Excerpt from the book The Vory by Mark Galeotti (2018)
The first criminal war: taking Crimea
Is Crimea the first conquest in history conducted by gangsters working for a state?
- A question I was asked at a NATO workshop, 2015
The answer to the above question, as is so often the case when academics are asked seemingly simple questions, is complex. It is hardly novel for gangsters to be used in times of war, but, unusually in this case, the criminals were combatants, not just collaborators, and they were not merely unleashed against an enemy like eighteenth-century privateers – pirates given sanction so long as they attacked the other side – but integrated into the invader’s forces. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it did so not only with its infamous ‘little green men’ – special forces without any insignia – but also with criminals. To the gangsters, this was not about geopolitics, less yet about redressing what Putin called the ‘outrageous historical injustice’ that occurred when the Crimean peninsula was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, it was about business opportunities.
From the first, Moscow’s campaign to wrest Crimea from Kiev depended on an alliance with local underworld interests. Sergei Aksyonov, the premier of the new Crimean region, is alleged to have had a vor past, having gone by the nickname of ‘Goblin’ back when he was a member of the Salem organised crime group in the 1990s. Aksyonov rejects all claims of such links as being part of a slander campaign initiated by political opponents, but the one time he brought a defamation action against someone who made these allegations, the Appeals Court dismissed the case as groundless.
Nonetheless, the respective trajectories of both Aksyonov and the Salem tell us something about Crimea’s own development, and the role the vory could play in Russia’s near-bloodless seizure of the peninsula. ... Even before the collapse of the USSR at the end of 1991, Crimea had become a haven for smuggling, black marketeering and a lucrative array of embezzlement schemes centring on the region’s health spas and holiday resorts. As independent Ukraine struggled in the early 1990s both with economic crisis and the near-collapse of its law enforcement structures, organised crime assumed an increasingly visible and violent form. Simferopol was fought over by two rival gangs, the Bashmaki (‘Shoes’) and the Salem. They were at once entrepreneurs and predators, forcing local businesses to pay tribute and sell their goods on pain of arson, beatings and worse. [...]
This was an inherently unstable situation: not only was there pressure from political and business elites for the police to reassert their authority, but the gang war was beginning to prevent either side from actually turning a profit. The conflict escalated until a paroxysm of murder and violence in 1996 left both gangs on their knees. It also opened a window of opportunity for Gennady Moskal, the Crimean police chief between 1997 and 2000, to launch a crackdown on overt gangsterism. Crimea became a more peaceful place, but claims that the gangs were finally broken were a convenient fiction.‘Alfrid’, a grizzled Tatar veteran of the 1990s turf wars, claimed that ‘the punks just grew up, they realised wars were bad for business and there was a lot more money to be made in business. Moskal just helped them make the jump.’ The more senior and less blatantly thuggish leaders – including one brigadir, known as ‘Goblin’ – instead took their money and their connections and went (semi-)legitimate, in business and politics. Indeed, usually they were involved in both, leveraging their continued, although less overt, criminal alliances to further their political and economic ends. In this respect, Crimea’s vory followed much the same pattern as in Russia.
By the 2000s, these gangster-businessmen were increasingly dominant within Crimea. Kiev appeared to have little interest in bringing good governance and economic prosperity to this peninsula of ethnic Russians, and this gave the local elites both free rein and also a perverse legitimacy.
Crimea regarded itself as neglected by, and separate from, the political mainstream. In this political, economic and social vacuum, the new mafia–business–political empires could thrive. As one US embassy cable in 2006 put it, these ‘Crimean criminals were fundamentally different than in the 1990s: then, they were sportsuit-wearing, pistol-wielding “bandits” who gave Crimea a reputation as the “Ukrainian Sicily” and ended up in jail, shot, or going to ground; now they had moved into mainly above-board businesses, as well as local government.’ It added that ‘dozens of figures with known criminal backgrounds were elected to local office in the March 26 elections’. Viktor Shemchuk, former chief prosecutor of the region, recalled that ‘every government level of Crimea was criminalised. It was far from unusual that a parliamentary session in Crimea would start with a minute of silence honouring one of their murdered “brothers”.’
The key commodities were control of businesses and, increasingly, land. Some of the former leaders of the Bashmaki, for example, were accused of trying to take over SC Tavriya Simferopol, Crimea’s main football club, largely for the properties it owned. More generally, as prices rose – especially as Tatars, displaced from their Crimean homelands under the Soviets, began to return home – the gangster-businessmen and their allies within the corrupt local bureaucracy sought to snap up real estate and construction projects to take advantage of this market.
Although Crimea was part of Ukraine, many of the most lucrative criminal businesses, such as trafficking narcotics and counterfeit or untaxed cigarettes, depended on relationships with the Russian criminal networks. It helped that Russia’s Black Sea Fleet still had its base at Sevastopol in Crimea under a treaty with Kiev, and that so many navy veterans had retired locally: there was common civilian and military traffic back and forth. When the Ukrainian state began to totter as President Yanukovych struggled with the Maidan protesters, Moscow was able to begin to reach out to potential allies in Crimea through underworld channels. According to a conversation with a Russian police officer, representatives from Solntsevo had visited Crimea for talks with local vory even before 4 February 2014, when Crimea’s presidium, or governing council, considered a referendum on its status. The Muscovites came not just to feel out the scope for further criminal business, but also to gauge the mood of the local underworld.
Aksyonov, head of the Russian Unity party, seemed an ideal choice as a Kremlin figurehead. Even though he had been elected to the regional parliament in 2010 with just 4 per cent of the vote, he was ambitious, ruthless and alleged to be closely connected with both political and criminal power-brokers on the peninsula.
When Moscow moved to seize Crimea on the morning of 27 February, it deployed the ‘little green men’, some local police who solidly supported the coup, and also thugs in mismatched fatigues and red armbands, nonetheless often clutching brand new assault rifles.
These ‘self-defence forces’ spent as much time occupying businesses – including a car dealership owned by a partner of Ukraine’s next president, Petro Poroshenko – and throwing their weight around on street corners as they did actually securing strategic locations. While some were veterans and volunteers, many were the footsoldiers of the peninsula’s crime gangs [including Bashmaki and the descendants of Salem], who had temporarily put their rivalries aside to pull Crimea out of Ukraine.
The new elite is thus a triumvirate of Moscow appointees, local politicians and gangsters made good. And they did indeed make good, quickly moving to skim funds from the sums Moscow provided to start developing the peninsula, and simply expropriating properties owned by the Ukrainian government and its allies. In theory, these properties were sold at auction to raise more development funds, but often in practice the ‘auctions’ were clearly rigged sweetheart deals. ‘Alfrid’, for example, made no bones about the fact that he was taking many of his liquid assets, and using the cash to snap up properties. ‘This is like privatisation in the 1990s,’ he said, ‘one of those chances in life when you can make a fortune if you move fast and know what you’re doing.’ For ‘Alfrid’, in his sixties, this was his ‘pension plan’.
Meanwhile, Sevastopol could begin to challenge the Ukrainian port of Odessa as a smuggling hub. Historically, Odessa had handled the lion’s share of not just Ukrainian but also Russian smuggling across (and very occasionally beneath) the Black Sea. Whether or not Sevastopol ever could emerge as a credible rival, especially in light of Western sanctions, is in a way irrelevant: the very possibility that it might do so forced Odessa’s godfathers to lower the ‘tax’ they levy on criminal traffic through the port, an example of black-market economics at its most basic.
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'Bad Decision All Around': US Depleted Uranium Move in Ukraine Gets Scorched by Ex-Pentagon Brass
️Fasten your seatbelts: the U.S. has cranked up its recklessness by shipping depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine. Astonishingly, it's not just the Kremlin sounding the alarm—retired U.S. military officials are appalled.
Retired Lt. Colonel Earl Rasmussen, with two decades of U.S. Army experience, minces no words: "This is a sign of desperation." What does this desperation mean in tangible terms? Depleted uranium rounds do more than shred armoured vehicles; they inject radioactive material into the very soil. The result? A radioactive wasteland that's a ticking time bomb for cancer rates.
@DDGeopolitics
☣ Statement by the Chief of the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection troops of the Russian Federation Armed Forces Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov (March 7, 2022)
