On The Edge Of Civil War In Ukraine

In the eastern city of Donetsk, friends and neighbors have transformed into enemies, and people on both sides of the conflict worry that there’s no way out from a slide to civil war.













Ukrainian police try to stop a pro-Russian protester from attacking a pro-Ukrainian rally in Donetsk.


Baz Ratner / Reuters











DONETSK, Ukraine — Wearing a black shirt and white clerical collar, the pastor walked into the occupied government building that serves as rebel headquarters in this eastern Ukrainian city. Serhiy Kosyak had come to plead for leniency: Rebels threatened to kill anyone who visited the small prayer vigils he held for Ukrainian unity, the city's last open resistance to the separatist republic rebels had declared. As he waited for an audience, he saw an old friend among the gunmen milling around. Kosyak asked how he was doing. The man's eyes stared back at him with hate.

There's a moment on the slide to civil war where friends and neighbors become hard to recognize. The man screamed that Kosyak was a traitor and spy, an outburst sure to doom him amid the fevered atmosphere in the building, where suspicions ran high. Kosyak, 38, had seen the same anger in the passersby who sometimes accosted his pro-Ukraine prayer tent. And he saw it now in the rebels who tied him to a chair in the building and beat him as he prayed. He thought there was evil in it — real evil, because he believed in such things. He thought Satan grabbed hold of people with the ideas pouring into Donetsk on the Russian airwaves: that Russian-speakers there were in danger and needed to rise against Ukraine's government. When the beatings finally stopped, and he was cleared for release, he stayed in his chair for a minute to bless his assailants: God, enter their lives and open their eyes.
Kosyak was still bruised a deep purple under his dress shirt when he opened his sidewalk service more than a week later, on the last day of May. The interfaith vigils once drew hundreds, but attendance was fading as worried supporters fled. Thirty people stood at the edge of a busy bridge beneath an intermittent rain. The sermons were about Sodom: a biblical city so overrun with evil that God decided it couldn't be saved. In Genesis 19, angels send away a man named Lot, Sodom's last good soul. Then the Lord levels it from the skies. "God didn't destroy Sodom until Lot left," said a pastor named Pavel Zaystev, 46. "As long as we're here, there's still hope."
But he worried privately that Donetsk was beyond redemption. "You don't think even some miracle could change them," he said of the rebels. "That's why I think of Sodom: God destroyed them because he could not change them."
Ukraine's corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, a native of the Donetsk region and Russian ally, was ousted by a popular uprising in Kiev on Feb. 22. The conflict came to Russian-speaking Donetsk, where about half of the 1 million residents are ethnically Russian, soon afterward, initially with small demonstrations. Protesters worried that the new government would punish Russian-speakers — fears fueled by Kremlin propaganda. They believed that their language would be banned and that fascists from Kiev were coming to hurt them. At first, the so-called fascists they had in mind were members of the Right Sector, a fringe ultra-nationalist group that had played an outsized role on the front lines of the protests in Kiev, but soon the label included the new government and its supporters, who had largely ignored their concerns. Then the protesters were storming government buildings as Russia warned that it would intervene, if needed, to protect its "compatriots." They called for a referendum on secession, like the one that saw Russia annex Crimea in March, and they took up arms. Polls showed that most Donetsk residents wanted to remain in Ukraine, but outspoken opponents of the separatists began fleeing the city amid abductions and death threats. Some who remained deleted their Facebook pages, wondering who among their friends might be tracking their loyalties. "Fear is like a virus," one said.

But there was still hope for peace in Donetsk, the political nexus for eastern Ukraine's separatists and an important economic hub, even as fighting flared elsewhere. Throughout the spring, some residents had looked ahead to two events that might swing things back toward normalcy: Ukraine holding fresh presidential elections and Russia recalling the troops massed along the border nearby. Both came to pass, but they did nothing to stop the conflict from surging ahead. Each side had already come to see the battle as one between irreconcilable ideas — with an enemy that had to be eradicated. The fabric that let two groups of people with their own histories coexist in post-Soviet Ukraine had been ripped away. "This city needs to be cleansed," warned a Catholic priest at the unity vigil, and on another evening, inside an expanding, makeshift armory, a rebel in a flannel shirt said, "There is some dirt here now, and we have to clean it from our land."





















Pastor Serhiy Kosyak.


Photograph by Evgeniy Maloletka for











On the afternoon before the vigil, a rebel commander from Russia sat before a bottle of bourbon at a faded desk and outlined his mission, which he said served God.
He was in a bright office at the end of an unlit hall, inside a compound that used to house the Ukrainian security service. He had a welcoming smile and tattoos that ran down his arms and peaked out from his crew neck. He was a leader in a group called the Russian Orthodox Army, and he went by the nickname Veren, or "the faithful."
"First of all it's purification of the land — purification from fascists," Veren said. He described an awakening of Russian identity centered on Donetsk, where it was under threat, and he seemed to be an incarnation of the ideology the pastor had seen on the Russian airwaves, personally spreading it by hand.
Just a few weeks earlier, he had been overseeing what seemed like a small outlaw empire from the fifth floor of the rebel headquarters, the former government building, where masked men roamed the halls and speakers blared Soviet anthems from behind sprawling barricades. As separatist politicians scurried about overhead one day, Veren said he concerned himself with "special operations" — kidnappings and interrogations. Armed men kept handing him keys to cars they'd taken from their enemies. He has since been expanding his power, trading his spot in the crowded building for the more exclusive digs of the security compound, where men with assault rifles blocked the approaches and access was controlled with an intensity that felt paranoid. The Russian Orthodox Army's seal of a Christendom-evoking sword and shield was stenciled onto each concrete block of one outer wall. On the wall across the street, another set of rebels, the highly professional Vostok battalion, had done the same, marking turf of their own.
In the new office, a Russian flag with the army's logo hung from a bookshelf, and portraits of a fierce-looking Jesus were taped to the walls. Stickers and insignia patches sat on the desk. The first edition of the army's newsletter had just arrived, and beneath its banner were recruitment phone numbers. It also had a website. Veren saw untapped potential in the Donetsk region's 5 million people — and maybe across the Russian-speaking world. "People support us, but they're afraid to take the first step," he said. "I'm interested in any kind of promotion that gets the flow of people going."

They had even released a promotional rap video featuring gunmen packed into the same office. It got 200,000 YouTube views in less than a week. Veren bounced his head and lip-synched the lyrics as he twisted a computer monitor around:Till last fighter, till the victorious, glorious end
On the battlefield. Russian Orthodox!
Who if not us? When if not now?
Mom, I'm sorry. Nobody but us.







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