe Donetsk Mafia quoted Sergey Pryjmachuk, the chief of police between 1994 and 1998 in the Donbas city of Slovyansk, as follows: “Criminals took advantage of the fact that recently released prisoners were not in a hurry to leave the Donetsk region as long as people had money. Thus, illegal night clubs and casinos were created, while that was prohibited in the rest of the USSR. Those casinos and night clubs belonged to criminal gangs that cultivated their own territory.”
Even today, there are still 20 prisons in Donetsk and 16 in Luhansk—more than in any another region of Ukraine. As a local saying goes, “every third man in the Donetsk region is in prison, has been in prison, or will be in prison.”
Migrant populations and recently released prisoners cemented into the urban culture of Soviet Donetsk certain norms, customs, and rituals practiced in prisons and labor colonies, from an acceptance of territoriality and racket to more subtle distinguishing traits, such as tattoos, nicknames, and slang. Ukrainian criminological research shows that these norms shaped not only social and economic life, but also Donbas civic and legal cultures. Indeed, in many sectors of Donbas life, legal nihilism became prevalent.
By the 1980s, criminal practices blended in the Donbas with the social psychology of the Homo Sovieticus. Soviet legal practices on the periphery of the USSR had replaced rule of law with a culture of perfunctory obedience, private disdain, and social anomie. Then, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroikaopened the floodgates.
At the same time, the Donbas cities grew more densely populated, and the region as a whole became more urban. Since most towns and cities were built around or near mines and quarries, already by 1966, 87 percent of the Donetsk region’s population was living in urban areas, with a figure of 83 percent for the Luhansk region. One year later, Ukraine accounted for 59 percent of Soviet iron and steel production, 56 percent in coal, and 65 percent in heavy machinery and metallurgy. By 1990, miners amounted to 47 percent of the total urban Donbas population. At the same time, alcoholism and drug abuse proliferated.
The result: “Trashcanistan,” which, in the post-Soviet Donbas, manifested as a mafia state. Already under Gorbachev, carceral norms began to penetrate everyday life in the Donetsk region. Prison gangs took on a visible presence in the public life of the community, in parallel with the moribund Soviet state. Towns in the Donbas acquired gangs of “watchers”—staples of Soviet labor camps, prisoners accumulating power by developing reputations for keeping order.
In this environment, neither rule of law nor civil society developed in the Donbas. As a result, theHomo Sovieticus never disappeared. Indeed, the rise of the mafia state perverted the Homo Sovieticus into a cornerstone of a society more broken than even The Gulag Archipelago. Firearms, strongmen, and public displays of power through violent conflict made crime not only an accepted norm, but the surest means of survival, and even status-building. The Donbas completed its evolution from Ukraine’s industrial center to its center of bloodshed.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, an incomplete and co-opted version of the free market came to a Donbas region already rife with criminal activity. The resource-rich industrial region proved understandably attractive to new generations of mafia leadership looking to cement their social and economic positions by assuming formal control over the worlds of politics and law. As a culture of might-trumps-right shaped successive generations of youth, so the Donbas coal industry hit a rough patch that led to waves of layoffs. Despite ups and downs, the overall trends have persisted: In 2013 alone, 30,000 people in the Donetsk region joined the ranks of the unemployed.
Years before Viktor Yanukovych became president of independent Ukraine, he and his family were already exercising control over the Donetsk region. Ukraine under its successive post-Soviet leaders—Kravchuk, Kuchma, Yushchenko—was a failed state in the Donbas, where mafia connections pointed the surest way to survival, let alone success, in this post-Soviet rust belt territory. In response to a 1994 survey asking Ukrainians what social groups they thought played “a considerable role in state-building in Ukraine,” residents of both eastern and southern Ukraine listed the mafia “underworld” well above any other group (35.9 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively).
Many of Ukraine’s most influential political and economic players have come from this region: not just the two presidents touched most directly by revolutions in Kiev’s Maidan—Kuchma and Yanukovych—but also Rinat Akhmetov, Oleksandr Yefremov, Borys Kolesnikov, and the infamous “Alik Grek” (assassinated in 1995). (An exception to this tendency is Ukraine’s newly elected president, Petro Poroshenko, who was born outside Odessa and grew up in central Ukraine.)
Are these men responsible for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics? And, if so, why? The billions of dollars, euros, and hryvnie tied up in these men’s assets link them both to Russia and to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, displaced by the Maidan revolution. Memory of the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution has played a crucial role in determining the Donbas oligarchs’ reactions to the events of the past six months. As they remember it, the Orange Revolution threatened their world, until the governing Orange coalition’s political incompetence opened the door to Yanukovych’s election to the presidency.
Political scientist Keith Darden rightly argued in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs that the Maidan revolution seems threatening in the Donbas because the “relevant fact for Ukrainian politics is that power shifted in an extreme fashion from one regional base to another.” This is certainly not the first such shift since 1991, but this shift seems particularly threatening to the stakeholders of the Donbas mafia state. Yanukovych was close to the murdered underworld boss “Alik Grek,” whose successors have aligned themselves publicly with Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.
This is the heart of the Donbas mafia state. Its leaders may not speak publicly on behalf of the muddled and tragicomical people’s republics, but by and large they do not oppose these movements. They may well be providing financial support, but it is too early to say for sure who, how much, and within what constraints.
None of this can erase the fact that non-trivial numbers of Donbas residents are in the streets declaring support for Russia, the separatists, or both, while decrying the Maidan government asbanderovtsy (World War II-era Ukrainian nationalists—a term today roughly synonymous with “fascists”). Rust-belt infrastructure, dysfunctional public works—paradoxically, these symbols of the limits of Kiev’s long-term power in the Donbas generate social support for separatism. Add to this both Russian and local propaganda, and the conditions of possibility for the “people’s republics” become clear.
Whatever the extent to which Russia is directly involved, the Donbas has been a powder keg just waiting to explode in the face of the Ukrainian state. With whom is Kiev to negotiate now? The mafia state? The “people’s republicans,” with their AK-47s? Or the retirees and Donbas mining town residents going on record on YouTube as supporting the separatists because they’re tired of only having hot water for a few hours each day?
Moscow can offer no solutions, but a solution from Kiev seems equally elusive at this point. Before eastern and southern Ukraine can accept the consequences of this year’s Maidan revolution, Kiev must break the decades-long cycle of sacrificing rule of law in those regions in a desperate attempt to maintain social peace—with the mafia state as the only real beneficiary. Martial law may help to rein in separatist violence, but it alone cannot ensure either a functioning “rule of law” or a lessening of the mafia’s grip on the residents of the Donbas.
Despite the gloom of this essay, we would like to think that Kiev can still manage to integrate the Donbas into a Ukrainian state and society that accepts the Maidan revolution. A massive influx of capital into local and regional infrastructure might be a start—as long as it bypasses the well-worn channels of mafia-controlled contractors and middlemen. No matter what, Kiev must be prepared for a long, obstacle-filled path of serious, constructive action—beyond martial law and anti-terrorism—that can break the cycle of violence in the Donbas. Otherwise, everyone loses, except for the mafia state and, possibly, Moscow.
Piotr H. Kosicki is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Oksana Nesterenko is Associate Professor in the Yaroslav the Wise National Law Academy of Ukraine in Kharkiv.
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Spend a few days riding around the separatist badlands of eastern Ukraine, and you’d have a good chance of running into Alexander Mozhaev, the fighter suspected of being a Russian government operative. He’s hard to miss, and not just because photographs of him — or claiming to be of him — have been made available by the Ukrainian government in recent days. His beard, which juts out of his face like a spade, has made him something of a mascot for the local separatists.
Perhaps aptly, Mozhaev’s nickname among them is Babay, the Russian word for bogeyman, which is exactly what the Ukrainian government has tried to make him. Over the past week, authorities in Kiev have released photographs that purport to prove that Mozhaev is an agent of the Russian military intelligence service known as GRU, and they have shared that information with senior Western diplomats and some reporters. This claim has been at the center of their narrative that Russian special forces, controlled by the Kremlin, have taken over towns in the Donbass, the industrial heartland of eastern Ukraine.
But Mozhaev, a mild-mannered fighter with a chest like a barrel, says he only wishes that were true, and so do many of the people in the separatist-controlled towns that dot this region. If Russian forces had indeed taken over eastern Ukraine, as they did in Crimea last month, the streets of the separatist stronghold of Slavyansk would probably not be nearly as lawless as they have become in recent days. On the ground, the conflict in this town of 120,000 feels far more erratic and dangerous than the Russian occupation of Crimea, where a sense of order largely prevailed, in part because of the presence of disciplined and professional Russian troops. The ranks of the so-called “green men” who are running Slavyansk, in contrast to those troops, appear to be made up mostly of war veterans, itinerant pro-Russian nationalists and ethnic Cossacks from across the former Soviet Union. Fitting neatly into all these categories is Mozhaev, a Russian citizen, whose fellow fighters are now armed not only with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but also tanks and armored vehicles that they have seized from the Ukrainian army.
Mozhaev and his comrades took control of Slavyansk about a week ago. But over the past few days there has been no evident sign that they are receiving material support from Russia. Their foot soldiers have been so short on fuel that they have asked journalists to bring them gasoline in exchange for granting interviews, saying they don’t have enough fuel to go on patrols.
Their leader, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, a soap manufacturer who took the title of “people’s mayor” after seizing power, has pleaded for assistance from Russian President Vladimir Putin, but has apparently been ignored. “We need guns, you understand? We’re running out of everything but spirit,” he tells TIME. His militia force, he admits, is made up partly of volunteers who have come from Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and other parts of the former Soviet Union. But Kiev’s cries of a separatist insurgency fueled with money, weapons and troops from the Russian government look out of sync with the reality in Slavyansk.
No one embodies that disconnect quite like Mozhaev. In trying to link him to Russia’s GRU special forces, the government in Kiev has offered two blurry photos as evidence. One of them, allegedly taken during the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, shows a bearded man wearing the GRU insignia — a black bat with its wings spanning the globe — on the shoulder of his uniform. The second photo, taken this year in eastern Ukraine, shows Mozhaev dressed in camouflage among his fellow separatists. Kiev says the two photos are of the same man. Mozhaev finds that slightly flattering but altogether false.
When TIME tracked him down on Monday night, Mozhaev and his men had just finished taking over the local headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, in the town of Kramatorsk, a short drive from their base of operations in Slavyansk. Having met no resistance at the SBU that evening, he and his men were riding around Kramatorsk in a dark green van, which looked like a windowless, Soviet version of an old VW Camper. The vehicle, whose fender had been stenciled with the wordsPeople’s Militia of the Donbass, disgorged at least 10 heavily armed passengers in mismatching camouflage uniforms.
This was the rapid reaction force of the local separatist militia. Mozhaev is a member of that force. TIME showed him the picture supposedly placing him in Georgia during the 2008 war. With a smile, he said, “I’ve never even been to Georgia, not even for a holiday.” His men then gathered around to laugh at the photos of Mozhaev and the man in Georgia, slapping Mozhaev on the back as he learned that he was not only famous, but a famous Russian special-forces agent. “That guy looks more like Osama bin Laden than our Babay,” one of the gunmen remarked.
In reality, Mozhaev, 36, fits the description of many of the separatist fighters in the area around Slavyansk, a zone of about 100 km in diameter that all branches of the Ukrainian state, from the police to the tax authorities, have effectively abandoned to the separatists. According to his passport, which he showed to TIME, Mozhaev hails from the town of Belorechensk in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, the traditional stomping ground of the Cossacks, the warrior clan into which he was born.
Though he would have liked to have served in the Russian special forces, he says his service was in the regular Russian army, and it ended in the mid-1990s, when he attained the rank of staff sergeant. His reasons for coming to Ukraine in March had a bit to do with Russian nationalism, but more to do with adventurism, and even more to do with his apparently being a fugitive from Russian law. Earlier this year, Mozhaev said, just as a revolution was forcing Ukraine’s old regime from power, he was charged in Krasnodar with a violent crime — which he described as “threatening to kill someone with a knife.” When he failed to come up with the bribe money for the corrupt officials who he says fabricated the charges, Mozhaev was put on a national wanted list in Russia and went on the run, according to his account, which could not be verified.
By coincidence, he says, he was forced to flee arrest on March 7, in the middle of Russia’s invasion of Crimea. He chose Crimea as his destination. As TIME reported last month, thousands of state-sponsored Russian Cossacks were then streaming into Crimea to aid the Russian troops with that invasion. For most of March, Mozhaev says, he was there along with some of the men from his Cossack battalion, the Wolves’ Hundred, helping in the siege of a Ukrainian military base near the city of Bakhchysarai and guarding a local TV tower. In late March, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, “we were sitting around down there and wondering what to do next,” he says. “So we decided to go conquer some more historically Russian lands.” Eventually he wound up in Slavyansk, where Ponomaryov was glad to welcome him into his separatist militia.
As of Monday, Ponomaryov said his forces number around 2,500. That number is impossible to verify. Many of his armed supporters wear civilian clothes and do not appear to be part of any military or organized paramilitary group. Well-armed fighters like Mozhaev make up a small minority of Ponomaryov’s force, perhaps a few hundred men at most, with a fair share of Cossacks among them. Known as “green men” for the camouflage uniforms they wear, these militia members are not as well drilled and equipped as the Russian troops who occupied Crimea last month. If there is a Russian military presence currently in Slavyansk, it has remained or is now out of public view.
From the beginning, the head of Ponomaryov’s militia force has been a wiry man who goes by the nickname Romashka, which means Daisy in Russian. Romashka claims to have served in a branch of the Russian military in Chechnya, attaining the rank of captain. Some years ago, he says, he married a Ukrainian woman, took Ukrainian citizenship and moved to eastern Ukraine.
These days, Romashka drives around Slavyansk in a police cruiser, having removed the license plates and affixed a separatist flag to the hood. When asked about his ties to the Russian security services, Romashka smiles and says, “Well, let’s leave that between the lines.” But the statements coming out of Kiev about a Russian military operation in eastern Ukraine have left him a bit perplexed. “My buddies watch TV and then call me to say we have some kind of military conflict going on, with tanks, shooting, the works, like in Chechnya,” he says in an interview at the separatist headquarters in the center of Slavyansk. “In reality, it’s not like that. They’ve made up a war.”
In recent days, Kiev has intensified its efforts to prove that Russian special forces are operating in eastern Ukraine. Its evidence, according to the New York Times, is built around a series of photographs, including the one of Mozhaev, which the Ukrainian authorities have passed on to the U.S. State Department and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It is not clear to what extent those pictures have influenced Western decisionmaking on the crisis in Ukraine, but Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the State Department, has said the U.S. and its allies “don’t have a shadow of a doubt about the connection” between what she called “the Russians” and the armed militants in eastern Ukraine. But if that connection exists, it is not as explicit as it was in Crimea.
For his part, Mozhaev hopes that help is indeed on its way from Moscow. “Russians don’t leave Russians in the lurch,” he says. “So before the American menace comes to my homeland, I came here to stop it, and to get back some Russian land in the process.” The criminal charges against him, however, will keep him from returning to his homeland anytime soon. In May or June, his wife back in Krasnodar is due to give birth to his first son — “a full-blooded Cossack,” he says. But he’s resigned himself to missing that family occasion. “When we take Kiev, I’ll go back, and then we’ll celebrate.”
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