The Donbass Interviews: Vladislav Ugolny

First part of an interview with Donetsk-born Russian military blogger & activist Vladislav Ugolny, and hopefully the first in a series of interviews with active participants in the struggle for Novoro

Vladislav Ugolny is the nom de plume of a Donetsk-born Russian blogger, journalist & activist, who has been covering the Donbass conflict since 2019. In this interview, he tells us the story of the Russian movement in modern Ukraine, its failures and its transformation into something larger. Along the way, we learn a bit about how a history nerd turned into one of the most trustworthy sources on the war.

Hello, Vlad. You are the author of a political & military Telegram channel and a member of the OPSB¹ association that provides material support to the fighting troops. Could you have imagined 10 years ago that you would be doing this kind of thing?

Hello. Generally speaking, the expression “material support for the fighting troops” contains a lot of pathos and, indeed, it may seem like some incredibly difficult and inaccessible work for the average person, but in fact it's quite simple. It's no different than sponsoring a cat shelter, in principle. The process is pretty simple: intake, purchasing, logistics, dispensing, crowdfunding, public relations, accounting. You don't have to be a daring genius to do it.

It's just citizenship and patriotism, the only question is that you need to be mature enough to dive directly into such a “serious” topic. War as an extreme manifestation of politics and an extreme form of social organization is indeed regarded as very serious or even sacred. But in fact it is an everyday occurrence — mankind has, in one way or another, been at war for most of its history and people were always closely connected to armies or other paramilitary structures. Why the perception of war and the army as something abnormal has emerged in society I personally do not understand.

If you have no psychological barriers or an attitude like “the smart people at the top will sort it out themselves”, you are free to immerse yourself in such activities.

But you probably meant whether I could have suspected ten years ago that there would be a war and that I would say in interviews that war is normal... In principle, yes, I could have.

Tell us briefly about your biography. You grew up in Ukraine, but in 2015 you moved to Donbass, am I remembering that correctly?

I was born in Donetsk and spent a considerable part of my life there. I also spent much of my childhood in Kiev and Odessa. I finally returned to Donetsk after I came of age, that was in August 2015.

How was your worldview formed? Did you have a clear understanding of your Russian identity during your “Ukrainian” childhood, and did the radicalization of Ukraine since 2013 have an effect on your “ethnic identity”?

Before 2014 I was a regular history nerd with certain social problems. I was a “C” student, who was sent to about half of the competitions² (the subjects varied from school to school), I had some success in them. I used my successes at the competitions to get school authorities and parents off my back, to let me skip the subjects I didn't like, which were taught by nasty teachers. The list was subject to change, but almost always it was Ukrainian language and literature. I used to skip classes in the company of the worst losers and bullies. There were a lot of scandals, but I hated my Ukrainian identity when I was still in school. And the reason for that was the teachers, who tried to force some incomprehensible crap on me (one of them fed us homemade vareniki that were not very tasty, and the lessons were not in a warm classroom, but in a very cold little room, made into a museum of Ukrainian folk culture) and an incomprehensible language.

Being a history buff, I always liked the nineteenth and twentieth century, the period of the Russian Civil War. When I was 13 or 14 I tried to read “Atlas Shrugged”. I couldn't do it. But I read the Wikipedia summary and decided to become a libertarian. Atlas is allowed to skip class, right? Well, in general, the Soviet paternalism in my family annoyed me. So I became a right-wing kid who strongly disliked communism.

I liked the Ukrainian nationalist party “Svoboda”, because it was entertaining when they started physical fights in the parliament, but did not vote for them. And in general, my knowledge of history had shown me that Ukrainian nationalists are not very successful guys, and even leftists themselves, but the White Guard was pretty cool. Plus I always liked the movie “Admiral”³ - so, I was always drawn to the Russian anti-Communists.

And then I found “Sputnik & Pogrom”⁴, read it all, and realized that I could call myself a Russian nationalist. At the same time, I distinctly remember thinking about their articles about Ukraine and their skeptical attitude toward its independence. And then, at the age of 15, I agreed: Ukraine should be part of Russia.

By the beginning of Maidan, I was already aware of myself as a Russian nationalist and understood that neither Maidan nor Anti-Maidan expressed my interests and that I belonged to a third force. I welcomed the radicalization of the protest in the hope that Yanukovych would be forced to use Russian nationalism against Ukrainian nationalism. Stalin did so in 1941. But, unfortunately, Yanukovych did not do this and the card of Russian nationalism began to be played only after the victory of Maidan.

And, accordingly, from this position of a “third party” everything that happened next should be interpreted. To talk about the Russian Spring and sentiments about joining Russia, it is necessary to critically analyze Ukrainian politics before the Maidan of 2013-2014.

How strong was the irredentist Russian sentiment before the Maidan?

So, the collapse of the Soviet Union turned out to be a disaster for the Russians of Ukraine. There was a demographic decline, deindustrialization. The social hierarchy changed — the party elites were replaced either by gangsters, or these elites themselves turned from party elites to economic elites. They clinged to those sectors of the economy that could generate capital. Ukraine has turned into an oligarchic state with constant conflict between various regional oligarchic groups and industry monopolies. This was very bad.

Gradually a political bloc was formed around the elites of the southeastern regions, which controlled the metallurgy and energy sectors. This is primarily the “Donetsk clan” and a number of its allies. They struck a blow against the more financially oriented (plus the gas trade, but let's not complicate it, then it would take an entire monograph) “Dnepropetrovsk clan”. Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine and associated with Dnepropetrovsk, pretended to make Yanukovych, a native of Donbass, his successor; he was prime minister. But during the presidential election, the first Maidan happened.

The first Maidan brought Yushchenko, the banker who headed the National Bank of Ukraine, to power. He was supported by the “gas queen,” Yulia Tymoshenko. Then there was Arseniy Yatsenyuk, also a banker, in that entourage. Very briefly and simply, there was a battle between the financial circles allied to the energy sector and the industrialists. The former won, exploiting the pro-Ukrainian passionate groups, while the latter, supported by the Russian southeast, were afraid to flirt with the theme of Russian nationalism.

One person, a bright native of the Kharkov nomenklatura, devoid of super-profitable industry, but having the colossal administrative apparatus of the “first capital of Ukraine” at his disposal, was not afraid. We are talking about Yevgeny Kushnaryov.

The response to the first Maidan was a prototype of the Anti-Maidan movement with demands for federalization, the “Severodonetsk Congress” of elected representatives of all levels. It ended in nothing. It was attended by then-Mayor of Moscow Luzhkov, who, for some reason, had always been somewhat of a patron to the Russians of Ukraine, especially Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet. But the southeastern bloc, the “Party of Regions”, decided not to incite a civil confrontation. Only Kushnaryov, then chairman of the Kharkov regional state administration, made more or less radical demands, and then refused to transfer the taxes collected in the Kharkov region to Kiev. For which he was accused of separatism, dismissed by the new authorities, and almost imprisoned.

The “Party of Regions”, which had lost the race for the presidency, needed revenge in the parliamentary elections and was preparing to come to power in 2010 (which it succeeded in doing). As a result, they succeeded in rehabilitating Kushnaryov and made him their ideologist, staking on the decentralization of the country and the protection of the rights of the regions, their identity, and their cultural and economic interests. And since the electoral base was in the southeast of the country, it was just about the Russian regions.

But on the whole, it was good to make such a statement, polarizing the electorate, but the regionalists did not want to carry it out to the full. Kushnaryov ended up dying in a hunting accident under very mysterious circumstances. Who benefited from it? The “Donetsk clan” and a number of Kharkov regionalists (Kernes, who died of Covid, and Dobkin, who joined the Ukrainian Territorial Defence). After Kushnaryov's death, the “Party of Regions” became absolutely dominated by the Donetsk people, which led to its degeneration from the “Party of Regions” into the “Party of the Donetsk Clan”.

As a result, they came to power and began to flirt with the Ukrainian electorate, trying not to provoke a “split of the country”. They gave positions in humanitarian policy to people from western Ukraine. The main debate of 2011-2012 revolved around the Russophile Minister of Science and Education Tabachnik. For a couple of years the students revolted against him and the “Regionals” used him as a main scarecrow, thinking that while the students are protesting against the Minister of Education, they can quietly make money from the economy and the government budget. As a result, the pro-Ukrainian students acquired an excellent activism infrastructure and cadres for holding rallies, which played its role on the Maidan.

The Russian language did not become a state language. It was equalized in rights with the Ukrainian language in some regions, but it was not fixed in the Constitution, it was just a law. At the same time, official documents could be in Russian, but e.g. entering universities was only possible based on the high school finals, which necessarily included only the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian literature. For me, who knew Bulgakov and, let's say, Dostoyevsky very well, this would not have helped in any way to get a state-financed place at the university. I had to study Shevchenko. In the end, the scholarship slots were more likely to go to people from western Ukraine. Or residents of southeastern Ukraine, who had properly indoctrinated themselves with toxic (I didn't skip classes for nothing, damn it) Ukrainian culture. Thus, there was an institutionalized oppression of Russian college applicants.

Did the increased “anti-Russianness” of Kiev cause the people to reach an understanding that they wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, or was it primarily about greater autonomy from Kiev?

Well, the “Party of Regions” did not give the Russians anything they had promised. They simply stopped publicly cultivating the Holodomor and other anti-Russian nonsense. At the same time, it continued in the depths of the backrooms and public organizations, and no one closed the Holodomor Museum. They simply stopped publicly annoying Russians.

The “Party of Regions”, on the contrary, harmed Russians by trying to completely monopolize the Russian agenda. The pro-Russian policy (expressed in the desire to receive loans from the Russian Federation and trade with it profitably, having political autonomy) was supposed to be expressed exclusively by the “Regionals”. That is why, for example, they crushed the Russian nationalist party that sat on the Odessa City Council, called “Rodina”, in the fall of 2013. As far as I know, the “Regionals” also tried to crush the Crimean structures that would become the basis of the resistance in February and March 2014.

So, the “Regionals” purged the entire pro-Russian field (except for Crimea, which they simply couldn’t) and established a poisonous regime aimed at accumulating all capital, including pressure on small and medium-sized businesses. The security forces, bureaucrats, and thugs were merged. The “Donetsk Clan” was hated. Yanukovych's bank, the All-Ukrainian Development Bank, had a near monopoly on lending to the entire defense industry, infrastructure, and other state enterprises. At the time it seemed that the Yanukovych regime was the apotheosis of a Ukrainian nightmare.

That's when the Maidan broke out. And it turned out that Yanukovych, of course, is a bastard, but there are worse things.

So, when the Maidan broke out, there were objective reasons not related to the geopolitical vector of the country's development — for example, the protest of small and medium businesses against the "Donetsk Clan’s" racket — it turned out (very suddenly for the Ukrainian average citizen, yeah) that any protest against the supposedly “pro-Russian” Yanukovych was infiltrated by radicals from the Ukrainian nationalists. They were used first as provocateurs and then as shock troops against law enforcement.

The result was Anti-Maidan, the rather pathetic brainchild of the amorphous “Party of Regions,” its attempt to suppress the western Ukrainian political movement with a southeastern one. Of course, the Anti-Maidan was bankrupt ideologically, aesthetically, there were no people's tribunes — they lacked all that their opponents had, albeit in a very perverted form of a mixture of Ukrainian nationalism and Euro-oriented liberals.

Of course the Anti-Maidan lost, the security forces lost (never having received an order to disperse the Maidan), Yanukovych lost and fled. Immediately afterwards, the “Regionals” tried to repeat 2004 and assemble a congress of regional deputies in Kharkov. But Kushnaryov had already been dead for seven years, and the mendacious “pro-Russian” politicians never managed to create a replacement for him, because they were afraid of strong personalities. In the end, they lost.

And then, a big shift occurred…

Yes. On February 23 2014, large-scale demonstrations occurred in Sevastopol, Simferopol, and Odessa, where people came out with Russian flags. In Crimea, this led to the proclamation of popular governors and an uprising. This would then be called the “Russian Spring”. On March 1, similar actions would take place in all other regions of Novorossiya.

Between February 23 and March 1, the most important change happened — the appearance of the Russian army in Crimea. It would completely destroy the Overton Window: earlier, Russians in Ukraine could not dream of changing the borders, because they did not feel that Russia was ready to act. Because of this, politics revolved around political demands for regional rights and the Russian language — separating from Ukraine was too radical an idea because people did not believe in Russia's willingness to break the administrative borders. And so they instead cared about the improvement of their own, as they thought, country.

In fact, practice would show that they were living in a concentration camp. However, demands to change Ukraine were predominant before the events in Crimea. As soon as Russia showed its will to change the 1991 borders, eliminate the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the XX century and ensure the unity of the Russian nation, the main demand of the protesters was the secession of at least Novorossiya from Ukraine and its inclusion into Russia.

Nowadays we associate Novorossiya with a certain political ideology, a certain aesthetic. It is distinct from pure irredentism or pure identity. How and when did that happen?

It was only after the Russian troops had not kept going, after the massacre in Odessa and after the fighting in Slavyansk had begun, after a flood of volunteers with different ideological preferences had come, that the ideas of a “New Russia”⁵ (or “Other Russia,” in reference to Limonov) began to emerge. A passionate, politically engaged, Russian Frontier with brave armed Russian men. This idea then gave birth to a number of political figures, people's tribunes of the present. But this was already a consequence of the militarization and mobilization of passionate, Russian-oriented elements. As they left Donbass due to personnel decisions and ceasefires, the situation stabilized again and the overwhelming idea became the normalization of life, which only Russia could provide. For eight years, people had dreamed of becoming the most ordinary quiet (and perhaps even boring) working-class region of Russia. Like neighboring Rostov, for example.

More than by hundreds of videos of explosions and firefights, my mother was shocked by a video of some Ukrainian POW who said he didn't know who Lenin was or that there was a Revolution in 1917. Tell us a little about school education in Ukraine.

I personally had a good school education in Ukraine. I checked out these rumors that there is no information about Lenin in the school textbooks. But no, there is a lot, because Lenin is an enemy. The Ukrainians write about the Civil War in some detail, focusing on what the Russians call Southwest Russia. They talk about the Bolsheviks, about Denikin and the Armed Forces of South Russia, they talk about the “Kyyyyiv tragedy” - when the White Guard entered Kiev right after the troops of the UNR and drove them back 30 kilometers. All this is talked about, even if it is assessed from the Ukrainian point of view.

The Soviet period is given a lot of attention, because there, in fact, the Ukrainian statehood was created. Well, for example the creation of reservoirs, the cascade of Dnieper hydroelectric power stations, they criticize from the position of some rural eco-activism, they say that good arable land was flooded. This is nonsense, how would the Dnieper towns live without these reservoirs?

With the Ukrainian language and literature it’s more complicated. Something more or less interesting in literature was taught only in the 11th grade, when we studied the Modernists. Before that, it was pure chthonic nonsense and anti-Dostoevsky. The worst thing was - “Хіба ревуть воли, як ясла повні?” (“Do bulls roar, if the troughs are full?”). It’s a novel about how some village bandit wanted to rob the landowner, but in the end did not steal anything, but killed a simple watchman. And he eventually comes to the realization that he was right to do so, because this stupid crime of his is due to social oppression.

Well, I was lucky to study exclusively in Russian-speaking schools, our math, geography, physics and other lessons were in Russian. How to teach chemistry in Ukrainian, in which the periodic table of Mendeleev is translated into some Russian-English-Latin duckspeak — I personally can not imagine.

Donetsk is associated with death and destruction. Before the war, it was associated with coal miners. It's supposed to be a sullen place, but the people from Donetsk always seemed to me much more cheerful and lively than other Russians. Is that still true?

Well, Donbass is not just miners, but also metallurgists and railroad workers. These are the three main professions that form the identity of the region. During the 1990s, there were also gangsters. But during the 00s and the first years of the 10s there was a lot of post-industrialization, all kinds of bankers, businessmen and so on. Some kind of urban culture was starting to emerge.

And then the war happened and people were stressed, which exhausted them, but made them somehow more vital. The pre-war Donetsk was all about showing off, but when the war began the people became simpler and livelier.

This liveliness gradually faded in the furnace of a protracted war, people sometimes did not get paid for 10 months, for example, but the Donbass remained a very pluralistic place, ready to give shelter to those who agreed to share with the Donbass way of life, to settle here. Although there were some rather nasty exceptions in the form of a spiteful attitude toward militiamen from other regions.

But, in general, yes, liveliness is quite a characteristic trait of those who face great risks. It is quite natural, a Russian fatum so to speak, which after reflection by the people turns into a desire to live in the here and now.

To be continued…

1. A coalition of Russian Telegram channels and real life activists & soldiers who provide training, material support and OSINT to the Donbass militias and the Russian Armed Forces. They don’t disclose what the abbreviation means.

2. Competitions, called “Olympiads”, are a very common occurrence in the post-Soviet school system. Students compete in various subjects and may receive some preferential treatment or benefits with college applications if they are successful at these.

3. 2008 movie about Alexander Kolchak, a vice admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy and leader of the anti-communist White movement during the Russian Civil War.

4. A nationalist Russian online journal founded by the late Yegor Prosvirnin. It was the first right-wing “new media” in Russia and gained a huge cult following back in the day.

5. Literal translation of “Novorossiya”.