Vladimir Putin’s New Alter Ego Is
Igor Strelkov
Russia’s president has come around to the twisted views of
the man who started the conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Putin is following in Strelkov’s footsteps.
ByLeonid Bershidsky
March 30, 2022, 8:00 AM GMT+1
Leonid
Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation team based in Berlin.
He was previously Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He recently authored a
Russian translation of George Orwell's "1984." @Bershidsky
Amid the carnage of war in Ukraine, one man appears to feel
grimly vindicated, if not quite happy about how things have turned out — the
man who played an outsize role in starting the conflict in 2014, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov.
Few people are hated as much in Ukraine as Strelkov (I’ll
use his nom-de-guerre throughout, since he prefers it to his real name). In
April 2014, after Ukraine’s provisional government said it would send troops to
put down pro-Russian revolts in eastern Ukraine, Strelkov crossed the border
from Russia with about 50 men and wreaked enough havoc to pull the Russian
military into a conflict that Vladimir Putin initially was reluctant to enter.
He almost got Putin to do in 2014 what he is doing now, but Strelkov received no
thanks from the Kremlin, was marginalized and became — so it seemed — little
more than a bitter fringe figure.
The conventional wisdom saw Putin as a wily, modern
strongman more interested in self-preservation and the enrichment of his clique
than in any kind of ideology. By contrast, Strelkov was a romantic believer
in a version of the Russian Empire that has never really existed outside of
nostalgic pseudo-historical literature. Putin pursued a bureaucratic, then
a political, career and consolidated power while Strelkov reconstructed
historical battles as a hobby and fought as a volunteer in Transnistria and the
former Yugoslavia. And yet in 2022, Putin is so besotted with history that he
can talk of little else; to a large extent, he’s come around to Strelkov’s
worldview, ditching his cynicism and pragmatism for a kind of murderous
idealism.
“I have written more than once that the president is
‘sitting on two chairs that are gradually moving apart under his butt’,”
Strelkov wrote recently on his Telegram channel.
The chairs were a patriotic state ideology, represented by
all kinds of military and civilian officials, and a ‘liberal-oligarchic’
economic model. Your humble servant has also cautioned that, while one could be
comfortable sitting like that before the Crimea events, it was no longer
sustainable, and the president would have to choose a chair — or fall down in
between. And now — incredibly late, but still — the choice has been made.
Indeed, Putin appears to be past caring about the open
economy he maintained for the first 21 years of his rule. He certainly cares
little about the fortunes of the wealthiest Russians, or about the effect of
unprecedented Western sanctions on everyone in Russia, from his closest friends
to millions of ordinary workers. He’s no longer listening to “systemic liberals” around him, the
architects of Russia’s relative
oil-fueled prosperity that underpinned Putin’s popular support. The
recent headlong emigration of a key
“syslib,” Anatoly Chubais, a man to whom Putin in large part owes his rise,
is a sign that this group no longer has a place in Putin’s system of power.
This metamorphosis makes Strelkov’s utterances a rare window
on what Putin might do next as he continues his spiritual and intellectual
journey toward the loony edge Strelkov has always inhabited — a journey
that ends when the two become indistinguishable.
When Strelkov’s tiny group of fighters, funded apparently by
the wealthy nationalist Konstantin Malofeev, took control of the
Ukrainian town of Slavyansk in 2014, it became a magnet for local separatists,
like-minded Russian volunteers and out-of-uniform soldiers acting as
mercenaries. Strelkov quickly rose to “defense
minister” of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, commanding a
substantial ragtag force. As the regular Ukrainian army caught its stride and
pushed back against Strelkov’s fighters, the Russian resorted to the tactic
that serves the Ukrainians well in the current conflict: He led the rebel army
into the city of Donetsk, where street-by-street urban combat would have been
too costly for the Ukrainians. Then Putin reluctantly sent Russian troops to
support the separatists — their defeat would have undermined the popular euphoria
that gave him his best-ever poll numbers after the Crimea annexation.
Strelkov, however, was too uncompromisingly odious a figure
for Putin to support or even tolerate. He was ousted as “minister” in Aug.
2014, as Putin’s aide Vladislav Surkov became “curator” of the separatist
“people’s republics,” with a brief to make them as self-reliant as possible,
and thus less costly for Russia. Putin appeared to be interested in minimizing
all kinds of costs, including foreign policy ones; he wanted a deal with the
West, and he got one in the form of the Minsk
agreements of 2014 and 2015, brokered by the leaders of Germany and France.
“The biggest tragedy for the residents of Donbas is that the
founding referenda of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s republics weren’t
immediately recognized by Russia like Crimea’s referendum,” Strelkov told an
interviewer at the time, complaining that the Kremlin didn’t share his
enthusiasm for further military action. “They never thought their uprising
would lead to an outcome as disgraceful as the Minsk agreements.”
Eight years later, Putin gave up on Minsk and recognized the
“people’s republics,” as if Strelkov’s pleas have only just reached his ears.
The time lapse in following Strelkov’s advice appears to be
hurting Vladimir the invader. The former “defense minister,” for example, never
would have advised the Russian dictator to go into Ukraine as blithely as he’s
done: He knew from his remaining sources in the separatist statelets that
Ukrainians were much better prepared to resist now than they were eight years
ago. Thus his often sarcastic criticism of Russia’s invasion planning.
Responding to the Russian General Staff’s recent assertion that Russia never
planned to storm big Ukrainian cities, Strelkov wrote:
Agreed: They just planned to occupy them — Kharkov,
Chernihiv, Kyiv, the whole list. The occupation didn’t quite work out, but
they really didn’t plan to storm — and so didn’t pull together the
necessary forces.
What would Strelkov
do differently? Firstly, give up the official pretense of a “special military
operation” and start using the word “war.” No more talk of “demilitarization
and denazification.” Instead, an
existential war to the death. This framing, Strelkov’s thinking goes, would
allow a mobilization of the much more numerous military force needed to
conquer and hold Ukraine. He would withdraw official recognition from
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his government as a whole,
declaring them fair game. He would pull out all the stops to achieve total
victory, because the only alternative to it is an equally total defeat.
Strelkov has suggested that Putin would arrive at the same conclusions by his
usual circuitous route — just as he arrived at the inevitability of the
February invasion.
If there’s any kind of logic to Putin’s recent actions,
after all, it’s the warped logic of Strelkov, the empire-or-death logic. Theirs is now a kinship of war criminals:
Strelkov is wanted by the Dutch authorities for his alleged role in the 2014
downing of a Malaysian passenger airliner over eastern Ukraine, and Putin will
never be safe from prosecution for the near-complete destruction of Ukrainian
cities such as Mariupol and Volnovakha. If Putin loses the war, Strelkov’s
relative safety in Moscow will end, too. For the former “defense minister,” defeat is no abstract notion — it’s
an existential threat. That
applies to Putin, too.
As I read Strelkov’s impassioned commentary from the
sidelines, I wish I’d paid more attention to his ramblings earlier. I wish I’d
noticed the clear connection between his ideas and Putin’s increasing history
obsession, between Strelkov’s insistence that the very name “Ukraine” be
stamped out and replaced with Malorossia
— Little Russia — and Putin’s contempt for Ukrainians as a people.
If I’d noticed how close the two men’s beliefs had grown, I wouldn’t have
misjudged Putin's determination to wreck two countries — the neighboring one
and his own, my own — in the name of an apocryphal reading of history. I fear
there’s no going back for the dictator now: He has to go where Strelkov has
been waiting for him all these years. And even if there are seeming victories
along the way, this road leads toward the bitterest defeat.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the
editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story:
Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
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