/ 7 Minuten zu lesen
Die Dokumentation bietet einen Überblick über die neueren politischen Entwicklungen in den beiden ostukrainischen "Volksrepubliken". Die Zeichen stehen auf Umbruch: Während in Donezk eine zunehmende Zentralisierung der Macht stattfindet, wurde Separatistenführer Igor Plotnitsky in Luhansk durch einen bewaffneten Putsch unerwartet gestürzt.
Erstellt werden die Ukraine-Analysen von der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen, dem Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien und der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde. Die bpb veröffentlicht sie als Lizenzausgabe.
Unterstützer der "Volksrepublik Donezk" bei einer Kundgebung im Dezember 2016. (© picture alliance/ZUMAPRESS)
Zur Dokumentation interner politischer Entwicklungen und damit auch des Charakters der Organisation von Politik in den beiden "Volksrepubliken", veröffentlichen die Ukraine-Analyse hier Auszüge aus dem Newsletter "Entwicklungen in "DNR" und "LNR"".
Der Newsletter erscheint im Rahmen der Projekte "Dialog für Verständigung und Recht: Europäische NGOs gemeinsam für Konfliktbewältigung im Donbass" und "Internationales Menschenrechtsmonitoring in der Ostukraine". Basierend auf der Auswertung von öffentlich zugänglichen Internet-Quellen und erstellt von Nikolaus von Twickel gibt der Newsletter einen Überblick aktueller gesellschaftspolitischer Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der selbsternannten "Volksrepubliken Donezk und Luhansk". Die Projekte werden vom Deutsch-Russischen Austausch (DRA e.V.) in Kooperation mit ukrainischen und russischen Partnern durchgeführt und vom Auswärtigen Amt gefördert. Der Newsletter ist im Internet archiviert unter civicmonitoring.org. Dort finden sich auch die Internetadressen der im Text genannten Originalquellen. Ansprechpartner beim Deutsch-Russischen Austausch sind Tim Bohse (E-Mail Link: tim.bohse@austausch.org) und Yuliya Erner (E-Mail Link: yuliya.erner@austausch.org).
Die Redaktion der Ukraine-Analysen
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. (…)
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 (Externer Link: 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. (…)
The Russian-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine suffered their biggest upheaval since 2014 when Luhansk separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky was replaced by the local State Security chief Leonid Pasechnik after an armed intervention by Donetsk separatist forces.
Pasechnik wins the "war of the Igors"
The conflict within the leadership of the Luhansk "People’s Republic (LNR)" escalated last week, when armed men thwarted an attempt by separatist leader Igor Plotnitsky to fire Igor Kornet, his Interior "Minister".
The mysterious soldiers, who bore no insignia and refused to say where they came from, cordoned off the ministry early on November 21 (Tuesday) and prevented Plotnitsky from taking control and install his successor. In an improvised press conference the next day, Plotnitsky accused Kornet of staging a coup.
However, on Thursday November 23 Plotnitsky apparently flew to Moscow "for consultations”. Another day later, the standoff – dubbed the War of the Igors – was seemingly decided, and Plotnitsky had lost. State Security "Minister" Leonid Pasechnik declared that Plotnitsky had resigned "for health reasons” (he claimed that he suffered from a concussion) and had appointed him as interim leader until elections would be held in autumn 2018.
The reshuffle was swiftly sanctioned by "parliament" one day later, which also passed a constitutional change so that the parliamentary speaker does not have to take over power if a leader resigns.
Pasechnik and Kornet, who together control sizable security forces, were long believed to work against Plotnitsky. They are closely linked to a group of separatists from Kadiivka (formerly Stakhanov), where Pasechnik worked for Ukraine’s Security Service SBU before he joined the separatists in 2014. The local separatist leader here, Pavel Dryomov, a fierce critic of Plotnitsky, died when his car exploded in December 2015.
Other members of this group are Alexei Karyakin, who fled to Russia after Plotnitsky sacked him as parliamentary speaker in March 2016, and Valeri Bolotov, the first LNR leader, who died under murky circumstances in January 2017 in Moscow.
Pasechnik claimed that he would continue his predecessor’s foreign and domestic policies, but it remains to be seen, if he will keep his word. While he personally has kept a low profile, his "State Security Ministry" has become infamous for conducting interviews with prisoners confessing all sorts of crimes. On its website it already published a string of interviews with detainees confessing to plot terrorist attacks for Ukraine during last week’s armed intervention, which Pasechnik’s explained as an anti-terrorist operation.
Pasechnik and Kornet were thought to be plotting a leadership change as early as October 2015, when Pasechnik’s people arrested the then Energy "Minister" and Plotnitsky-ally Dmitry Lyamin. Plotnitsky protested, saying that the arrest was illegal, but after a brief trip to Moscow he backed down and promised to start a fresh fight against corruption. Pasechnik and Kornet are also closely associated with Karyakin (Externer Link: see Newsletter 15), and a return of the former "parliamentary speaker” from exile would strengthen the separatists’ ideological wing (known as ideinie separatisty in Russian).
lotnitsky had been under heavy criticism for some time. Accusations that he was enriching himself and his entourage by controlling imports, e.g. of pharmaceuticals, have been carried by leading Russian pro-Kremlin outlets (Externer Link: see Newsletter 8).
he Lyamin affair left Plotnitsky’s authority badly damaged, and last week’s events showed that he could not (or would not) muster a force against a military intervention in his own city.
However, few had expected such a turn of events, including an armed intervention of one "people’s republic" in another.
The fact that the anonymous soldiers came from Donetsk was first confirmed by Kornet, who said on November 22 that he received help from "our friends […] the law enforcement organs of the Donetsk People’s Republic". One day later, the Donetsk "State Security Ministry” said that it had conducted a joint security operation with the local Interior Ministry in Luhansk.
According to the OSCE monitoring mission, a military convoy of almost 30 vehicles drove from Debaltseve, a town controlled by the Donetsk separatists, to Luhansk on November 21.
The revelation that the soldiers, which reminded many of the "green men" who prepared the annexation of Crimea in 2014, were from Donetsk rather than Russia, prompted speculation that Moscow is mulling a merger of the two people’s republics.
A story in the Russian weekly Nasha Versia suggested that Moscow will form a new entity dubbed "Ukraine-2" to present a viable alternative to the (pro-western) Ukraine governed from Kiev – a bit like the German Democratic Republic being a competitor to West Germany.
Such a model is reminiscent of the Malorossiya initiative made by Donetsk separatist leader Alexander Zakharchenko in July. That proposal was quietly dropped soon after it emerged that neither Luhansk nor even Moscow seemed to know much of this (Externer Link: see Newsletter 23).
However, many observers argued that Russia wants to keep two entities, not least because this preserves the legal framework of the Minsk peace accords. Both Plotnitsky and Zakharchenko signed the Minsk protocol and memorandum of autumn 2014, as well as the package of measures of February 2015.
Pasechnik seemed to confirm this when he said that Plotnitsky had been appointed the "LNR’s" chief Minsk negotiator for the ongoing peace talks because "he is one of the Minsk agreements signatories." However, he promised on November 25 that the hitherto negotiator Vladislav Deinego should continue to carry out this role.
There is little doubt that Russia has enormous financial, military and political control over both Luhansk and Donetsk. Using "DNR" forces in the conflict in Luhansk might just be a tactical ploy: Moscow can plausibly deny that they are Russian while still being in charge of operations.