LUHANSKA STATION, Ukraine – People pass through a bare checkpoint, dragging suitcases on wheels on the muddy sidewalk, crossing one of the biggest political divisions in Europe today.
In the pale winter sun on Sunday afternoon, 17-year-old Gleb Egorov made his way to Ukraine after crossing a half-mile buffer zone and then crossing a footbridge over a ravine. Artillery thunders in the distance.
Behind him was a Russian-backed separatist enclave known as the Luhansk People’s Republic, from which he said he was fleeing to avoid the military. He barely escaped, he said, after an eight-hour interrogation from the separatist end of the crossing and would never return.
“There is no future for me,” he said. “They send boys to the front and don’t think about it if they die.”
For years, the Luhansk People’s Republic and its breakaway Ukrainian enclave, the Donetsk People’s Republic, have been largely ignored. They were just two strange little political subjects, Stalinist returns with a domestic policy too esoteric to deserve much attention from the outside world.
But now that Europe’s biggest war in decades may depend on them, sometimes Luhansk and Donetsk seem to be all that one thinks.
As Ukraine is surrounded by Russian forces, Western governments warn that Moscow could use the two Russian-backed republics as a stage for a “false flag” attack on ethnic Russian civilians – and then cite it as an excuse to storm the border. .
The division between these mini-states and Ukraine is reminiscent of the Berlin Wall, a division that stems not from language or ethnicity but from Cold War-style politics. On one side of the 250-kilometer front line is Ukraine, a western-looking nation that seeks to integrate with European democracies. On the other hand, about 3.5 million people live in virtual police states.
The concern is that these areas will become an environment for disaster, whether staged or accidental, which could lead to much greater violence. A stray projectile, for example, can hit a residential building or there could be a terrorist attack on fleeing refugees. Whatever the situation, Ukraine will be blamed and Russia will have a pretext to invade.
Russia, despite repeated accusations from the West, says it has no intention of invading, but simply wants its legitimate geopolitical interests to be respected.
On Sunday evening, the Ukrainian military issued a statement saying Russian-backed separatists in the Luhansk region opened heavy artillery fire on their own capital “in order to blame the Ukrainian military”.
“In the absence of any aggressive action by Ukrainian defenders, the occupiers themselves are blowing up infrastructure in the occupied territories and shelling cities chaotically,” the statement said. Russian news agencies report artillery strikes in the area. There are no immediate reports of casualties.
Although attacking one’s own country to blame an enemy may seem particularly sinister, this will not be the first time in the eight-year history of the two enclaves.
Analysts suspect that many violent events are false flag attacks. And domestic violence by Russian security services or local officials has been an integral part of the republic’s history for years, according to Ukrainian intelligence and public statements by comrades of some of those killed.
In recent days, both countries on the eastern Ukrainian front have been making ominous predictions of an event with mass casualties somewhere in the mining and agricultural villages – and blaming each other, even before it happened.
“The Russian army and special services are preparing a terrorist attack, the victims of which must be civilians,” Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander Valery Zaluzhny warned in a statement over the weekend. “The enemy is trying to use this as an excuse to introduce the Russian army as ‘peacekeepers.'”
On Sunday, Ukraine’s interior ministry issued a statement saying the Donetsk People’s Republic’s Ministry of Information is appointing film crews to sites for alleged impending Ukrainian drone strikes. “The aim of such actions is to demonize the Ukrainian military,” the statement said.
The Luhansk People’s Republic, meanwhile, said its security service – known as the MGB, a version of the name used by the KGB in the Soviet Union – found a radio-controlled car bomb on the route of buses carrying evacuees. The claim cannot be verified independently.
Rising tensions, the people’s republics have said they plan to evacuate 700,000 women and children because the Ukrainian army is planning an attack. Western governments have scoffed at the idea that Ukraine will launch an attack just as Russia has amassed, according to the latest US estimates, 190,000 troops near its borders.
Residents of separatist enclaves evacuating to Russia had radically different views on escalating violence on the front lines, accusing Ukraine of firing artillery at cities on their side.
“Ukrainian soldiers are only six miles away from us and we can hear them very well,” said Lyudmila N. Zueva, 63, when she entered Russia at the Matveev Kurgan border crossing over the weekend.
The enclaves seceded in 2014, and once they did, entering these regions deep in Eastern Europe meant traveling to a kingdom seemingly separate from the modern world. Pontoon bridges are built up to blown up highways that follow the route of half-abandoned cities and scattered massifs of destroyed factories. No commercial aircraft can be seen from above. The flights ended in 2014 after a civilian plane was shot down.
What is happening in the republics is something like a black box.
Gaining access for international journalists can be a challenge. And only one international group, a monitoring mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe with a weak mandate, has observers on the ground.
But some information has emerged.
The military and civilian leadership is swinging between Russian citizens suspected of links to intelligence agencies and local Ukrainians with modest CVs, and this has been overcome by a series of violent purges. At various times, senior positions have been held by the owner of a school for dog behavior, a man who introduced himself as Santa in a mall, a Ponzi scheme operator and a well-known organized crime boss.
As they were removed and replaced, separatist leaders blamed the Ukrainian military for killings and ambushes that officials in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, said were entirely domestic.
Perhaps the most notorious assassination is that of the President of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, who died in a restaurant bombing in 2018 that pinned each other to the other.
But other bloody episodes have occurred before that, including one in which several separatist paramilitary commanders and their supporters were killed in an ambush in 2015. The victim of the attack was a man named Alexei B. Mozgovoy, a pro-Russian military leader nicknamed “Brain.” “, Whose five bodyguards proved to be of no use. Mr Mozgovoy’s spokesman was also killed.
One of his comrades-in-arms, Pavel L. Dromov, made a video address to Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing the pro-Russian country of interpersonal violence.
“Is that why we intervened? Is that why we died? ”He asked.
Mr. Dromov was soon killed. The Luhansk People’s Republic accused the Ukrainian special forces.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine estimates that 200 people were killed in the purge and said that the Russian military intelligence GRU organized the attacks.
Enclave politics is a mixture of Russian imperialism and nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Sickle and hammer flags are often waved. In government offices, officials hung portraits of Stalin and Orthodox Christian icons.
“When it all started then, I had the feeling that I was not connected to reality,” said Maria Paseka, who left the Luhansk People’s Republic and moved to the government-controlled country last August. “The puzzle doesn’t fit. I had the feeling that everyone around me had been told something I didn’t know about. “
In Ukraine, Ms. Paseka acknowledged, “there are things to improve, such as government, wages, prices, living standards. But it is clear to me where I live now and that we are moving to Europe without going back to prehistoric times with Russia.
Last week’s order by the new leader of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, to evacuate hundreds of thousands of women and children was seen as a particularly ominous signal.
Mr Pushilin, who intervened after Mr Zakharchenko’s assassination, said he expected a Ukrainian attack that would kill civilians.
As thousands of people boarded buses and evacuated to Russia, some took the opportunity to flee west, crossing into Ukraine through the only checkpoint in operation: a pedestrian bridge and a nearly mile-long section of sidewalk here where it is usually concluded. a ceasefire observed to allow the passage of civilians.
On Saturday, 33-year-old Natalia Kasheeva, a lawyer, rolled a yellow suitcase for Day-Glo as she took her two daughters, whom she sent to their grandparents to escape the violence.
“You feel the pressure,” she said of life in the Luhansk People’s Republic.
Mr. Egorov, who left to avoid the current, with his green eyes narrowing in the late afternoon, said he had lived with his grandfather, but would now live with his mother in Kiev. He said he saw exactly what he called the leadership’s false, communist revival policy.
“No one I know,” he said, “wants to fight for the Luhansk People’s Republic.”
Maria Varenikova contributed to reports from Kiev, Ukraine and Ivan Nechepurenko from the border checkpoint Matveev Kurgan in Russia.