A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

  It wasn’t difficult to piece together what lay behind Walter’s stagey recantation. The death of his second wife had devastated him; he’d been very attached to her; now, in the final years of his life, he felt lonely and overwhelmingly homesick. Moreover, Walter wanted to help his surviving son Maxim. After Walter’s TV confession, the family’s business affairs were said to have suddenly improved.

  Astonishingly, Walter said he wanted to contact Lugovoi in Russia. Goldfarb likened the encounter – between a father and his son’s unrepentant killer – to a scene from Homer’s Iliad. ‘It has a proportion of drama akin to the Trojan War, with Priam and Achilles,’ Goldfarb said.

  Priam was king of Troy; his son Paris caused the Trojan War by abducting Helen from the Greeks. The Greeks fought a war to get her back. Their best warrior Achilles kills another of Priam’s sons, Hector. Achilles refuses to give back the body and so Priam goes to the Greek camp to plead with him for his dead son’s return. He invokes memories of Achilles’ own father and says: ‘I kiss the hand of the man who killed my son.’

  In Goldfarb’s analogy, Walter is the ageing Priam, seeking out his son’s killer, Achilles/Lugovoi, to make peace with him in return for personal favours. Marina Litvinenko said her father-in-law surprised and disappointed her. Contact between them stopped. ‘I was very sad,’ she said.

  11

  A Small Victorious War

  Donbas, eastern Ukraine, Spring 2014

  ‘We’ve come here to help’

  RUSSIAN SOLDIER, SLAVYANSK, APRIL 2014

  It was once the government building in Donetsk. But in spring 2014 the city’s administrative HQ resembled a crazy Soviet theme park. Outside were barricades: a pile of tyres, razor wire and wooden crates. Stuck to them were banners with anti-western slogans. There were caricatures of Barack Obama. In one, Obama was dressed as Hitler, with a pencil moustache. In another, the US president was pictured next to Bonaparte and the Führer, and the words: ‘They all thought their nations were superior.’ In a third, Obama was a monkey.

  Further inside, past a serpentine wall of debris, pro-Russian activist Vitaly Akulov stood under a Stalin flag. The Soviet leader had a Kalashnikov. He looked like a matinée idol. Wasn’t Stalin responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens? ‘Without a tough tsar who uses harsh methods you can’t build an imperium,’ Akulov replied. Other banners read: ‘Fuck EU and USA’, ‘Donbas with Russia’ and ‘Russians should be together’.

  That April, pro-Kremlin separatists seized the regional administration building in Donetsk, a city of one million people in eastern Ukraine. The activists hijacked a string of other buildings across the Donbas, Ukraine’s traditional industrial heartland. They took over town halls and police stations. And proclaimed two new political entities: the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’. The city of Luhansk – in the next-door region or oblast, with a population of 445,000 – was 20 miles (35 km) from the Russian border.

  The rebels’ Donetsk HQ was an improvised youth hostel and centre for revolutionary operations. The eleven-storey block overlooked Pushkin Boulevard. Inside, I found a group of teenagers in balaclavas, some just fifteen or sixteen, and bearded, newly important, middle-aged men in military jackets. The Donetsk People’s Republic – or DNR – had taken over the top floor. To reach it you had to walk up a lot of stairs; the lifts didn’t work. Its leader, or ‘people’s governor’, was Denis Pushilin, a neatly dressed local businessman apparently picked by Moscow for the role.

  The city police and security services had made little effort to stop this takeover. Indeed, they appeared to sympathise with it. A police car was parked outside; officers chatted happily to masked separatists. The separatists had commandeered another building opposite Donetsk’s art gallery. (It housed a portrait by Leonid Pasternak, the father of Boris, author of Doctor Zhivago, alongside nineteenth-century works by the ‘Wanderers’, my favourite Russian artistic movement.)

  Forty miles (65 km) up the road north of Donetsk were signs that Ukraine’s sovereignty was fast disappearing. A pro-Russian militia unit had taken over the town of Slavyansk. They were equipped with Kalashnikovs – military-issue AK-74s – commando knives, flak jackets and walkie-talkies. They arrived in a green military truck. It bore no insignia. Who exactly were they? ‘We’re Cossacks,’ one of the group explained, as he and his comrades – one in a traditional woolly Cossack hat – posed for photos outside Slavyansk’s town hall. The commander declined to give his name.

  Instead he offered me a quick history lesson, stretching back a thousand years, to when Slavic tribes banded together to form Kievan Rus – the dynasty that eventually flourished into modern-day Ukraine and its big neighbour Russia. ‘We don’t want Ukraine. Ukraine doesn’t exist for us. There are no people called Ukrainians,’ he declared. ‘There are just Slav people who used to be in Kievan Rus, before Jews like Trotsky divided us. We should all be together again.’

  The man – a middle-aged commando with a bushy beard – said he had come to Slavyansk ‘to help’. He declined to say where he was from. ‘It doesn’t matter where we are from.’ He didn’t intend to kill anybody, he said. Producing a long knife, he said: ‘I can’t kill my brother Slavs.’ The mysterious Cossacks had been visiting Crimea, where they had ‘helped’ with the peninsula’s annexation. They disliked Jews but were now fighting ‘fascism’.

  Ukraine’s new defence minister, Arsen Avakov, set a deadline for these enigmatic militia groups to give up their weapons. It came and went. On the road between Donetsk and Slavyansk, Ukraine’s elusive army was nowhere to be seen. Poplars and colourful apricot trees with white blossom lined the highway; the route passed crumbling collective farms and old ladies selling local produce, including jars of birch juice and saplings.

  Pro-Russian groups set up roadblocks heaped with black tyres. Masked youths, mostly armed with sticks, stopped and checked cars. Closer to Slavyansk the barricades got bigger. The route and main checkpoint led over a bridge. Halfway across was an extraordinary sight: a group of women, mostly elderly, stood in a line holding gold-framed icons, praying and bowing.

  It was hard to tell whether the Cossacks were a serious military force or a sort of colourful grenade-wielding theatre troupe, made for Russian TV propaganda. The central government in Kiev responded by dispatching a convoy of six armoured personnel carriers (APCs). It turned up in Kramatorsk, 10 miles (16 km) south of Slavyansk. Other Ukrainian soldiers were holed up in a nearby aerodrome.

  A crowd surrounded the column, then armed men in fatigues. Without firing a shot, they persuaded the terrified Ukrainian servicemen to yield their vehicles. The gunmen sat on top of them. Someone raised a Russian tricolour. Around 200 people cheered and took photos. The men drove off. The column rattled past Kramatorsk’s train station and turned right over a steep dusty bridge, belching clouds of diesel smoke.

  From close up, it was clear that these rebels were different from the amateur teenage volunteers camping out in Donetsk. They were professionals. They had Kalashnikovs, flak jackets, ammunition. One even carried a green tube-shaped grenade-launcher. Where had they come from? Some hid their faces under black balaclavas. Others waved and smiled. All wore orange and black St George’s ribbons – the symbol of the Soviet victory in the Second World War over Hitler and fascism.

  The column disappeared. It was easy to follow. I got into my vehicle and pursued a line of fresh white tread tracks left in the tarmac. The column drove serenely into Slavyansk, past its checkpoints, and parked round the back of the occupied city hall, next to the White Nights café. Locals seemed mystified. ‘I heard the sound of tanks approaching. I thought Ukrainian troops had arrived,’ Vladimir Ivanovich said. So who were the soldiers in masks? ‘I don’t know,’ he told me.

  The mysterious armed men stood around in a small municipal park. It was sunny, a perfect spring morning. The captured APCs became the town’s newest, most unexpected tourist attraction. Teenage girls posed with the masked gunmen. Small children l
ined up for photos as well. The atmosphere was calm, one of military order. The town hall had been meticulously sandbagged. Sniper points had sprung up on the roof.

  I asked one of the masked men where his unit had come from.

  He said: ‘Crimea.’

  Crimea was Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula, now under new Russian ownership. Vladimir Putin had annexed it the previous month. It had already been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet and to thousands of Russian military personnel. And it was several hundreds of miles away. It appeared the gunman and his unit had managed to infiltrate across the Russian–Ukrainian border. Now they were in Slavyansk.

  How were things back in Crimea?

  ‘Zamechatelno,’ he replied in Russian – terrific, splendid. ‘The old ladies are happy. Because of Russia their pensions have doubled.’

  Where was he from originally? Ukraine? Somewhere else?

  ‘I’m from Russia,’ the soldier said.

  Days later, the kidnappings and murders started. Those taken hostage included a group of international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe; journalists, Ukrainian and western; and others suspected of pro-Kiev views. If Russia was a mafia state, the DNR, it appeared, was a mafia statelet.

  A local councillor, Vladimir Rybak, confronted DNR supporters who had taken over the town hall in neighbouring Gorlovka. As he left the square, four men in masks and military fatigues grabbed him and bundled him into a Kia car. Three days later, his battered body was found in Slavyansk next to a river. He’d been tortured. There were stab marks on his stomach and bruising on his chest. His kidnappers had tied a sandbag to his body. While he was unconscious they drowned him.

  *

  The conflict that gripped Ukraine in 2014 wasn’t, as Moscow would claim, a civil war. It was, in reality, a Frankenstein-like conflict, created by the Russian government artificially and given life by the brute external shock of military force and invasion.

  Many of the themes that featured in Litvinenko’s murder were here again, played out on a bigger and more terrible canvas. There was the use of violent methods to achieve political goals. As in his previous war in Chechnya, Russia’s president seemed entirely indifferent to the cost in human lives. This was true both of Ukrainian civilians who were the war’s main victims, and of Putin’s own soldiers, whose deaths in conflict he refused to acknowledge.

  The Kremlin had lied about Litvinenko’s assassination; now it was lying about its role in a major war in Europe. The Russian military supplied the hardware used by the rebels: tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery pieces. Russian soldiers – sometimes repackaged as ‘volunteers’ – did much of the fighting. When it appeared the rebels were on the brink of defeat, Moscow used its regular units to crush Ukrainian forces.

  Without Russia there wouldn’t have been a war in 2014. There would undoubtedly have been tension between the central government in Kiev and its predominantly Russian eastern regions – a political dispute about autonomy, devolved powers, and the status of the Russian language. But Ukraine wouldn’t have fallen apart. Fewer people would have died.

  Months earlier, a pro-western revolution had taken place in the capital Kiev. It began as a spontaneous grass-roots movement. It sought to employ democratic methods and peaceful protest. It looked like other global uprisings in New York or Paris or London. There were tent encampments in the centre of Kiev, rallies, speeches and flags. It only turned violent following a brutal government clampdown.

  The counter-revolution that took place in eastern Ukraine soon afterwards was different. For sure, it enjoyed some popular support. But this was in essence a top-down army and intelligence operation, coordinated from next door by Russia. It soon morphed into a full-scale covert Russian invasion. The first revolution happened by accident; its antithesis was the result of a carefully curated plan that might have come – and probably did come – from a KGB textbook.

  In November 2013, a well-known Kiev journalist, Mustafa Nayem, posted a question on Facebook. Earlier that day, Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych had announced he was dumping his country’s preparations to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The agreement had been long awaited. Instead, Yanukovych said he was turning to Russia. He said Moscow had offered Kiev a $15 billion loan.

  Nayem – an investigative reporter born in Afghanistan – wrote on his Facebook page: was anyone planning to go to the Maidan? The Maidan is downtown Kiev’s central square and the scene of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. ‘In one hour my post had more than 1,000 “likes”,’ Nayem said. ‘That night 400 people showed up. They stayed until 6 a.m. Most of them were my friends from Facebook. It was the so-called creative class,’ he told me.

  The demonstrators understood what Yanukovych’s decision meant: that the president had abandoned the idea of closer integration with the west. Instead, Ukraine would remain part of Russian political and economic space – with key decisions over the country’s future and foreign policy taken, in effect, by the Kremlin. Yanukovych would be Putin’s provincial viceroy. The loan was a bribe.

  For the opposition, this vision of Ukraine’s future was unappealing. It came on top of four years of misrule, during which the president, his family and cronies had robbed the state. Corruption was nothing new in Ukraine; the country of 46 million had always had lousy leadership.

  But after winning elections in 2010, Yanukovych divided the nation’s assets among his immediate relatives. He built himself a palace on the outskirts of Kiev, Mezhyhirya, complete with a helipad, golf course, pirateship restaurant and a zoo. Sadly, his kangaroos failed to survive the Ukrainian winter.

  Yanukovych also dismantled the democratic reforms carried out post-2004. He jailed his chief political rival Yulia Tymoshenko, whose chaotic term as prime minister contributed to Ukraine’s economic and governance mess. Yanukovych suborned parliament and the courts. Political repression grew. He pursued a policy of Russification, which alienated many in the west of the country and fuelled the growth of radical Ukrainian nationalism.

  Nayem’s Maidan protest went through several iterations. For weeks it was peaceful. Then, the government used brutal force. This was counter-productive: the demonstrators grew. By February 2014, the mood in Kiev was angry and febrile. Prominent anti-government activists were disappearing; some turned up dead; others alive but showing signs of torture. Titushki – paid government thugs – roamed the streets, beating and killing. Crowds of protesters built barricades. The riot police fired teargas.

  As the analyst Andrew Wilson put it, the uprising was a curious concoction of a revolution. It was the anti-Soviet rebellion that failed to happen when Ukraine got independence from the Soviet Union in 1991; a lot of Lenin statues were pulled down. It was also an Occupy-style protest and a Cossack rebellion. Much of it was strikingly retro. Protesters donned homemade shields and helmets. They hurled cobblestones and Molotov cocktails. There was a medieval-style catapult.

  In the last hours of the regime, government snipers killed dozens. Video footage shows them firing on unarmed protesters trying to advance across open ground. Eleven police died too. Yanukovych was at his palace in the outskirts of Kiev. He was in no physical danger but chose to escape. He took $32 billion with him (having looted an estimated $100 billion in four years), leaving by helicopter and fleeing to Russia. Other members of his government ran away too, stuffing money and jewels in their hand luggage, like comedy gangsters.

  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 gun
men 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.