3. Another look at the Euro-Maidan and its Snipers

From the book "Black wind White snow", by Charles Clover 2016

A deep voice crackled over the radio. ‘Work, on my mark. With a three-second countdown.’
The silence was broken again seven seconds later as a second voice came on the frequency. ‘Okay, ready.’
‘Ready’, said a third voice.
‘Three. Two. One.’
There followed the echoed sound of high-velocity rifle shots.
‘Three. Two. One.’
More shots.
Then later:
‘Forty-fifth. Fire!’ Crack crack crack.

(3,500 words) This radio transmission recorded what is possibly the bloodiest day in Kiev’s post-1945 history. The voices were those of a sniper team, perched in buildings high above Independence Square, the center of the massive street protest against the government. In the streets below, there was carnage. Dozens of protesters, most carrying nothing more than wooden shields and helmets, lay in pools of blood in rain-soaked Institutskaya Street as they struggled up the hill from their protest camp towards police positions. All told, 53 protesters (108 finally died), and 18 police were killed by snipers in a three-day period at the climax of protests in Kiev in February 2014.

The ‘sniper massacre’, as it came to be known, was the culmination of a months-long political crisis sparked by old-fashioned great-power rivalry between Russia and the West over the destiny of Ukraine. It was the bloody collision of two world-views: Putin’s Eurasian vision and the opposing Western-sponsored course of European integration and Russian submission.

The violence reached its climax with the bloody and one-sided street battle, the details of which are still debated. Intercepts of police radio communications revealed the existence of at least three sniper teams operating in the area that day. Hours of video footage, along with radio communications intercepted and placed on the internet, allow a more complete picture of the events.

People sheltering during the Kiev sniper massacre, February 2014.

That police special units participated in the killings is not in doubt: dozens of witnesses and at least ten cameras recorded footage of men in Special Forces uniforms firing on the crowd with high-velocity rifles from various positions occupied by the police. They appeared to be covering a withdrawal by unarmed ‘Berkut’ riot police, who themselves were under sniper fire from the opposition (18 Berkut riot police were killed by gunshot wounds between 18 February and 20 February).

Most westerners laid the blame for the killings of the protesters at President Viktor Yanukovich’s door. He was under Russian pressure to end the protests, and possibly gambled that a show of overwhelming force would send the protesters home. However, the Kiev sniper massacre has since taken on the familiar characteristics of similarly decisive moments in post-Soviet and Ukraine history, becoming obscured in an immense tangle of conspiracy theories.

A very different narrative of these events, for example, has played out on Russian TV screens. During a news conference in March, Putin addressed the issue in response to a reporter’s question, suggesting that the snipers in fact ‘may have been provocateurs from opposition parties’. In Russia, the snipers were portrayed as a shadowy fifth column, deployed by the Euromaidan’s foreign paymasters as an enormous provocation, shooting at both sides in an effort to escalate the situation and orchestrate the collapse of Yanukovich, who was now courting Russia after his attempts with the IMF. This was the ushering in of a pro-NATO fascist junta. The physical battlefield of the streets of Kiev had been replaced with a virtual battlefield in which two simulacra of reality competed for the eyeballs and attention-spans of the world. While Russia lost the fight for terrain, it was the latter battlefield that mattered more.

The history of the massacre has since become akin to a fork in the road of history: two completely different realities emerged following the sniper massacre. To the West, it symbolizes the savagery of the Yanukovich regime, justifying its overthrow. But to their opponents, particularly Russian television viewers, it bears all the hallmarks of a false flag, a monstrous conspiracy, designed to discredit Yanukovich’s (not always a) pro-Russian regime.

(We know from the last post #2 that Yanukovich was a self serving gangster.)

To be fair to the Russian version, there is some evidence to suggest that the massacre was more complicated than it at first seemed: a leaked phone call between Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, visiting Kiev, and EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton recorded Paet as saying that police and protesters had been killed by the same type of bullets from the same guns. ‘So there is now stronger and stronger understanding’, Paet told Ashton, ‘that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.’¹ His evidence was called into question by the chief witness he cited, Olga Bogomolets, head of the protesters’ medical service, who said she had never told Paet what he attributed to her – that the same weapons had been used on both police and protesters. However, interim Health Minister Oleh Musiy has made a similar claim – that protesters and police alike were shot with the same rifles: ‘I think it wasn’t just a part of the old regime that [plotted the provocation], but it was also the work of Russian special forces who served and maintained the ideology of the [old] regime.’²

If such a force existed, its motives can only be guessed at. Opposition snipers might have had an interest in hanging an atrocity around the neck of the regime and discrediting Yanukovich (this is the version is put forward for obvious reasons by the security service chief that was blamed for the atrocity). A second theory is that regime snipers, firing at both police and protesters, could have been trying to quickly escalate the situation in order to justify a massive armed crackdown and the introduction of tanks to force an end to the protests (the version put forward by former Deputy Interior Minister Hennady Moskal).³ Musiy, meanwhile, says he believes the ‘third force’ (proxy) scenario might have been carried out by Russians in an effort to drive Yanukovich from power and justify an invasion.

These allegations have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Like any conspiracy theory, it relies on the ex post facto argument that what actually happened was indeed the goal of the plotters. The presence of snipers does prove something. The reality is could be simpler. Rather than a ‘third force’ shooting at both protesters and police, it could be that protesters shot at police, and police shot at protesters. But what protesters were sniper specialists?

[Here Charles Clover waffles around extenuating possibilities.]

Three police and commando sniper units were in the area during the massacre. The first, filmed with Kalashnikov assault rifles as well as sniper rifles, and wearing telltale yellow armbands, was an Interior Ministry unit named ‘Omega’, which appeared to be giving cover to retreating Berkut police. Three members of this unit, wearing the yellow armbands and shoulder patches, had been filmed firing Kalashnikovs from a police barricade on 20 February, down Institutskaya Street in the direction of Independence Square.⁴ This is also thought to be the unit whose radio communications (reproduced above) were captured and uploaded to the internet, apparently by a radio enthusiast with an iPhone. We clearly hear snipers being given orders to fire and then firing. Later in the recording, an after-action report makes the result clear: ‘Movement on the rooftop has ceased.’

Another unit, ‘Alpha’, under the command of the SBU (Ukraine’s version of the KGB), had taken up positions in the Cabinet of Ministers building, with a clear line of sight down Institutskaya Street. The radio communications of this unit were also recorded and posted on the internet, but these contain no evidence that its members actually used their weapons: there are no orders to fire, no after-action reports from snipers, and no sounds of gunfire on the recording.⁵ Six days later, Ukrainian TV station TVi interviewed a masked man who identified himself as Colonel Bychkovsky, commander of the Alpha unit, who insisted during the half-hour interview that his team had arrived at 10 a.m., after the violence. Bychkovsky also alluded to the existence of a different sniper team, a unit named ‘Bulat’, under the command of the State Guards Agency. This unit was alleged by parliamentarian and former defense minister Anatoly Hrytsenko to have participated in the killings; he offered no evidence for his assertion, however.

The only pieces of hard evidence showing what is possibly opposition snipers firing at opposition demonstrators comes from a video of the shooting of one protester on a terrace with a direct line of sight from the Hotel Ukraine, then under the control of the opposition. In addition, an unedited video recording posted on YouTube (but since removed) shows a BBC camera crew, along with correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse, being fired on from a window of the Hotel Ukraine. The tape is ultimately inconclusive, however; one of the camera crew is heard to say ‘Fuck knows who it was.’

Ivan Siyak, a Kiev-based journalist who has worked tirelessly for the website Colta.ru to document the various claims and counter-claims,⁶ writes that the ‘third force’ accusations have to be regarded skeptically: ‘everyone has a reason to like this theory’. The Ukrainian opposition – which has since come to power – likes it because it ‘gives them a convenient explanation for why the 18 policemen were killed by gunshot wounds’ during the supposedly peaceful protest. Russia, meanwhile, likes the theory because ‘it can blame the bloodbath on Right Sector [a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist movement], the current Ukrainian government, or Western special services’. And Ukraine’s security services like the theory because it ‘allows them to hang blame for at least a portion of the victims on someone else’. Siyak, however, has come to the conclusion that the ‘third force’ was most likely a myth:

Firing at both sides, the snipers of the ‘third force’ would have had to hide not only from thousands of opposition members and police, but also from dozens of cameras, which would have been astonishingly hard in the small patch that is downtown Kiev where Euromaidan stood. (Is that so?)

The detention in early April 2014 of a dozen Interior Ministry soldiers charged with committing the murders is probably not the end of the story, though it is clear that many would like it to be.

It was not the first time that mysterious snipers had changed history. But instead of crushing the opposition and consolidating central control, like the Ostankino massacre had in Yeltsin’s case, [We will post in detail about Ostankino (the TV station) later.]

This one shocked the Ukrainian political class and immediately destroyed Yanukovich politically. His bodyguards melted away, loyal oligarchs headed for the airports, and Yanukovich himself was forced to flee to Russia. On 28 February he held a press conference in Rostov on Don to call on President Putin to ‘restore order’.

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In the midst of the constitutional vacuum following Yanukovich’s hurried exit, Putin struck quickly. With the events in Kiev bringing Ukrainian nationalists to power, one place in particular – the ethnically Russian Crimean Peninsula – was an obvious place of concern.

On Friday, 28 February, dozens of unmarked military vehicles suddenly appeared on the roads of the Crimean Peninsula, ferrying soldiers in uniforms without insignia to take control of chokepoints and airfields, and to man roadblocks. Ukraine’s military on the peninsula were confined to their barracks, hemmed in by these other troops. Aside from a single incident on 18 March, which killed one person, the takeover was bloodless. The Russian invasion was pulled off flawlessly as Kiev, in the midst of a constitutional vacuum, flailed helplessly. It was an infiltration, not an invasion, in the words of the BBC; and Russian occupiers were welcomed by much of the ethnically Russian populace. A lightning-quick referendum on seceding from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation then won overwhelming support.

The whole operation was a tactical masterstroke, which left Western critics fuming but unable to respond to Russia’s new ‘asymmetric warfare’. It cost virtually no lives and appeared to be in line with the wishes of most of the population. Taking a page from the postmodern playbook of Kremlin political technology, in a documentary aired a year after the Crimean campaign Putin claimed that the first orders he had given, in the effort to seize Crimea had been to sociologists, who then conducted secret public opinion polls to seek to ensure that the referendum would achieve the desired result.⁷

But, following the events in Kiev and Crimea, Putin’s rhetoric slowly darkened. In his speech about Crimea’s accession to Russia he spoke of a ‘fifth column’ and ‘national traitors’ – rhetoric straight from Alexandr Dugin’s speech in Victory Park in February 2012. In April, Putin concluded his annual phone-in show (known as ‘Direct Line’) with a long monologue about the meaning of the Russian nation, in which he referred to the ‘Russian cultural code’, as well as a ‘powerful genetic code’, as:

…one of our main competitive advantages in today’s world. This code is very flexible and enduring. We don’t even feel it but it is certainly here … It seems to me that the Russian person or, on a broader scale, a person of the Russian world, primarily thinks about his or her highest moral designation, some highest moral truths. This is why the Russian person, or a person of the Russian world, does not concentrate on his or her own precious personality … Western values are different and are focused only on one’s inner self. Personal success is the yardstick of success in life and this is acknowledged by society. The more successful a man is, the better he is. This is not enough for us in this country … I think only our people could have come up with the famous saying: ‘Meeting your death is no fear when you have got people round you.’ How come? Death is horrible, isn’t it? But no, it appears it may be beautiful if it serves the people: death for one’s friends, one’s people or for the homeland, to use a modern word. These are the deep roots of our patriotism. They explain mass heroism during armed conflicts and wars and even sacrifice in peacetime. Hence there is a feeling of fellowship and family values. Of course, we are less pragmatic, less calculating than representatives of other peoples, and we have bigger hearts. Maybe this is a reflection of the grandeur of our country and its boundless expanses. Our people have a more generous spirit.⁸

Amplified by the mass media, the message was hammered home over and over again: Russia is unique, Russia is different, Russia is superior, Russia is under attack, Russia must defend itself.

Or, as the novelist Vladimir Sorokin put it in a New York Review of Books op-ed devoted to the Crimea speech: ‘The huge iceberg Russia, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has since split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown.’⁹

***

Beginning in April, pro-Russia paramilitary units fanned out across Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, seizing government buildings and security facilities. On 17 April, during his annual phone-in, Putin referred to eastern Ukraine as Novorossiya or ‘New Russia’ – a term which dates from the eighteenth-century conquest of Ukraine:

what was called Novorossiya (New Russia) back in the tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolaev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine back then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by Lenin and the Soviet government.¹⁰

He thus appeared to predict that more than just Crimea would eventually fall into Russian hands.

The pro-Russia militias that moved into eastern Ukraine appeared to be split into two groups. One, fairly harmless, was loyal to Donetsk-based oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, who ran the province’s steel industry (and who has since switched to opposing the separatists). The other, more serious group, appeared to have had proper military training and advanced weapons, and it took control of several strategic towns in Donetsk Oblast: Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. Western diplomats and military analysts said the ‘professional coordinated nature’ and the weaponry they carried suggested that a core group consisted of Russian Special Forces. They were led by two shadowy figures, Igor Strelkov and Alexander Boroday. They became the core of Moscow’s efforts to bring eastern Ukraine under its sway.

Strelkov’s real name was Igor Girkin. He was a professional mercenary and die-hard ideological nationalist who found time (in between battles) to write for Prokhanov’s counterculture newspaper Zavtra. Strelkov, also known as Strelok (‘shooter’), had fought in most of the dirty wars around the Russian periphery since the fall of the Soviet Union: he served in Transnistria until 1992, Bosnia in 1993 and Chechnya in 1995; and from 1999–2005 he was a kontraktnik, or non-conscript professional soldier, serving in the Russian army. In 2005 he had also, intriguingly, boarded an aircraft showing an ID badge as an active officer in the Federal Security Service, according to Moscow journalist Sergey Kanev, who found the information in a pirated civil aviation database.

There is a further fascinating detail which, while it does not indicate direct state involvement, nonetheless provides a window onto how the Kremlin’s arm’s-length deniable operations such as this would work. Russia’s state bank VTB had accused Malofeev of misusing a $225 million loan, and threatened to sue him in a London court. Coincidentally or not, the two parties reached a resolution on 27 February – the day before the Crimea operation – and VTB declined to sue. That must have removed a major cloud hanging over Malofeev’s future, at precisely the moment the Kremlin was seeking his financial help in securing Crimea. In other words, Malofeev was, however deniably, a private citizen spending his own money – one or two places removed from the Kremlin, which could claim it had no finger in the pie and that Crimea’s decision to secede and to join Russia was spontaneous.

From 2005, Strelkov/Girkin had worked in Malofeev’s security detail, a position secured for him by his friend and collaborator Alexander Boroday (son of Yury, whom we met earlier). Alexander Boroday, who had also worked for Malofeev, was appointed prime minister of the Donetsk Republic with Strelkov as defense minister. In fact, the Donetsk rebel Ukrainian government was almost entirely Russian.

The takeover of east and south Ukraine, financed by Malofeev using money he appears to have owed VTB, is an example of a ‘public–private partnership’, according to Moscow journalist Oleg Kashin:

Crimea was taken over by the Kremlin and the oligarch Malofeev. The situation is now looking like a literal quotation from the film “Wag the Dog”. A spin doctor has been put in charge of actual soldiers.¹¹

But rather than revealing Moscow as the master puppeteer behind the scenes, the critical mass of Russians among the indigenous separatist movement instead symbolized the slightly amateurish nature of the whole operation. ‘Let’s be precise’, wrote Kashin:

the appointment to the job of prime minister of the Donetsk Republic was given not just to any spin doctor, but to a bad spin doctor [Boroday], because a good spin doctor would try to behave in such a way that he didn’t stick out so much. Even the Soviets, less experienced in such matters, always had a routine: from the Baltic states in 1940 to Afghanistan in 1979 they always managed to find a local Babrak Karmal [Soviet-backed prime minister of Afghanistan]. It never occurred to anyone to give an official post to a Soviet emissary.¹²

Eventually the Russian leaders of the Donetsk Republic were prudently replaced by Ukrainians. First Strelkov resigned, disappearing into Russia after behaving too independently off his Kremlin leash. Then Boroday was replaced by the Ukrainian Alexander Zakharchenko, an appointment that was meant to neutralize accusations that the prime minister of the Donetsk Republic was a puppet. Nonetheless, Zakharchenko insisted on coming to cabinet meetings dressed in camouflage and sporting the Cross of St George (4th Class), a Russian military decoration. On 28 August he told Vesti.ru news agency that between 3,000 and 4,000 active-duty Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine while they were ‘on vacation’: ‘Among us are fighting serving soldiers, who would rather take their vacation not on a beach but with us, among brothers, (mercenaries), who are fighting for their freedom.’

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