The New Tsar (81 page)

Within days of the annexation of Crimea, protesters in eastern Ukraine, incited or joined by Russian intelligence agents and volunteer fighters, began seizing administrative buildings in several cities. In two provincial capitals, Donetsk and Luhansk, they denounced the new central authorities in Kyiv and declared the creation of “People’s Republics,” scheduling their own referendums for May. The events unfolded just
as officials in the regions had warned they would do after the political upheaval in 2004, supported by compatriots across the border in Russia. Both regions included large populations of ethnic Russians, though not outright majorities, whose political sympathies were far closer to Putin’s Russia than to Kyiv, especially after the upheaval in the winter of 2013–2014. They were far more susceptible to the propaganda of the Kremlin-controlled media, which was widely available in eastern Ukraine and which portrayed those now in power as rabid nationalists who would deny Russians basic rights, who would suppress them, even torture and kill them. Although he stopped short of expressing explicit support for the protests, Putin repeatedly denounced the Ukrainian authorities and restated Russia’s right to protect the interests of the Russian world. Within weeks, he used the term
Novorossiya
, or New Russia, to evoke a historical claim over the swath of Ukrainian territory from Odessa to the Russian border that imperial Russia seized in the eighteenth century from the declining Ottoman Empire. The ethnic fault lines that rived Ukraine—like others left behind by the messy breakup of the Soviet Union—now ruptured, perhaps irrevocably.

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T
he Americans and Europeans were caught by surprise by the move on Crimea, as they had been by the bloodshed in Kyiv and by Yanukovych’s abrupt flight on February 22. The initial international reaction to the annexation—and the unrest in eastern Ukraine—was confused and halting, hobbled by Putin’s subterfuge and the startling ease with which thousands of Russian commandos managed to seize more than ten thousand square miles of territory populated by nearly two million people. In the days before Crimea’s referendum, leaders in Europe and the United States hoped that diplomatic pressure would work; when the referendum went ahead anyway, they calculated that the threat of economic punishment—and international censure—would still be deterrent enough.

On March 17, the day after the referendum, the United States and European Union announced sanctions against nearly a dozen officials in Russia and in Crimea, but they included only those like Valentina Matviyenko of the Federation Council and the former Kremlin political strategist Vladislav Surkov, who, though prominent, had no influence over the decisions Putin was making now. Putin paid no heed to the initial response. He brushed aside the increasingly stern warnings not only of Barack Obama, whose relations with him after the adoption ban,
Edward Snowden, and Syria were already beyond repair, but also of leaders like Angela Merkel, who remained the counterpart on the continent most vested in maintaining close relations with Russia. He so strained credulity in his conversations with Merkel, denouncing the nefarious European actions against Russia, that she confided in Obama her belief that Putin was now living “in another world.”
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Putin’s intransigence proved to be unifying, shoring up international opposition. Russia was expelled from the G8, whose annual summit was to be held in the summer of 2014 in the newly rebuilt Sochi. Two days after the annexation, the United States ratcheted up the sanctions, followed by the European Union. This time the sanctions targeted those closest to Putin, intending to change his behavior by inflicting punishment on the friends who had amassed their fortunes during his presidency. They included his old judo partners, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg; Vladimir Yakunin, Yuri Kovalchuk, and Andrei Fursenko from the Ozero dacha cooperative; and Gennady Timchenko. Echoing the claims made by Putin’s critics for years, the Treasury Department in Washington asserted that Putin himself had investments in Timchenko’s company, Gunvor, and “may have access to Gunvor funds.” The Americans accused Kovalchuk’s Bank Rossiya of acting as the “personal banker” of senior officials in the Kremlin, including Putin.
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The sanctions barred those targeted from traveling to the United States, froze their assets, and forbade American companies from doing business with them, effectively restricting their activities involving dollars almost anywhere. The American and European sanctions would continue to expand, singling out more officials and businesses, including the Rotenbergs’ bank, SMP, the Russian abbreviation for the Northern Sea Route, which coursed through the Arctic, and ultimately entire sectors of the economy, including Rosneft and its ambitious plans to extract oil from the Arctic.

And yet these new sanctions had no more obvious effect than the sanctions against the aides and acolytes of the outer orbits of Putin’s power, indeed, no more obvious effect than no sanctions at all. Putin’s resolve could not be challenged even by those closest to him. All of those sanctioned—the high and the low, the close friends and the acquaintances, the agents of influence and the mere hangers-on—owed their places within the system to him. They were the new elite of the Putin era, above the law and thus protected by one man’s justice. Their power and their fortunes relied on his power and their loyalty to him. Vladimir Yakunin, for whom the sanctions seemed a personal affront, said his
old friend would never let anyone try to dissuade him from any decision made in what he considered the best interests of Russia. He would consider even the effort to do so an act of betrayal. “He will not forget that—or forgive that,” Yakunin said.
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And no one dared. One after another, those facing sanctions expressed fealty and solidarity with the leader, proclaiming their willingness to make any sacrifice that was necessary. “You have to pay for everything in this life,” Gennady Timchenko said, rather richly, since he had managed to sell his shares in Gunvor to his partner the day
before
the sanctions were announced, suggesting that he had insider information of the looming threat and moved quickly to protect his assets from seizure. Timchenko acknowledged his Gulfstream jet had been grounded because he could no longer buy parts to service it, that his wife’s credit cards had been suspended, and that he could no longer safely vacation in Europe with his family and their dog, Romi, the offspring of Putin’s beloved Koni. “But one can put up with business costs and personal inconveniences when state interests are at stake. These are trifles on the background of global problems.”
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P
rotests like the ones that materialized in Simferopol and other cities of Crimea in February spread across Ukraine. In Odessa, a violent confrontation in May between pro-Russian protesters and government supporters in the city’s center ended in a fire at the old House of Trade Unions that killed forty-eight people. The referendums held that month by the people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were as hastily organized and legally dubious as the one in Crimea. Ukraine’s security service claimed to have captured a recording of one rebel leader, Dmitri Boitsov of the Russian Orthodox Army, complaining that he could not oversee a vote because a large force of Ukrainian troops and weaponry remained in the region. “We can’t conduct it lawfully as long as these cocksuckers are here,” he said. The man allegedly on the other end of the line was Aleksandr Barkashov, a notorious neo-Nazi in Russia who in 1993 had joined those who defended the White House in Moscow in defiance of Boris Yeltsin’s decrees. He told him to press ahead anyway, fixing a result of, say, 89 percent. “Are you going to walk around collecting papers?” Barkashov barked at him. “Are you fucking insane?”
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When the votes were counted, the total mirrored his recommendation—with 89 percent in favor—while in Luhansk the tally exceeded an improbable 96 percent. The referendums were followed by escalating
violent clashes. The country descended into open war, one that the chief of Russia’s general staff, Valery Gerasimov, seemingly anticipated the year before when he outlined a new military doctrine drafted after Putin’s return to the presidency in reaction to the uprisings in the Arab world. “In the twenty-first century, we have seen a tendency toward blurring the lines between the states of war and peace,” General Gerasimov wrote.
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“Wars are no longer declared and, having begun, proceed according to an unfamiliar template. The experience of military conflicts—including those connected with the so-called colored revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East—confirm that a perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflict, become a victim of foreign intervention, and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war.” And so it would be.

The annexation of Crimea had proved nearly effortless, but the situation in eastern Ukraine turned out to be far more complicated, and the uncertainty of Putin’s intentions muddled the efforts by the insurgents. The newly elected president who replaced the self-exiled Yanukovych, the chocolate tycoon Petro Poroshenko, also acted with far greater determination to hold onto the rebellious regions in the east than the provisional government had been able to do in the case of Crimea in March. The Ukrainian military, joined by irregular militias that had formed during the events on the Maidan, counterattacked and moved to retake territory that was no longer government controlled, and with each passing day the fighting turned into civil war. Officially at least, Putin maintained an assiduous distance from those calling for independence in Donetsk and Luhansk; with the sanctions tightening further than he probably expected, he even called for postponing the votes on independence. The Americans and Europeans hoped that the diplomatic isolation facing Russia and the intensifying sanctions were, at last, altering Putin’s choices, forcing him and other officials into more and more improbable denials of Russian involvement.

The insurgents nevertheless had ample support from Russia, both officially and unofficially. Their leaders at first were ethnic Russians, including a former or possible current military intelligence officer, Igor Girkin, who went by the nom de guerre Igor Strelkov. The militias that formed—and there were many, with unclear chains of command—included local fighters and “volunteers” from Russia who, the Kremlin insisted unconvincingly, joined the uprisings purely out of a fraternal
desire to defend the
Russki mir
. Some had fought in the previous conflicts along the unravelling fringes of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and the sliver of territory in Moldova known as Transnistria. They were bolstered by Russian commandos and intelligence officers and later regular troops, dispatched as “volunteers” by their commanders with the promise of extra payments and required on the Kremlin’s orders to resign from the military and wear no Russian insignia. Putin did not want to risk an open Russian intervention, and the obfuscation masked the extent of Russia’s activity enough to create confusion and, as he hoped, division and debate within Europe over how forcefully to respond. As Gerasimov predicted, the conflict in eastern Ukraine blurred the lines between war and peace, between instigator and defender. The Kremlin continued to deny the existence of Russian fighters and weaponry in Ukraine long after the first coffins of soldiers returned to Russia, buried in secrecy, just as the bodies of those who had died for the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It would do so even after Russian soldiers were captured inside Ukraine and paraded by the authorities there.

On June 6, Putin traveled to France to attend ceremonies commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy on D-Day. His ostracism was palpable. The G7, having expelled Russia, met that week in Brussels instead of Sochi. Including him in the memorial ceremonies paid homage to the Soviet Union’s contribution to the defeat of the Nazis, but Russia’s intervention in a new war strained even that courtesy. The European leaders became increasingly frustrated with Putin’s denials of culpability and his insistence that only a political resolution was possible, as he was equally frustrated by Ukrainian efforts to reassert control over the regions in the east. Angela Merkel and François Hollande tested his stated desire for a peaceful political solution in Ukraine by brokering peace talks. For the first time since the crisis began, he met Petro Poroshenko in Normandy, acting as proxy for the rebel regions he disavowed providing any support to. The fighting, however, intensified anyway, with government forces and insurgents trading fire with heavier weapons, including mortar and artillery.

A month later, Putin met again with Merkel in Brazil ahead of a World Cup final between Germany and Argentina. He was in attendance as the leader of the host nation for the tournament in 2018, a highly anticipated event for which he had already launched a new mega-project of stadium construction but one that would be dogged by questions
over improprieties surrounding Russia’s winning bid.
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Even as they met again, pledging to negotiate a new ceasefire, there were new reports of Russian equipment crossing the border. A day later a Ukrainian AN-26 military cargo jet flying at an altitude of more than twenty-thousand feet was shot down along the Russian border near Luhansk; its downing, coming after the destruction of another military transport jet as it landed in June, was a portentous sign of the increasing firepower of the insurgents. Two days after that a Sukhoi fighter jet went down, hit by a sophisticated surface-to-air missile of a type the irregular fighters were not known to possess.