Angry Planet - Who was pulling the strings when Ukraine unraveled?

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

When Ukraine pulled itself apart in 2014, the world was confused over who was doing the pulling. Was the takeover of Luhansk, Donetsk and other regional capitals all part of a Russian plan, or a local movement? This week on War College, we speak with Antony Butts. He was in Donetsk when it all went down and has a unique story to tell.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. There was a massive psychological change that I observed in Dernets. It wasn't that they were scared that the same thing would happen to them. It was more like a kind of a moral outrage.

They were looking for evidence that there really were fascists. When Ukraine pulled itself apart in 2014, the world was confused over who exactly was doing the polling. Was the takeover of Luhansk, Benetsk, and other regional capitals all part of a Russian plan, or just a local movement? Today, on a special edition of War College, we speak with Anthony Butts. He was in Denez, when it all went. down and has a very interesting take on exactly what happened. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to a special edition of War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields, and today I'm joined by Tom Barton of Reuters Moscow Bureau. And Tom is also going to introduce our guests. So would you be so kind? Of course. Anthony Butts is an independent journalist and documentary maker specialising in assignments in the former Soviet Union. He's covered the effects of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, the disaster of Hurricane Hyan in the Philippines, and has spent weeks filming inside the separatist declared Donetsk People's Republic in eastern Ukraine. His documentary on the subject, DIY country, is going to be shown by the French TV channel Arte. and also screened at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto between April the 28th and May the 8th.

Anthony, welcome. Welcome. Thank you for having me here. If we could just start with Dinesk, when were you there filming? So I turned up in Denexk about 10 days after they'd captured the administration building in Dernetsk. I think that that was beginning of April 2014. And this was after Russia had already taken over Krenzsche. Yeah, I mean, things were moving very fast at that point. There'd been, obviously, the revolution in Kiev two months before, and then Russia had invaded Crimea shortly after that.

It was sort of spearheaded by its sort of special forces taking over buildings, pretended to be locals. And then, you know, it seemed like a similar kind of thing was going down in the sort of Dombas at that period of time. You know, buildings sort of falling to, you know, mixed bag of soldiers, soldier types and locals. and when I sort of turned up in the region, I went to Slaviansk first, and filming there was impossible. It was just far too dangerous. But then Dernetsk was taken over, and that seemed to be a sort of a different kettle of fish.

It was almost like an entirely separate project. The building wasn't taken over by gunmen like elsewhere. It was taken over by local activists. And that was kind of very interesting because it was far more open. It seemed a kind of a different project to kind of put the civilian face on things. And it was very difficult to disaggregate whether it was really planned by Russia or was something kind of like very freewheeling and fluid from the grassroots pro-Russian movement. Can you just describe Denedzsk to us? How many people live there, Russian speaking, I assume?

Yeah, so Dernetsk is the capital of Donbass, which is the sort of eastern Ukrainian region. It's sort of famous for its coal and industry. Just under a million people live there. It's almost entirely Russian-speaking. It doesn't necessarily mean what people's sympathies are. My guess is that people were wanting to return to the Soviet Union. Denexk was kind of quite empty until the Soviet Union came along, and they sort of just obviously used it as a big industrial power base,

lots of mines, lots of smelters and stuff like that. So people had this sort of very kind of like industrial, you know, stereotypical worker identity. Suddenly, you know, 23 years ago, they find themselves part of Ukraine. And this really leaves the people quite lost at sea. Some of them take up the Ukrainian identity, some of them, the Russian identity, but most of them still feel in the Soviet Union. And over those years, Ukraine didn't really serve these people very well because of the corruption, the oligoths took over all the mines and industry, milked them for all as well. left it in ruins. And so people were kind of very bitter at what independence had done for them

because of the oligarchy. And they saw the Soviet Union as, you know, better times. And simply because Russia, under Putin, it's kind of making itself out like it owns the Soviet Union brand. So people associated Russia's sort of oil wealth and so on with the Soviet Union brand and thought that somehow joining Russia, being part of Russia, is going to make their lives better. Russia's going to bring back the Soviet Union. It's going to give them some of that nice oil wealth and restart their industry, whereas they felt that Ukraine, with its pro-Western stance and association with the IMF and sort of structural adjustment programs, all that stuff was just going to leave the whole region much worse off than it was even back then. Their identity was very fluid.

Do you perhaps feel that obviously the big question that the world asks is, about Russian involvement. And obviously, Russia continues to deny that it ever had its actual official forces there in eastern Ukraine. But do you feel that without whoever these mysterious people that were coming and helping the local rebels, do you feel that if they hadn't stepped in, and many people assume they are Russian, there were Russian, that the local elites or groups simply didn't have the organisation, the skill to pull it off, and the whole thing was going to collapse unless there was outside help. Is that a picture that you saw that stood up by the evidence?

I think that Russia was involved somehow, but I don't think it was as direct as everyone's thinking. I think it's more, at least in Denez. I think somebody was behind the scenes in place in Prushilin there, but I have a feeling that that was done through oligarchs, And who told the oligoths to do that? Who put them up to it? I don't know.

But Russia did play a vital role psychologically, which is the most important thing. Russia had moved its army to within the borders of Harkov and Dernetsk area. So it could have invaded at any time. And the Ukrainian army would have been completely flattened. So people really felt that Russia was behind them. The Crimean precedent also gave people the idea that whatever they do, they're doing so with relative impunity, because as in they can rebel, because no one's going to stop them. The police who could have put down the uprising in Denex relatively easily just did nothing. There were guys with knives holding knives in their hands, and policemen would not do anything.

And these guys were just walking around the streets. And I spoke to the police and they said they were just waiting to see he would win. So if the police have been confident that they would be punished by the Ukrainian government, if they weren't neutral, I think things would be very different. And that is down to the threat of Russia in that, in creating this atmosphere of impunity. In addition, Russia also had a very important role in the formation of the identity, and steering the identity of the Republic. In Dernetsk, it was initially mostly a working-class revolution.

People who were in the mines, in the factories, who felt they've got nothing out of Ukraine because of the corruption and oligarchy of all these years, saw in this revolution a chance to upend things and sort of seize control. This was very quickly steered by the Russian media into an uprising against fascism, not against oligarchs, because, of course, Russia doesn't want to have a working-class revolution in its backyard, right? So it wanted to use the mobilization that all these angry miners

had sort of brought about and turn it into that these miners had risen up spontaneously to fight fascism. This was a sort of a very important thing because when Odessa happened, when something like 30, 40 people were pro-Russians were killed in an arson attack in Odessa, there was a massive psychological change

that I observed in Dernetsk, it really was like night and day. People really felt their identity was under threat. The people who had stood up for the referendum in Odessa, like they were standing up for a referendum in Denex, they had just been, but do you know what I mean? It wasn't that they were scared

that the same thing would happen to them. It wasn't that. It was more like a kind of a moral outrage backed by the fact that they could get away with it. So they could like let loose their feelings. It was, they were looking for evidence that there really were fascists. And Russian TV spun the, what happened in the Dessa, so much so that it looked like on TV a, as if Ukrainian government back near Nazis had incinerated 35 pregnant women.

And that's what people were telling me in, in the East. administration building. And that they felt that this was like proof positive, that they really were fascists. And after this period, the mobilization just like was like picked up so fast. You know, political scientists talk about mobilization before civil war as a bit like a kind of like an S. It starts off slowly, builds up a big head of steam and rises really, really fast and it sort tailors off when all the would-be rebels have sort of joined up. And that was the moment when when everything really started going south for Ukraine after Odessa, because Russia had given them the psychological reason to fight.

Some of this actually does go back to World War II. I mean, the propaganda does, that even though Ukraine was actually probably more people died in Ukraine than anywhere else at the hands of the Nazis, they were able to form a Ukrainian Nazi brigade, if I remember right. and people are still, they still have that narrative in their heads. The Russians do anyway. Whether or not it's a false narrative, and clearly it seems to largely be false, it's definitely very useful for propaganda.

Yeah, I mean, indeed, it's, unfortunately, there's always an element of truth in this stuff, and there are, as many the pro-Russian activists I met, you know, would tell me that, you know, There's a video you can find on YouTube of people in L'Evov dressed up as SS officers going foyer, foyer, as they're reburying SS soldiers. This kind of stuff, I mean, of course, these guys are minority, but they are inflated to, so it becomes in people's minds that this is the entirety of the enemy they're fighting.

And in essence, it becomes a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy because people's start talking about media wars, identities get polarised and more and more people become radicalised on both sides. So you saw the rise of the Idar battalion, the Dombass battalion, some of which had openly neo-Nazi people inside them and this to sort of in any society have these kind of people and the media really brought them to the fall. Yeah, we've talked about the early days of it. I think though, I mean, certainly outside Russia, very few people believe that Russian forces were never involved, certainly when it came to bigger battles later in the east of Ukraine.

And I know you were based in Dinesk, but there was a lot you saw, a lot you heard, a lot of people you talked to. How, if you can answer this, how great an involvement do you think from what you saw and heard? Was there from the Russian military? and do you think that there, again, that seems to be the great shadow hanging over the Ukrainian forces there, that they are worried if they push too hard, there would just be an outright invasion. Was that a realistic prospect as well, do you feel? Okay, so on May the 16th, I think, I was kind of, well, I wouldn't say kidnapped, but I was sort of held by a militia commander who fought for the Nets People's Republic.

And after he released me, we were talking about what the scale of the Russian involvement was. And he was saying, look, the Russians have provided, there was a guy that came over. He was saying that we're all going to be involved in a project called Project Retribution, where we're going to go all the way to Lvov, and the idea is that the Ukrainian army is going to be shelling civilians the whole way because they're so incompetent, which was just radicalised the population,

and we'll just ride that wave of radicalisation due to civilian casualties all the way to Kiev and beyond. I think that was a fantasy spun to get people like him involved. But he was saying that there were weapons and training that was going on in this base that was just near Lugansk, right on the border.

And that was Russians who were training them and Russian weaponry coming over. I was actually, I got permission, and Moscovoi, by the way, was in that base. I got permission to go to that base. On the very day I was going to go, the Ukrainian Air Force bombed it. And this militia commander I was with,

he was injured in that raid, so it was kind of lucky I didn't go. The point being that mid-May, The Russians had already set up some training center. There was an active moving of weaponry across the border. Whether this was the Russian army that was directly doing this, whether this was Russian volunteers, I don't really know, but for sure it must have had the blessing

of the Russian border guards or elements in the Russian forces for that to happen, at a minimum. So, I mean, that's like two years ago, right? this kind of trickling in of weaponry that was coming in at that time really sort of was important in a sense that it started giving people guns because there weren't many guns that people had in Dernetsk at the time. And it was also this time when Russian volunteers started coming over. And really, there were Russian volunteers. I know a lot of talked about the Russian army, but all the guys I met were volunteers. whether they were paid for by the Russian government, it's not clear.

But the Russian army was important, I think, as later on, when it looked like several times that the Nets People's Republic was losing because the Ukrainians were much stronger than they anticipated. And so the Russian army came in to save the day at least several times. And that's really why the thing was a stalemate, because the Nets People's Republic was never allowed to. really grow beyond its initial sort of borders. And, yeah, it just became trench warfare.

Can we talk just a little bit about the situation now? Who controls the Netsk? Yeah, it's a good question. So, in my opinion, you've got people like Pushilin, Zakhine, and so on. They notionally controlled Denezsk, but really the true masters are the Russians. For instance, my character in the film, Boris Litvinov, who is the head. head of the Communist Party was kind of threatened by Alexander Borodai, who was the Prime Minister of Denex People's Republic. And he's a Russian consultant, right, from Moscow. So he basically

said, look, this is a recorded phone call you can sort of listen to it on the internet. It's quite entertaining. He said, look, Boris, don't run the Communist Party. Stop all your activities, you know, because I've got to know that you're on our side. And Boris was kind of like tried to bluff Borodai by saying, you know, like people are going to have another revolution. I am barely holding them back from the barricades. And, well, this was kind of like bullshitting from Boris's part because I turned up to a couple of his sort of little rallies where he was trying to get communists involved

to try to put in some kind of bring the government of the next people's republic back to its sort of working-class origins. Kind of nobody really turned up apart from a few old women. And then Boris was then pushed out. out of the local elections. So there seems to be a lot of evidence that Russia is really pulling the strings here using people like Pushulin as puppets. And insiders that I met with in Dene's People's Republic were saying that the way it works

is Russia provides the military guarantee. Their economy is also completely dependent on Russian aid. So Russian can always withhold the aid. And that will mean there's civil unrest inside the republic. this is their sort of lever over them. Plus also because they allow the officials to skim off some of their aid, that's a way for keeping them sweet. So, I mean, Russia controls it through mechanisms like that.

It's also sort of taking over the military structures as well. I know that your film was very much focused on the sort of the personalities, the sort of the human side of the revolution. But I mean, I think that's, you know, all revolutions are actually, at the end of the day, not made up of sort of faceless forces. they're made up of people, aren't they? So that's actually a unique viewpoint. Yeah, yeah, and that's really something I wanted to get across

because when you watch the film, it's not like you really learn that much about Ukraine and geopolitics, but I think you do learn a lot about what it's like to be in a revolution, the kind of people that turned up, the kind of forces that drive it and the sort of ultimate destiny of revolutionaries. Like, I think it was a...

Camus once said that every revolutionary is destiny, to be either a heretic or an oppressor. So that certainly was the case. And I just was so struck by how very Russian it looked. You know, just the way everyone was dressed, the casual profanity, you know. I mean, it's just such an interesting looking group. I mean, they look, I guess, like what they are. They look like people who came out of factories or mines or, you know,

I just thought it was fascinating. There really is a civil realisational difference between the type of people in Dombast that are for the Soviet Union for Russia. Because they reject, you know, they're kind of people out of time, right? They reject the way the Ukraine is trying to, the hipsters in Kiev and the Maidan, people who want no corruption and so on. because they, it's completely different kind of people, really. All this kind of stuff about gay Europa and that thing. It's just, it's just sort of an expression of the fact that they really consider themselves a different kind of people.

And this was really what the Kremlin were tapping into, that kind of dissatisfaction and anger. Russia helped a lot by providing key military and logistical support and ideological support and so on. but they gave voice to grievances that were already there. And one must have forgotten that Ukraine deserves a significant amount of blame in this whole crisis for basically failing to deal with these kind of deep-set grievances. That's why you'll find now that there's a lot of public support still for the rebel movement, even though they know that they were taken over. In many ways, they were fooled and so on.

They're still proud that they stood up for, you know, for, I guess, I mean, it sounds a bit pathetic, but for their dignity, you know. These were things that Ukraine hadn't addressed, and it dealt, you know, it sort of paid the price, really, in the kind of, you know, in this sort of anarchy of geopolitics for that. And it's also, it's very logical. I mean, it seems to fit the fact. So it's hard to, you know, if you listen to it from the outside and, I mean, just an American point of view, I mean, I couldn't be further from the events. You know, it's hard to defend, right? I mean, yes, they are getting screwed, but, you know, maybe it doesn't help to do what they're doing.

But you know what? This is this is very, very philosophically interesting because if you don't stand up and fight against these big forces, right? Because, you know, capitalism is about conflict, right? If you don't fight, then you don't get anywhere. But they had tried, it's not as if it's the first time that people in Ukraine had sort of tried to fight these. big forces of corruption and so on. Each time they'd done that, they've been screwed over. I remember going to Denex about five years ago and doing a story on kidney transplants.

People were selling their kidneys in Denex because the corrupt policemen were framing their relatives, threatening to not let them be in school, go to university and so on. And so they were having to sell their kidneys to raise the cash to bribe the police. This is, if you don't control this kind of stuff, then people will, will seek more violent forms of getting what they want, and they'll obviously get manipulated along the way. This is no different from what Trump is doing. And whether you blame Trump as the baddie, who is responsible for what's happening in Russia? Yeah, Trump is, there'll always be

somebody like Hitler or Trump or somebody who will capitalize in on this grievance. But ultimately, you've also got to blame the people and the system that let it get to that. state as well. And when you ignore that, when you just put the blame on Russia or Trump or whatever, you are doing a massive disservice to these people because it's not like they're going to not be pissed off. They're going to carry on being pissed off and at one point they will rebel. Whether that's morally right or wrong to rebel, you know what? I'm kind of feeling as though if you ignore people, then they have a moral right to rebel because they're literally, you know, society has got to be fair. I think we'll have to end.

end it there, but thank you so much for joining us. And it's fascinating to find out exactly how this came about. I hope you enjoyed this week's edition of War College. While I have your attention, I wanted to let you know about an app for iOS called White House Run. It's the other big project I've been working on this year. It lets you run for president against Reuters Ipsos polling data. You get asked a series of questions, and depending on how you match up with Republicans or Democrats, In the primary, you'll get a score of your electability. Download it today, and I'd love to get your feedback. Thanks so much.

Next time on War College. So the FBI's Counterterrorism Game has a full title of Don't Be a Puppet, Pull Back the Curtain on Violent Extremism. And it's been under fire for getting the psychological processes of developing extremism wrong.