DONETSK, Ukraine — Wearing a black shirt and
white clerical collar, the pastor walked into the occupied government
building that serves as rebel headquarters in this eastern Ukrainian
city. Serhiy Kosyak had come to plead for leniency: Rebels threatened to
kill anyone who visited the small prayer vigils he held for Ukrainian
unity, the city’s last open resistance to the separatist republic rebels
had declared. As he waited for an audience, he saw an old friend among
the gunmen milling around. Kosyak asked how he was doing. The man’s eyes
stared back at him with hate.
There’s a moment on the slide to civil war where friends and
neighbors become hard to recognize. The man screamed that Kosyak was a
traitor and spy, an outburst sure to doom him amid the fevered
atmosphere in the building, where suspicions ran high. Kosyak, 38, had
seen the same anger in the passersby who sometimes accosted his
pro-Ukraine prayer tent. And he saw it now in the rebels who tied him to
a chair in the building and beat him as he prayed. He thought there was
evil in it — real evil, because he believed in such things. He thought
Satan grabbed hold of people with the ideas pouring into Donetsk on the
Russian airwaves: that Russian-speakers there were in danger and needed
to rise against Ukraine’s government. When the beatings finally stopped,
and he was cleared for release, he stayed in his chair for a minute to
bless his assailants: God, enter their lives and open their eyes.
Kosyak was still bruised a deep purple under his dress shirt when he
opened his sidewalk service more than a week later, on the last day of
May. The interfaith vigils once drew hundreds, but attendance was fading
as worried supporters fled. Thirty people stood at the edge of a busy
bridge beneath an intermittent rain. The sermons were about Sodom: a
biblical city so overrun with evil that God decided it couldn’t be
saved. In Genesis 19, angels send away a man named Lot, Sodom’s last
good soul. Then the Lord levels it from the skies. “God didn’t destroy
Sodom until Lot left,” said a pastor named Pavel Zaystev, 46. “As long
as we’re here, there’s still hope.”
But he worried privately that Donetsk was beyond redemption. “You don’t
think even some miracle could change them,” he said of the rebels.
“That’s why I think of Sodom: God destroyed them because he could not
change them.”
Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, a native of the Donetsk
region and Russian ally, was ousted by a popular uprising in Kiev on
Feb. 22. The conflict came to Russian-speaking Donetsk, where about half
of the 1 million residents are ethnically Russian, soon afterward,
initially with small demonstrations. Protesters worried that the new
government would punish Russian-speakers — fears fueled by Kremlin
propaganda. They believed that their language would be banned and that
fascists from Kiev were coming to hurt them. At first, the so-called
fascists they had in mind were members of the Right Sector, a fringe
ultra-nationalist group that had played an outsized role on the front
lines of the protests in Kiev, but soon the label included the new
government and its supporters, who had largely ignored their concerns.
Then the protesters were storming government buildings as Russia warned
that it would intervene, if needed, to protect its “compatriots.” They
called for a referendum on secession, like the one that saw Russia annex
Crimea in March, and they took up arms. Polls showed that most Donetsk
residents wanted to remain in Ukraine, but outspoken opponents of the
separatists began fleeing the city amid abductions and death threats.
Some who remained deleted their Facebook pages, wondering who among
their friends might be tracking their loyalties. “Fear is like a virus,”
one said.
But there was still hope for peace in Donetsk, the political nexus
for eastern Ukraine’s separatists and an important economic hub, even as
fighting flared elsewhere. Throughout the spring, some residents had
looked ahead to two events that might swing things back toward normalcy:
Ukraine holding fresh presidential elections and Russia recalling the
troops massed along the border nearby. Both came to pass, but they did
nothing to stop the conflict from surging ahead. Each side had already
come to see the battle as one between irreconcilable ideas — with an
enemy that had to be eradicated. The fabric that let two groups of
people with their own histories coexist in post-Soviet Ukraine had been
ripped away. “This city needs to be cleansed,” warned a Catholic priest
at the unity vigil, and on another evening, inside an expanding,
makeshift armory, a rebel in a flannel shirt said, “There is some dirt
here now, and we have to clean it from our land.”
Like many of the Russian nationals operating
in Donetsk, Veren was something of an enigma: The dark tasks he said he
employed didn’t match his amiable demeanor. He had no military
experience, he said; he’d once owned a fast food chain, where he picked
up his knack for marketing. He was a 34-year-old from Sochi, but his
wife was from Donetsk. Rumors of covert Russian soldiers and spies — and
financial and military aid — had swirled around the conflict, but Veren
said he had no contact with the Russian government. He said he got his
start in the separatist movement by attending the protests that erupted
in March.
If he was a demon to the pastors at the prayer vigil, he was also a
protector of local separatists, who believed they were largely on their
own against the Ukrainian army and what they saw as its fascist allies.
They worried that if enough civilians left the city, the government
might bomb it.
A recruit walked into Veren’s office. Overweight and nervous-looking in a
button-down shirt, the young professional, 28, wasn’t built for war.
But he wanted to help — he and Veren discussed whether he might do some
managerial work, maybe go on neighborhood patrols. “Because I’m a
conscious person,” he said when asked why he wanted to join. “And when
bad things come to your house, a conscious person can’t ignore them.”
With much of the whiskey, brought to the meeting as a gift, now gone,
Veren described a more ambitious quality to the conflict at hand. “The
Russian person should remain Russian in any nationality and any land,”
he said. The rebels gathered with him in the room — some locals and
others Russian — likewise spoke about their battle as if it were about
more than Donetsk. One man called it a “historical conflict,” another “a
conflict of mentalities.” A likeness of St. George the dragon-slayer
graced the army’s flag because Russians throughout history had fought
under his banner. Veren said he had started groups in nearby hotspots
like Mariupol and Slavyansk — and also had his eye on Kiev, Serbia,
Georgia.
But first he was building his franchise in Donetsk. Someone put the
keys to an Audi on his desk. The car’s registration showed that it
belonged to the company of Serhiy Taruta, the billionaire steel magnate
and regional governor. Taruta had fled to Kiev recently because of death
threats. Veren went down to the compound’s parking garage, empty except
for a couple rows of commandeered vehicles, neatly parked. A man
waiting there appeared to be working as valet.
Veren got into the Audi’s driver’s seat. “This is a good car. I’ll
trade it for 20 AK-47s,” he said. It was just past sunset, and the
compound was quiet as guards opened the gate so Veren could ease the car
from the sealed-off rebel zone. Then he jammed the gas and sped through
the city’s quiet streets.
Later, as Veren and his comrades settled into a long dinner in a way
that felt suddenly normal for a Friday night — they were the big,
boisterous group at the restaurant carrying on happily as fellow diners
tried not to mind — Fyodor, the intense young Russian who had designed
the Army’s flag, gave a lesson on history. Russians made their great
advances, he said, in huge, sudden leaps. The pace seems slow; the
momentum builds. Then comes the exhilarating wave. “We must only run,”
Fyodor said, seeming not to care where this moment would take him. “The
end — it is nothing. Run to progress. Run to more.”
With darkness falling on a recent Sunday, a
rebel in his fifties named Oleg wheeled a compact sedan through the
city, his big frame packed into the driver’s seat. A veteran of the
feared Berkut riot police, he still carried a natural authority, with
his shaved head and intense blue eyes. He was headed to the airport,
where a battle on May 26 had shocked the city with its violence. A
mechanic who lived nearby would later remember seeing dead civilians
along the roadside as he sped home to get his dog; a soldier at the
airport recalled getting orders to hold fire as rebels massed outside,
then watching in awe when fighter jets arrived. The bloodshed, with at
least 50 rebels killed, showed that war was closing on Donetsk, and some
rebels embraced it. Others, like Oleg, seemed deeply shaken. Asked if
he’d been at the airport that day, he paused, looked down, and said,
“Yes.”
Donetsk — a relatively affluent city with riverside parks and a
sparkling soccer stadium — seemed to proceed with normal life as Oleg
drove past glass-walled office buildings. “It looks like there is no
war. Everything is quiet — peaceful,” he said. “And we will see how that
will change now.”
He pulled up to the last rebel checkpoint before the road to the airport
became a no-man’s-land. Shirtless men in dusty jeans worked feverishly
in the fading sunlight, digging and stacking sandbags, with an eye to
the approaching night. Then the sedan passed into the silence of the
edge of war; the Ukrainian army was hidden in the distance somewhere.
Oleg stopped the car in front of a flatbed truck. Bullet holes pocked
the windshield; shoes and clothing scraps were scattered around. The
back was caked in blood. Some 30 rebels had died there, Oleg said, when
the truck was ambushed en route to the airport by a Ukrainian RPG team.
The only sound on the deserted highway came from a billboard flapping in
the wind overhead. “This cannot go without punishment,” Oleg said.
A silver van pulled up suddenly, and a man in a black cap pointed a
submachine gun from the driver’s side window. “Who are you?” he shouted.
A young couple, holding hands, approached on the sidewalk about 100
yards away, taking slow and deliberate steps toward an apartment
building set back in the trees. Bursts of gunfire echoed nearby. Then
the sedan was back onto Donetsk’s busy streets. “And now there is no
war. So it’s a feature of civil war,” Oleg said, meaning that sometimes
people don’t recognize it until it’s right upon them. “Most people still
don’t understand that this is war. But when there will be more victims
and more death, they will stand up.”
“You have to respond somehow to the killing,”
said another man late that night. He called himself a scientist, and his
name was Mikhail. To make a tally of the dead around the truck just
after the attack, he had counted their heads, since the bodies were in
pieces. Then he crept in his sandals through the woods, armed only with a
folding knife. When he came upon a Ukrainian soldier, he said, he
killed him with the 6-inch blade. Mikhail, 56, had served in
Afghanistan, but it was different this time, killing his fellow
Ukrainian. “Before it was an order,” he said. “Now it’s voluntary.”
He was sitting with friends inside a rebel-held building in the heart of
the city, in a room where a small arsenal of guns leant against the
walls. Half were old carabiners, half modern AK-74s — rebels were
accumulating more weapons as they crawled deeper into the conflict.
Mikhail put his folding knife on the table, and then produced the rifle
of the soldier he said he had killed, with red stains along the shoulder
strap. “It was covered in blood,” Mikhail said. “I washed it, and now
it belongs to me.”
The Kiev government was stepping up what it had termed its
“anti-terrorist operation,” and the men felt it pressing closer. They
thought of it as retribution — “a punishment operation” — rained down
from tanks and airplanes. The rebels in the room, all former Berkut, had
created a battalion, hoping to act as police, but instead they were
being drawn into the war. Their burly commander, a 57-year-old martial
arts instructor named Yuriy Sivokonenko, worried for his family, and had
tried to ensure that his two sons wouldn’t take up arms. His wife of 32
years, meanwhile, was breaking down, spending her days, he said,
“crying and praying.”
Sivokonenko said he hoped for compromise as he served homemade cognac
and jam that supporters had donated. But the possibility seemed to be
shrinking; the conflict had reopened past wounds and the present had
become polarized. He took a book from the armoire where he kept the
cognac, describing it as a key to the truths he was fighting to defend —
he had always held them, but now they felt threatened by those of his
neighbors. It was a beautiful hardcover with grand illustrations,
detailing a glorious history of the ethnic Russian people dating back to
the 14th century. Shown the book the next morning, a local historian
who supports the government would dismiss it as “fairy tales and myths.”
For Sure These Peep's Ain't Playin.
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