To this day, we still don’t know the real circumstances behind the emergence of “Novorossiya”. This independent “new Russian state”, which was projected to hold sway from the breakaway state of Transnistria to the Russian border city of Belgorod, stalled amidst the increasingly violent conflict that began in southeast Ukraine after February 2014. As Russia annexed Crimea, the unrecognised “Peoples’ Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk (DNR and LNR) became Russian protectorates — a trifle in comparison to what the supporters of “Novorossiya” were hoping for. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, de-facto head of the Donetsk People's Republic. Image still: CC via YouTube. The “heroes of Novorossiya”, the people behind the initial moves, have met with different fates. In Luhansk, the older field commanders (Alexei Mozgovoi, Evgeny Ishchenko, Pavel Dremov and Aleksandr Bednov) largely despised the LNR leadership. They are now all dead. Meanwhile, the “legends” of the DNR, most of them in their early 30s, have made successful careers in Donetsk (Pavel Gubarev, Mikhail Tolstykh, Arseny Pavlov, Igor Khakimzyanov), and maintain good relations with Aleksandr Zakharchenko, the self-declared head of the “republic”. This could be the calm before the storm. As the Minsk peace process drags on, influential commander of the Vostok battalion Aleksandr Khodakovsky is openly confronting Zakharchenko in the DNR, and accuses Russia of abandoning him.
The initial ringleaders of the separatist movement (Igor Girkin, Igor Bezler, and Vyacheslav Ponomarev) are out of a job, and spend most of their time arguing on social media. Meanwhile, the Russian citizens who influenced the “Russian Spring” (Aleksandr Borodai, Dmitry Steshin, Aleksandr Zaldostanov) remain at the forefront of Russian imperial politics.
Igor Girkin (Strelkov)
The nationalist Igor Girkin, DNR de-facto minister of defence between May and August 2014, was one of the key figures in the Donbas separatist movement. His operation to seize the city of Slovyansk kicked off the conflict in earnest, in a region that was already in chaos.
