In Wartime Read online

  Next Year in Donetsk

  When wars begin there is a strange period when ordinary, pre-war life continues before the new rhythm of wartime begins. It is also the period of disbelief and delusion, euphoria or shock. At the beginning of the First World War millions across Europe enthusiastically cheered their men marching off to fight, having no inkling of the catastrophes that lay before them. In 1939, in the West, after war was declared and before the Germans began their advance, we had the “phoney war.” In our times, in Bosnia in 1991, as war raged in neighboring Croatia, many assumed that it would not spread because, as everyone knew and said just how bad it would be, no one believed that anyone would be so stupid as to actually start it. When it did start in 1992, the first months were chaotic. No one knew who was firing at whom and from where. Then things settled down: frontlines became clear and for three years people got killed, cities and towns were besieged and hundreds of thousands fled or were ethnically cleansed, but the front did not move much until the very end. All of this was in my mind as the war began in Ukraine. All too often I saw similarities with the Balkan wars, all of which I had reported on. A period of the surreal preceded the new reality. You could see this both in Kiev and Donetsk where, even if people talked of war, it was clear that they did not believe it was really coming.

  In early April 2014, in the center of Kiev, on the Maidan and Khreshchatyk, the city’s central boulevard, and on the road leading up to Parliament you could see the remnants of revolution. There were makeshift shrines and candles for the 130 who died during the revolution, many of whom had been cut down by snipers. A year later no one had been brought to justice for this crime, which was widely assumed to have been ordered by Yanukovych or someone close to him. The failure to find the guilty, bad enough in itself, nourished conspiracy theories, namely that the pro-Maidan protesters had killed their own people in order to blame Yanukovych and hasten his downfall. There was no memorial for the eighteen Berkut riot and other policemen, many who came from units brought in from Crimea and the east, who had died fighting the protesters—deaths which were not forgotten or forgiven in the places they had come from, a fact which did much to engender bitterness.

  Around the Maidan there was a tent encampment. Perhaps a thousand people remained here. They had collection boxes for their different groups. People dressed as bears, Mickey Mouse, or zebras ambled about hoping that you would want to pay to have your photo taken with them. There was a large catapult which looked as if it had been taken from the set of a film about the siege of Troy. The stage from where people had spoken remained, though now it sported a large ad for the newly formed military National Guard. It also had a large crucifix propped up in front of it. There were pictures of Stepan Bandera, the controversial and divisive Ukrainian nationalist leader of the Second World War, and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, who had been given a Hitler mustache and hairstyle. Those who remained here said they wanted to stay until the presidential elections on May 25. Many just seemed lost. They included men and women from outside Kiev to whom the revolution had given a sense of purpose for the first time in their lives; now they were staving off a return to humdrum lives back home. Between the Maidan and Parliament, all sorts of militias in different uniforms marched up and down, but to what purpose was not clear. Outside Parliament I asked Andreii Irodenko what he and his men were doing and might they not serve Ukraine better in the east, and he replied: “If we left this spot, provocations would start here.” He said that provocateurs could be agents of the FSB, Russia’s secret service, and other supporters of Russia.

  While the threat of losing complete control of the east loomed, all sorts of people and groups demonstrated outside the building of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Some were demanding a lustration of judges and some were protesting about legislation concerning duties on imported cars. At the door of Parliament, Myroslava Krupa, who had made herself a cloak of cigarette boxes, was protesting because she had not received compensation for damage to her health caused, she said, by poor conditions at an American tobacco company she had worked for in Lviv. Strange groups roamed around and roads were blocked. Suddenly a black car driven by a glamorous woman frustrated at not being able to get to where she wanted, veered off down a path in the park only to be stopped and surrounded by an angry crowd. One man was dressed as the Grim Reaper, with a black cloak, mask and scythe on which he had written: “Putin, I am coming for you.” No one in Kiev quite seemed to grasp what was happening in the east, which was surprising since Crimea had already been lost more than a month before.

  Myroslava Krupa in a cigarette packet cloak protesting at the Verkhovna Rada. Kiev, April 2014.

  Many were alarmed and disappointed. They had braved the bullets and the cold for a root and branch change for Ukraine, but now the leading candidates for president were Yulia Tymoshenko, the oligarch and former prime minister who had been jailed by Yanukovych, and Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire who had earlier been a minister under Yanukovych.

  Middle-class Natalyia Yaroshevych, aged forty-eight, who sells cosmetics for the American company Amway, said she had liked what she had seen at the beginning on the Maidan, but later felt that “political games were being played” there by Russia, the EU and the U.S. As we sat in a café at Ocean Plaza, a Kiev shopping mall featuring a giant fish tank with sharks, the French supermarket Auchan, Gap, Marks & Spencer, and many of the other big Western chain stores, she said she was “anxious but not fearful” of war but what concerned her and many of her friends even more was the cost of living. Her husband, an engineer, had his own small company installing and maintaining industrial gas meters. Orders had plummeted because of the crisis and he was worried about the family’s income because like many, not only in Ukraine but other parts of the former communist world, they had taken out a mortgage denominated in a foreign currency. Few understood the implications of these when they borrowed. When the Yaroshevych family took out their mortgage, just before the financial crisis of 2008, the exchange rate for $1 stood at 5.5 hryvnia. Before the Maidan revolution started it was 8 hryvnia. Now it was 11 hryvnia. For ordinary people, whatever was happening in the east, bills still had to be paid and the risk of losing your home to the bank was a more immediate and existential threat to them than the idea of losing Donetsk in a war which might or might not come to Kiev. (A year later, $1 was 22 hryvnia, but the Yaroshevych family had been able to solve their problem. Natalyia’s husband sold his office and paid off the home mortgage.)

  On April 6, 2014, armed men seized the regional administration building in Donetsk. Then they began to fortify it with sandbags and tires and a few thousand came to show their support. For many outside the building there was a sort of carnival atmosphere. Roadblocks manned by armed men went up. At one, near the town of Sloviansk, which would briefly be a rebel stronghold, a man said that what was happening here was going to be “just like Crimea.” In other words, he thought that without a shot being fired, Russia would swiftly annex the Donbass, the name of this eastern region. Nearby, at another checkpoint manned by rebels, who mostly seemed to be locals, they lined up rows of Molotov cocktails a stone’s throw from a roadside shop selling serried ranks of garden gnomes.

  On April 11 there were just a couple of hundred milling around in front of the regional administration building. The building flew Russian flags, Soviet flags and those of the new Donetsk People’s Republic, which had been proclaimed on April 7. In a city of 900,000 people there did not seem to be much popular support for the rebels, but there was also a climate of fear. Who knew what the future would hold? Still, those that were here were neither frightened nor shy about expressing their opinions. Yulia Yefanova, aged twenty-four, who was posing for pictures in front of a mock Russian frontier post which had been erected there, said she wanted the Donbass to unite with Russia because the ties were close and much of her family was there. Crowding around, people began to shout their opinions. “It is impossible to be friends with Europe and with Russia,”
said one man. “They are like cat and dog.” Another said: “If Russia was here, she would put everything in order. She would fight corruption.” People shouted that the hardworking people of the Donbass subsidized lazy people in the center and west of Ukraine. Then, repeating the line pushed by Russia’s media, the people began shouting about Kiev’s “fascist junta.” Said one woman: “Only Russia can save us from a power which is not democratic!”

  Three days later I was invited to the Seder, the Passover dinner, of the local Jewish community. As a guest from abroad I was asked to say a few words. I described the roadblocks I had seen outside the city and said that it looked to me like war was coming. Much of what I had seen was eerily similar to the beginnings of the Balkan wars. No one seemed to believe me. No one believed that their world was about to come crashing down. They clapped politely when I said that while the traditional Passover saying of “Next year in Jerusalem!” was fine, “Next year in Donetsk!” would be good too. Few who were present would be. Likewise, on the barricades no one really believed there would be fighting—because they thought Russian troops would soon come pouring over the border to finish off what they thought they were starting. Those who were euphoric and took snaps in front of the mock Russian frontier post had no inkling of what was coming. They thought of bigger Russian salaries and pensions and not of their tiny walk-on roles in starting a war that nobody expected or wanted.

  This strange atmosphere lasted for a few weeks more. On May 9, the countries of the former Soviet Union celebrate Victory Day, the day when the dead of the Second World War are remembered and elderly men and women, dressed in their uniforms and bedecked with medals, are honored. In then rebel-held Sloviansk the ceremonies began in front of the Lenin statue in the town square. Old men and one woman stood in a line in front of it while rebel leaders, who had seized power here on the same day as in Donetsk, stepped forward to make speeches to about a thousand people. Given that the Ukrainian forces had by now surrounded the town, what was most surprising was the sheer emptiness of what was being said. Pavel Gubarev, then an important rebel leader, who had just been released in a prisoner exchange with the Ukrainians, said: “Fascism! It is coming for us again!” Then he talked of Novorossiya, the would-be new state he and his friends wanted to create from the south and east of the Ukraine they wanted to destroy, and finally he began proclaiming “Eternal glory!,” his voice rising and falling in dramatic cadences, referring to the fallen of the Second World War. As though at a religious service, or as if they were taking part in a mystical experience, the crowd, which was mostly but not entirely elderly, began to respond in unison:

  “Glory!”

  “Glory!”

  “Glory!”

  Then Gubarev said: “Glory to the heroes and victors of the Russian Spring!” by which he meant the anti-Ukrainian revolt in the east.

  The crowd responded:

  “Glory!”

  “Glory!”

  “Glory!”

  At this point came a distraction. Five armored cars captured by the rebels drove down one side of the square and appeared on the other side, but they could not do a victory lap around it because the roads were blocked by concrete and other barricades. With militiamen sitting on top they drove up as far as Irina, the ice cream vendor, and then clumsily, in a cloud of exhaust fumes, had to back up to get out again. The sales girls from the local Eva, a cosmetics supermarket chain, and others ran out to cheer on their men, kiss them and give them cigarettes.

  Thus the victories in 1945 and 2014 ran seamlessly into one another. At the same time Russian television, which many people had on in the background at home or in shops, was showing live footage of the huge military parade in Moscow, and later in the day of Vladimir Putin celebrating in newly annexed Crimea.

  Now everyone moved off in a procession toward the war memorial. Victims of this new conflict, said one man in a speech when we got there, “would be lifted to the heavens on the wings of angels.” Then, flags were dipped for a brief silence. They were the DNR flag, Russian flags, communist flags and variations of old Russian imperial and tsarist flags. Then I spotted one I had never seen before. It was white with a big blue snowflake in the middle. Thinking this might be the flag of a new and significant political movement I shoved through the crowd to get to the man who was holding it. He told me that it was the flag of “Fridgers of the World” and that from Siberia to the Baltics “they are supporting us.” It took me some time to understand who the “Fridgers” were. They are people in the refrigeration business across the former Soviet Union who have an online forum to discuss issues relating to fridges and their maintenance.

  Stepping away from children and old ladies weeping as they laid flowers at the eternal flame, I ran into sprightly Anatoliy, aged eighty-six, who was walking home, his chest decorated with medals, including one of Stalin. He had been too young to take part in the Second World War, he told me, but had seen action in 1956 in, as he called it, “the war with Hungary.” He described the anti-communist revolt there as one having been organized “by the remains of the pro-fascists” and thus it had been absolutely right to intervene. When I asked him about the current conflict he talked of “fascism” just like everyone else. “We want a free Ukraine,” he said, “but the Banderovtsi”—the term once given to followers of Stepan Bandera and now used to insult the post-Maidan leadership and their supporters—“want to take control over the whole of Ukraine. We just want justice.” Josip Vissarionovich, he said, referring to Stalin, would never have let the country get in such a mess. He had had a writing table, a couple of chairs and a pipe. But “these presidents now surround themselves with gold. They have golden toilets and golden chairs.” He was talking about Ukraine’s leaders in general but I was surprised by his reaction when I asked him about Putin, whom many in the DNR and other pro-Russians in Ukraine see as a savior. In terms of gold, he said, “our presidents pale into insignificance next to him.”

  Anatoliy’s face was smudged with lipstick. As a veteran he had been given flowers by children and kisses by women. I said I hoped I could be like him at his age and he said: “Your wife would kick your ass!” before briskly setting off home. Except for certain specific places where there had been fighting, the war still seemed remote and unreal to most people. When it began in earnest and as it dragged on, old people would suffer the most.

  Chocolate Putins. Lviv, November 2014.

  Just because something is a cliché does not mean that it is not true. In his book 1984 George Orwell famously wrote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” The war in Ukraine is not about history, but without using or, to employ the fashionable term, “weaponizing” history, the conflict simply could not be fought. There is nothing unique about this. In our times, in Europe, history was deployed as the advance guard and recruiting sergeant in the run-up to the Yugoslav wars, and exactly the same has happened again in Ukraine. In this way people are mobilized believing horrendously garbled versions of history. On the Russian and rebel side, fear is instilled by summoning up the ghosts of the past and simply ignoring inconvenient historical truths. On the Ukrainian side, the ugliest parts of history are ignored, as though they never happened, thus giving the enemy more propaganda ammunition to fire.

  In this conflict the words “info-war” or “information war” have replaced the word “propaganda.” In one way that is fitting because fighting the info-war is more complicated than disseminating old-fashioned propaganda. The battlefields include Facebook, Twitter, vKontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) and YouTube. On news and other websites tens of thousands of people “comment” on articles in such a way as to make them feel as though they are doing something useful. They are, as a boy who was about to start military training in Kharkiv told me, “sofa warriors.” But some it seems are mercenaries too. According to numerous reliable reports, the Russian authorities contract firms to employ people to “comment” and spread, among other things
, the central line of Russian propaganda, which is that the Ukrainian government, after the Maidan revolution, is nothing but Nazism reincarnated.

  What is odd is how much rubbish people believe, disregarding what they must know from their own experiences or those of their families. What has happened on the Russian side of the info-war, especially, bears close resemblance to the experience of Serbs in the early 1990s. Then, most of their media painted all Croats as Ustashas, after their wartime fascist movement, and Bosnian Muslims as jihadis. While of course, just as there were indeed then some admirers of the Ustashas, and some jihadis too, just as there are admirers of Ukraine’s wartime fascists now, the big lie is to give them a significance they didn’t and don’t have. As in the Balkans, the same is happening again: in Russia all of the mainstream media is following the modern party line. As the rebels seized control of eastern regions of Ukraine in April 2014, they moved quickly to take over local TV buildings and transmission facilities, turning off Ukrainian channels and tuning in to Russian ones. On the other side of the line, Russian channels were switched off and removed from cable packages. However, in the age of satellite TV and the Internet, it is not possible to deprive everyone of all information, bar that which you want them to see, but it is nevertheless remarkable how people so often accept what they are told. In this story, or “narrative” to use the technical term, history is something of a foundation and bedrock and this is why rewriting history is as important as writing the news. What you believe today depends on what you believe about the past. In that sense it is important for the “political technologists,” to use the pithy and apt term popular in post-Soviet countries, who might be understood by Westerners as turbo-spin doctors, to fashion a past which suits the future they are trying to create.