Dear Readers:
Today we continue translating/summarizing this piece from RIA News, authored by reporter Andrei Veselov, who travelled to the Donbass to interview these interesting men in person. To find out who they are, and why they fight.
Limonovite youth radicalized by Russia’s Troubles
As mentioned yesterday, this particular Battalion has no particular nickname, it is just called “Prilepin’s Battalion”. Yesterday we met its leader, Major Zakhar Prilepin. Given his radicalization in the 1990’s and his membership in the Limonovite fraction (the National Bolshevik Party, which is not a legally registered political party in Russia), it is not all that surprising that Prilepin would end up fighting as a volunteer for the Donetsk Separatists. After all, Sensei Limonov instructed his disciples well in the art of rumbles and street-fighting. Which is a good, if not adequate, preparation for actual war. Limonovites had [I speak of them in the past tense] a mixed ideology, combining Communism/Stalinism, a nostalgia for the Soviet Union, and (primarily) an ardent Russian patriotism. Their opponents have called them Nationalists, anti-Semites, and worse. But the real Russian nationalists are actually nothing like the Limonovites: They are racists, Great Russian chauvinists, and would never be caught dead with a hammer-and-sickle insignia.
Anyhow, if Tolstoy were still alive and writing the story of this brutal war, he would say that all of Prilepin’s previous history led him to his Destiny in the Donbass. What is more surprising is that the literary circles that Zakhar frequented in Russia, expected something different from him. As Prilepin mentioned to the interviewer: Once he became a novelist and poet, an intellectual, the Russian Liberal literati somehow expected him to adopt their political views. Which tend to coincide with the geo-political talking points of Washington D.C. Prilepin pointed out the irony of these kreakles, who pretend to be pacifists, but actually support the brutalities of the other warring side: Kiev. Just as previously, they tended to support the Chechen jihadists against Russia, whilst masquerading as peaceniks! It’s one thing to take a side, quite another to be a flaming hypocrite.
The Prilepin Battalion is quartered in the former “Prague” hotel, in the very center of the city of Donetsk. Both HQ and barracks are all here. One hundred kilometers away is the actual front line, where the two warring sides interface. On the other side of the front stands the enemy: Ukrainian marines.
Foma
Prilepin Battalion maintains a regular rotation, each soldier spends a few days on the front line, and then is rotated back to safer ground. Battalion Commander is Sergei Fomchenkov, a Russian with the call-sign “Foma”. It is noted that both Foma and Prilepin, being volunteers from Russia, are the exceptions — most of the men serving here are locals hailing from Donetsk/Luhansk.
Commander Sergei Fomchenkov
“Foma” has been here since the very beginning of the conflict, starting in the artillery section of the Second Brigade in Luhansk. [It should be noted that the war between the Ukrainian army and the Seps is primarily an artillery, not a tank war, although there have been tanks, as well.]
Foma remarks that he and Prilepin have known each other for around 20 years. Way back in 1999 Foma took part in an “action” in Crimea, then still under Ukrainian jurisdiction: “We climbed up the tower of the Sailors Club and hung a banner reading Sebastopol is a Russian City! We chanted: Sebastopol! Crimea! Russia! We built barricades. The Ukrainian Special Forces drove us out of that tower and threw us in jail. We paid for that action with 6 months in prison.”
Crash-Top
Next we meet the Head of HQ, Alexander Kreshtop, whose name in English sounds like Crash-Top. That’s his real name, though, not a call-sign!
Crash-Top stands guard
Kreshtop is a local born and bred, from Donbass. He is the poster-child of the primarily working class Donbass Rebel: Formerly a miner, a factory worker, a mechanic. Not a Russian citizen, not a political person, just an ordinary guy who went to war to save his town from artillery barrages. If he were on the other side of this conflict, then Hollywood would make a movie about him, because his story precisely fits their propaganda mold. It’s just that he plays for the “wrong” team, in their view.
Kreshtop decided to go to war when he saw ordinary people, including children, dying at the hands of the Ukrainian artillery: “My motivation is quite simple: When I saw children dying. I have kids myself, and I worry about them a lot.”
[Kreshtop is not exaggerating. The Ukrainian Federalists wantonly, egregiously, without any precision, and without any concern for human life, have shelled, and continue to shell, the cities and towns of Donbass during their so-called “Anti-Terrorist” operation. In fact, one of the main strategic goals of the Rebel armies is to widen the protective perimeter around residential areas.]
Ukrainians shelled Donbass apartment blocks
According to Kreshtop, the Donbass conflict did not spring up overnight. It had been brewing for a long time. [yalensis: Having immediate political roots in the East-West division of the nation along political lines, e.g., Orange Parties in the West versus Party of the Regions in the East.]
The repressions against ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, “Donbasso-phobia,” in Kreshtop’s words, “is not a made up thing, it’s a real thing. By nationality I am a Russian. I was offended when I received my first passport, at the age of 16. I filled out the form, I wrote everywhere on it that I am an ethnic Russian, then they handed me a passport saying that I am a Ukrainian.” Another insulting incident struck Kreshtop as he was growing up: “After [Orange Party] President Viktor Yushchenko was elected [in a very tight and contested election in 2004], the Ukrainians demonstratively patrolled the Donbass region, bringing in police from the Western provinces. They strutted about the center of the city with their dogs, and told us right to our faces: Donetsk is a bandit city, and you are all bandits.”
[to be continued]
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Awful Avalanche 