Chapter 1
The "People's Republics"
Russia's war against Ukraine had begun eight years earlier, with what Ukrainians called their "Revolution of Dignity" and what Moscow described as an American-sponsored putsch.
The initial divorce between Russia and Ukraine, agreed in December 1991, was surprisingly bloodless. At a meeting in a Belarusian forest lodge, Russian president Boris Yeltsin and his counterparts from Ukraine and Belarus decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, respecting each other's territorial integrity. Russia recognized Ukraine's sovereignty over lands that many, if not most, Russians had always considered rightfully theirs, from Kharkiv to Crimea to Odesa.
The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky reacted by writing a vitriolic poem wishing that the mighty Dnipro River would flow backward to punish ungrateful and uppity
khokhols, a Russian slur for Ukrainians. Another Russian Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, cried betrayal. But nobody in Moscow seriously tried to stop the breakup. Russia was so magnanimous because it expected Ukraine's independence to be nominal at best, just like that of nearby Belarus. The bonds between the two countries and the two peoples were so tight, after all, that a truly separate and viable Ukrainian state was impossible to imagine-at least in Moscow.
In Belarus, the 1994 election of former collective farm chief Aleksandr Lukashenko-the only member of the Belarusian parliament who voted against independence-snuffed out any attempt to steer the country westward. Lukashenko brought Belarus into a confederation with Russia, and brutally suppressed the democratic opposition by jailing or outright assassinating opponents.
The authoritarian Yanukovych, a Russian-speaking coal-industry boss and onetime juvenile criminal from Donbas, was supposed to perform a similar role for Ukraine-and he might well have, except that the Ukrainian people revolted twice.
The first revolution was in 2004, when Yanukovych, who was prime minister at the time, tried to steal a presidential election by using local bureaucracies to stuff ballot boxes. President Leonid Kuchma, at the end of his second and final term, ordered security forces to remain neutral. Under pressure from protesters, Ukraine's supreme court acknowledged the fraud and ordered another round of elections. This time, Yanukovych lost.
In 2010, a chastened, seemingly changed Yanukovych won the presidency fair and square. In part, he gained power because of unchecked graft and infighting in Ukraine's pro-Western camp. As all Ukrainian presidents had done since independence, Yanukovych promised to seek closer ties with the European Union. He even negotiated a free-trade and political-association agreement with the EU. But, in November 2013, he unexpectedly pulled out of the deal and moved to join a customs union with Russia.
As stunned Ukrainians digested the news, Mustafa Nayyem, a Kyiv journalist of Afghan descent, made the first call for protests. "People, let's get serious," he wrote on Facebook. "Who is ready to come to Maidan before midnight tonight? Likes don't count."
Hundreds of thousands showed up in the following days and weeks. The initially peaceful rallies turned violent when Yanukovych ordered riot police to open fire, and descended into an outright bloodbath on February 20, 2014, with dozens gunned down in central Kyiv. The Ukrainian parliament-including many lawmakers from the president's party-intervened to outlaw the use of force against protesters just as a delegation of European foreign ministers reached a compromise. On February 21, Yanukovych agreed to form a government of national unity with the opposition and to hold presidential elections under international supervision by December.
But the president lost his nerve that night. The Ukrainian security services crumbled and protesters demanded that Yanukovych leave Kyiv by the morning. From his palatial residence, he absconded first to the eastern city of Kharkiv, then to Donetsk, and eventually on to Crimea, where he was picked up by Russian troops and escorted to safety in Russia. The next day, February 22, the Ukrainian parliament declared that Yanukovych had abandoned his constitutional duties. Lawmakers appointed the new opposition-backed speaker as interim president and scheduled a presidential election for May. Moscow called it a coup.
Up until that moment, most Ukrainians had often been wary of Russia's intentions but had not considered Russia a foe. Millions of Ukrainians worked in Russia, which, because of its oil and gas wealth, and because of Ukraine's corrosive corruption, was perceived as a prosperous land of opportunity. Zelensky also spent much of his time in Moscow working as a comedian and was a rising star of Russian state TV.
In the middle of the Ukrainian revolution, Zelensky cohosted Russian TV's 2014 New Year's Day show, watched by tens of millions of people in both nations. He sang and danced onstage, wearing a black tuxedo, a bow tie, and a black top hat.
"New Year, the first day, what awaits us," Ukraine's future president crooned. "Na-na na-na-na." Then he delivered a schmaltzy stand-up routine, comparing the previous night's celebrations to a military campaign. "You can even write military memoirs about it. The New Year's offensive started precisely at midnight with a volley of champagne," he joked. The stars of Russian showbiz howled with laughter in the audience, raising their glasses.
The real military offensive began fifty-seven days later, on February 27, 2014.
Russian special forces-operating without insignia and dubbed "little green men"-fanned out from the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. The base had been leased from Ukraine by Moscow since the Soviet Union's collapse in an agreement that was extended by Yanukovych in 2010. The soldiers seized Crimea's government and legislature buildings, raising Russian flags. Crimean lawmakers, gathered at gunpoint, voted to secede from Ukraine. Ukrainian forces in Crimea didn't offer much resistance, except for singing patriotic songs.
Many military leaders, including the newly appointed commander of the Ukrainian Navy, simply joined the Russians. Hollowed out and thoroughly infiltrated by Russian agents, the Ukrainian military was hardly a fighting force. Only some 6,000 Ukrainian troops were combat-ready, the interim government estimated. When they tried to deploy, they discovered that their armored vehicles lacked batteries. Private businessmen had to pitch in with a few million dollars to fix that.
Russia didn't have military bases in other parts of Ukraine, but it had cultivated a network of sleeper agents, especially inside Ukrainian law enforcement, as well as a legion of pro-Russian politicians. As one of its first moves, the interim government in Kyiv, which held power until Poroshenko's victory in May's presidential elections, passed legislation to limit the use of the Russian language in public, a blunder that made it easier for Putin to posture as the defender of Ukraine's Russian-speakers.
Overnight, Russian flags appeared across cities in eastern and southern Ukraine. Pro-Russian protesters, organized and often armed, tried to seize government buildings, clashing with rival, pro-Ukrainian activists. The police mostly stood by, or even tacitly helped the pro-Russians.
In Kharkiv, an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking metropolis of 1.5 million people, a deadly gun battle erupted in March as Russian and pro-Russian militants stormed the headquarters of a pro-Ukrainian organization. Terror spread to the streets, and pro-Russian thugs assaulted one of Ukraine's most famous novelists, Serhiy Zhadan, beating him with bats in the center of the city.
Even as blood was spilled in Kharkiv, many people in eastern and southern Ukraine remained indifferent, in denial about the consequences of the political confrontation unfolding on their streets.
The Russian takeover of Crimea had been nearly bloodless, and Russian rule, in the minds of many-particularly the retirees, and parts of law enforcement-meant not war but higher salaries, generous pensions, and political stability after years of turmoil. In April 2014, Putin proclaimed that all of eastern and southern Ukraine wasn't historically Ukrainian and should henceforth be known as Novorossiya, or New Russia.
That month, pro-Russian militants seized the regional government headquarters and other administrative buildings in Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk, hoisting Russian flags and proclaiming three supposedly independent "people's republics." Similar plans in other Ukrainian cities were thwarted by organized pro-Ukrainian groups. In Odesa, this confrontation ended in tragedy after pro-Russian protesters, some of them armed, barricaded themselves in the regional labor union headquarters. On May 2, 2014, after the two sides exchanged firebombs, the building caught fire. A total of forty-eight people died, most of them burned inside the union headquarters.
In Kharkiv, the Russian takeover of the regional government lasted just one night. A special police unit flown from central Ukraine stormed the building at dawn, and the sixty-three founding fathers of the Kharkiv "people's republic" were detained. Things turned out differently in Donetsk and Luhansk. With local police and intelligence services refusing to act or switching sides, the occupied government compounds quickly turned into fortresses, as weapons, explosives, and men in fatigues poured in. Donbas was plunged into war.
The morning of April 12, 2014, five days after the proclamation of the Donetsk “people’s republic,” Igor Girkin, a retired Russian intelligence colonel with a fondness for reenacting historical battles, led a small group of Russian military veterans to capture the police station in the town of Slovyansk, on the northern edge of the Donetsk region. They quickly distributed the captured weapons to local supporters and took control of the city.
When the Ukrainian military sent creaky fighting vehicles to reclaim Slovyansk, Girkin's men and local pro-Russian supporters blocked the roads. To many Ukrainian soldiers, shooting at fellow Ukrainians was unthinkable. They surrendered six vehicles and even handed over the firing pins of their rifles before being allowed to leave.
The weakness of Ukraine's regular army had been revealed. In response, many Ukrainian civilians organized to protect their broke, dysfunctional state. Unruly militias sprang up, often financed by political parties or oligarchs, some of them with a far-right political history, others affiliated with soccer fan clubs. A powerful network of volunteer groups rose alongside these battalions, drawing on activists who had banded together in revolutionary encampments on Kyiv's Maidan.
The war that spread through Donbas in the following months was bloodier than anyone had predicted. After nearly three months of fighting, Ukrainian forces managed to retake Slovyansk. By then, thousands of heavily armed volunteers, including Russian intelligence and military personnel, had thronged into Donetsk and Luhansk from Russia. Suddenly, these self-proclaimed "people's republics" possessed large tank and artillery formations. When the Ukrainian Air Force tried to ferry troops and supplies to a garrison in the Luhansk airport in June, Russian proxies shot down a Ukrainian Il-76 transport plane, killing all forty-six people aboard. A month later, a Russian Buk missile launcher shot down a Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner, mistaking it for another Ukrainian resupply run and killing 298 people, most of them Dutch citizens. Girkin by then was the Donetsk "people's republic" minister of defense, and has since been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by a Dutch court.
Instead of higher salaries and economic prosperity, the Russian intervention brought devastation to Donbas. Russian men with guns took over. Properties were seized by gangs. Soon, even the oligarchs who had once supported Yanukovych and flirted with Russia were no longer able to stay. Moscow didn't need them anymore. As jobs and services disappeared, and fighting continued, more than half of the roughly four million people in the Russian-controlled parts of Donbas fled the region-to other parts of Ukraine, to Russia, or to the West. Those who remained were mostly too poor, too old, or too sick to move.
Throughout 2014, the more success the Ukrainian Army achieved, the more directly Russia became involved, although Putin insisted the fighters were all local oppressed coal miners and tractor drivers. In February 2015, elite Russian units tipped the scales in the last major operation of that campaign, the Battle of Debaltseve. Thousands of Ukrainian forces desperately fought to break out, sustaining heavy casualties as Russian troops captured the town.
Russia's show of strength meant that Ukraine had to accept a cease-fire on Moscow's terms. With Ukrainian forces facing a catastrophe in Debaltseve, Poroshenko, Putin, and the leaders of Germany and France flew to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, for peace talks. The so-called Minsk-2 agreement that they signed in February 2015 ended large-scale hostilities in Donbas, with both sides pulling back heavy artillery and stopping offensive operations. The rest of the deal, which foresaw a comprehensive political settlement, was never implemented.
For a while, this limbo suited everyone. Viewed in Moscow with contempt, President Barack Obama had pursued a "restart" with Putin shortly after the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and saw no reason to get involved beyond mild sanctions. He refused to provide any weapons to Kyiv, and the Minsk-2 agreement relieved any pressure on him to help Ukraine defend itself. Ukraine, Obama explained in an interview with
The Atlantic the following year, "is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do."
Instead, Obama focused on working with Moscow to achieve his foreign policy priority, the Iran nuclear deal. Germany was free to build the lucrative Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would provide cheap Russian gas, and the ability to distribute it to the rest of Europe.
Putin ended up with authority over one-third of Donbas, including two of its three main cities, Donetsk and Luhansk. For Ukraine, the frozen conflict in Donbas was an open wound preventing integration with the West and stunting economic development. Yet Kyiv also gained precious time to rebuild its institutions and thwart-for the time being, at least-Putin's "New Russia" ambition to swallow the entirety of Ukraine's south and east. By occupying Crimea and parts of Donbas in 2014, Russia acquired 7 percent of Ukrainian territory-but forfeited the sympathy of most Ukrainians, likely for generations. According to the United Nations, 4,400 Ukrainian troops, 6,500 Russian proxies and Russians, and 3,400 civilians on both sides died in Donbas in 2014 and 2015.
In the aftermath, Poroshenko focused on beefing up the Ukrainian military, with the United States, Britain, and Canada teaching thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and officers the NATO doctrine. Volunteer units were incorporated into national security forces. In a major psychological shift, Ukrainians gained the right to travel to the EU without a visa, with $29.99 budget flights to Paris or Vienna making European weekends routine even for students on limited incomes-and reorienting the society further away from Russia. Russian TV was no longer able to broadcast in Ukraine, Russian pop music was taken off the air, and flights to Russia were discontinued.
Having further entrenched Ukrainian as the national language and achieved the recognition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church's independence from Moscow by Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Poroshenko campaigned in the 2019 presidential election under the patriotic slogan "Army, Language, Faith."
By then the conflict in Donbas was simmering far away, with only occasional bouts of violence, and most Ukrainian voters cared more about rising prices and the rampant graft that continued under his rule. Zelensky, famous for playing an accidental president in the TV series
Servant of the People, ran as an uncompromised outsider who would bring peace with Russia.
Copyright © 2024 by Yaroslav Trofimov. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
