Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

While the Crimea operation produced few casualties, thousands have died since Moscow supported unrest in the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine, along the land border with Russia. Consisting of the provinces of Donetsk (pre-conflict population 4.4 million) and Luhansk (2.2m), the Donbas hosted a high concentration of the country’s mining and metallurgy and was the political base of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Separatist ‘people’s republics’, with material and moral support from Russia, were declared in both pieces of the Donbas in April 2014. A Ukrainian military operation to quell the rebellion began that spring and within months had forced a rebel retreat. Late that summer, regular Russian units – far better equipped and trained than their Donbas separatist comrades – intervened directly. The resulting setback for Ukrainian forces produced negotiations that led to a ceasefire deal, signed in Minsk, Belarus, on 5 September. It broke down within weeks. A second and more robust pact was signed on 12 February 2015, again in Minsk, following another punishing Russian intervention.

The crumbling of the first of the two Minsk agreements resulted in large part from the battle for control of the airport of the city of Donetsk, the provincial capital. This event serves as a powerful reminder of the destructive forces at work. Located ten kilometres northwest of central Donetsk, the facility was officially called Sergei Prokofiev International Airport, in honour of the world-renowned composer, a native of Donetsk province. Prokofiev was born there when it was part of the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, but lived and worked from 1936 until his death in 1953 in the USSR, specifically in what is now Russia.[1] While he identified as an ethnic Russian, Prokofiev inserted into his works motifs from the Ukrainian folk songs he had heard as a child. The airfield, first constructed by Soviet engineers in the 1940s, was renovated at great cost in 2011–12 as part of the preparations for the European football championship of 2012, co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland. Shiny and modern, the passenger terminal seemed to reflect the relative prosperity the Ukrainian industrial heartland had come to enjoy, as well as the country’s increased international standing.

On 26 May 2014, insurgents loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) seized the airport. By the next evening, the Ukrainian military and pro-government militias had wrested back control. In the months that followed, they used the now-inoperative airport as a base to shell Donetsk city, the rebel stronghold. Accordingly, separatist forces began in late September to try to reverse their earlier defeat. In stages, this monument to inter-ethnic cooperation and the promise of globalisation was demolished. One by one, the air-traffic control tower, the new and old terminals, hangars, fuel-storage tanks, equipment sheds and a hotel were reduced to rubble or to charred hulks. The facility finally fell to the separatists in January 2015, by which time it looked like Second World War-era Stalingrad and was littered with broken glass, booby traps and burned-out vehicles. Sporadic fighting has continued around the defunct airport.

The tragedy of the grinding siege of the Sergei Prokofiev International Airport is that around 700 human beings died over a superfluous asset. The DNR had no air force, and in any event artillery rendered the runways useless during the first round of fighting. Ukrainian ground forces could have fired at the city, if they had so wished, from more readily defensible wooded areas nearby. The September truce had called for the airport to be ceded to the rebels. But Ukrainian soldiers remained encamped there in violation of the terms. They stayed because the glare of the television cameras made retreat to safety politically unattractive for their commanders and the leadership in Kyiv. On national television, these troops were lionised as ‘cyborgs’, super-human fighting machines prepared to battle to the death, as if the airport were a latter-day Alamo. Unlike the Alamo in Texas, however, this site had no military value to speak of. And, unlike the Mexicans who besieged the Alamo in 1836, the rebels here allowed the Ukrainian defenders to rotate in and out for several months, subject to inspection.[2]