BY
When separatists started a war in eastern Ukraine,
hundreds of Russians, Belarusians, and other foreigners came to Kiev’s defense.
Now they’ve been abandoned.
EV, Ukraine — In May 2014, Rudolph, then a 19-year-old student in Gomel, in
eastern Belarus, saw a post on Facebook that inspired him. “This is not a war of Russia with Ukraine; this is
a war between freedom and lawlessness,” wrote Semen Semenchenko, a prolific
Facebook blogger and the commander of the Donbass Battalion, a volunteer
paramilitary unit fighting against Russia-backed separatists in eastern
Ukraine. The commander called on sympathetic Russians and Belarusians to come
help their neighbor in its time of need, announcing that he was recruiting
foreigners “who share our views and want to help.”
Rudolph took an academic leave from his university and left for Kiev. He
signed up with Semenchenko’s battalion, which became part of the Ukrainian
National Guard and assisted the Ukrainian Army in Luhansk and Donetsk, the two
regions partially seized by rebels who declared independence. “I saw it as my
duty to defend Ukraine from Russian aggression which spreads to all neighboring
countries,” the lanky former computer science student told me last month. He
worked in the battalion’s radio communications unit as Ukraine’s forces took
back Artemivsk, Lisichansk, and other towns while losing vast territories along
the Russian border last summer. The conflict is now frozen, a quagmire that has
claimed 6,800 lives.
Now, months after he left the fighting, Rudolph is stuck in Kiev, living on
friends’ couches. He still wears fatigues, with a pre-Soviet, red-and-white
Belarusian flag patch sewed onto the sleeve. He is desperately trying to
legalize his new Ukrainian life. The 90-day, visa-less stay that Ukraine allows
Russians and Belarusians has long expired, and his participation in the Donbass
Battalion has been leaked to the Belarusian KGB, a close ally of Moscow. He
can’t go home.
Rudolph is just one of several hundred foreign volunteers, mostly Russians
and Belarusians, who are stranded in Ukraine after risking their lives fighting
for the government in Kiev and being promised passports in return. The
Ukrainian military has been closed off to foreigners so these sympathizers of
the Maidan revolution have opted to join the ranks of the dozen or so volunteer
battalions defending Ukraine against what was seen as an invasion by neo-Soviet
master Moscow. Most seem to be driven by a deep aversion to President Vladimir
Putin’s policies, which Russian fighters say have degraded their country’s
economy and society and many Belarusians say are turning their country into a protectorate with a military
presence.
“Show that the face of Russia is not Putin,” Semenchenko wrote on Facebook on May 14, 2014, days after rebels in Ukraine’s eastern
regions of Luhansk and Donetsk organized a “referendum” for independence and a
month into Kiev’s operations to put down the separatist insurgency with an
inexperienced and woefully underfunded army.
Men answering the call trained with the National Guard, went through a
background check, and pledged allegiance to Ukraine before they joined the
fight. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov hailed them as heroes and promised them
“fast-track citizenship” as they waited to be naturalized, according to Rudolph
and other former volunteers. While their battalion became part of the National
Guard, their individual paperwork was never fully processed by the government —
which meant they received no pay and citizenship never came, but the men
figured that the details would be sorted out later, after the separatists had
been defeated.
“Finally, they pushed us out to the east without resolving this problem. We
thought, ‘OK, we will go on to win and then raise this issue again. But in the
end it so happened that the troops’ advance turned to withdrawal, then to a frozen
conflict, and everyone without documents was basically purged into civilian
life without any means of existence,” Rudolph told me as we sat in a café in
downtown Kiev. He later went back to the front lines — but with a militia group
that neither asked for nor promised him any official paperwork. But since
returning, he’s been stuck.
Last December, Gen. Alexander Rozmaznin estimated that Ukraine’s forces contained “about [a] thousand” foreigners.
Statistics on their nationalities are not public, but he said they include
people from the former Soviet Union and beyond, including France and the United
States. Rudolph told me he personally knows 50 former volunteers like him scattered
around Ukraine with no documents. The total number is estimated to be in the
several hundreds. Many could be in hiding, since their illegal status in
Ukraine could lead to deportation by officials enforcing immigration laws.
Some are in especially dire conditions. Sergei, a young Russian opposition
activist from the city of Ulyanovsk who fought for the Shakhtarsk Battalion — a
volunteer force answerable to the Interior Ministry which was later dissolved
for looting — was stopped in Dnipropetrovsk in July and given orders to leave
the country. Scared of going back to Russia, he headed back to the conflict
zone, where last month he stepped on a mine and nearly lost his legs. Migration
officials brought his deportation injunction to the hospital’s intensive care
unit just as his friends were crowdfunding for his surgery on Facebook.
Yulia has found herself in a similarly tight spot. The petite 20-year-old,
who goes by the nom de guerre Valkrie, left her home in southern Russia to join
the Maidan demonstrations shortly after they broke out. Later, she fought for
the Aidar Battalion, a nationalist volunteer group that fought in Luhansk and
was made part of the Ukrainian military this year but also has a reputation for human rights abuses. Yulia lost her passport in a fire during combat. Several months ago, she
gave birth in Ukraine but cannot get a birth certificate or medical care for
her baby.
Commanders of
Ukraine’s volunteer battalions had written
to President Petro Poroshenko several times over the past year with lists of
foreign fighters who deserve citizenship. They received no response from the
president’s office. But it’s not like the government wasn’t opening its arms to
foreigners. On Dec. 2, 2014, Poroshenko, who has the authority to grant
citizenship by decree, handed out Ukrainian passports to several non-Ukrainians
tasked with economic reform, including American investment banker Natalie
Jaresko, now finance minister, and Lithuanian investment banker Aivaras
Abromavicius, who became the country’s economy and trade minister.
“I want to also say hello to my fighting comrades,” Poroshenko said in a speech before the parliament in Kiev that day, by way of responding to the
battalion commanders’ requests to naturalize their foreign fighters. “Your
appeals to the president of Ukraine regarding granting Ukrainian citizenship to
Russians and Belarusians who defended the honor of the country and independence
of the state together with you — I will sign the decree to give them Ukrainian
citizenship as promised,” he said to a standing ovation from jubilant
lawmakers.
Many more months went by, but only two foreign volunteers had their
Ukrainian nationality handed to them by presidential decree, fighters said,
dismissing their cases as political flukes. Meanwhile, Russian authorities
launched probes against several men who fought for Ukraine, while Belarusian
President Alexander Lukashenko ominously promised to “deal with everyone fighting in Ukraine when they come back.”
Sympathetic lawmakers have put forth two bills this year that purport to
help out foreign soldiers by easing residency and citizenship procedures for
those who want to serve. On Oct. 6, the parliament voted to legalize service by foreigners in the armed forces. Even if the
bills, which have floated around parliament for months, are passed, they are
not going to help those whose legal stay in the country has already run out.
Their heroism on the front lines last year has no legal weight in the face of
migration officials doing their jobs.
“It is clear to me that the citizenship mechanism has to be simplified for
them, but why this wasn’t put to a vote is hard to say,” said Natalia Veselova,
a member of parliament from the pro-European Self-Reliance party. Veselova was
one of the people behind creating the Donbass Battalion last year.
(Semenchenko, the battalion’s commander, is also a member of parliament now.)
“I cannot understand why, but there is no political will [to resolve the
issue],” she said. Although the government does not want to “give shelter to
criminals” by blanket naturalization, she said, cutting volunteers loose
effectively makes criminals out of them in their own countries. “These people
can be prosecuted at home simply because they volunteered for us.”
The foreigners resent the fact that Russians like Maria Gaidar, a former
member of Russia’s opposition, was granted citizenship when she was made deputy
head of the Odessa region. In May, Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of
Georgia, was flown into Odessa from exile in Brooklyn and made head of the
region. He was also given citizenship. Along with Gaidar, Poroshenko gave a Ukrainian passport to Vladimir
Fedorin, a Russian-born journalist, who edited the Ukrainian edition of Forbes. Overall, 707 people were granted Ukrainian
citizenship by presidential decree in the first eight months of 2015, according to official statistics. Some of them are clearly handpicked government officials, but the list of
names is not made public — raising further questions among those who fought.
“On what merit?” Gennady, a 35-year-old Russian who was a platoon commander
on the front lines in eastern Ukraine this spring, said of Gaidar’s
citizenship. “If we must be government workers like her to qualify for
citizenship,” he said, “I’m ready to work any job, even as a driver. We don’t
ask for any money or a salary.” Gennady’s legal stay in Ukraine ran out when he
was in the hospital with an injury he acquired in May during a sortie into
separatist territory in Pisky, near Donetsk. “At any moment, police can stop me
on the street and deport me,” the former fighter with Right Sector, a
nationalist group active near Donetsk, said by phone from an undisclosed city
in Ukraine, where “kind people” are helping him out. “This is simply unfair to
the guys who put their lives on the line for Ukraine’s independence.”
Dmitry, another former Donbass Battalion fighter, said the volunteers’ case
shows that the Ukrainian leadership simply cannot be trusted. “To me,
personally, our story is a marker. When Poroshenko goes on television and says,
‘Russia attacked, but we have no money for tanks’ — I can understand that. But
he promised us passports, that costs nothing, and it takes five minutes to sign
a decree. Why doesn’t he do it? Perhaps he does not want to. Then perhaps he
does not want to win the war either,” he said.
Dmitry, a 40-year-old Belarusian, moved to Ukraine in 2007 and lives near
Kiev with a Ukrainian wife and child. He has residency in Ukraine, but his
situation is still fickle as he will need to renew his passport in Minsk, the
capital of Belarus, when it expires soon, which he is afraid to do after
fighting against the Russia-backed rebels. “We are completely disenfranchised
and defenseless, and there is nothing we can do,” he added.
Dmitry says the “humiliation” of foreigners who fought for Kiev is
compounded with his own experience at the front, where disorganized command led
to massive casualties in the town of Ilovaisk. Suspicious of the “humanitarian corridor”
offered to encircle Ukrainian troops, Dmitry decided to break away from his
unit and make his way out on his own terms with a small group of fellow
fighters. He walked for five days before being able to call for assistance to
reach Ukrainian ranks 50 miles away. He was lucky: Hundreds of those who
listened to their commanders were either killed or captured and subjected to forced labor by rebels. The Ilovaisk massacre, which is still being investigated
by Ukraine, is arguably the darkest hour for Ukraine’s Army — one that
commanders blame on Russia’s misinformation but that soldiers like Dmitry put wholly
on Kiev’s generals.
Foreign fighters, like many of their Ukrainian comrades, blame poor
military leadership for the ultimate failure to seize territory back from the
rebels. Red tape prevented the enlistment of willing volunteers while
unmotivated draftees were not given proper training and went numb with fear —
and alcohol — upon reaching combat zones. Dmitry listed the Ukrainian forces’
bloodiest failures: “We lost the [Donetsk] airport; we lost Ilovaisk; we lost
Debaltseve,” he said. And yet none of these defeats led to any change in the
top command.
“Once an entire company simply ran away from the sound of our own machine
gun,” said Rudolph, recalling an incident in the winter, when he went back to
the front lines briefly to join Right Sector — the only unit that would still
take foreigners at that time. When Right Sector wasn’t fighting, its members
fought against drinking in the army by raiding local shops and moonshine
producers and dumping out alcohol.
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