Some notes on "85 Days in Slavyansk"

It’s undeniable that the War in Ukraine has been receeding in the public consciousness. Even in Finland, insofar as the “current important world event” scales go, it’s been sidelined by the Israel/Palestine conflict flaring up.

Nevertheless, I've been long interested in finding more about the original start of the war, or the “Donbass War” phase starting from 2014. Thus, I decided to read a book from the pro-Russian side, 85 Days in Slavyansk by Alexander Zhuchkovsky, which is, I guess, the best-known one of such memoirs. It's not what I'd call a work of high literature, but the style and translation was serviceable.

The book describes the event that really turned the post-Euromaidan Russophile protests (“Antimaidan”/”Russian Spring”) into a full-scale war; the occupation of Sloviansk (Slavyansk in Russian, Slovjansk in Finnish) by a small group of militants led by Igor Girkin (“Strelkov”), the battles with Ukrainian army and volunteer groups like Azov after that, and the eventual withdrawal from the city after Ukrainian pressure got too high.

At least the understanding I got from the book was that the author was not in the city right at the beginning but became a volunteer fighter at a later stage and has interviewed militants who were there (and were still alive after the battles). Some parts of the book give a “macro” view of the conflict, but much of it just recounts individual battles and, to some degree, life at the city.

Some things I thought while reading it:

It’s hard to miss how the (blatantly, unapologetically) one-sided perspective makes the author describe things differently when the sides do them. I mean, obviously a book like this would be one-sided, but still.

When Ukrainians kill civilians, it shows their idiotic, brutish nature, when the separatists kill civilians, well, war is war, cruelty is sometimes needed etc. When Ukrainians make a maneuver wearing Russian symbols its duplicitous, when the separatists do a maneuver while flying the Ukrainian flag it's smart. "Ukraine" is a fake nation invented by Austrians and Poles but the "Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic" which briefly existed in the 1918 is extremely crucial to understanding the current situation in Donetsk. And so on.

What stuck with me was that Zhuchkovsky finds it ridiculous that Ukrainians would describe him and other Russian volunteers in Donbass as "mercenaries" - of course they would not fight for money but for a cause - but then, when there are soldiers crying out in English or Polish in the Ukrainian ranks, the only explanation he can find is that they are, indeed, mercenaries.

This is a mental block that I've continuously encountered by Russians; they can understand for sure why a Russian nationalist would volunteer in Donbass, they can even at some level understand why an Ukrainian would volunteer to fight (because his mind has been eaten up by the ghost of Bandera), but the idea that a foreigner could fight and die for Ukraine simply because he believes in the Ukrainian national cause seems impossible. Must be that they're mercenaries or Western ops!

One of the arguments I remember having around 2014-2015 multiple times is what events served as "triggers" for the war. Pro-Russians frequently finger the transfer of power after Euromaidan ("the NATO coup") and the fire at Odessa Trade House to claim that the separatist uprising was an internal development with scant external Russian influence. When I pointed out what has seemed to me be the absolutely most crucial trigger - the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea - it was often dismissed, almost as if it had no effect on the events in the East.

Well, Zhuchkovsky's book certainly seems to confirm my view. While the Euromaidan is discussed rather perfunctorily and Odessa basically gets a sentence confirming it increased agitation and recruitment among separatists as a part of an ongoing process, the Crimean invasion is constantly referred as a major separatist point of reference, something that made both local and foreign militants confident that if they just stuck at Sloviansk hard enough the Russians would surely do the same as in Crimea and annex the Donbas republics. Which they eventually did, of course, but not within the time schedule the original volunteers had imagined.

In addition to the Crimean invasion, the other thing that, in Zhuchkovsky's narrative, led to the whole thing happening was one man, Strelkov, a great leader who can do almost no wrong (the book has a sentence amounting to "Strelkov made mistakes" but never really points out what these mistakes were) and who pretty much single-handedly creates Donbas out of nothing. With a lot of "smart" analysis talks about cultures and economic forces and whatnot, it's always refreshing to see someone come out with “Nah, that stuff’s there, of course, but in the end, it comes down to this one guy.”

I’ve seen some controversy on whether the 2014-2022 phase of the War in Ukraine was a civil war or a Russian invasion from the get-go. One of the arguments for the idea that it at least started as a civil war was that most of the separatist fighters were locals, with volunteers from Russia and elsewhere only being like 30% of the fighters, according to the book. Even that is a flawed argument, especially considering that Russian troops were directly being dispatched to the area as “volunteers” prior to Minsk, but if basically all the most important actors in getting the conflict going, especially the most important one, came from Russia, wouldn’t that be crucial factor?

One of the least clear thing about the book is the level of Russian state involvement in the whole affair. In some parts of the book, the author says that the Russian state, or at least some shady group of “backers” even tried to dissuade them, in other parts there are references to Glazyev and Aksynyov and other Russian state figures egging them on and promising support, with implication that this at least couldn’t have happened without some tacit approval from Putin.

The feeling I get is that the Russian system was, at least initially, using the volunteers as chaos agents and to force Ukraine to have to accept Donetsk autonomy and veto on foreign affairs. The Russian state created an illusion that they’d send the Russian army (openly, not just as “volunteer soldiers on a holiday” etc. to help the militants, and then left them without the formal invasion and annexation they wanted for eight years. Even when it came, it was scant benefit for them personally - Strelkov is in jail, after all.

In the end, from my perspective, the book is basically like one of those "What if the good guys were the bad ones and the bad ones good ones?" fiction book reworkings. Reading the book, I can get the sense that what these guys are doing is, at some level an enterprise taking a lot of courage and gumption, and they’re ready to die for ideals – those ideals simply are, from my point of view, bad.

This especially applies to the ones like Strelkov who are doing all of this to revive Russian monarchical imperialism, an ideology that could easily conceivably threaten Finland’s existence as an independent country (and would certainly do it for nearby nations like Estonia and Latvia). Being heroic, courageous, and demonstrating manly valor for a terrible ideal is, in the end, worse than being a coward that accomplishes nothing for the same ideal!

What the volunteers and the local fighters ended up causing was 8 years of chaos and misery for those regions, which are still a target of fighting. Even if the only evidence of what has happened was this book, reading between the lines (and occasionally lines, too), one gets the sense that the whole region has been thrown into a chaos – even if Strelkov’s guys might have possessed some discipline, there are constant references to random looters and marauding Cossacks wrecking shit up for the lols.

Of course, in the end, these people got what they wished for – large parts of Donbass, and other parts of Ukraine besides – have been annexed to Russia, and the current chances of Ukraine making short-term gains in these areas, let alone taking them over entirely, seem remote.

So that’s a point for the Margaret Mead “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” quote. Whether that change is good? Well, no-one ever promised that…

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