I met a Ukrainian waiter on the weekend. I was unsure of his accent at first, but increasingly suspected he was some sort of slav. I was speaking Russian with my companion. When the waiter returned to our table to offer some extra cheese, he pleasantly entered our conversation.
It turned out that like us, he’d come from Kiev. But unlike us, he’d been able to interpret the signs correctly - he left a week before February 24, 2022.
On February 27 or so, I met a stranger individual in Kiev. This was a Romanian restauranteur who I’ll call Nikolai. We met in the underground parking lot-turned-bombshelter of an elite apartment building. I’d found myself there after talking to a confused-looking Ghanian music producer outside the local supermarket.
On the 24th, I’d encountered a Nigerian woman who was still unaware a war had begun, so I asked this gentleman how he was finding things. Happy to find another English speaker, he invited me to his bomb shelter. I was happy to sleep somewhere other than our apartment (let alone the metro), so off we went.
Apologies for this recursive loop of memories, but the question of an ideal bomb shelter brings me to another individual. I believe I also met him on the 26th, outside the very same supermarket. It was around 4pm - 5pm was curfew. No one wanted to be mistaken for a ‘Russian infiltrator’ and shot on the spot by the paranoid ‘territorial defense’ units.
But for some reason, the atmosphere was languid, even relaxed. The sun was shining through the acrid gunpowder hazing in from the outskirts of the city, where the battle for the capital raged on. Distant smoke plumed up through the orange sky.
A homeless woman covered in tinfoil wandered the steps of the grandiose soviet circus. A week earlier, the area would have been covered with people this time of day.
Throughout the chaotic first week of the war, one of my most vivid memories was seeing relaxed homeless people strolling the parks, talking together on a bench. Usually, they might find themselves the object of judging eyes or harassed by security guards. Now, for once, they were left alone.
I think I was waiting to be allowed into the supermarket. A young man gestured to me - a former student at the school I had taught in. I came over to him and his father, and we entered a fairly leisurely conversation, considering the situation.
The family was from Donetsk. The father engaged me in a weighty but distant conversation. The true meaning of war, per Tolstoy. And what he had learned, living in Donetsk throughout 2014, under Ukrainian artillery fire.
He told me not to heed the greatest illusion of all - bomb shelters. The frail attics passed off as such offer no protection to a direct hit.
You’re better off, he told me, to simply stay at home. Sleep in your apartment. Relax. There’s no point worrying. If it hits you, it hits you. Apartment walls can withstand quite a lot, anyway.
Wise words, probably. But my nerves couldn’t take it, and the first few days of the war were spent flitting between idiotic ‘bomb shelters’. Though meant to be publicly shared, the residents of one seemed to want everyone else to leave.
Mayor Klitschko, in his infinite wisdom, began sending out telegram messages that ‘THEY WANT TO DESTROY US AS A NATION. IT IS ABOUT TO BEGIN’ or something along those lines. Convinced that the carpet-bombing of the city with bunker-busters was imminent, our bunker-buddies began strongly hinting that we should leave, since it was ‘they bunker’ (they lived in the building above, whereas we lived in the building nearby).
It was dark by then, and at one point some ominous individuals poked their torches into the window of our shelter. Were they about to barge in, searching for ‘Russian infiltrators’? Shoot us all? Increasingly harangued by those in our bunker, we decided to make a break for it and run to the metro. Quite a terrifying few minutes, unsure whether we might be shot by the armed bands patrolling the city, or destroyed by the supposedly imminent bombs.
Anyway, there was no bombing of Kyiv. At the time, of course, there seemed to be few limits to one’s fear. Glued as we all were to a million different telegram channels, all churning out contradictory, cataclysmic announcements.
We spent a few days a hundred meters underground in the metro station. Policemen patrolling with automatic weapons, the underground hermetically shut off with a vast door - something reminiscent of the fortress in Lord of the Rings. Sleeping in the cold metro train, occasionally visiting the filthy toilets, eventually let out two days later.
Maybe the old man from Donetsk was right.
Anyway, I can finally get to what I wanted to say. We were in the cold, empty parking lot under the elite apartment block. With the Ghanian musician and his mousy Chinese wife (partner?) - a loan shark in Ukraine because, in her words, the loans she charged featured interest rates illegal in China.
Somewhat better than the metro, though probably also irrelevant as a bomb shelter. I remember reading about the capabilities of various bunker busters, and receiving disheartening results.
Then the swaggering Romanian enters. Nikolai offers us fresh sausages, brie cheese, a bottle of wine. The exclamations come out rapid fire:
I’m the last man left in the entire building! I’m the biggest patriot here - everyone else left! All I’ve been doing the past few days is sniffing coke and watching the rockets fly, the explosions, the artillery battles!
He invited me up to his penthouse. All the flat surfaces caked with a thin white film I occasionally dipped my finger in. He told me he was about to take some western journalists close to the frontlines. Given the conditions, no wonder such fantastical stories emerged. Long live the Ghost of Kiev.
Anyway, Nikolai could also be quite blunt. He gave little thought to the diplomatic niceties of the Chinese woman. He told me about his business experience:
A rival Ukrainian restaurant owner tried to set me up last year - he got his friend in the security services (SBU) to accuse me of financing terrorism. But I’m a Romanian, I know how to deal with corruption. I figured things out.
At a certain point, I got a bit tired of his ironizing and wisecracking. Out for a cigarette, I cornered him. Didn’t he realize we found ourself in a sort of Rakka 2016 situation? Locked in the city on all sides, about to become the mediatized victims of another ISIS, our deaths to be beamed out across CNN?
He dropped his airs and concurred, showing me death threats he’d received the other day after calling for a peace deal on instagram. He understood where we were, what was happening. But what’s the point worrying about it? A similar approach to the old man from Donetsk.
He also told me a fascinating story. The reason I even began this whole series of Proustian recollections.
He had come into contact with some signs. Or rather, an individual with a correct reading of the signs.
A few months ago, he told me, he was in a sauna (banya) with an SBU officer. The banya is where all important business deals happen. Perhaps it had something to do with the aforementioned conflict in the restaurant sector.
Anyway, the SBU officer confided his confidence that a big war was coming. Nikola dismissed it, like everyone did. The spook from the SBU laughed. He knew it was coming - everyone important did.
I, too, didn’t read the signs properly. Well, by February 22, February 23, it became obvious that at least something would happen. But my better informed Ukrainian friends told me it would simply be something in the Donbass. One fairly young, healthy, intelligent man who told me that died a year or so later — either a heart attack or suicide.
One important question, of course, is how Zelensky was reading the signs. In late January, he infamously promised that we would all be roasting meat on the barbecue for the May holidays.
In retrospect, as I told the young Kievan I met at the restaurant on the weekend, the signs were all too obvious. He read them correctly and left beforehand, as did some others. But I didn’t, even though I had been quite aware of these very same signs.
So let’s take a look at those signs. Perhaps correctly understanding them will help in predicting the future. Particularly given the current obsession with predicting a Russian invasion of the EU. In fact, as we will see, Moscow doesn’t tend to invade without warning - you just need to pay attention to the signs.
Today’s signs will be those most directly related to war. So we won’t be looking at broader changes in Zelensky’s domestic popularity and political standing. Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Zelensky steadily centralized political power in the country and removed opponents. This itself played no small role in the eruption and continuation of war, but was not by itself a sufficient cause. Countries with dictators can be isolationist, and countries with democratic elections can wage endless wars.
What can be said is that Zelensky, constantly losing popularity and gaining enemies, was not in a position to make controversial decisions. And it was controversial decisions that were needed to end the war. Hence, it is no wonder that he reacted to each of Russia’s signs with an aggression response. Nor is it a surprise that he has found war somewhat of a more comfortable position than peace.
In a future article, I’ll speculate on why exactly Zelensky so adamantly denied western reports of an imminent Russian military operation. Today’s topic is the insistent Russian signaling that unless their demands were implemented, war was imminent.
Context
But before we get to the signs, a few words on the Russian demands themselves. And the history of the military conflict that began in 2014, whose scale drastically increased in 2022.
In February 2014, armed protestors took control of central government in Kiev - the maidan revolution/regime change/coup. A range of armed clashes between pro-maidan and anti-maidan forces took place in the east and south of the country, which was not favorably disposed to the ethnonationalist, neoliberal agenda of the maidan.
On April 7, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) declared its existence. Later in April, the nearby Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) declared its existence. On April 12, the new government in Kyiv began its ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ against armed dissidents in the east.
Over the rest of the 2014, Ukrainian nationalist forces fought against the forces of the DPR and LPR. As the conflict went on, the Russian military increasingly increased its covert involvement in the war.
By early 2015, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was forced to agree to the demands of the Russian government - on February 12, the second Minsk Agreements were signed.
Minsk represented the demands of the Russian government, but not necessarily those of the DPR and LPR. When the DPR and LPR declared their existence in April 2014, they hoped that the Russian government would annex these territories, just as they did for Crimea in March. This hope is repeated in all the memoirs of the anti-maidan political figures, such as the Ukrainian Pavel Gubarev or the Russian Igor Strelkov.
Minsk stipulated the opposite of what anti-maidan figures and other Russian nationalists desired. The Minsk agreements required all the territories of the Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts to return to Ukrainian jurisdiction. Correspondingly, the Russian government never officially recognized the LPR or DPR - not until 2022.
Why did the Russian government choose this route? Many Russian nationalists now regret that the Russian army hadn’t entered Ukraine in 2014 to, say, reinstate president Viktor Yanukovych, the legal president who had been overthrown unconstitutionally. Had the Russians done so in 2014, they would have faced a far weaker, more pro-Russian army, and a much less nationalistic society. Legally speaking (whatever that’s worth), it may have also been easier to market.
The Russian government, however, had other interests. For one, of course, continued trade with Europe. Russia’s economy was much less sanction-proof in 2014 than it was in 2022.
But more importantly, Moscow believed that its strategic aims could be achieved in Ukraine through politico-military means, rather than purely military ones. Minsk stipulated the return of Donetsk and Lugansk to Ukraine because these regions had always pulled Ukrainian politics away from the pro-NATO ethnonationalism espoused by western Ukraine and the Kyiv intelligentsia. Ukraine was already highly divided on these issues, and the addition of millions of Donbass voters and their political parties, their economic assets, would tip the balance. I wrote about this socio-political context to Minsk here.
Which is precisely why the post-2014 regime in Ukraine refused to implement the Minsk agreements. Within a year of government, Ukraine’s new atlanticist prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, saw his popularity fall to 2%. A similar fate would befall president Poroshenko. They were barely surviving without the Donbass, and with it back, they would probably be lucky to stay in the country.
That’s why the ‘liberals’ in power implemented a range of measures preventing residents of the remaining parts of the Donbass from voting in regional elections. I wrote about this disenfranchisement here and here.
This still couldn’t stem the tide of anti-maidan resentment, however, and in 2019 Zelensky won the elections on the platform of ‘peace at any cost’ with Russia. The Russian-speaking populist from the east had won against the neoliberal nationalist incumbent president. Atlanticists the world over were outraged.
The Russian government hoped that Zelensky would indeed implement the Minsk agreements to end the war. It was the eastern sections of Ukraine that voted most overwhelmingly for Zelensky in 2019. He received almost 90% of the vote in the remaining areas of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions under Ukrainian control - even higher figures than the Dnepropetrovsk region, where Zelensky came from. The only region in Ukraine where Zelensky lost the elections was the nationalist Lviv oblast.
But Zelensky betrayed the people who voted for him. I’ve written a number of articles on why Minsk was doomed. In short, Zelensky was too weak-willed to move against the liberal atlanticist political establishment, the nationalist paramilitaries. The anti-Minsk forces comprised a minority of society, but were by far the most politically organized. And they also disposed of total support from western governments. And it was the financial largesse of the west upon which the Ukrainian government depended heavily, even moreso because of Covid.
Now, let’s finally move onto the signs Russia sent. These signs conveyed a simple message — if Minsk were to remain unimplemented, Moscow would use military means to ensure the Ukrainian government severed ties with NATO and ceased crafting itself into an ‘anti-Russia’.
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, Russia increasingly signaled that it was tired of the lack of progress in implementing Minsk. We will go month by month, from October 2020 to February 2022.
