As the onslaught of war in Ukraine continues, one man seems to be savoring sad revenge, not to mention some happiness, for how things turned out. And he is the man who played a vital role in initiating the conflict in 2014: Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov.
Few people are more hated in Ukraine than Strelkov (I’ll use his battle title, as he prefers it to his real name). In April 2014, after the provisional government of Ukraine declared it would send its troops to quash the pro-Russian uprisings in the east of the country, Strelkov left Russia with fifty men, crossing the border and causing enough havoc to push the Russian army in a conflict that Putin initially hesitated to enter. In 2014 Strelkov had almost convinced Putin to do what he is doing now, but he had not received any certificates of gratitude from the Kremlin. And he had ended up being marginalized, becoming – so it seemed – little more than a bitter marginal figure.
At the time, it was widely believed that Putin was a shrewd and modern strongman, more interested in self-preservation and enrichment of his clique than in any ideology. On the contrary Strelkov was a romantic, convinced supporter of an idea of a Russian empire that never really existed outside a certain nostalgic and pseudo-historical literature. Putin embarked on a bureaucratic, then political career, consolidating his power, while Strelkov devoted himself as a hobby to the reconstruction of historical battles and fought voluntarily in Transnistria and in the former Yugoslavia. In 2022, however, Putin appears so infatuated with history that he can hardly talk about anything else. He has largely come to align with Strelkov’s worldview, abandoning his cynicism and pragmatism in favor of a kind of murderous idealism.
The choice between two chairs
“I have written more than once that the president is ‘sitting on two chairs that are gradually receding under his buttocks,'” Strelkov recently wrote on his Telegram channel. “The two chairs stand for state patriotic ideology, represented by all civil and military officials, and a ‘liberal-oligarchic’ economic model. His humble servant also warned the Russian president that, while it may have been comfortable to sit like that before the events in Crimea, this is no longer possible now. If Putin does not want to fall between the two chairs, he will have to choose one. And today – incredibly late, but that’s how things went – the choice was made “.
Indeed, Putin now seems very little interested in the open economy that he defended for the first 21 years of his government. Surely he cares little about the fortunes of the wealthiest Russians, or the effects of the unprecedented Western sanctions against all Russians, from his closest friends to the millions of ordinary workers. He no longer listens to the “systemic liberals” close to him, architects of Russia’s relative oil prosperity and who have fueled popular support for Putin. The recent and sudden emigration of one of them, Anatolij Chubajs, a man to whom the Russian president owes much of his rise, is a sign that that group no longer has a place in Putin’s system of power.
This metamorphosis makes Strelkov’s statements a tool for imagining what Putin might do in the future, as he continues his spiritual and intellectual journey to the insane border territories that Strelkov has always inhabited: a journey that ends when the two men become indistinguishable. ‘from each other.
When Strelkov’s small number of fighters, ostensibly funded by wealthy nationalist Konstantin Malofeev, took control of the Ukrainian city of Slavyansk in 2014, it had become a magnet for local separatists, like-minded Russian volunteers and uniformless fighters active as mercenaries. Strelkov had quickly risen to the rank of “defense minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, putting himself at the head of a large and botched military force.
When the regular Ukrainian army responded by attacking Strelkov’s fighters, the Russians had resorted to the tactics used by the Ukrainians in the current conflict: they had led the rebel army into the city of Donetsk, where street-to-street urban fighting would have been too much. heavy for Ukrainians. And later Putin reluctantly sent Russian troops to support the separatists: their defeat, in fact, would have undermined the popular euphoria that after the annexation of Crimea, in February 2014, had given him the highest rates of satisfaction.
Strelkov, however, was too detestable a figure to be supported or even tolerated by Putin. In August 2014 he was removed from his post as “minister”, when Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s adviser, became the “curator” of the separatist people’s republic, with the indication of making it as self-sufficient as possible and therefore less expensive for Moscow. . Putin seemed interested in minimizing all kinds of costs, including those of foreign policy. He wanted an agreement with the West and he had one in the form of the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements, obtained through the mediation of Germany and France.
“The biggest tragedy, for the inhabitants of Donbass, is that the founding referendums of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk were not immediately accepted by Russia, unlike the one in Crimea”, said Strelkov in an interview at the time. , complaining that the Kremlin had not shared its enthusiasm for further military action. “They never thought their revolt would lead to an unfortunate outcome like the Minsk agreements.”
Threat to survival
Eight years later Putin renounced the Minsk agreements and recognized the “people’s republics”, as if Strelkov’s demands had only just reached his ear.
The time elapsed before accepting Strelkov’s advice today seems to harm Vladimir the invader. The former “defense minister”, for example, would never have advised the Russian dictator to enter Ukraine so lightly: he knew, in fact, from the sources he has left in the separatist states, that the Ukrainians were much better prepared to resist than eight years ago. Hence his often sarcastic criticisms of the Russian invasion planning. Responding to recent claims by the Russian general staff that Moscow never planned to storm major Ukrainian cities, Strelkov wrote: “I agree, they only planned the occupation of Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Kiev, all of them. how much it is. The occupation didn’t work as planned, but they didn’t really plan on storming them. And therefore they have not gathered all the necessary forces ”.
What would Strelkov have done differently? First of all, he would have dropped the official wording of “special military operation” and started using the term “war”. He would have stopped talking about “demilitarization and denazification”, instead declaring an existential war to the death. This kind of formulation, according to Strelkov’s thinking, would have allowed the mobilization of the much larger military forces needed to conquer and dominate Ukraine. He would then have stopped officially recognizing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskii and his full government, declaring them a legitimate military target. Strelkov would do whatever it takes to achieve a total victory, because the only alternative would be an equally total defeat. Strelkov suggested that Putin would come to the same conclusions through a tortuous path, as usual for the Russian president. Just like he came up with the idea of the inevitability of the February invasion.
If there is any logic in Putin’s recent actions, after all, it is Strelkov’s twisted logic, the logic of “empire or death”. The two are now closely related in their nature as war criminals: Strelkov is wanted by the Dutch authorities for his alleged role in the downing of a Malaysian passenger plane over eastern Ukraine in 2014 and Putin is unlikely to avoid the war crimes trial. for the almost total destruction of Ukrainian cities such as Mariupol and Volnovacha. If Putin loses the war, the relative security in which Strelkov lives in Moscow will also end. For the former “defense minister”, defeat is not an abstract notion, but a threat to survival. The same is also true for Putin.
As I read Strelkov’s passionate commentary, written far from the heart of military action, I thought I should pay more attention to his past rants. I should have noted the clear link between his ideas and Putin’s growing obsession with history, between Strelkov’s insistence that the very name of Ukraine be deleted and replaced with that of Malaya Rus – Little Russia – and the contempt of Putin for the Ukrainians as a people. If I had noticed how close the two men’s beliefs had come together, I would not have been wrong about Putin’s determination to destroy two countries – his neighbor and his own, which is also mine – in the name of an apocryphal reading of history. I fear that it is no longer possible for the dictator to back down: he must go where Strelkov has been waiting for him all these years. And while there appear to be some victories along this path, it is a road to the bitterest of defeats.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)