History leading up to Russia’s defeat at Lyman. Looking forward to POW interviews.

20221002

Three regiments of Russian soldiers escaped encirclement in Lyman in eastern Ukraine. Two of the regiments were from the People's Republics and one from Russia. The number of soldiers is estimated somewhere between 1500 and 5,000. Ukraine had hoped to take them prisoner. Instead they simply killed some number of them and forced the rest to largely abandon their armaments.

To capture the soldiers would have been a propaganda coup and given Ukraine some bargaining chits when it came to a prisoner exchange. I was looking forward to seeing the prisoners from the People’s republics testifying on video as to how they happened to be there in the first place. Perhaps we will. At any rate this is an opportunity for me to provide a little history of the Donbass.

The southern steppe region was largely uninhabited when the Tatars controlled Crimea. The Tatar raids on the steppes yielded Caucasian slaves which they sold to the Ottoman Empire.

Settlement on the steppe was dangerous. The people who came there evolved into the Cossacks. They were mostly fleeing servitude, Polish overlords in the West and to some extent Russians and others.

Their quest for freedom put them between a rock and a hard place. They chose to fight the Tatars on the open steppe instead of live under domination in the more settled lands. They were a tough warlike people fighting for their freedom. That part of Ukraine remained underpopulated. Catherine the Great, about the time of the American revolution, founded Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnieper Dnipro). The tsars tried to move Russians in to occupy the land. 

One wave consisted of Jews. The Tsar wanted to get them out of the Russian Empire and wanted somebody to occupy these fairly empty lands.  The government promoted Jewish settlements by giving them land and farm implements. Solzhenitsyn writes in his 200 Years Together, translated into English as The Crucifixion of Russia (almost unavailable for purchase), that the Jews took the emoluments but didn't become farmers. As an aside, they are city people.  They have not become farmers for more than a generation much of anywhere, including the kibbutzim in Israel and Rothschild-financed settlements on the pampas of Argentina.

A Welshman named John Hughes began to exploit coal in Donbass about 1869. They needed people to mine it. Local farmers weren't interested and neither were the Jews. The Russians scoured the empire for malcontents and misfits and they sent them to mine coal. These Russian-speaking people were not Ukrainian but nor were they really truly Russian. Perhaps akin to the English convicts transported to settle Australia.

They established their own hard-edged culture. Just as the Italian Mafia in Boston and New York were not like the Italians back in Italy, and the Irish travelers in England are not like Irishmen. The coal miners established rough big-city politics, out of which emerged the toughest of the tough, Victor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych stole the October 2004 presidential election from Victor Yushenko.  Yushenko won the second election when the fraud was disallowed.  He enacted language legislation prejudicial to Russian speakers, dominant in the east but present everywhere except the far west.  Yushenko was neither terribly competent nor honest.  He continually battled with gas baroness Yulia Timushenko.  She wound up on top in 2010, pushing Yushenko out to contest Yanukovych.

Yanukovych remained true to form. It is not a terribly intelligent man and but he was very heavy-handed and larcenous. My make on him is that ”he broke more than he stole and he stole everything he could.”  His tax police terrorized business.  He plundered big business, making his 20-something protégée/bagman Kerchenko a billionaire. He halted grain exports, many by foreign-owned companies,  for a period of months just in order to ensure that they flowed through entities he controlled. He was widely, thoroughly despised. When he was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 he was a billionaire.  Putin protected him and exploited him to the extent possible, but Yanukovych was both dumb and impossible to control. 

David Stockman has a graphic showing that in that election Timoshenko won the west of Ukraine and Yanukovych won the east and south as if this were totally representative.

Not at all. A voter has to choose between existing candidates and Timoshenko had a lot of baggage as well. Though Yanukovych certainly played up the language issue, it doesn't represent the pro-Russian sentiment the way Stockman would have one believe.  People wanted to be free to speak their native language.  They did not want to be part of Russia. The fact is that the country voted for him in 2010 and despised him by 2014.  It has happened to other presidents elsewhere.

Russia has a great deal of practice fomenting spontaneous people’s uprisings throughout the world. They are not alone – the United States had quite a bit to do with color revolutions here and there. It is the game of great powers. That notwithstanding, the Maidan uprising in 2014 was as close to genuine as these things get. I have looked diligently to find Russian and Ukrainian language sources confirming that the CIA was meddling. Aside from handing out doughnuts to the demonstrators, I couldn’t find much. I think they were caught flat-footed.

It is obvious to me that Russia was behind the “spontaneous” uprisings that created the two existing People’s republics and attempted to start others in Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mariupol, Mykolaiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhia.  With its military and intelligence services shot through with Russian agents as a result of Yanukovych’s laxity and perfidy, the Ukrainian government wasn’t able to fight back. The citizens, however, did. The only two that succeeded were Donetsk and Lugansk. 

The unfortunate people of those provinces saw Russia dismantle and cart off a great many of the better assets, such as the steelmaking equipment. They lost jobs as the entrepreneurs went west. There were some benefits – Russian pensions were a bit more generous than Ukrainian. The result was the exodus of the more talented people, leaving the old and the impecunious. Those latter are now being dragooned into the Russian army as cannon fodder. This is the sad fate of people who were unable to recognize or defend their own self interest.

Though I am sure there are soldiers from the Donbass who somewhat believe in what they are doing, and a great many who would be afraid for their families’ sakes to tell about how they happen to be fighting in Lyman, I am sure there are some who would be willing to tell their stories to the camera. When they appear, please pay close attention.

One Russian general who participated in the war was abruptly cut off as he was giving an interview on Russian TV about what went wrong in Lyman. The last sentence he got out was something to the effect of “deceit upon deceit, from bottom to top.”  This echoes a series of articles you can find written by Russians on Substack and book reviews I posted here in February and March.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the mood is cautiously optimistic. Eddie pushes me aside every day to watch the latest from Denys Davidov (above) on YouTube. He has not yet discovered Denys’ telegram channel which has lots of uncensored video.  Zoriana and Marianna wedge themselves in just because they feel the excitement. The good-looking woman tolerates their watching video for these few minutes at a time.

Graham