‘WEST’S RED LINE’
Putin now ‘hostage’ to war in Ukraine, says former rebel commander.
Moscow • Vladimir Putin’s critics say he went too far on Ukraine. The former Russian agent who helped trigger the conflict says his biggest mistake was not going far enough.
The Russian president has made himself a “hostage” to the war in Ukraine by opting not to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions after taking Crimea, says Igor Girkin, the former rebel commander who goes by the name Igor Strelkov, or Shooter.
If he had sent troops into Donetsk and Luhansk to support the insurgents like he did in Crimea, all Novorossiya, or New Russia, the term the rebels and their supporters revived to identify a swath of southeastern Ukraine once part of the Russian empire, would now be reunited with the motherland, Mr. Strelkov said.
But Mr. Putin, “not understanding that he’d already crossed the West’s red line,” and influenced by “top bureaucrats and oligarchs,” decided to stop at Crimea. “Now we have a war that will continue to grow, regardless of whether Russia wants it to or not.”
Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies claim Russia is supporting militias with hardware, cash and troops, accusations the Kremlin has repeatedly denied. Russia says Ukraine is waging war against its own citizens and discriminating against Russian speakers, a majority in Donetsk and Luhansk.
Mr. Strelkov, 44, is a historian and a monarchist who retired from the Federal Security Service in 2013 as a colonel, the same rank as Mr. Putin, after serving in war zones in Bosnia, Transnistria and Chechnya. Kyiv has charged him with terrorism, while the U.S. and the European Union blacklisted him for his role in the conflict.
After volunteering to help organize the Crimean referendum on joining Russia, Mr. Strelkov said he led a convoy of 51 fighters northeast from the Black Sea peninsula in early April to Slovyansk, a city in the Donetsk region, to support pro-Russian protests after the ouster of Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych. The vote and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea was condemned by the U.S. and the EU as a violation of international law.
They quickly seized city hall and the local police headquarters, igniting a conflict in which more than 5,300 people have been killed. It’s also led to the worst standoff between Russia and the U.S. and its allies in Europe since the Cold War.
Russian authorities were not involved in the Slovyansk operation, Mr. Strelkov said.
“I think some of Russia’s special services [knew of the plan, but they] didn’t provide any direct support,” he said, adding the first people killed were Ukrainian security agents who tried to halt his convoy.
Ukraine and its allies have also accused the rebels of shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 with a Russian missile system on July 17, killing all 298 people on board. Mr. Strelkov insisted the rebels played no role in the crash.
A few weeks after the tragedy, which is still being investigated, he stepped down as defence minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and returned to Moscow. He said he was “pulled out of the game” and it became clear it “would be destructive” for him to stay because he would never support the political settlement Russia was seeking to achieve.
A tentative truce signed in the Belarus capital, Minsk, in September has been all but abandoned, with fighting intensifying as the insurgents seek to expand the area under their control. The escalation is “an attempt to move the front line to a more-or- less safe distance” from cities held by the rebels, he said.
“Ukraine used the four months since Minsk to pump up the army to the maximum and solve the question by force,” Mr. Strelkov said, adding it’s now “impossible” to drive Ukrainian government forces out of all Donetsk.
The Russian, whose hobbies include re-enacting czarist-era military battles, said the campaign in Ukraine has deteriorated into an embarrassing and “absurd” facsimile of the trench warfare seen during the First World War.
As for the dilemma Mr. Putin now faces in the biggest challenge of his presidency, it’s all or nothing: “The war we entered, whether we wanted it or not, will either bring about Russia’s destruction or the resurrection of our national elite.”