Ukraine rebel chief Igor Bezler: 'I won't hesitate to have you shot' / The Guardian .Está em movimento a engrenagem da tensão, por Jorge Almeida Fernandes.

 Ukraine rebel chief Igor Bezler: 'I won't hesitate to have you shot'

Nicknamed the Demon, leader said to be behind the downing of MH17 ends rare interview by exploding into rage and threatening journalists

Shaun Walker in Gorlovka

Tuesday 29 July 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/29/-sp-ukraine-rebel-igor-bezler-interview-demon

 

Igor Bezler / The Demon

With a walrus moustache, a fiery temper and a reputation for brutality, Igor Bezler is the most feared of all the rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine. Nicknamed Bes, or “the Demon”, he is regarded as something of a loose cannon, even by other rebels, who speak about him in hushed tones.

If the Ukrainian security services, the SBU, are to be believed, the Demon and a group of his men were responsible for shooting down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the region a fortnight ago.

According to audio of a phone call allegedly made two minutes before the disaster, the Demon was told: “A bird is flying towards you.” He asked whether it is small or big, and was told that it was hard to see, as it was flying high above the clouds. In another recording, apparently made 20 minutes later, the Demon reported to his interlocutor, supposedly a Russian intelligence official, that a plane had indeed been shot down. Bezler said the recording was real but referred to a different incident: as well as MH17 the rebels have shot down 10 Ukrainian aircraft.

The Demon hardly ever gives interviews, but a Russian journalist and I managed to secure one, so we set off last Thursday to visit his headquarters in the town of Gorlovka, a 40-minute drive along deserted roads from the regional capital of Donetsk.

Previously a normal east Ukrainian town, with decaying Soviet-era industrial plants and a political elite that skimmed off the financial flows that might have helped lift it from its decrepit state, Gorlovka has become the Demon’s fiefdom in the three months since the uprising started.

At the entrance to the town was a checkpoint with high barricades of sandbags and armoured personnel carriers with their guns pointed at the road. It was manned by rebels with Kalashnikovs in their hands and rocket-propelled grenade launchers slung over their shoulders.

The man on the post, who introduced himself as Gorynych – like the three-headed dragon from Russian folklore – did not want to let us pass but we explained we had an interview set up with the Demon himself. Phone calls were made, and eventually we were allowed to enter the town.

Arriving at the government building that the Demon’s fighters had seized at the start of the uprising, we were led through several barricades, made up of sandbags and stacked ammunition boxes, and brought to the first floor, where there was a waiting area for those who wanted to be granted an audience with the Demon. On the wall, there was a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and one of Soviet-era bard Vladimir Vysotsky, with the caption: “A thief should sit in prison.”

Periodically, fighters came dashing up the stairs with news for the boss. Before they entered his office, they had to leave their telephones and weapons on a table. One man with a Cossack fur hat deposited two pistols, a Kalashnikov, a foot-long dagger and an iPhone 5 on the table before he was allowed into the Demon’s inner sanctum.

While we waited, a group of fighters made us tea in plastic cups with a lilac-coloured kettle, and we talked about life in the warzone. The rumble of shelling in the distance was audible. It had been getting closer every day, said the fighters, as the Ukrainian army continued retaking towns, not without civilian loss of life.

Some of the fighters were locals, others had come from Russia and attended a training camp in Rostov, across the border, before being sent to the Demon. One was a local who had lived in Moscow and worked as a lighting engineer for photoshoots. Holding up an umbrella all day, he found it demeaning work, and longed for something more meaningful in life. When the insurgency started, he had returned to his home town and now looked every inch the fighter, with a flowing beard, irregular fatigues, and a waistcoat with pockets for knives and ammunition.

The fighters showed me a room in disarray, filing cabinets tipped over and documents strewn across the floor. In the corner, incongruously, was a petting zoo of 10 rabbits. One of them was a huge, white specimen that the fighters had nicknamed Yatsenyuk, after the leader of the Maidan protests in Kiev, who went on to become prime minister and resigned last week. They said they planned to skin, cook and eat Yatsenyuk soon. It was unclear if they were joking. In the bathroom, instead of toilet paper, a copy of the Ukrainian legal code sat on top of the holder, half of its pages already ripped out.

The door to the Demon’s office opened and the man himself emerged, cigarette in hand and wearing a telnyashka – the stripy Russian naval vest – underneath military fatigues. In an instant the fighters were on their feet, standing rigid and saluting. One meekly explained that two journalists were waiting to see him.

 

Igor Bezler / The Demon

“I’m busy, we will talk later. For now, show them the prisoners,” he snapped, striding down the stairs surrounded by heavily armed men.

The Demon was born in Crimea as Igor Bezler and lived for a long time in Russia before moving to Gorlovka where he worked for a time as the director of the local funeral parlour. The SBU claims he is a Russian military intelligence agent who coordinates his actions directly with Moscow.

He is one of a number of key commanders of the rebel movement who Kiev claims are Russian agents, including the mysterious figure of Igor Girkin, nicknamed Strelkov or “the Shooter”, who is the commander in chief of the Donetsk resistance. An enthusiast of military re-enactments, Strelkov himself has admitted he was a Russian agent until last year, and took part in the Russian takeover of Crimea.

It is possible that men like Bezler and Strelkov are not directly carrying out Moscow’s orders but are proxy agents with handlers two, three or four steps removed from the Kremlin or other official Russian structures; players that can be directed from Moscow but who are also liable to go rogue at any time.

Bezler, Strelkov and many of the other commanders in the patchwork network of rebel groups operating in eastern Ukraine have all taken hostages. At the headquarters in Gorlovka, we were led down to the ground floor and into two small rooms filled with mattresses.

In one of the rooms I met Vasyl Budik, a local journalist arrested for supposed links to Pravy Sektor, a Ukrainian far-right group. He had been a prisoner for nearly three months, and was even subjected to a mock execution captured on video to pressure Kiev into agreeing an exchange for the remaining prisoners. There was also a 64-year-old Swede, who did not want to say what he was doing when captured (though he said he was not involved in combat), and a number of Ukrainian soldiers. One of them was with his wife; she had travelled from Kiev and voluntarily entered captivity so she could be with her husband.

As we talked, guards came for Budik, and took him upstairs into the main courtyard. A van had arrived, serving as an impromptu hearse, carrying the body of a rebel fighter who had just died in combat. The Demon and the other fighters crowded round the open doors of the van to glance at the open coffin and pay their respects. Budik was also emotional.

“I knew him well, since he was eight years old,” he said. “My wife and I would bring in homeless kids or orphans and try to give them a decent upbringing. I taught him boxing, tried to give him a grounding in life. I helped him out a lot. He was a good lad.”

I remarked what an extraordinary testament it was to the mindless, fratricidal nature of the conflict in eastern Ukraine that he was mourning the death of one of his captors. Budik chuckled. “You think that’s weird, they’ve got a high-ranking SBU official as a prisoner here, and one of his in-laws is guarding him,” he said.

The Demon materialised outside the rooms holding the hostages and told us he was ready to talk, but as we turned to walk up to his office, he became agitated over the question of why he keeps hostages. He looked back at us with furious eyes.

“The only reason they are here is because they are Ukrainian army soldiers,” he said, gesturing at the rooms with the hostages in. “Those who are fighting with the Ukrainian army, we keep as prisoners. Those who are fighting with volunteer battalions, we question them and then shoot them on the spot. Why should we show any pity to them?”

His voice got louder as he got more and more angry.

“You should [see] what they have done to my people. They chop off their heads and shit in the helmets! They are fascists! So why should we stand on ceremony with them? Questioning, an execution, that’s it. I will hang those fuckers from lampposts!”

By this point he was shouting at the top of his voice, and suddenly noticed that the Russian journalist I was with had her dictaphone on, and I was making notes in my notebook. He grabbed the dictaphone from her hands and ordered one of the fighters to throw it at the wall. Pulling my notebook from my hands, he began to rip out the pages frantically.

Protesting only made it worse. He barked commands at his subordinates: “Burn their notebooks! Seize their electronics! Search everything for compromising material and then destroy it! If you find anything, execute them as spies!”

Working in eastern Ukraine has been difficult for all journalists and anger and threats are commonplace. This was the first time, however, that I felt a very real sense of danger. “Don’t think for one minute I will hesitate to have you shot,” he yelled at the pair of us.

We were taken into a room for our bags to be rummaged through by underlings, the gravity of the situation underlined by just how scared the rebel fighters themselves appeared to be.

Twenty minutes later, as a nervous woman was methodically flicking through our possessions and I was clandestinely deleting all photographs and messages from the phone in my pocket they had not noticed, the Demon appeared at the door again, smoking a cigarette. He had calmed down, somewhat.

“Give them back their things. Drive them to the checkpoint, kick them out and never let them in,” he barked. We left hastily, and I never did get to ask the Demon about his alleged role in shooting down MH17.

I may never get another chance. Three days after our visit, on Sunday, Gorlovka was shelled ruthlessly using Grad rockets. Meaning “hail” in Russian, the Grad can launch up to 40 rockets in a matter of seconds, and is a spectacularly imprecise weapon designed to inflict maximum casualties. The missiles hailed down on central Gorlovka without warning, with plumes of smoke rising from buildings across the town.

The Demon was not there when the attack came – the Ukrainians say he has fled, his fighters say he left Gorlovka on a mission. But the missiles missed the headquarters anyway, coming down in various residential areas.

As the conflict enters what looks like an endgame, both sides are more resolute that ever. When the bodies began to fall from the sky earlier this month, the downing of MH17 seemed like an event so outlandish, and so gruesome, that some thought it might just act to jolt the players in the region’s conflict to their senses. A collateral massacre whose victims had no stake in the messy conflict on the ground, it was surely enough to end a war that has appeared largely manufactured, but has nevertheless cost hundreds of civilian lives.

Instead, the fighting has only intensified. The pro-Russian rebels have continued to down Ukrainian planes and Kiev claims Russia is still funnelling weapons and fighters across the border. Ukrainian forces, meanwhile, have intensified their attacks on the rebels and appear to have used indiscriminate missile systems against civilian areas. The conflict, far from calming down, has entered its most vicious stage yet.

Around 13 people died in Gorlovka on Sunday, including a mother and her young child. A haunting photograph of the pair lying on the ground, the mother’s body badly mangled but one arm still cradling the corpse of her child, was shared on social media and led to another round of both sides loudly blaming the other for the atrocity.

The headquarters of the Ukrainian anti-terrorist operation denied it had used Grad missiles on Gorlovka, and instead blamed the rebels, saying they had done so to “discredit the Ukrainian army” among the town’s residents.

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly denied using Grads against residential areas, and it is true that both sides have the missile launchers in their arsenals. However, Human Rights Watch found that on the outskirts of Donetsk there was compelling evidence that shelling had come from Ukrainian positions.

The rebels have a healthy supply of weaponry and, if Kiev is believed, are still receiving shipments from Russia. But they are no match for the sheer size of the Ukrainian army and the various volunteer regiments fighting on Kiev’s side, whatever state of disarray the government forces may be in.

Deep down, they all expect to die here. One of the Demon’s men, a jovial Muscovite, gave us a number to call so we could tell his relatives where to find his body when he is killed. None of his family knew he had come to Ukraine to fight.

“There is nowhere for us to go now, we will fight until the end, until the last drop of our blood is spilled and the last one of us is dead,” he said.

The question is how much more civilian blood will be spilled before that happens.

Está em movimento a engrenagem da tensão

30-7-2014- PÚBLICO

Vladimir Putin está a cometer demasiados erros de avaliação, o que é perigoso. A tragédia do avião da Malásia mostrou os riscos da sua política ucraniana e da perda de controlo sobre os bandos “separatistas”. A seguir, perdeu a oportunidade de contribuir para uma desescalada sem perder a face. Está agora confrontado com a perspectiva de sanções mais duras, que poderão constituir uma séria ameaça para economia russa. Na sua lógica, não recuará — isto é, calcula que não pode recuar por razões de prestígio e de poder doméstico — e ampliará consequentemente a dimensão da crise.

O analista russo Aleksander Morozov explicou à Reuters que o Presidente teria podido atenuar a reacção ocidental e reduzir o nível das sanções de uma forma simples: demarcando-se dos separatistas. Terá calculado que isso não lhe traria dividendos políticos. Agora é tarde: “Ele falhou a oportunidade.” E lançouse em diatribes antiocidentais.

Outro analista, Nikolai Svanidze, disse a uma rádio de Moscovo: “Penso que a nossa liderança é experiente, mas creio que não avalia devidamente a mentalidade do Ocidente.” Os mortos do “voo 17” endureceram a atitude ocidental, atenuaram as divergências entre a UE e Washington sobre as sanções e “reduziram a resistência do poderoso lobby económico alemão”.

“O avião mudou tudo”, diz ao Washington Post Sophia Pugsley, especialista nas relações UERússia no European Council on Foreign Relations. “E o que fundamentalmente mudou foi a atitude alemã.” Berlim será quem mais perde, já que largos sectores da sua economia estão ligados à Rússia. “Não sabemos se a Rússia quer ser nosso parceiro ou nosso adversário”, declarou à Spiegel o MNE alemão, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. A Alemanha — explica — está a meio caminho entre os países do Leste europeu, vizinhos da Rússia, e os da costa atlântica que têm uma visão diferente do peso de Moscovo.

Os governos ocidentais são forçados a agir e podem acreditar que as sanções levarão Putin a repensar a sua estratégia, evitando que esta crise o encoste à parede. Mas o que se passará será previsivelmente o inverso. Moscovo endurecerá a sua postura. “Putin já investiu demasiado, seja de um ponto de vista geopolítico seja em termos do seu estatuto [político] doméstico para ser convencido por sanções”, afirma Nicholas Spiro, director de uma agência britânica de riscos estratégicos. “[O avião] está a forçá-lo a endurecer a postura antiocidental muito mais cedo do que desejaria. Putin não quer queimar as pontes com as grande economias europeias, mas agora pode ser forçado a fazê-lo.”

Um preço elevado

Putin está de certo modo prisioneiro da sua retórica nacionalista e “imperial”. Uma sondagem do independente Levada Center indica que 61% dos russos dizem não temer as sanções, enquanto 64 culpam o Ocidente pela crise ucraniana.

A economia russa está à beira da recessão e as sanções terão efeitos graves ao nível da transferência de tecnologias e do investimento. Alexei Kudrin, antigo ministro das Finanças de Putin, teme o isolamento. Diz à Reuters: “Tenho sérias preocupações de que a escalada do conflito da Ucrânia leve à conclusão (...) de que não precisamos das melhores práticas do mundo. De facto, uma tal atitude prejudica seriamente a modernização da Rússia.”

O desígnio que guia Putin desde a sua eleição em 2000 é devolver à Rússia o “estatuto a que tem direito” no mundo, isto é, o papel que a antiga União Soviética ocupou — falar de igual para igual com os EUA e reduzir a influência global ganha pelos EUA no pósGuerra Fria. “Mas para isto não pode estar isolada nem tornar-se, pelo seu comportamento ou pelo dos seus homens de mão, numa espécie de estado-pária”, anota o analista francês Daniel Vernet.

Para lá da Ucrânia