In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine

by Tim Judah

Novorossiya or the New Russia of Catherine the Great and some of the Donetsk Republic of 1918. Hardly anyone in the Donbass noticed these people or what they were doing on the far fringes of political life.

the 1918 Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic and, according to a declaration of the DNR parliament in 2015, was the first to resurrect its flag in 1991.

All of Ukraine should become part of this Russia except perhaps for Lviv and Galicia in the west, which had not been part of the Russian empire before the First World War. “Ukraine should not exist.” The creation of the DNR, he explained, was just the “first stage” that people like him had a “historical mission” to complete.

Everything that Baryshnikov believes is consistent with the beliefs of Alexander Dugin, the influential Russian philosopher and proponent of a Russian-dominated Eurasian empire which would not only reunite ethnic Russians but dominate the West too. Dugin has chastised Putin for being too soft on Ukraine, and is a visceral opponent of anything that smacks of Western liberalism.

Purgin was one of the founders of Donetsk Republic, the miniature group of political activists who from 2005 had been working to re-create the state of 1918. The group was born in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004 in whose wake Viktor Yuschenko, a man with Ukrainian nationalist credentials, became president.

Freedom House is a human rights NGO that has long worked closely with USAID, which distributes U.S. government money for human rights promotion as well as regular aid and which has been condemned as Russophobic by Russian officials. As far back as 2004—before the founding of Donetsk Republic—it was also accused in Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. of indirectly supporting organizations working to promote the election of Viktor Yushchenko.

So, what about the other parts of the map? Again, he did not know. “We are part of the industrial Ukraine that includes all the southeast,” and here he mentioned Kharkiv to the north, Odessa, the regions of Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk and the industrial city of Krivoy Rog. “We really hope that somehow we will be united with the rest of this industrial part…Moreover, we hope that in the future we will somehow be able to help those people who are now left in Ukrainian-controlled territory and who are now persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.” Clearly the most important target for the DNR is the port of Mariupol, but, “sadly,” so far it had proved impossible to take it. He pinned his hopes on Ukraine going bankrupt and it being very hard to keep Mariupol’s angry and then unpaid people “under the barrel of a large-caliber machine gun…I think in the end the people of Mariupol themselves will decide its fate.”

If the opportunistic seizure of Crimea had rather been characterized as revenge for NATO’s seventy-eight-day bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war in 1999, which the then enfeebled Russia had been unable to prevent, that might have been closer to the mark.

Just before this the Verkhovna Rada made a cardinal error. It voted to pass a law to downgrade the official status of the Russian language. This was immediately vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, but the damage was done. It frightened many Russian speakers and gave Putin and the “anti-Maidan” and pro-Russian constituency just what they needed in terms of “proof” of their claims that neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists had taken over.

The war had started and Aleksandr and Volodymyr were among the first to die. That is why their names are remembered, why journalists wrote about them and why they are recorded here. After that, those who died became a statistic to everyone but their families and friends.

For this reason much of Ukraine’s threadbare army was positioned in ways which reflected its old Cold War Soviet background, i.e., prepared, albeit barely, to fight a war on its western flanks—not its eastern ones.

The towns of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka and Krasnoarmeysk were reclaimed and briefly it looked as though the Ukrainian advance was unstoppable.

The turning point at this juncture in the war came at Ilovaysk, a small, nondescript town forty-five minutes’ drive southeast of Donetsk.

The Nemtsov report claimed that to that date some 170 Russian regular soldiers, as opposed to volunteers, had died, and a large proportion of them died in and around Ilovaysk.

The rebels, however, wanted them out of two places in particular—Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, through which local roads and railways run. The airport, named for the famous composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953), who was born nearby, was gleaming and new, having been among those rebuilt for the 2012 Euro soccer championships.

Debaltseve were certainly defeats for the Ukrainians, but the fact that it took the rebels and the Russians months to achieve these victories demonstrated two things: first, that the Ukrainians were no longer disorganized and that their military was getting stronger by the day; and secondly, that the rebels and the Russians were reaching the limits of what they could do unless there was a lot more help from Russia.

In terms of winning the war for global public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the charge of Ukrainian neo-Nazism, fascism and extreme nationalism all combine to make Ukraine’s Achilles’ heel. Small elements of truth have painted, and allowed the Russian media and their Western fellow travelers to paint, an utterly distorted picture of the whole. In the general election of October 2014 Ukraine’s far-right parties flopped. In electoral terms they are insignificant compared to their strength in Hungary, France or Italy, for example. And yet, many Westerners do not see this. Many also do not see that much of the Russian propaganda aimed at depicting Ukraine as a kind of Third Reich reincarnated is a sort of displacement activity. It is, after all, Russia which is in the grip of nationalistic euphoria and whose once nascent democracy has died as people rally round its one and only unchallenged leader.

According to Anton Shekhovtsov, an academic who has followed the far right in Ukraine, the new party wanted a national and social revolution and believed Russia to be the cause of all Ukraine’s ills.

He also spoke of his admiration for Alain de Benoist, the French far-right philosopher, whom I was beginning to realize had fans on both sides of the line.

Russia, he said, had no troops in Ukraine, and lies to the contrary had to be stopped. Russia only wanted no NATO on its borders and an economy open to east and west. Castel claimed hackers had discovered that 1,037 Poles and Americans had been killed fighting in Ukraine but these deaths were being hidden. He talked approvingly of Alexander Dugin and his Eurasian vision for Europe and of Alain de Benoist and his ideas about a Europe in which emerging identities such as those of Catalonia, Flanders and presumably Donbass played a new role as the old order collapsed.

For Castel, the rebel Donbass cause is a noble crusade, which he has joined with the zeal of those foreigners who once flocked to the cause of the Spanish Republic. Everything he told me and believes about Ukraine has been said by the Kremlin’s propaganda machine, but anything that counters this narrative is regarded as Western propaganda serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex. What

This is why among the foreigners fighting for the rebels in Ukraine there are modern-day fascists ranged alongside extreme leftists who believe they are participating in a new and glorious communist revolution.

Now there was a lull in the fighting, following the signing in Minsk of the second ceasefire agreement, which officially began on February 15. This made it easier to travel about and to get to Pervomaysk from Donetsk, since the road between them led through Debaltseve, which had fallen to the rebels two days after the ceasefire began. Both towns were badly damaged.

Officially you had to travel to government-controlled regions and register as a refugee there. That was beyond the means of many. It was taking up to two months even to get the Ukrainian permission necessary to travel to government territory and back. That was one reason why the other side of the front line was increasingly being referred to as “Ukraine,” as though it had already become the foreign country that rebel leaders said they wanted it to be. About the future, Nataliya

Both scenarios are possible in Ukraine’s east, and Ukrainian politicians have talked about the “Croatian model,” by which they mean freeze the lines, build up your forces and reconquer when you are ready.

remained firmly under Ukrainian control. Every now and then bombs exploded at Ukrainian volunteer recruitment offices, but as they went off at night they were clearly designed to intimidate rather than kill. Similar

After that, the climate in the city changed. Pro-Russians understood that Ukrainians would fight back and Odessa and the south would not be snatched from them without resistance as Crimea had been.

Odessa, founded by Empress Catherine the Great in 1794, is famous for its colorful history and stories. But for Westerners its name more often than not triggers associations with a city that no longer exists. It might conjure up images of the booming nineteenth-century cosmopolitan port in which every language from French to Greek to Albanian was spoken, or the great city of Jewish memory in which a third of the population were Jews. It might make one think of Isaac Babel, the famous writer, born here in 1894 and executed in 1940, a victim of Stalin’s purges. Or possibly the first association might be with

famous Odessa city steps, which lead down to the port and were immortalized in the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein Soviet movie, Battleship Potemkin.

The figures were dire. In 2014 industrial production declined by 21 percent and the hyrvnia had lost 69 percent of its value against the dollar.

A big part of the problem, she said, was that while the removal of subsidies was going to make gas and heating bills far more expensive for most people now, reforms will take years to affect people’s lives for the better. It was part of her job to come up with ideas which could make things better now, before people concluded that nothing was being done.

Russians had explained what they wanted to do. When the Kazakhs began to put forward their ideas, the Russians told them they were not interested because they had just explained to them what would be done, whether they liked it or not.

In a bustling Brussels bistro he told me that for Russia, Ukraine had always been part of a geostrategic game but that the EU had struggled to decide to what extent it should play geostrategy too, as opposed to relying solely “on our values and principles.” The Russian tactic was “bullying, bullying, bullying and being brutal,” but “our mistake is only ever having been half serious about the transformation of that part of Europe and not clearly offering them membership in the long run.” In Odessa, just before the revolution

Ukrainian media funded from Russian sources had, she said, given people the impression that if Ukraine chose Russia over the EU, “then everything will be cheaper, such as gas, and that if we go toward the EU normal marriages will not exist, only gay marriages.”

Ukraine needed money and foreign investment to stabilize its economy, but investment especially would not come as long as there was war. Heavy industry and mining had been badly affected by the fighting in the east, but Ukraine is big and a country of enormous unrealized potential. At the western edge of Kiev, for example, is Antonov, the plane maker and designer and Ukraine’s only internationally known brand and company. The war had left the firm, which employs more than 12,000 people, struggling to disentangle itself from Russia. Before the war, Russia ordered their military transport planes especially, and it was there that so many of their parts were made.

With its catastrophic drop in population from 52.18 million in 1992 to an estimated 45.49 million in 2013, Ukraine cannot afford to lose any more of its educated youth.

They don’t worry overly if Lugansk is written in the Russian way with a “g” or in the Ukrainian way, Luhansk, with an “h,” so I don’t feel compelled to either. I am spelling Kiev and Odessa in the way they have always been spelled in English and don’t feel the need to take what many regard as a political stance by switching to the Ukrainian Kyiv and Odesa. Likewise it really does not matter if Aleksandr becomes Alexander or Oleksandr, the Ukrainian version, and so on. In the traditional Russian spelling it is Donbass and in Ukrainian Donbas. I have used both.