THREE

THE RUSSIAN SPRING

On March 7, 2014, Igor Grebtsov became a little green man.

From the town of Slavyansk-na-Kubani, near the Kerch Strait that separates Russia from Ukrainian Crimea—some 1,600 miles from his home in the Ural Mountains—Grebtsov called his wife to tell her that he would not be back in time to celebrate Women’s Day on March 8. At first, she thought it was a prank and called him back three times to make sure. As the reality sank in, she threatened him with divorce, but eventually relented. He would return home, nursing wounds from a tank battle in eastern Ukraine, nine months later.

After breaking the news to his wife, Grebtsov crossed into Crimea with a group of other men, mostly army veterans and reservists, and more than a few Cossacks, and settled into a hotel. The next morning, according to an interview he gave to his hometown newspaper, he and others went to witness what he called a “Banderite march”—a rally of supporters of the “Euromaidan” movement that had overthrown Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.1 Grebtsov and his comrades saw the revolutionaries as followers of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian partisan leader who fought against both Soviet and German domination of western Ukraine during and after World War II, but who also aligned himself with the SS at times and terrorized the Jewish population of the region. Later that day, Grebtsov enlisted in the “militia” of “little green men,” the covert operation that led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. By the end of the month, he was in Donetsk, the key city in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and the focal point of what would soon become a separatist war.

Oddly enough, it was the disconnect between what he was seeing on Russian state-controlled TV and what he was reading on independent Ukrainian websites that finally made him pick up and go to war, Grebtsov remembered in an April 2014 interview with the local newspaper Kachkanarsky Chetverg. “When you see that they’re saying one thing here, and something totally different there, and you don’t understand what’s really happening, the only way to figure it out is to go there yourself,” he said.

The story of how Russia went to war with Ukraine is, above all, the story of men like Igor Grebtsov. We don’t know how many of the Russian fighters in various parts of Ukraine were following orders, and how many—like Grebtsov—were volunteers. But we do know that the Kremlin’s decision to occupy first Crimea and then parts of the Donbas, and to plunge the region into an armed conflict that continues to this day, produced a groundswell of genuine support: in some cases, support strong enough to move men to leave behind families and put themselves in the line of fire.

“At first, I wasn’t intending to enlist in the militia,” Grebtsov told Kachkanarsky Chetverg. “The idea arose while I was there, when I saw those Banderite rallies, talked to people, learned more about the conflict.” When a rumor began to spread among the anti-Maidan crowd about NATO exercises planned for March 9, his mind was made up.

“I decided to join and defend Russians,” he said.

There were no NATO exercises in March 2014, but that hardly matters.

TO WAR

By the middle of February 2014, it was becoming increasingly clear that Viktor Yanukovych’s grip on Ukraine was failing. Protesters had occupied Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—since November 21, 2013, when President Yanukovych suspended plans to sign an association agreement with the European Union. In the ensuing days, protesters drafted demands calling for constitutional reform reducing the power of the presidency and refused to leave the square. Clashes with police ensued on November 30, leading to riots and running skirmishes that lasted well into the new year. On February 20, the Russian prime minister (and former president) Dmitry Medvedev—who had kept his own riot police largely at bay during the 2011–12 Russian mass protests—publicly called on Yanukovych to take a harder line: “Don’t let people wipe their feet on you,” Medvedev said.2 That day, amid shooting from both sides, between sixty and eighty protesters were shot dead on and around the Maidan.³ The next day, Vladimir Lukin—a former Russian ambassador to Washington and Putin’s long-time human-rights ombudsman—arrived in Kyiv, ostensibly to help mediate in negotiations between the government and the opposition; instead, he spirited Yanukovych out of the country, installing him in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. During the flight, the Ukrainian parliament voted to impeach the president. Two weeks later, Igor Grebtsov was in Crimea, and he wasn’t alone.

On February 22, 2014—the day after Yanukovych fled Ukraine—someone in Russia registered the internet domain address dobrovolec.org, the name drawn from the Russian word for “volunteer.” After sitting dormant for several weeks, the address eventually began to be used for recruiting mercenaries like Grebtsov. We don’t know who bought the domain or why, but the facts that are available suggest a startling degree either of foresight or of planning on the part of whoever was behind it. Before those plans (or that foresight) could be put to use, however, there was work to be done.

On February 26, 2014, unrest broke out on the grounds of the Crimean Rada, the parliament of the Republic of Crimea, which, together with the port city of Sevastopol, where Russia had its Black Sea Fleet base, enjoyed semi-autonomous status under the Ukrainian constitution. On the one side were Crimean Tatars, members of an ethnic group indigenous to the region but who were deported en masse to Central Asia under Stalin and who had struggled to regain their lands and rights even under independent Ukraine; the Tatars were interspersed with pro-Maidan activists, waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags. Opposing both groups was a contingent waving Russian flags. The exact composition of this latter group remains a mystery: they were mostly young and mostly Russian-speaking, but whether they were from the large Russian-speaking majority that inhabits Crimea or from Russia itself is unclear. What is clear is that fisticuffs resulted, and the opposing sides barricaded themselves into corners of the Rada compound.4

This, apparently, provided the opening that someone in Moscow had been waiting for. Under cover of night, masked armed men in military uniforms bearing no insignia stormed the building. The next morning, with Ukrainian police watching from a safe distance, the masked men marshaled a self-declared quorum of Rada members, who in turn voted to hold a referendum on independence for the peninsula, scheduled for May 2; the “little green men” guarded the doors and windows of the building as the voting occurred.⁵ That night, another group of armed masked men in military uniforms with no insignia—delivered in army-green trucks with no markings or number plates—seized control of the Simferopol airport, the peninsula’s key airfield.⁶ The sun rose on February 28 to find checkpoints armed by unidentifiable “little green men” on the road between Simferopol and Sevastopol—the peninsula’s main artery—and on other major roads.⁷ In a hint of things to come, a number of these checkpoints were also manned by members of the Night Wolves, a Moscow-based biker gang known for its nationalism and, indeed, the only openly nationalist organization with which Vladimir Putin has ever posed for a photo opportunity.⁸

“It was truly bizarre,” recalls Roland Oliphant, who arrived in Simferopol on February 26 to cover the events for London’s Daily Telegraph and was the first Western reporter to write about the rapid emergence of the “little green men.” “They were like the guards at Buckingham Palace who aren’t allowed to interact with the tourists. We would go up to them, run after them, taking pictures and asking questions about where they were from and what they were doing, and they would just stare blankly at you through those balaclavas.”9

Russia’s mainstream media—led by the three government-controlled television stations—were covering events in Crimea through the same prisms that had shaped their coverage of the Euromaidan in Kyiv, but with a twist. The overarching narrative of a fascist junta brought to power by radical nationalists and with the backing of Washington and Brussels was diluted somewhat by Russian reporters’ own bewilderment at the “little green men”—although most Russian media used the term “polite people,” in reference to the masked men’s evidently placid demeanor. On this front, at least, the Russian mainstream reporters knew no more than their Western or Ukrainian competitors. It was, then, perhaps unsurprising that Grebtsov and others might have been motivated by a desire to learn the truth.

Another Russian citizen who traveled to Crimea in search of the truth was the prominent opposition blogger Ilya Varlamov. In a post on his LiveJournal blog from March 4, 2014, Varlamov wrote:

The most important thing is, everything’s calm. There is tension, but it’s being stoked from outside. People are watching the television, reading newspapers, and then make horrified phone calls to their relatives in Crimea, saying “Is there a war there? Get out! Save yourselves!” In Crimea, Russian soldiers are sharing their cigarettes with their Ukrainian colleagues and no one has heard anything about a war or could even think about it. But there is tension.

There were, however, Russian soldiers in places they weren’t supposed to be, Varlamov reported.

Since officially these aren’t Russian soldiers, the Moscow PR people, who have also come to Crimea, invented a very cool thing: “Polite people.” They’re creating the image of the liberating Russian soldier, who came in a nice new uniform with beautiful weapons to protect peaceful villages and cities. He’s courteous, smiles, you can take a picture with him as a souvenir. He’s polite.10

The official line—delivered emphatically by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and President Putin himself—was that these “polite people” were most certainly not Russian soldiers; rather, they were local self-defense forces, made up of volunteers, and the Russian government knew nothing whatsoever about how these local volunteer forces managed to acquire late-model Russian uniforms, equipment and vehicles.¹¹ Few if anyone bought that story, however. On March 6, the Obama administration laid the groundwork for sanctions against Russia should it move to annex Crimea under any pretense, citing what Washington saw as a covert invasion of the peninsula. As the referendum approached—brought forward to March 16—international media were filled with stories about Crimea’s now ubiquitous “little green men.”12 The rest, of course, is history. On March 16, more than 95 percent of participants in the Crimean referendum voted to declare independence and join Russia; the only other option on the ballot was to seek functional autonomy through a constitutional reform in Ukraine.¹³ The following day, the US, the EU and Canada imposed the first round of sanctions, focusing on Russian officials and state-linked companies directly involved in the annexation, including, incidentally, the Night Wolves. A day after that, Putin solemnly announced that Crimea had “rejoined” the Russian Federation.

PUTIN V. THE NATIONALISTS

It has become common among Western analysts and policymakers to think of Vladimir Putin as a nationalist. Such accusations usually point to his statement in 2005 that the breakup of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” as well as to his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference, in which the Russian president pointedly challenged American power in the world.¹⁴ Russia’s intervention in Ukraine would seem to prove the point. But until men like Igor Grebtsov started packing their bags for Crimea, the Kremlin went out of its way to avoid nationalism at home.

Nationalism—including xenophobia and chauvinism—has always been a part of Russian politics (distinguishing Russia, of course, from no other country on the planet). Russian and various other ethnic nationalists were among the dissident groups that opposed the Soviet government after Khrushchev’s post-Stalin thaw, meeting in apartments to hone their ideologies, building underground networks of sympathizers at home and abroad, distributing clandestine texts through samizdat. The ultra-nationalist and notoriously anti-Semitic movement Pamyat was among the most powerful movements to emerge in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was far from alone. Among the longest-lasting groups was Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist movement, drawing on the thought of earlier generations of nationalists including Lev Gumilev (1912–92) and Ivan Il’in (1883–1954), as well as more esoteric sources.

In 1993, Vladimir Zhirinovsky shocked the world when his nationalist and anti-Semitic (and ironically named) Liberal Democratic Party won the largest share of votes in the parliamentary elections. Zhirinovsky and the populist former mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov, among others, would periodically call for President Boris Yeltsin to intervene on behalf of ethnic Russians living in the Baltics or Central Asia—as well as for the return of Crimea—but Yeltsin demurred. More recently, groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI, by its Russian acronym) emerged to oppose the migration of dark-skinned “guest workers” from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Even Alexei Navalny—nominal leader of Russia’s liberal opposition—has frequented the nationalist “Russian Marches” held annually on November 4. However, Putin’s Kremlin had steadfastly ignored calls from both the DPNI and Navalny to impose a visa regime on migrant workers from Central Asia.

By the time Putin rose to power in 1999, Zhirinovsky had become a mostly tame mainstream Russian politician, and the more extreme nationalist organizations were effectively suppressed by the Federal Security Service (FSB), which Putin himself had headed. Putin’s administration, however, was always aware of the nationalists on its flank and from time to time launched experiments to try to keep at least the more mainstream nationalists on board.

In 2003, Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s chief political adviser, brought together a group of moderately nationalist politicians to create a new political party, Rodina (Motherland), in an effort to give nationalist-minded voters a Kremlin-friendly option for that year’s Duma elections; the party duly won 9 percent of the vote but was disbanded in 2006 amidst the growing ambitions of its leaders.15 In 2007, the nationalist flag was picked up by Nashi, the youth group created by the Kremlin to channel the political energy of young people in pro-regime directions (and which had once employed Kristina Potupchik, the Kremlin internet operative we met in the previous chapter). Nashi went on the offensive against the government of Estonia, when it attempted to remove a prominent Soviet-era war memorial. Nashi activists took part in riots in the Estonian capital and hounded the country’s ambassador in Moscow. They similarly harassed the British and American ambassadors. The Kremlin itself, however, maintained a polite distance and eventually brought the activists to heel.

In deciding not to allow radical nationalists to contest the 2007 parliamentary elections, the Kremlin reinforced its policy of suppressing that part of the political spectrum. Nationalism and xenophobia did not, however, go away. Even though they were subject to prosecution under laws against extremism and inciting ethnic hatred, nationalist groups proliferated, making use of online social media to grow beyond kitchen tables and clandestine clubs. Often, football fan groups served as hotbeds of nationalist sentiment, as they do in many countries. Predominantly, the nationalists’ anger was directed against migrants, including immigrants from Central Asia and internal migrants from the ethnic republics of the North Caucasus, who in turn organized themselves into communities of solidarity and self-defense (as well as organized crime).

That violence would ensue was almost inevitable. In September 2006, riots erupted in the small northern-Russian town of Kondopoga, near the border with Finland, after a bar-room fight led to the murder of two ethnic Russians by a group of Chechen and Dagestani migrants. In December 2010, some 50,000 nationalists rioted on Manezh Square, under the walls of the Kremlin, demanding revenge for the death of an ethnically Russian football fan in a mass brawl with a group of North Caucasians living in Moscow. The Kremlin responded to the rising unrest with a wave of arrests of nationalist leaders, including Alexander Belov (leader of the DPNI).16 The result, unsurprisingly, was to further deepen the mistrust between nationalists and the Kremlin, according to Alexander Verkhovsky, a human-rights activist and long-time Russian observer of the nationalist movement. “Because the bulk of radical nationalists are members of violence-oriented groups, the entire movement saw this policy as a ‘declaration of war,’ which raised the temperature of their anti-government sentiment,” Verkhovsky wrote.17

Sensing that rising temperature, the Kremlin again decided to dabble. In an effort to show that he was tough on migrants, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin—who was running for election in September 2013—decided to organize a series of raids on goods markets, transport hubs, dormitories and other sites where immigrants could be found en masse; detainees were herded into makeshift detention centers and then onto airplanes out of the country, all under the watchful eye of television cameras.¹⁸ The anti-migrant campaign that led up to the election was, in part, a response both to the memory of the Manezh and Kondopoga riots, and to the participation of nationalists in the anti-Kremlin “Bolotnaya” movement of 2011–12, Verkhovsky argues. Not only did the campaign respond to the nationalists’ immediate demands, but it gave nationalist groups an opportunity to participate directly in the implementation of their desired policies, by helping the police and other authorities to identify and round up illegal immigrants.

All but one of Sobyanin’s opponents in the election, meanwhile, lined up on the same side of the issue, each vying to outdo the others in anti-immigrant fervor.¹⁹ Navalny, for one, promised (with tongue only partly in cheek) to ban public performance of the lezginka, an iconic folk dance from the Caucasus.²⁰ Sobyanin duly won the election, which in turn brought an end to the crackdown on migrants—but, of course, not to the nationalism. One month later, the working-class Moscow neighborhood of Western Biriulevo was rocked by a wave of pogroms, in the wake of the death of an ethnic Russian resident, allegedly at the hands of an immigrant from Azerbaijan. As before, the Kremlin was silent.

CRIMEA IS OURS!

When Vladimir Putin addresses the Russian parliament—whether for his inauguration, to deliver his annual “state of the nation” address, or for any other purpose—the parliament comes to him. Once all are seated in a gilded Kremlin hall, massive doors swing open and Putin, alone, enters, striding wordlessly to the podium amid the applause of his audience. The address on March 18, 2014, was no exception.

The circumstances were, however, exceptional. For the first time since the end of World War II, Russia had annexed territory by force from one of its neighbors. For all its ambivalence about nationalism, the Putin administration had just delivered on one of the nationalists’ fondest dreams—taking Crimea. And it had all happened without the Russian government acknowledging what it had done. Now finally, Putin was to speak, to frame the annexation and state official Russian policy.

“To understand why this decision was made,” Putin said, “it is enough to know the history of Crimea, to know what Russia meant and means for Crimea, and Crimea for Russia.” He continued:

In Crimea, literally everything is saturated with our common history and pride. It is the land of ancient Chersonesus, where the Holy Prince Vladimir was baptized. His spiritual feat—his conversion to Orthodox Christianity—predetermined the common cultural, moral and civilizational foundation that binds the people of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In Crimea are found the graves of Russian soldiers, through whose bravery in 1783 Crimea was brought under Russian rule. Crimea is Sevastopol, that legendary city, that city of great fate, the fortress city and Motherland of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is Balaklava and Kerch, Malakhov Kurgan and Sapun-Gora. Each one of these places is sacred to us, as symbols of Russian military glory and unheard-of valor.21

Some of this history would have been familiar to Russians, but much of it was obscure and being heard by most people for the first time.²² As we will see in Chapter 4, to say that many Russians responded positively to the annexation of Crimea would be an understatement, but Putin and his advisers could not have known just how powerfully his words and actions would resonate. According to Gleb Pavlovsky, Putin’s first chief political adviser, the approach taken in the March 18 speech was to throw things at the wall and see what stuck. Much like Potupchik’s work with the online okhraniteli on behalf of the Kremlin, Putin’s speechwriters tried a bit of everything: in the president’s words, the annexation of Crimea was an act of humanitarian intervention to liberate an oppressed Russian-speaking population; an act of historical justice; even an act of Christian piety. It was justified by geopolitics, by ethnic solidarity, and by the long arc of history. Whatever the rhetoric, though, the nationalists came running.

Most Russians are not ardent nationalists. Very few would pick up and go to war. Comparatively few, in fact, would spend much time thinking and talking about war, or the potential for war. And yet, some people obviously did, and it was from that cohort that people like Grebtsov were recruited. Finding these people, of course, is a challenge. One place to do it was on the battlefields of Donbas; these, alas, were off limits to us. Another place was online. Indeed, it was in social media communities and a handful of dedicated websites that many of the recruits—and their financial and ideological supporters back home in Russia—found one another and joined the cause.

At the core of this digital nationalist movement was a group of “community” pages on the popular Russian online social network VKontakte (VK, for short). We concentrated on the largest of these, sixteen communities bringing together more than 1 million people. At their peak, these communities were generating as many as 6 million “likes” per month. To learn more about this group, we examined more than half a million posts—and several million comments—made between December 2011 and May 2016.

Nationalists being nationalists, prior to the eruption of the Euromaidan in Ukraine most of these groups spent their time talking about Russia. In fact, most of the pre-Euromaidan content wasn’t overtly political: participants would share patriotic movie clips and images, indulge in nostalgia, get whipped up in the fervor around Victory Day every May 9, and so on. Notably absent from these communities was Putin: the Russian president—who had so assiduously avoided outright nationalism himself—made it into fewer than 5 percent of the posts we found prior to Crimea. Every once in a while, America or Europe—the nationalists’ primary bogeymen—would come into the picture, but only in about one in ten posts. When things did get political, messages were most often imbued with a sense of historical grievance and the need for revenge, mostly for the loss of the Soviet empire. In fact, the language of revenge was present in about one in five posts prior to December 2013.

But the Euromaidan changed all of that. A popular meme making the rounds in December 2013 on the nationalist VK communities showed two photographs—one of Soviet soldiers in World War II, and the other of protesters waving the EU flag on the Maidan—with the caption, “Back then, they didn’t know that seventy years later the Ukrainians would hand their Motherland over to the enemy.” In fact, these online communities had begun talking more and more about Ukraine in the summer of 2013, as Russian nationalists on both sides of the border reacted to the growing likelihood that the EU and Ukraine would, in fact, conclude and sign an association agreement.23 Attention only grew as events in Kyiv unfolded, for a while drowning out even discussion of Russia itself.²⁴ Much as mass anti-Georgian sentiment had been whipped up prior to Russia’s short 2008 war with that country, so too did Ukraine come to capture a segment of the Russian public imagination. For Russian nationalists, the Moscow-based political scientist Sergei Medvedev wrote, talking about Ukraine became an important way of talking about themselves. In short, it was the fight in Ukraine that came to define Russian nationalism itself.

It was around this time, too, that the nationalists’ rhetoric began to merge with the Kremlin’s. Many of the “wedge issues” that were so powerful in countering Russia’s own oppositional uprising in 2012—homophobia, antipathy to “liberal values,” and the imperative of counteracting allegedly Western-backed “fascism”—worked their way into nationalists’ discussions of Ukraine.25 All of these were argued by both the nationalists and the Kremlin to be part of the West’s nefarious bargain with the Maidan. In describing his comrades in Crimea and Donbas to an interviewer from his local newspaper, Igor Grebtsov put it this way:

Grebtsov: These people, they came to defend Russians and the interests of their country. They came because they don’t like the European life. A [Russian] guy from Germany told us how he works as a computer programmer, he’s 40-something years old, raising two kids. One day his daughter brings an assignment home from school—write an essay on tolerance. The conditions: your parents are being visited for the weekend by a gay friend, and you and your brother have to occupy the guest while your parents are out doing the shopping.

Interviewer: And you think that’s unacceptable?

Grebtsov: Naturally. In Crimea, the front line now lies not between Ukraine and Russia, the European Union or anyone else, but between normal people and abnormal people. People consciously don’t want to join Europe.²⁶

On the morning of February 27, 2014, the trending post in the VK community known as “Anti-maydan” (sic) was a report that special-ops troops from Chechnya had arrived in Crimea “to defend the population and restore order,” linking this rumor (for which there is still no clear corroboration) to earlier reports on the occupation of the Crimean Rada in Simferopol. Later that day, however, it was overtaken by a post headlined “VICTORY!!!” and reporting the news that the Rada had announced the referendum. On March 1, by far the most popular post was a report that the Russian Federation Council had authorized Putin to move Russian troops across the Ukrainian border. The post read: “The decision has been taken. Russian troops are going to Ukraine. The decision has been taken!!! A minute ago!!!”

The nationalists’ excitement at the reports from Crimea was understandable, as was their newfound admiration for Putin. The Kremlin was finally putting the force of the Russian state—indeed, the force of Russian arms—behind an agenda for which the nationalists had been agitating for years, if not decades. By contrast, Putin’s set-piece annexation speech was almost a non-event. On the day of Putin’s speech, one of the most popular posts in the nationalist segment of VK read simply: “Russian warriors don’t start wars, they end them!” Another popular post was a joke:

Obama, Merkel, Hollande and the rest—Putin’s sick of them already. They keep calling and calling, so he switched his phone to voicemail. His message says, “Hello. You have called Russian President Putin. Unfortunately, I cannot take your call at the moment. If you want to surrender, please press 1. If you want to threaten sanctions, please press 2. If you want to discuss the situation in Ukraine, please press 3. All buttons other than 1 activate our Topol-M intercontinental missiles. Have a nice day!”

ON THE FRONT LINES

When and if a future Russian government decides to open up its archives and declassify military and intelligence dossiers from 2014, historians will be able to tell us how much of what happened next in eastern Ukraine was planned in advance.

It began on April 7, 2014, in Kharkiv, where anti-Maidan protesters stormed the regional administration building. Three days later, protesters overran the local headquarters of the Ukrainian security services—the SBU—in Luhansk. Oleksander Turchynov, Ukraine’s acting president, promised the protesters immunity from prosecution if they would leave the government compounds peacefully, but the gesture was in vain.27 On April 11, anti-Maidan protests emerged in Odessa; on April 12, protesters tried to seize the Donetsk office of the Ukrainian prosecutorial service, but were turned away.

In the town of Slavyansk, however, things took a more ominous turn: a group of heavily armed men—wearing masks and military uniforms bearing no insignia—led by someone calling himself Igor Strelkov, took over the local police headquarters; the town wouldn’t return firmly to Ukrainian government control until July 5.²⁸ On April 14, “Polite People”—identical to those who had been seen in Crimea—began turning up in Luhansk.29 On April 16, a group led by Kharkiv-based nationalist leader Alexander Zakharchenko overran the Donetsk city hall and called on the authorities in Kyiv to allow a referendum “on the territorial status of the Donetsk region.”³⁰ The next day, “Polite People” were spotted at the Donetsk airport.³¹

An “anti-terrorist operation” launched by Turchynov on April 15 resulted in a series of embarrassing defeats for the Ukrainian military, which found itself outgunned and out-maneuvered. By the end of April 2014, much of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions were effectively outside of Kyiv’s control, and skirmishes began to break out further afield, including in Mariupol (on the road from Donetsk to Crimea) and in Odessa, where running street battles ultimately led to approximately sixty anti-Kyiv protesters being burned to death on May 2.³² Sensing Russia’s hand—and corroborated by Putin’s own admission on April 17 that regular Russian troops had “backed up” the local self-defense forces in Crimea—the US and EU expanded sanctions on April 28.³³ (In December 2015, Putin would publicly acknowledge that the Russian government ran the Crimean operation from start to finish.)³⁴

As with Crimea, the nationalist groups on VK obsessed over reports from the emerging “front” in eastern Ukraine. From March through July 2014, “war reports” account for between half and two thirds of each month’s online activity. Over the course of the spring and summer of 2014, the number of large, public community pages on VK dedicated to the emerging conflict mushroomed from three that were active prior to February 2014, to six by the end of April, twelve by the end of May and fifteen by the end of August 2014. Whereas the pre-conflict groups bore names like “Anti-Maidan” or “Against the EU,” the new groups took titles more specific to the war: “Novorossia” or the “Republic of New Russia,” “Russian Spring,” “Revolution East,” “News Front,” “South Ukraine,” “Government DNR,” and so on. The largest group to emerge bore the name of the war’s most prominent commander: “Strelkov-Info.”

But these communities were about more than banal voyeurism. On May 13, the following message begins appearing across several of the nationalist communities on VK:

ATTENTION!

Announcing the formation of a special brigade, inviting ONLY (!) people with combat experience.

Creation of the 1^st SOUTH-EAST INTERBRIGADE

To save your time and ours, and for more effective cooperation, keep strictly to the form.

Form:

1. Your city (Formation takes place in Moscow).

2. Your age.

3. Military specialization category number.

4. Combat experience and skills.

5. Additional information.

6. Contact information.

Send your information to: Oborona_ua@dobrovolec.org with the subject line “Special Battalion” or write here: coordinator on VKontakte

#junta #ukraine #Novorossia #DNR #Russia #Odessa #Mariupol

Note the domain name on the email address: dobrovolec.org—the same address that was registered on February 22, the day after Yanukovych fled the country. On June 19, two more messages went out across the network, with the same contact details. One of them read:

RUSSIAN VOLUNTEERS

We need military paramedics, communications officers, artillerymen, staff officers (platoon, troop, division, battalion), mortar squads (brigade regiment), self-propelled howitzer specialists, operational department, reconnaissance, transport, missile artillery specialists, rear officers, rifle platoon and squad commanders, battalion commanders, service technicians for armored transports, armored infantry vehicles, armored landing vehicles and tanks, launch operators.

The second message that day requested help in requisitioning twenty-four pieces of heavy equipment, including generators, pumps, compressors and other machines. The text begins with the line “Reports from Strelkov, Igor Ivanovich” and notes that the supplies are needed “URGENTLY” for the troops in Slavyansk.

By mid-May 2014, Strelkov had emerged as the most prominent of the Donbas separatist leaders, although he wasn’t from the region. A Russian FSB agent whose real name is Igor Girkin, he had served in Transnistria and Serbia, as well as Chechnya and Dagestan. In a breathless profile of Girkin–Strelkov published in June 2014, the newspaper Moskovsky komsomolets—one of Russia’s most widely read dailies—wrote:

Today, the defenders of Donbas, wielding only light arms, are taking losses in battle with regular forces of the Kyiv army and fighters from the Nazi “Right Sector,” who are armed to the teeth. The rich military experience of Igor Strelkov helps to even the scales and gives south-eastern Ukraine hope for a quiet and peaceful future. The bravery of the defenders of Donbas and Strelkov’s talents have melded into an armor against which the new Banderites’ anger is powerless.35

Indeed, as support for the Donbas uprising grew online and spilled into Russia’s mainstream media, neither the fighters themselves nor even the Russian government went too far out of their way to hide the connections between the two. Denis Pushilin, co-chair of the government of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) at the time, was most prominently known as the head of the regional branch of the Moscow-based “multi-level marketing” pyramid scheme MMM. Pavel Gubarev, who took the title of people’s governor of Donetsk region, was best known as a member of the Russian neo-Nazi group Russian National Unity.³⁶ Another DNR commander, Alexander Borodai, told journalists on May 15 that plans for Donbas and Crimea were developed “more or less by the same cohort of people.” He went on to say, “I won’t hide that I worked in Crimea.”³⁷ A day later, RIA Novosti—Russia’s official state-run news agency—ran a story touting “Polite People” as the new symbol of the Russian military.38 In another interview more than a year later, Borodai claimed that between 30,000 and 50,000 Russians fought in the Donbas and launched a Union of Donbas Volunteers to “defend volunteers, assist the families of those who died, and the people of Donbas.”³⁹

TURNING TIDES

On May 25, 2014, Ukrainian troops attacked separatist positions in and around the Donetsk airport.⁴⁰ Now fighting with a clearer sense of their opponent and intelligence and advice from the US, the UK and Germany, Kyiv’s operation was not the abject failure that many of its earlier missions had been, but neither did it end in success; in fact, the struggle for the Donetsk airport—or, rather, what was left of it—would go on for the better part of a year. Nonetheless, the terms of the war were beginning to shift. In voting on May 15, Petro Poroshenko was elected as president of Ukraine, to be inaugurated the following month. His promise was to seek peace if possible, but to win the war if necessary.

As Poroshenko took office, Kyiv launched an offensive that would, for the first time since the war began, push the front line toward Russia. On June 21, Putin announced a general mobilization of active duty servicemen and reserves in Russia’s Central Military District and used a series of exercises to reposition troops and equipment near the Ukrainian border. Battles were fierce and casualties mounted, including among civilians.

Among the most symbolic victories for the Ukrainian army was the retaking on July 5, 2014, of Slavyansk—the town where the fighting had first begun a few months earlier. The online nationalist communities were livid. One popular post on the South Ukraine page July 5 read simply: “It was not for nothing that Moscow was delivered to the Frenchman, burned to the ground. . . .”

But the most popular post written in reaction to the fall of Slavyansk was a startling combination of anger, accusation and confession. Too lengthy to reproduce here in full, it is written as though from an anonymous Russian soldier to an anonymous Ukrainian soldier:

Ukrainian soldier, you won! Congratulations!

What did you see when you entered the liberated Slavyansk?

Did you see happiness on the faces of the locals? Did you see celebration? Did happy women throw flowers on your armored personnel carrier or your tank? Did they hold out their children for you?

Did you see the people’s happiness at your arrival? Did you feel oneness with these people? Were you happy that you—a Ukrainian soldier—were a defender, a liberator, a preserver of life?

Did you feel what our soldiers felt in Prishtina or South Ossetia?

Or not?

Did you see demolished homes?

Hospitals?

Schools?

Kindergartens?

Did you see fear in people’s eyes? Did you see hate in those eyes?

Did you see the fresh graves? Did you count them?

What did you bring with you to Slavyansk, the city you liberated?

From whom did you liberate it, and for whom?

You were followed into the city by nationalists. You were followed by mercenaries. You were followed by Ukrainian secret services, and we know whom they serve.

And what are they doing right now, before your very eyes? What are they doing?

They are looking for unreliable elements. They are dealing in arrests, in interrogations, in revenge. They are taking their revenge on the city. They are putting the residents on their knees. They are forcing them to jump and yell “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” right next to the fresh graves of their relatives and neighbors.

How do I know this?

Simply because it has happened before.

And you were also followed by Ukrainian politicians and journalists.

And what are they doing now?

They are lying. They are making set-piece films. They are taking false interviews.

. . .

This is all your doing.

Almost as if foreshadowed by the nationalists’ own desperate rhetoric, the Russian retreat from Slavyansk also saw Moscow switch its attention to a very different front. On July 12, Russia’s Channel 1 television—the country’s most popular broadcaster—showed a report alleging that Ukrainian forces had sought revenge against residents of the town who were thought to have supported the separatists. Among the interviewees was a woman who claimed that her 3-year-old son had been crucified before her eyes. It was a powerful story, evoking basic human emotions, including sympathy for the mother and hatred of the boy’s killers.

But it was also a lie. A few days before Channel 1 aired its report, Alexander Dugin—the leader of the Eurasianist movement and supporter of the Donbas separatists, who had become a prominent television personality in the early months of the war—posted a story about a crucified boy on his Facebook page, as did an anonymous user on the Strelkov-Info VK page. Independent Russian journalists investigating the case, however, could find no corroborating evidence and determined that the woman in the clip had no children anywhere near the right age.41 In December 2014, Channel 1 itself backed away from the story.⁴²

Although it was obviously not the first lie told during the war, the incident of the “crucified boy” instantly became Exhibit No. 1 for the use of “fake news” and “disinformation” in warfare and political conflict. Evidently, someone at Channel 1 had decided that such stories, whether they were true or not, were needed in order to evoke in the wider Russian population the passions that were already roiling the nationalists. And clearly, since Channel 1 had picked up the story from social media feeds associated with Dugin and Strelkov, they had become accustomed to taking their inspiration from the nationalists.

The relationship of the nationalists themselves to “fake news” was, in truth, ambivalent. Their online social networks were rife with rumor and falsehood, but that does not appear itself to have been the goal. After years of feeling at turns undermined or repressed by the Kremlin, the nationalists were not inclined to trust the Russian government nor its media outlets. Indeed, discussion of media manipulation was a common topic in the nationalist VK groups long before the war broke out, accounting for about 10 percent of the posts in our database between December 2011 and December 2013. And because so much of what was being posted on these VK pages was reports from the front, many of the nationalists felt that they were privy to truths that the Kremlin was unwilling to share with its own citizens. Thus, a poll by the independent Russian research group the Levada Center in September 2014 found that only 29 percent of Russians thought that there were Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine; few if any among the nationalists on VK would have had any doubt.43

In his April 2014 interview with Kachkanarsky Chetverg, Igor Grebtsov was philosophical about the truth. The news—trumpeted on Russian television—that Crimeans were partying in the streets until dawn after the “referendum” was a bald-faced lie, he said: there was a storm that night, with lashing rains and strong winds. Equally false, he said, was the idea that there was no fighting. But despite the ubiquity of “fake news” on the Russian airwaves, Grebtsov didn’t put much stock in truth-telling. The only way to win the propaganda war, he concluded, was to fight lies with bigger lies. “If Ukrainian TV channels were lying that two [Russian] soldiers raped two girls from Crimea, then Russian TV needs to lie and say that a crowd of Banderites raped a whole kindergarten,” he said.

Not everyone among the nationalist contingent on VK, of course, would have shared Grebtsov’s interpretation. It is notable, however, that when the news was hard to spin in the movement’s favor, it was largely ignored. Stories like the retreat from Slavyansk could be used to whip up anger and reinforce the fighting spirit. But when a surface-to-air missile brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Donbas on July 17, 2014, it was discussed in only twenty-seven posts—out of more than 19,000 posts in our database that month. Mainstream Russian media spun stories about how the plane had been shot down by a Ukrainian air force jet that mistook it for Putin’s presidential liner, or how it was actually the Malaysia Airlines plane that had gone missing somewhere in the Indian Ocean earlier in the year and was now being used to frame Russia, but the nationalists didn’t go in for that.

Neither, unsurprisingly, did the nationalists go in for the Minsk Protocol signed on September 15, 2014. Based on an initial twelve-point agreement discussed by Poroshenko and Putin, the accord called for a bilateral ceasefire, established an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission, and promised a process of legal reform that would grant the Donbas more autonomy, but it also clearly disenfranchised the leaders of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR). Again, the nationalists were livid. Many, evidently, saw it as treason. On the day the Minsk accords were completed, Dmitry Dzygovbrodsky, a prominent nationalist blogger involved in the Russian Spring movement, wrote on Strelkov-Info (and in his own LiveJournal blog):

The forces in Moscow and Kyiv who thought that they could continue to play with the people, as they have for the past twenty-three years, have still not learned that historic processes are at work here, as they were in 1917 and 1789. And [no one] can keep these processes under control. Never. Vivat Novorossia!

In an interview published on September 16 on the Strelkov-Info VK page, separatist leader Pavel Gubarev was more measured:

Peace talks are always a good thing. In that sense, I support the Minsk agreements. But with two caveats: the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics must be the starting point for these negotiations, and the ceasefire must be observed de facto.

Mostly, however, they ignored the topic. Minsk figured in only 6 percent of the posts in our database in September 2014. It got more attention in February 2015 when, following renewed fighting and the evident reinforcement of the separatists, the agreement was revised on terms much more favorable to the DNR and LNR; but even then, it figured in only 15 percent of posts that month. The largest pro-separatist community on VK at the time, Strelkov-Info, ignored Minsk altogether. Instead, September 15 and 16, 2014 were filled with reports from the front, such as this:

A mysterious sniper is picking off Banderites in Slavyansk. In the Slavyansk area an unknown sniper is destroying Ukrainian occupiers in cold blood and in the light of day. . . .

Or this:

Letter from Mariupol

I can say this, after the liberation of Mariupol from the ukro-fascist “defenders” I can guarantee a serious surprise—the Novorossia battalion made up of Mariupol residents will be the largest and the most merciless. . . .

Mariupol never fell.

HOME TO ROOST

On May 20, 2015, Oleg Tsarev—a Ukrainian politician who joined the separatist movement and was “elected” in June 2014 speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia, which brought together separatist leaders from the DNR and LNR—announced that Novorossia was done. In messages put out on the movement’s VK pages and other social networks, and in subsequent interviews, Tsarev explained that the idea of Novorossia as a unified, independent republic “doesn’t fit into the peace plan.”44 The first Minsk protocol was effectively dead in the water by the end of 2014, scuppered in large measure by the separatists. In February 2015, however, France and Germany brought the warring sides back to the table, and a new agreement—Minsk II—was hammered out, in a fashion much less advantageous to Ukraine.

For many among the nationalists, however, Minsk II was still a step too far, and Tsarev’s announcement was yet a further confirmation of Moscow’s treason. Within the nationalists’ communities on VK, the news had an explosive effect, and the size of the blast can be measured in words. Across the sixteen “communities” we followed online, the remarkable convergence of rhetoric that had seen the nationalists talk about the war and the world in virtually identical terms from the start of the war in April 2014 and until May 2015 disintegrated.⁴⁵ As the Kremlin sought to dampen down the passions of separatism and empire that had only recently united the nationalists and aligned them with Putin, discord among the nationalists once again became the norm.

That is not to say that the nationalists somehow reverted to their status quo ante. Ukraine had changed too much for that to be possible. Ukraine in fact continued to dominate the conversation even after Tsarev announced the Kremlin’s betrayal, outpacing even Russia among the topics discussed. Fascism and the vocabulary of revenge remained popular framings for the conversation. But topics from Russian domestic politics that strayed into the debate—such as the discussion of homosexuals—fell away, as did mention of Putin himself.

If Putin was once again pushed to the margins of Russia’s nationalist discourse by the dawn of 2016, the Russian president certainly responded in kind. Dugin, a darling of the nightly TV news and debate shows at the height of the war, disappeared from the airwaves. Girkin–Strelkov, too, faded into relative obscurity, and by the end of 2016 almost the entire leadership of the DNR and LNR had been purged.46 Left in place was a leadership with the will and resources to fight. But unlike Strelkov’s troops—who attacked Mariupol on the day the first Minsk protocol was signed—the local commanders were also ready to stop on command from Moscow. Closer to home, too, the Kremlin took few chances, arresting the leaders of two nationalist groups, the Russian March and the Orthodox State (so named in a purposeful parallel with the Islamic State).⁴⁷ Having brought nationalist forces out into the streets of Moscow and other major cities for a wave of Anti-Maidan marches in February 2015—marches that were headed by the Night Wolves, carrying portraits of Putin and the father of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov (but not of Ramzan himself)—the government evidently did not want to see disaffected nationalists return to the streets of their own accord.

After Igor Grebtsov finished his part of the war in Ukraine—with a medal for his service in Crimea, and a shrapnel wound for his service in Donbas—he returned to his hometown of Lesnoi and took a job as an editor at Kachkanarsky Chetverg, the newspaper that had interviewed him during the war. It was a hero’s welcome, and he filled numerous pages of the paper with his recollections from the front. In March 2015, the Moscow-based journalist Maria Eismont traveled to Kachkanar to interview him and his colleagues, resulting in a long profile published by the online news magazine Snob and the online television channel Dozhd.48 In her profile, Eismont writes:

Grebtsov has a lot of photographs on his computer of pro-Ukrainian rallies in Crimea and he happily shows them, commenting: “This guy here, who was talking a lot, we detained him and shipped him to Ukraine. There were a lot of slogans about us being occupiers and all that, but there’s one slogan I agree with: ‘The referendum is a step toward war.’ We wanted war, the people who were living in Crimea and then went to Donbas wanted war. Yes, the referendum was a step toward war, toward the war for Ukraine as a piece of Russia. If someone thinks otherwise, we disagree.”

Further in her article, Eismont recounts a party she witnessed at Grebtsov’s apartment. Grebtsov’s friends had gathered around the table, and the host, as he was wont to do, was telling war stories, when one of his friends, a younger man named Mikhail, spoke up:

“That’s the problem, that we think that Ukraine is our Ukraine,” [Mikhail] said. “But it’s not ours! It’s an independent country, Igor. It’s an independent country that has its own rights. If it wants to join the European Union, let it join the European Union.”

“There is no Ukraine,” Igor replies. “There is no war between Russia and Ukraine. There’s a war between Russia and the US, and the Ukrainians are just pieces of meat.”

“Oh come on,” said Mikhail, not giving up. “Ukraine has a right to be independent, has a right to join the European Union. Or it always has to be an appendage of Russia?”

“If Russia’s not opposed, let it join.”

“So you think that any country that was part of the Soviet Union still has to be ours?”

“No. Any country for which even a drop of Russian blood has been spilled should be part of Russia.”

“But what if it doesn’t want to be with us?”

“You know, Misha, it’s like with women. Not all the women we’ve slept with wanted to sleep with us. But we were men and convinced them otherwise.”

The men—and there were only men around the table—laughed loudly.

“What you’re talking about,” said Mikhail through the laughter, “sounds more like rape.”

Eismont’s profile made Grebtsov famous well beyond the provincial Ural Mountain towns of Lesnoi and Kachkanar. For Ukrainian partisans, Grebtsov was an enemy to be liquidated: he deleted his social media accounts and went into hiding after a call for his head went out on the internet.49 But for Eismont’s readers and viewers—mostly among the liberals of Moscow and St. Petersburg—Grebtsov was a mirror held up to Russia’s demons.