June 9, 2015
In waging a
clandestine war in eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has made a bargain with the
devil. He has farmed out much of the fighting to warlords, mercenaries and
criminals, partly in an attempt to simulate a broad-based indigenous resistance
to Ukrainian rule. But Mr. Putin’s strategy of using such proxies has resulted
in the establishment of a warlord kleptocracy in eastern Ukraine that threatens
even Moscow’s control of events.
Surrogate
fighters were recruited from four sources: local criminal gangs; jobless males
who live on the fringes of eastern Ukraine’s society; political extremists from
Russia’s far right, including Cossacks; and itinerant Russian mercenaries who
fought in Chechnya, North Ossetia, Transnistria and other regional conflicts in
the post-Soviet Union. They have been trained and equipped with modern weapons,
and are often supported by Russian regular and special troops.
These irregular
forces now form the backbone of the armies of Donetsk and Luhansk, two mostly
Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine along the border with Russia. Those
separatist enclaves are dominated by well-armed criminal networks whose leaders
play key roles in local politics, both formally, as government leaders, and
informally, as chieftains of gangs with their own turf. These men and women
have supplanted the pro-Russian elite that had held sway in the area since
Ukraine’s independence in 1991.
By striking a
bargain with what are, in effect, local warlords, Mr. Putin is recreating a
model Russia first tried in Chechnya more than a decade ago. There, the Russian
government made common cause with Ramzan Kadyrov, the son of a prominent
Chechen mullah turned separatist president. Mr. Kadyrov, whose clan had once
backed the indigenous independence movement, switched sides in 1999 and, with
Russian help, seized power in Chechnya. Chechen resistance was defeated, as the
Kremlin had hoped, but at the cost of letting a local warlord with his own powerful
army gain near-total sovereignty.
While Mr. Kadyrov
regularly pronounces his personal loyalty to Mr. Putin, he brooks no
intervention from federal Russian authorities. He flouts Russian law, for
example by permitting polygamy. On April 21, he stated his sovereignty with
clarity, telling his fighters that if any security officer, “whether from
Moscow or Stavropol, appears on your territory without your knowledge, shoot to
kill. They have to take us into account.”
The Kremlin is
now repeating its reckless policy from Chechnya in eastern Ukraine, with
similar results. Although the leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk rely on training
and arms from Russia, their crime-based financial independence also gives them
incentives to play their own game.
Their influence
comes from the trade of weapons, drugs and alcohol, and cash generated from
checkpoints on roads. New criminal fortunes are being made through corporate
raids, shakedowns of local businesses and the seizure of houses abandoned by
residents who have fled the region: As of last month, there were more than 1.3
million internally displaced people inside Ukraine, with the highest rates in
the eastern parts of the country, according to U.N. sources. And there were
more than 700,000 Ukrainian refugees seeking legal status in Russia.
The mounting
criminality in eastern Ukraine is also spilling over into Russia, with both
contraband and irregular fighters crossing the porous borders. Rostov Oblast, a
Russian province that is a staging ground for the Russian-backed insurgency in
eastern Ukraine, has experienced a huge spike in crime: an increase of more
than 23 percent in the first four months of this year. It is now the sixth-most
crime-ridden of Russia’s 83 regions.
The proliferation
of criminality and the emergence of a broad array of well-armed players along
Russia’s southwestern border have not been welcomed by the Russian security
services, which are accustomed to operating under a strict chain of command. In
fact, they are suspected of being involved in a spate of assassinations of some
troublesome local chieftains, most recently Aleksey Mozgovoy, who was killed in
an ambush on May 23. The head of an insurgent battalion in Luhansk, Mr.
Mozgovoy had criticized local separatist leaders for giving up on establishing
a larger breakaway region that was to be called Novorossiya, or New Russia.
Mr. Putin’s war
in Ukraine has brought death and mayhem to Ukraine, and sanctions, political
isolation and an economic downturn to Russia. It has also brought instability
to the vast swath of territory that runs from the Donetsk and Luhansk statelets
of Ukraine to Russia’s Rostov and Krasnodar regions, linking up with the
Caucasus. Mr. Putin’s war in Ukraine, in other words, is slipping out of his
control.
Adrian
Karatnycky
a senior fellow
with the Atlantic Council
