A Very Expensive Poison

by Luke Harding

  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.

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  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 a
lready 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.

  This was the first time the Kremlin had launched a major military action outside the borders of the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War. Putin’s objectives here were several. They included bolstering Assad, securing Russia’s air and naval bases on Syria’s coast, and – of course – rubbing Obama’s nose in it. In contrast to the US’s confused Syria strategy, Putin was showing decisive global leadership.

  The EU’s response to Russian aggression in Ukraine was insipid, to say the least. As Putin had calculated, neither Washington nor Brussels was prepared to answer Russian hard power with analogous military force. There would be no weapons sent to Kiev. Lethal aid was ruled out.

  Instead, western leaders offered … expressions of grave concern. Ukrainians who had stood on the Maidan in sub-zero temperatures, declaring their basic rights, were unimpressed. Vendors in Kiev began selling T-shirts to disillusioned Europhiles with the slogan: ‘Fuck your grave concern’.

  This left sanctions – the lever pulled by the US and its allies in the months to come. European governments were less willing to impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow than the White House was. The EU imported a third of its oil from Russia. It would suffer more pain than America, which was not dependent on Russian energy and did less trade. There was also the certainty that the Kremlin would respond with counter-sanctions.

  The first EU sanctions list identified twenty-one individuals. All were accused of undermining Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. They included Aksyonov and Russian parliamentarians. One was Leonid Slutsky, a leading member of the ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democrats. Andrei Lugovoi was Slutsky’s party colleague in the Duma. Most of those on the list were small fish – minor functionaries in the new Crimean ascendancy.

  The US lists went further. They included Putin’s closest political friends and cronies. Moreover, they sent a not-so-subtle message to Moscow: that America had identified Putin’s personal financial interests and was prepared to target them.

  Putin’s wealth is a mystery. Officially, he lives the modest life of an ordinary citizen. In 2007, leaks from inside his presidential administration suggested he was worth $40 billion via undisclosed interests in oil and gas companies. Putin denies this. But the subject of the boss’s wealth is something the Kremlin is reluctant to discuss.

  According to leaked US State Department cables, members of Putin’s inner circle acted as ‘proxies’ for his secret assets abroad. Formally, Putin owned nothing. Informally, he controlled many billions of dollars, which belonged to his team, most of them close allies and friends from his early career in East Germany and St Petersburg and now elevated to high offices of state.

  The US list included Viktor Ivanov, the former career KGB officer who was the subject of Litvinenko’s explosive report. What – if anything – did US intelligence know of Ivanov’s possible involvement in Litvinenko’s assassination? Alongside his job as head of the federal drugs agency, Ivanov sat on Russia’s security council. It also included Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s hawkish deputy prime minister, once seen as a possible presidential successor, who knew Putin from the 1970s and Leningrad’s KGB.

  Then there was Gennady Timchenko, another long-term Putin associate, whose Swiss-based company Gunvor exported a third of Russia’s seaborne oil. Gunvor rejects claims that Putin is a Gunvor beneficiary. The US Treasury Department was unconvinced by these denials and said: ‘Putin has investments in Gunvor and may have access to Gunvor funds.’

  The department said it was imposing asset freezes and visa bans on the Russian leadership’s ‘inner circle’. It threatened ‘increasing costs’ for Russia if it carried on with its ‘provocative actions’ and its efforts to destabilise Ukraine.

  Many of those on the list were members of Putin’s ozero dacha cooperative near St Petersburg. The president’s friends and former neighbours formed a new oligarchic class, and in many cases were richer than some of the original oligarchs they replaced. There was Yuri Kovalchuk, the head of Bank Rossiya – a ‘personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation’, according to the US. Also Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russian Railways, a prominent conservative and former diplomat to the UN with alleged KGB connections. And Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, Putin’s former St Petersburg judo partners. The treasury alleged the pair had ‘made billions’ from contracts awarded by Putin for Gazprom and the 2014 Sochi winter Olympics.

  This was, in short, Litvinenko’s mafia state.

  *

  By summer 2014, Donbas had become a full-blown war-zone. The regional governor – billionaire industrialist Sergei Taruta – fled Donetsk with his advisers. He escaped just in time. A group of Chechen gunmen turned up at his HQ, the city’s multi-storey Hotel Victoria, shouting: ‘Where is the fucking paedophile?’ Fighting broke out around Donetsk Airport. Rebels held the approach road; the Ukraini
an army the terminal. There were clashes further east near Luhansk. Ukrainian soldiers were in the airport there and villages to the north.

  The separatists were losing ground. Ukrainian forces had one substantial advantage: air power. When pro-Russian fighters seized the airport terminal building, Kiev responded with airstrikes; two lorries transporting wounded were hit, most of the Chechen ‘volunteers’ wiped out. Units from Ukraine’s national guard besieged Slavyansk, where Colonel Strelkov commanded a force of around 1,000 fighters. The rebels had mortars, small arms and a couple of armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. They were running low on ammunition and were outgunned.

  In early July, the rebels broke out. Strelkov retreated south to Donetsk; others from his group headed southeast to the town of Gorlovka, where 350–400 separatist fighters were based. With the Donetsk People’s Republic facing extinction, Russia moved to tip the balance in the rebels’ favour. It supplied them with heavy weapons, smuggled across the border. They included Grad multiple rocket launchers and self-propelled artillery pieces.

  Suddenly, Ukrainian military aircraft were being shot out of the sky. An Ilyushin was downed as it came in to land at Luhansk Airport. All forty-nine soldiers on board were killed. Russian agencies reported that the rebel ‘people’s republic’ had got hold of the Buk, a sophisticated surface-to-air missile launcher. The Buk could fire missiles up to an altitude of 22,000 metres. The DNR tweeted news of its new weapon. In mid-July, two more Ukrainian planes were shot down: an An-26 military transport plane and a Sukhoi jet.