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The Glazyev Tapes, Origins ofthe Donbass Conflict, and Minsk Agreements
By Andreas Umland 2016 12 28
What are the origins of the
armed conflict that has been raging in eastern Ukraine since 2014? Which role
did Russia play in the emergence and escalation of the originally unarmed
confrontation, in the Donets Basin (Donbas), after the victory of the Euromaidan
revolution? When, how and to what degree exactly did Moscow get involved? Which
relative weight did local sources of the conflict have when compared to the
impact of foreign factors, i.e. the Kremlin’s covert actions in Ukraine? These
and similar questions are not only academic topics hotly debated in Ukraine and
the West. The way one answers them will also have far-going implications for
Western thinking, policies and diplomacy with regard to Russia and Ukraine,
during the next years. Recently, new evidence and research has emerged that is
clarifying the picture.
For instance, Russia-watchers
have been lately intrigued by a leak of emails sent and received by the office of Vladislav Surkov, an official
adviser to President Putin, responsible for Russia’s policies towards Ukraine
and the Moscow’s satellite states in northern Georgia. The Surkov Leaks have renewed the
discussion of Moscow’s involvement in the pseudo-civil war and
emergence of “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine. These leaks confirm once
more that the armed conflict in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas is, to large extent, a
Kremlin project. It is merely one part of Moscow’s broader policy of undermining
the Ukrainian state after the victory of the Euromaidan revolution in February
2014.
Yet, while the Surkov Leaks provide important
additional documentation, they do not alter, in principle, our understanding of
the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. They confirm with details and they support with
empirical proof earlier mainstream interpretations of the nature of the armed
conflict in the Donbas as a covert Russian invasion of Ukraine. Two months
earlier, another leak did, however, provide evidence that has or should have
questioned earlier interpretations of the genesis of the tensions in eastern
and southern Ukraine. They deal with the prehistory of the events that
eventually led to the start of the still ongoing low-intensity war in the
Donets Basin, in April 2014.
In August 2016, Ukraine’s General Procurator
published a video tape
containing illustrated and annotated audio recordings of a
number of conversations between Sergey Glazyev, a Russian
Presidential Advisor (an official governmental position), and
several Russian as well as Ukrainian pro-Kremlin activists located or living in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. These dialogs
were recorded in late February – early March 2014. They vividly illustrate
Moscow’s covert support for anti-governmental protests in Ukraine’s russophone
regions following the victory of the Revolution of Dignity on 21 February 2014.
The tapes reveal the involvement either of the Russian state itself or of a
formally non-governmental Russian group directed from the Kremlin in the
initiation, coordination and financing of separatist meetings, demonstrations,
pickets and similar actions on Crimea as well as in various regional capitals
in Ukraine’s eastern and southern parts immediately after the victory
Revolution of Dignity.
Putin’s advisor Glazyev,
for instance, on 1 March 2014 informs his interlocutor Anatoliy Petrovich in
the south-east Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya: “I have an
order to raise everybody, to raise the people. People should gather on the
square [of Zaporizhzhya] and demand to turn to Russia for help against the
Banderites [derived from the name of Stepan Bandera – a war-time Ukrainian
ultra-nationalist who fought against, among others, Soviet power and was killed
by a KGB agent at Munich in 1959]. Specially trained people should throw out
the Banderites from the regional council’s building. Then they should arrange a
meeting of the regional council, create a regional executive committee, give it
executive power and subordinate the police to this new executive. I have direct
orders from the leadership [of Russia] – to raise the people in Ukraine
wherever we can. That means we have to bring people to the streets, as we did
in Kharkiv – according to this example! And as soon as possible! Because, you
see, President [Putin] has already signed a [presidential] decree. The
operation has already began, there is information that the troops are already
moving out. What are they waiting for? We can not do all this with [military]
force. We use force only to support the people – nothing more! But if there are
no people, what support can there be?”
While the tapes became a big
issue in Ukrainian media and caused an angry reaction in Moscow, they have been
largely ignored by Western newspapers and think-tanks. Mostly, they were – if
at all – mentioned only en passant in reports about Ukraine of
that time, by European and American journalists
and researchers. Their Russian contents were, to be sure, quickly translated
into English and annotated
with supplementary information by the Ukrainian analytical website UA Position. Yet, so
far, only few observers have made these tapes a prime topic of their analyses
of the Kremlin’s start of a Russian hybrid war against Ukraine.
This may have been partly due
to the fact that the Ukrainian General Procuracy office has still not published
the raw recordings out of which the annotated public tapes were composed. Some
may suspect that the published records were tampered with, or/and that they do
not reveal the full story of the events they are supposed to illustrate. It is,
however, unlikely that these recordings are mere fakes. The published
conversations are interactive and made by interlocutors whose voices can be
easily ascribed to persons, on the basis of their audible statements recorded
in video material published elsewhere. The Kremlin would have already published
proof for any manipulation, if they had taken place. Nor has there been any
other public questioning of the genuineness of these audio documents.
The continuing international
inattention for the Glazyev Tapes was and is surprising. If they are indeed
authentic, the Glazyev Tapes should modify our understanding of the origins and
nature of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The most important aspect of the
Glazyev Tapes is arguably not their contents. What is remarkable about these
conversations is the time of their recording in February-March 2014, i.e. several
weeks before the post-Euromaidan civil conflict in eastern Ukraine
turned into a pseudo-civil war in the Donbas.
Until the publication of the
Glazyev Tapes, the prevalent interpretation of the roots of the
Russian-Ukrainian War was that Moscow intervened – with, first, paramilitary
and, later, regular military forces – into an escalating confrontation between
pro-Kyiv and pro-Moscow Ukrainian citizens of the Donets Basin. To be sure, few
serious observers ever doubted the Kremlin’s crucial role in turning these
initially unarmed – though often already violent – winter confrontations on the
streets of the east and south Ukrainian cities into a putatively civil war in
spring 2014. Yet, there was still a debate among Ukrainian and foreign
observers of these events about the character of the pro-Moscow protest actions
that had preceded, and supposedly led to, the escalation of armed violence.
Even many “russocentric”
interpreters of the confrontation in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas conceded
that the cultural-regional differences between Ukraine’s russophone east and
south, on the one side, and ukrainophone west and
bilingual centre were the predominant cause of the tensions in such
Russian-speaking cities as Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk or Odessa, after the
Euromaidan. The post-revolutionary anti-Kyiv grass-roots activities of many
Russian-speakers in Ukraine – such was the story – led to their confrontation
with the new pro-Western and nationally oriented leadership that came to power
as a result of the Revolution of Dignity. The local tensions, so it seemed, led
to a conflict in the Donbas that the Kremlin eventually felt – depending on the
interpreter – obliged, forced or convenient enough to intervene in.
To be sure, the evidence
contained in the Glazyev Tapes does not nullify the factor of Ukrainian
inter-regional strains (not a particularly unique characteristic of Ukraine, in
any way) in the emergence of the Donbass conflict. In fact, the conversations
published do not concern the Donbas, but other regions in
russophone Eastern and Southern Ukraine. One can only infer from these
recordings that similar Russian mingling was happening in the Donbas too, and
that the now documented involvement of the Kremlin in certain locations is
merely the tip of a larger iceberg.
The Glazyev Tapes could, in
fact, be seen as strengthening the argument about the relevance of regional
differences within russophone Ukraine – and old theme in post-Soviet
sub-national studies. They indicate that Moscow was engaged in a broader
attempt to destabilize the russophone regions of Ukraine, but was only able to
instigate a pseudo-civil war in the Donets Basin. Russia’s informal influence
was, however, not strong enough to do so in other Russian-speaking regions in
which Glazyev with his local partners, as the tapes proof, actively supported
secessionist tendencies. The leak could be thus read as evidence for earlier
interpretations emphasizing the crucial role of specific regional factors in
Ukraine’s break-up.
Yet, the time of the recording
and documented depth of Glazyev’s involvement in these Ukrainian events also
support a different narrative. They imply that Russia was by no means merely an
additional third actor or late intervening factor when the protests turned
massively violent and led to the first armed skirmishes, in April 2014. Rather,
the Glazyev Tapes indicate that Moscow had been already entangled in the still
largely unarmed protests across eastern and southern Ukraine immediately
following the victory of the Euromaidan, in late February and early March 2014.
The Kremlin had been behind at least some separatist activities several weeks
before the actual war started. Yet, Moscow’s clandestine pre-war activities
remained remarkably unsuccessful in mainland Ukraine, in late February and
early March 2014. Surprisingly, the distinctly weak Ukrainian state – just
shaken by a full-scale revolution – was still strong enough to resist Russia’s
clandestine non-military assault on its sovereignty and integrity, at that
point. The only partial exclusion, in late February 2014, was Crimea where – as
we already know – Russian special forces played a crucial role in starting the
secession process.
The genealogy of the
Russian-Ukrainian conflict appears, after the publication of the Glazyev Tapes,
somewhat different than before. It looks now as if Moscow or, at least, a part
of the Russian leadership was, in late February 2014, starting a comprehensive
attempt to annex not only Crimea, but also large chunks of mainland southern
and eastern Ukraine, i.e. to create a Novorossiia (New
Russia). Yet, in order to do so, pro-Russian local activists had first to
produce some legal or/and political pretext for an official Russian military
intervention. An employment of Russian troops abroad had just been made
(domestically) legal by a special Federation Council resolution
adopted on 1 March 2014 granting the President the right “to use Russian
military forces in Ukraine to improve public and political situation in that
country" (– a right revoked in June 2014). Yet, for the Russian
public and international audiences, it still needed a weighty justification for such expansionism coming from inside Ukraine. To
this purpose, an – at least seemingly – official document or particularly grave
political event would first have to appear in the respective Ukrainian region
up for invasion, and to provide some basic fodder for the Kremlin propaganda
machine. Such an initial move in this or that Ukrainian region could have then
been spun by Russian media as providing sufficient legitimacy for preparing and
conducting an armed “humanitarian” intervention by Moscow on Ukrainian
territory – and to finally annex the occupied areas either formally or
informally.
This scenario materialized
more or less on Crimea. Glazyev’s conversations with the Russian imperialist politician Konstantin
Zatulin and Crimean pro-Russian separatist Sergey Aksyonov, on the tapes,
illustrates some of the particulars. Yet, even in Simferopol, the crucial
session of the Autonomous Republic’s parliament that initiated Crimea’s
secession had to be assembled and made to vote with the help of
Moscow’s paramilitary forces, as
one of their members, notorious Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), professed in a later
interview. Something similar – as the Glazyev Tapes indicate – was
also tried or, at least, intended in Kharkiv, Odessa and other cities. Yet, the
hoped-for Ukrainian calls for Russian help did not
come about as planned, during the first few weeks after the Euromaidan. The
following “civil war” that only began more than a month later in the Donets
Basin was seemingly Moscow’s Plan B. It may have been an altogether improvised
scenario that spontaneously grew out of the initially unarmed, yet abortive
subversion of the Ukrainian state by Russia-directed activists, in late
February and early March 2014. More revelations and research will be necessary
to fully verify, further specify and properly document this course of events.
Still, the Glazyev Tapes now
provide first direct evidence for what earlier empirical research – by, among
others, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Viacheslav Likhachev and Anton Shekhovtsov who focused on the
Russian far right’s role – had already indicated. At least one important circle
within the Kremlin was already actively fanning the East Ukrainian social
conflict several weeks before it was replaced by a covert Russian paramilitary
invasion. Whereas Mitrokhin, Likhachev and Shekhovtsov emphasized the
ultra-nationalist ideological motivations of the Russian or Russia-supported
activists in Eastern Ukraine, the Glazyev Tapes illustrate the financial
remuneration that the Kremlin or a Kremlin-directed group provided to the
pro-Moscow “anti-fascists.”
To be sure, one could have
suspected something like this already before the Glazyev Tapes were published.
There had been two obvious contradictions in the “ukrainocentric” narrative of the
origins of the conflict in the Donbass: First, comparative regional
studies have emphasized some peculiarly “uncivil” traits of society in the
Ukrainian Donbass. Ukraine’s easternmost population has been characterized as
relatively more pro-Soviet and patriarchal than people in many other Ukrainian
regions. After Ukraine’s assumption of independence in 1991, the Donbas’s
crucial social, political and economic structures were, moreover, largely
captured by the semi-criminal Donetsk clan and its political wing, the Party of
Regions. Against this background, it was, in spring 2014, remarkable how well
and sudden the most Soviet-nostalgic sections of the Donbas’s society managed
to seemingly self-organize a large anti-governmental protest without much
(official) help from the dominant regional Donetsk clan. Even before the
Glazyev Tapes appeared, this story – implicit in the civil war narrative of the
Russian-Ukrainian conflict – looked, at least, incomplete.
Second, while the pre-conflict
Ukrainian Donbas was characterized by certain socio-cultural pathologies, it
still had a functioning and structured social life. Like any other modern
populated region in the world, the Donets Basin had, before Russia’s covert intervention,
a multitude of established and interlinked political, industrial, educational,
cultural and other institutions with formal heads and informal leaders known to
all or large parts of the Basin’s citizenry. Yet, when the Donbass “uprising”
started in spring 2014, not a single widely known local dignitary seems to have
visibly taken part in it – not to mention, led it. Although the Donbas had –
like any other society – regionally prominent politicians, journalists,
doctors, entrepreneurs, writers etc., apparently none or very few of the
Luhansk and Donetsk notabilities chose to become, if not a leader, then at
least an open participant of the 2014 so-called “Russian Spring.”
The only prominent Ukrainian
politician ever officially involved with the putative insurrection in the
Donets Basin was Oleg Tsaryov, a notorious member of Ukraine’s pre-Euromaidan
parliament (who had, during the uprising of winter 2013-2014, tried to deport
approximately three dozen foreigners, including myself, from Ukraine). Tsaryov
became for a while the speaker of the joint and by now defunct Novorossia joint
parliament of the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. However,
Tsaryov is not from the Donbass, but from the neighboring Dnipro oblast –
perhaps, the country’s most staunchly pro-Ukrainian russophone region. Instead,
the leaders of the Donbas putative uprising and so-called “People’s Republics”
were either Russian citizens, like the prolific ultra-nationalists Igor Girkin
or Aleksandr Borodai, or hitherto un- or little known representatives of the
Donbass – some of them, like the first Donetsk “People’s Governor” Pavel
Gubarev, also Russian ultra-nationalists.
The Glazyev Tapes contribute
to explaining the reasons for these contradictions. The allegedly popular
insurrection in eastern and southern Ukraine was from its beginning in late
February 2014 an undertaking meticulously guided and heavily supported from
Moscow. The Russian Spring in the Donbas did thus not need an active local
civil society. As political leadership and resources were provided by Moscow,
an involvement of regional notabilities was not necessary for the rebellion to
happen.
This interpretation should not
only modify public narratives of the “Ukraine Crisis,” but also have
repercussions for the Western approach to the Minsk Agreements. In particular,
the West should re-consider its insistence on Ukraine’s soon fulfilment of the
political parts of the Minsk Agreements. Not only is it obvious that Ukraine
was forced to accept enormous political concessions to Moscow against the
background of extremely bloody Russian military offensives, during the
negotiations of both Minsk Agreements in September 2014 (Ilovays’k) and
February 2015 (Debal’tseve).
The Glazyev Tapes also
illustrate that the social rationale for far-reaching new political rules in
the Donbas envisaged in the Minsk Agreements – a considerable reduction of
Ukraine’s sovereignty, in the currently occupied territories – is slim. A
popular Western interpretation of the concessions to the separatists in these
Agreements had been that the mere fact of an, at least, initially grass-roots
insurgency in the Donbass should be somehow reflected in its future status.
Yet, the Glazyev Tapes illustrate that the entire East Ukrainian uprising was from
its start not as popular a phenomenon as it earlier seemed. If one acknowledges
the Russian involvement in, and imperial rather than local dimension of, the
insurgency, then the apparent compromise in the Minsk Agreements assumes a
different notion.
The Minsk compromise appears
now not any longer as a result of Ukrainian and Western consideration of
certain peculiarities of the Donets Basin. Rather, a future special status of
the currently occupied territories looks, after publication of the Glazyev Tapes,
as a strange reward for the partial successes that Russia had in fuelling
otherwise weak separatist tendencies in eastern Ukraine following the victory
of the Euromaidan. Ukraine has been undergoing a general decentralization drive
since 2014 – a development unrelated to the Minsk process and a direct result
of the victory of the Revolution of Dignity. A special status for the
currently occupied territories, as foreseen in the Minsk Agreements, is thus
redundant. All regions of Ukraine are or will be acquiring new rights,
additional responsibilities and greater autonomy. If the now Moscow-controlled
territories return under Kyiv’s control, they would benefit from general
Ukrainian decentralization. It is less the Donbass’s specific regional
interests than the partial successes of Russia’s secret subversion efforts that
has found their way into the texts of the two deals between the Ukrainian
government and the separatist pseudo-republics in Minsk. The West should treat
the questions of whether, when and how Kyiv needs to implement the respective
domestic political articles of the Minsk Agreements accordingly.
Andreas Umland is
Senior Research Fellow at the Institute
for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv and
general editor of the Germany-based bilingual book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics
and Society” distributed
outside Europe by Columbia University Press. This article appeared first on the
site of “Open Democracy Russia.”
DELFI (T. Vinickas) Image.

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