By
KIEV — 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.
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 is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council.
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