Written by Nikolaus von Twickel
Summary
In a sign of growing political volatility, Donetsk separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko declared surprisingly early that he would seek re-election next year and ousted Denis Pushilin from the ruling party leadership, replacing him with a drama theatre director. His move came after a high-profile assassination attempt and rumors of an impending leadership change. And while fear of spies is on the rise in both Donetsk and Luhansk, the economic situation remains stagnant at best.
- Pushilin ousted, Zakharchenko declares candidacy, amid volatility in Donetsk
In Donetsk, the leader of the “people’s republic”, Alexander Zakharchenko, announced on October 18 that he will stand for re-election in November 2018. The move came surprisingly early – not even Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly if he is running in the election next March. More importantly, it was accompanied by the removal of Denis Pushilin – long believed to be the number two in the separatist leadership – from his post as executive officer of “Donetsk Republic”, the political vehicle most likely to back Zakharchenko in an election.
Officially Zakharchenko, who chairs “Donetsk Republic, declared that Pushilin would focus on his “more important” roles as speaker of the “people’s council” (the de-facto parliament) and as chief negotiator at the Minsk talks, plus that he would concentrate efforts on reintegrating Donbass with Russia.
Relations between the two have never been warm. When Zakharchenko spectacularly announced in July that he was founding a new state called “Malorossia”, Pushilin was not even present. Instead, he dryly remarked a few hours later that such an initiative needed broader discussion. Zakharchenko’s plan, which apparently wasn’t well known even in Moscow, was then quietly dropped (see Newsletter 23).
Pushilin’s replacement as head of the executive committee of “Donetsk Republic”, which officially is a “movement” but really functions as a ruling party, is Natalya Volkova, the director of the Donetsk Drama Theatre. While being well-known in Donetsk, Volkova is likely to be less independent from Zakharchenko’s people, given her lack of political experience. Her position might also be weakened by the fact that she had publicly supported Donetsk to remain in Ukraine in March 2014.
Zakharchenko, a former mine electrician and local pro-Russian activist, has been at the helm of the Donetsk separatists since August 2014. In November of that year, he was elected to the post of “head of the republic” in a vote that was widely criticized as illegal.
His “candidacy” and the ousting of Pushilin are most likely an attempt to strengthen Zakharchenko’s role in a time of growing volatility inside the separatist leadership. It is probably no coincidence that it occurred just two days after Zakharchenko met Kremlin official Vladislav Surkov during the opening of a monument for Donbass volunteer fighters in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Surkov is widely believed to oversee all important policy decisions inside the “people’s republics”.
In the past two months, there were increasing signs of trouble in Donetsk:
On September 12, numerous sources in both Ukraine and Russia suggested that the Kremlin was looking at a leadership change in both Donetsk and Luhansk. This was not the first time such reports emerged, but given the uncertainties in international politics at the time (Donald Trump’s US administration was again debating lethal weapons’ deliveries to Ukraine, Germany headed for elections and Russia gearing up for the March 2018 presidential election), such a scenario did not look entirely unlikely.
Three days later, the Moscow-based news outlet RBC reported that the Russian government was looking into significantly reducing its financial aid to the “people’s republics” beginning in 2019. While this is a long way ahead by the standards of Donbass politics, it could be a warning shot that Moscow’s bankrolling cannot last forever (see our annual report, p 9-10).
On September 23, reports from Donetsk said that Alexander Timofeyev, the “people’s republic’s” powerful deputy “prime minister” and “income minister”, was critically injured, when explosions hit his car. But hours later Timofeyev, better known by his nom de guerre “Tashkent”, appeared on local TV unharmed, accusing Ukraine for being “a terrorist state that acts with the same methods as ISIS”. In a later video interview, Timofeyev denied that an internal dispute could be behind the attempt on his life by claiming that such disputes do not happen in people’s republics, because “the people do not spar with each other”.
Since no signs of an explosion were visible on photos published from the scene, suspicion was raised that the assassination attempt had been staged. While the benefits of pretending an attempt on one’s own life are unclear, similar doubts emerged one year ago after Luhansk separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky claimed that he was injured in a car bomb.
On October 3, the Donetsk “State Security Ministry” presented two men who told a press conference that they had been hired by Ukraine’s military intelligence service to carry out the attack.
Ukrainian media called the public confessions highly unconvincing and pointed out that the two suspects, Igor Yevtyushin and Denis Derbishin, were former fighters for the Luhansk “people’s republic” militia, whom the Luhansk de-facto authorities put on a wanted list for armed robbery last year.
There were also new cases of public figures turning against the separatist leadership. Thus, prominent journalist Konstantin Dolgov announced in September that he was looking for a new job outside the “people’s republic”. Dolgov, a hitherto loyal video blogger, explained that “people with rifles do not need PR positioning, image making, and so on.”
On September 28 reports said that Roman Manekin, a prominent political consultant and former journalist, had been abducted from his Donetsk home. Nothing definite has been heard from Manekin since, but his friends claim that he has been arrested and accused of wrongdoing by the “people’s republic’s” law enforcement agencies.
Manekin, an outspoken supporter of the separatists since 2014, had recently began to criticize the Donetsk leadership in public Facebook posts. On September 10, he claimed that “Interior Minister” Alexei Diky had been placed under house arrest (Zakharchenko’s administration denied), and hours before he vanished he launched an attack on Alexander Kofman – a former “Foreign Minister” now believed to live in Moscow.
On October 17, an article in Russia’s Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper quoted a former separatist minister as saying that Manekin had told him that he knew that Arsen Pavlov, the prominent separatist field commander known as “Motorola”, who was assassinated in Donetsk in October 2016, was not killed by Ukrainians, as claimed by the separatist leadership.
Zakharchenko himself announced one day earlier that all members of a group of Ukrainian agents, responsible for the killing, had been arrested and added that Interior “Minister” Dikiy would soon make a statement about that. As early as last November, weeks after Pavlov’s death, the “DNR” leader had said that the assassination was organized by Ukraine’s Security Service SBU and named two officers that he claimed were responsible (see Newsletter 5).
Pavlov’s assassination was followed in February by the violent death of fellow commander Mikhail Tolstykh (“Givi”), triggering speculation of a Russian-ordered purge of hardline Donetsk field commanders.
- “Spymania” in Donetsk and Luhansk
Separatist leaders vehemently deny any speculation of internal disputes and blame Ukrainian special forces squads (known by their Russian acronym DRG) for almost all acts of violence on their territory.
The ensuing “spymania” is also manifested – or promoted – by public arrests of purported enemy agents. In a typical instance in August, the Donetsk State Security Ministry (known as the MGB) published a video of the detention of man who it said wanted to blow up the city’s television tower.
Spying accusations have apparently also been levelled against Manekin and Stanislav Aseyev, a Donetsk-based journalist who disappeared on June 2. Six weeks later, the separatists reportedly confirmed that Aseyev, who had written under the pseudonym Stanislav Vasin for Ukrainian media and Radio Liberty, was being held on espionage charges that carry up to 14 years in prison. However, “DNR” outlets never confirmed this – Donetsk police even put out a missing notice for him.
Arguably, “spymania” is even stronger in the Luhansk “people’s republic”, whose leader Igor Plotnitsky even called for the introduction of mass-counterintelligence action modeled on the World-War-II-era SMERSH, or “death to spies” organization. “Soon media will carry instructions on how to uncover terrorists and alert law enforcement agencies,” he announced after a paratrooper monument in central Luhansk was blown up on September 18.
Luhansk leaders accused Ukrainian agents of terrorizing the “people’s republic” by going after monuments – another war memorial to the “Defenders of the Republic” was blown up already twice, first in September 2016, then on August 1 of this year.
Ukrainian agents were also blamed for the mysteriously murder of two MPs for the separatist “parliament” in August and for maliciously setting a dry field on fire in September, where they had placed anti-personnel mines – resulting in an explosion that killed three militiamen trying to put out the fire.
- Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky open volunteer monument in Rostov
On October 16, Donetsk separatist leader Zakharchenko made a rare public appearance in Russia with Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s point man for the Donbass conflict. Together with the Moscow-based political consultant Alexander Borodai, who in 2014 was Zakharchenko’s predecessor as leader of the Donetsk “people’s republic”, they opened a memorial in the south Russian city of Rostov-on-Don to the volunteers who fought in eastern Ukraine.
While Ukrainian commentators took the event as an another admission that Russians were fighting in what the Kremlin calls a “civil war” in eastern Ukraine (Moscow has never denied the presence of Russian volunteers), neither Denis Pushilin nor Luhansk separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky were present at the ceremony. Plotnitsky’s absence was widely ridiculed in Ukraine, while Pushilin was removed from his important party position in Donetsk two days later (see 1).
- Economy
Some eight months after Ukraine cut off trade ties with the “people’s republics” and the Russia-backed separatists effectively nationalized the big, hitherto Ukrainian-run factories in the areas they control, the economic effects are hard to gauge. While there is definitely no economic boom, there is also little indication that economic hardship is driving people to leave the areas outside of government control.
When the separatists decided to put all major industrial objects – mainly coal mines and metal works, but also smaller enterprises and hotels – under “external” (ie their own) control, they promised to reorient the local economy towards Russia within two months (see Newsletter 19).
In reality, reorientation is proving to be slower. When Donetsk “People’s Republic” leader Alexander Zakharchenko started steel production at the Yuzovsky Metallurgical Plant (known by its Russian acronym YuMZ) to great fanfare on October 5 in Donetsk, he admitted that it had taken 1.5 years to get the plant going again. He did not mention that the reopening of the formerly Russian-owned plant was postponed multiple times (see Newsletter 23).
Zakharchenko boasted that the plant would soon produce up to 40,000 tons of steel per month, however, his “Minister” for Industry and Trade, Alexei Granovsky, put the plant’s initial output at approximately 15,000 tons of steel within 1.5 months.
The challenges for restarting industrial production remain – supplying the plants with sufficient raw materials and finding buyers for their products outside Ukraine. Ukrainian experts said in July that some 430,000 tons of iron ore were shipped to the Donetsk “people’s republic” from Russia between April and June 2017.
The ore was supposedly from Russian state reserves, but media reports suggest that it really came from metals giants Metinvest and Severstal – which the companies denied. As publicly held corporations they risk being hit by western sanctions for selling production to the unrecognized “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine.
In return, some 208.000 tons of metals worth 70.6 million dollars from seized factories were shipped to Russia between June and August, from where they were exported to unknown countries by a company controlled by former Donetsk businessman Serhiy Kurchenko, according to a Ukrainian media report published September.
Meanwhile, the separatists admit that they are having difficulties to sell their main produce – coal. Zakharchenko said in June that because of the blockade, the production of coking coal (which is used to produce coke) in the Donetsk “people’s republic” has more than halved. “Now we are producing 43,000 tons coal, but we should (produce) 100,000,” he was quoted as saying. He did not specify the time span of those figures.
Zakharchenko promised that the situation would improve after the opening of the aforementioned Yuzovsky Metallurgy Plant and of another furnace in the Yenakiieve Plant.
Notably, Zakharchenko did not mention exporting coal to Russia, which in the past has been touted as the solution by him and other separatist leaders.
In September, Sergei Nazarov, a deputy Russian economy minister, said that Russia is helping the “people’s republics” to sell their coal internationally. As of August, nearly 1 million tons of coal per month are being shipped to Russia, Nazarov said in an interview with US news agency Bloomberg. The deputy minister did not say how much revenue the coal generates, but claimed that the separatists are currently raising 5 billion rubles ($86 million) per month from coal sales and local taxation.
Coal from the separatist-held areas is also likely to make up a large share of continuing coal shipments from Russia to Ukraine. According to official figures published earlier this month Ukraine imported coal worth 1 billion US dollars from Russia during the first nine months of 2017 (that would be 6.6 million tons at an assumed market price of 150 dollars per ton). Amid calls to prevent such shipments, which violate the spirit of the trade blockade imposed by Ukraine, the government in Kiev is promising to refit those power plants currently running on anthracite coal, so that they can take other fuel.
But experts doubt, that the separatists can increase their industrial production to pre-war levels. A recent analysis by the Ukrainian ostro.org website concludes, that current output in the Donetsk “People’s Republic” metals sector remains at just a fifth of prewar levels, while coal production is stagnant at 6-8 million tons per year – about half of the prewar production.
