While the Ukraine war has been sidelined by the Israel/Palestine conflict flaring up (there can apparently be just one ongoing war in public consciousness), I've been long interested in finding more about the original Donbass war starting from 2014, so I decided to read a book from the pro-Russian side, 85 Days in Slavyansk by Alexander Zhuchkovsky (I guess the best-known one of such memoirs.) It's not what I'd call a work of high literature, but the style and translation was serviceable, and the described events were highly interesting, so the book was a breeze.
The book describes the event that really turned the post-Euromaidan pro-Russian protests (“Antimaidan”/”Russian Spring”) into a war; the occupation of Slavyansk by a small group of militants led by Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), the battles with Ukrainian army and volunteer groups like Azovites after that and the eventual withdrawal from the city after Ukrainian pressure got too high. The author was not in the city right at the beginning but became a volunteer fighter at a later stage and has interviewed militants who were there (and are still alive). Some parts of the book give a “macro” view of the conflict, but much of it just recounts individual battles and, to some degree, life at the city.
Some things I thought while reading it:
While an obvious point, it’s hard to miss how the (blatantly, unapologetically) one-sided perspective makes the author describe things differently when the sides do them. When Ukrainians kill civilians, it shows their idiotic, brutish nature, when the separatists kill civilians, well, war is war, cruelty is sometimes needed etc. When Ukrainians make a maneuver wearing Russian symbols its duplicitous, when the separatists do a maneuver while flying the Ukrainian flag it's smart. "Ukraine" is a fake nation invented by Austrians and Poles but the flash-in-the-pan "Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic" which briefly existed in the 1918 is crucial to understanding the current situation in Donetsk. And so on.
All of this doublethink is to be expected, but what stuck with me was that Zhuchkovsky finds it ridiculous that Ukrainians would describe him and other Russian volunteers in Donbass as "mercenaries" - of course they would not fight for money as a cause - but then, when there are soldiers crying out in English or Polish in the Ukrainian ranks, the only explanation he can find is that they are, indeed, mercenaries. This is a mental block that I've continuously encountered in pro-Russian narratives; they can understand for sure why a Russian patriot would volunteer in Donbass, they can even at some level understand why an Ukrainian would volunteer to fight (because his mind has been eaten up by the ghost of Bandera), but the idea that a foreigner could fight and die for Ukraine simply because he believes in the Ukrainian national cause seems impossible. Must be that they're mercenaries or Western ops!
One of the arguments I've had often with pro-Russians is what events served as "triggers" for the war. Pro-Russians frequently finger the transfer of power after Euromaidan ("the NATO coup") and Odessa to claim that the separatist uprising was an internal development with scant external Russian influence, but when I've pointed out what has seemed to me be the absolutely most crucial trigger - the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea - it has often been dismissed, almost as if it had no effect on the events in the East.
Well, Zhuchkovsky's book certainly seems to confirm my view. While the Euromaidan is discussed rather perfunctorily and Odessa basically gets a sentence confirming it increased agitation and recruitment among separatist, but this just boosted an ongoing process, the Crimean invasion is constantly referred as a major separatist point of reference, something that made both locals and foreign volunteers confident that if they just stuck at Slavyansk hard enough the Russians would surely do the same as in Crimea and annex the Donbass republics. Which they eventually did, of course, but not within the time schedule the original volunteers had imagined.
In addition to the Crimean invasion, the other thing that, in Zhuchkovsky's narrative, led to the whole thing happening was one man - Strelkov. Strelkov is a virtual prince among men, a great leader who can do almost no wrong (the book has a mandatory sentence saying that "Strelkov made mistakes" but never really points out what these mistakes were), a great man against time who pretty much single-handedly creates Donbass out of nothing. In a way, with a lot of "smart" analysis talks about cultures and economic forces and whatnot, it's always refreshing to see someone come out with “Nah, that stuff’s there, of course, but in the end, it comes down to this one guy.”
I’ve seen some controversy on whether the 2014- Ukrainian war was a civil war or if a Russian invasion is the proper term, and one of the arguments for the idea that it at least started as a civil war was that most of the separatist fighters were locals, with volunteers from Russia and elsewhere only being like 30% of the fighters, according to the book. Even that is something of an uncomfortable argument, especially considering that Russian troops were directly being dispatched to the area as “volunteers” prior to Minsk, but if basically all the most important actors in getting the conflict going, especially the most important one, came from Russia, wouldn’t that be the most important thing to look at?
One of the least clear thing about the book is the level of Russian state involvement in the whole affair. In some parts of the book, the author says that the Russian state had nothing to do with them and the shady “backers” even tried to dissuade them, in other parts there are references to Glazyev and Aksynyov and other Russian state figures egging them on and promising support – with implication that this at least couldn’t have happened without some tacit approval from Putin. I get the feel the Russian system was using these guys as chaos agents and to force Ukraine to have to accept Donetsk autonomy and veto on foreign affairs. The Russian state created an illusion that they’d send the Russian army to help the volunteers, and then left them high and dry for eight years.
There are certain patterns in Finnish history that come to mind – Bolsheviks egging the Finnish radical socialists to start a revolution in 1918 and then, when they did that, offering almost no aid at all after some initial weapons supplies due to Brest-Litovsk, leaving the Finnish socialists to get brutally crushed. The guys in Slavyansk also seem comparable to Finnish “kinship warriors” immediately after that, right-wing volunteers who went to East Karelia in 1919 to take over the area with at least some backing from some sectors of the Finnish society, but then receiving no aid from the Finnish state after that and similarly getting eventually wiped out.
In the end, from my perspective it's basically like one of those "What if the good guys were the bad ones and the bad ones good ones?" fiction book reworkings. Reading the book, I can get the sense that what these guys are doing is, at some level an enterprise taking a lot of courage and gumption, and they’re ready to die for ideals – those ideals simply are, from my point of view, bad, especially for the ones like Strelkov who are doing all of this to revive Russian monarchical imperialism, an ideology that could easily conceivably threaten Finland’s existence as an independent country (and would certainly do it for nearby nations like Estonia and Latvia). Being heroic, courageous, and demonstrating manly valor for a bad idea is, in the end, worse than being a coward that accomplishes nothing for the same ideal!
Even the locals who could be excused as fighting for their specific homes and region against an army that’s bombing those regions got into an enterprise that just, in the end, led to eight years (and counting) chaos and misery for those regions, which are still a target of fighting. Even if the only evidence of what has happened was this book, reading between the lines (and occasionally lines, too), one gets the sense that the whole region has been thrown into a chaos – even if Strelkov’s guys might have possessed some discipline, there are constant references to random looters and marauding Cossacks wrecking shit up for the lols.
Of course, in the end, these people got what they wished for – large parts of Donbass, and other parts of Ukraine besides – have been annexed to Russia, and the current chances of Ukraine making short-term gains in these areas, let alone taking them over entirely, seem remote. So that’s a point for the Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” quote. Whether that change is good? Well, the quote never promised that…
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Notes -
Apparently even "they really, really hate/fear Russia" also has not managed to form as plausible reason.
It's not about that.
They're young men who want to fight. They're looking for an excuse.
EDIT:see Stefferi's comment under. I agree with it almost completely.
After I read the Slavyansk book, I read The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos, a Swedish/Finnish Azov volunteer in 2014, and Löfroos certainly referred to his belief that Ukraine must be supported against Russian threat and patriotic memories of Finnish wars against Soviet Union as a reason for signing up. However, he also describes many other men in his unit being there more to seek a fight, or possibly in some cases to just get something beyond petty crime to do. I guess that sort of a mixture would be common to all volunteer units in all conflicts.
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Are you convinced that all volunteers are just looking for some death games and all stated motivations are excuses? This is clearly false.
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