Ukrainian Insurgency, continued
Since this war started, I’ve been thinking my own very short experience reporting on the war in Eastern Ukraine back in the summer 2014 — about six months after the Maidan movement overthrew Viktor Yanukovich. I wrote a couple of pieces from there. It was a still a localized war, restricted mostly to the contested borders of the breakaway republics that were being backed by Russia. But it was still a very real war and towns along the frontline were getting regularly shelled by both sides and civilians were dying in appalling numbers. I guess it might not be in good taste to mention it now, but back then western observers were constantly accusing Ukrainian government forces and pro-Kiev militias of indiscriminately firing on cities and urban areas and talk about possible war crimes was regularly bandied about.
I wrote a few dispatches from there. They were the last things I reported for Pando, a Silicon Valley news mag that had bought up Paul Carr’s infamous NSFWCORP, where I had been employed. It was right around that time that Pando itself started having financial troubles as a result of its hard-nosed, critical reporting on Silicon Valley’s rapacious oligarchy and was ultimately forced to close up shop.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that trip out to Ukraine these days. In particular, I’ve been thinking about a young professional couple — let’s call them Andrei and Lena — that I had met in Kharkiv through an old journalist friend of mine. Those was still the early days of the conflict and a real war was on, and it wasn’t clear how it would resolve or whether the Russia-backed separatism in the east would spread out to the rest of the country. A lot of people were very on edge and nervous, and Andrei and Lena were in a particularly uncompromising, militaristic state of mind. They had turned bitterly against everything Russian and they looked at the refugees streaming out of occupied areas in Eastern Ukraine in Kharkov as possible traitors. They saw them as people who were taking advantage of the help offered to them by patriotic Ukrainians, while their fathers and husbands had taken up arms against these very patriotic Ukrainians and were killing young Ukrainian men for Russia’s sake. They were in a very “us vs. them” mentality and Andrei’s talk was veering into ugly blood and soil territory — about how Ukrainians and Russians could never get along because Russians were genetically predisposed to love autocracy and hate freedom. They were bred to be subservient through generations of serfdom, he said. It was fucked up to hear him talk that way. But then…I guess war is war. It only fortifies bigotry and division.
“Proud to be a Ukrainian! —Petro Poroshenko.” A billboard in Kharkov in August 2014, paid for by Ukraine’s candy oligarch president.
Even then, neither Andrei nor Lena saw a peaceful way out of the conflict. They were in favor of getting weapons and military advisors from the west, and they were ready for a protracted war. America and the EU, to them, were the only entities that could save Ukraine from annexation by Russia.
Andrei talked to me how he and lot of his friends were in talks about creating small partisan cells to train and prepare for the possibility of a Russian full military occupation. They weren’t alone. Another woman I met, a local activist and volunteer, told me a lot of people were in contact with the SBU and were planning on getting some kind of training or help for an possible insurgency.
At the time, I dismissed all this talk about creating partisan units to mount an insurgency against a Russian invasion as a keyed-up fantasy — an understandable fantasy for people living through such a nerve-racking conflict that was tearing the country apart, but a fantasy nonetheless. But turns out they had it right. Russia did invade. And a insurgency is possibly the works, if this thing drags out and Russia chooses to occupy swaths of Ukraine. I was too optimistic, for once. Just goes to show that it’s always good to bet on the worst possible outcome in this shitty world of ours.
Last week, I wrote about a possible insurgency in Ukraine — and how American intelligence agencies have been preparing to aid it in the event of a longterm Russian occupation. I wonder about Andrei and what he’s doing now? Did he and his buddies ever set up those partisan cells? Are they being activated now in earnest? I wouldn't be surprised if they were.
—Yasha Levine
