Gubarev: "people's governor" without a portfolio and with his wife arrested
Until 2014, Pavel Gubarev was not a remarkable figure. He owned a small advertising agency that worked with the Party of Regions, and did not disdain to act as Santa Claus at New Year's corporate parties. In his memoirs , he described the political line of his biography: a Russian nationalist circle in a student dormitory, participation in RNE training camps in Russia, where he played rugby in the Khokhly team, deputy in the district council from the pro-Russian party. But it is unlikely that all these carnival details made him a significant figure at the local level, creating rather a reputation as a freak.
Everything changed in the spring of 2014. During the pro-Russian riots in Donetsk, Gubarev emerged as a rally leader, led the seizure of administrative buildings, and was elected "people's governor." Analysts emphasized his close connection with the business group of the Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who financed the rise to power in Donetsk of pro-Russian puppets through his security chief Igor Strelkov-Girkin on the instructions of the Kremlin. His wife Ekaterina Gubareva met a group of Strelkov's militants at the Ukrainian border, who then captured Slavyansk. Subsequently, Strelkov exchanged Gubarev, who was arrested by the SBU, for officers of the Ukrainian Alpha special forces.
But Gubarev's further career did not work out. Together with Ekaterina, in October 2014, he created the Free Donbass movement, which claimed power in the DPR. However, the activity of the conflicted Gubarev, who began to criticize the order in Novorossiya, did not please the heads of the DPR – first Alexander Zakharchenko, then his successor Denis Pushilin, as well as the Kremlin curators. At the end of 2014, an attempt was made on Gubarev by “unidentified persons”. In 2015, Gubarev was not allowed to take control of the city of Yasinovataya, in 2018, when he tried to run for the election of the head of the “DPR”, he was completely squeezed out of the “republic”, and his party “Free Donbass” was subjected to a raider seizure from side of Pushilin's people. Ekaterina, a former member of the local "parliament", retained her position in local politics.
The couple perceived February 2022 as a second chance: Gubarev left to fight , but his wife suddenly surfaced in the occupation administration of the Kherson region, where she undertook to oversee social issues. Obviously, financial and “humanitarian” aid began to pass through her hands, with which the Russian authorities tried to buy the loyalty of the local population. The place was profitable, and the results were predictable: soon after the Russian troops left Kherson, Russian security forces arrested Gubareva, accusing her of embezzling 60 million rubles. Where the money went remains unclear. The fate of Gubareva herself also looks vague: there are reports that she is under house arrest, Ekaterina herself refutes this.
The place was profitable, and the results were predictable: Gubareva was arrested and accused of embezzling a large amount of money
Another thing is clear: the Gubarevs once again did not fit into the Russian system, for the establishment of which they fought so hard in Ukraine. The rise of Gubarev in 2014 was due to the chaos in which the Donbass plunged, as well as the activity of “private-state” partnerships such as the Malofeev-Strelkov ligament, to which the topic of “Novorossiya” was initially farmed out. And more serious patrons (unlike the same head of the "DPR" Denis Pushilin, who made the necessary contacts both in the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation and in United Russia), the Gubarevs did not acquire. After the annexation of Donbass and its inclusion in the all-Russian “vertical of power”, there was no place left for such exotic characters for bureaucratic Russia.
"Fathers of the DPR" deprived of parental rights
No less indicative is the fate of another pro-Russian activist during the "Russian spring" Andrey Purgin. It was he who back in 2005 became a co-founder of the Donetsk Republic organization , which promoted the ideas of Donbass separatism as a response to the victory of the Orange Revolution. Purgin's organizations were patronized by local authorities, represented by the Party of Regions, as well as Moscow curators. Activists of the "Donetsk Republic" were trained in the camps of the Eurasian movement of Alexander Dugin and received funding through this line. Criminal cases brought against the separatists under Yushchenko were quietly dropped after Yanukovych came to power. Already in 2012, Purgin's associates were distributing passports for the future "Donetsk Republic".
In 2014, Purgin's entire previous biography was supposed to provide him with the first roles in the "DPR". Indeed, at first he became the head of the first convocation of the "DNR parliament", but then he fully repeated the fate of Gubarev – the gradual removal from all levers of power and ousting from politics. Purgin had a chance to sit in the local "cellars": in September 2015, he was removed from the post of head of the People's Council of the "DPR" in favor of Denis Pushilin, and then arrested for "destructive actions." His supporters then wrote that the “ideological” Purgin, in contrast to the “systemic” Pushilin, was an opponent of the Minsk agreements, which provided for the reintegration of Donbass into Ukraine. Later, Purgin tried to create the "Republican Movement of Donbass" as a legal opposition to Pushilin, but was denied registration. At the same time, Purgin was accused in the local press of being a secret agent of Ukraine's influence.
A similar fate befell another ideologue of Donbass separatism, historian and journalist Roman Manekin. In 2017, he tried to make public information about citizens of the Russian Federation arrested in the “DPR”, former volunteers of the “militia”, he himself wasdetained by the Donetsk MGB and tortured, and left the “basement” as an invalid. Three years later, Manekin was again arrested for criticizing Pushilin and imprisoned for 2.5 years as a "Ukrainian spy." He was released in November this year.
Even before 2014, the ideologists of Donbass separatism were a rather marginal group of small henchmen of the Party of Regions, against which the Regionals themselves looked like respectable politicians. Donetsk politicians kept the separatists around as a scarecrow for Kyiv. After Yanukovych came to power, when he pretended to be engaged in European integration, it was convenient for the Party of Regions to shift the task of promoting anti-Western propaganda and combating "Ukrainian fascism" to them. At some point, the Donbass separatists made contacts with Russia, but the marginal essence has not changed: using them as an ideological cover, the Kremlin seized power in the region and sent them to the dustbin of history.
From the Donetsk steppe to the steppe of Kalmykia
Anticipating the impossibility of a career in the "People's Republic" they created, the more far-sighted figures of Donbass separatism decided to try their luck in "mainland" Russia. This was also facilitated by the departure of Vladislav Surkov, the former curator of Donbass, from the Presidential Administration.
One of the first such "transit" was carried out by Dmitry Trapeznikov. Before the war, a functionary of the Shakhtar football club owned by the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, then a minor official of the city administration, Trapeznikov managed to become an influential person during the leadership of the "DNR" by Alexander Zakharchenko, holding the posts of first deputy of his "administration" and vice-premier of the "government" . After the death of Zakharchenko in September 2018, he was the acting leader of the “DPR” for two months, but then, having lost the apparatus intrigue to Denis Pushilin, he left Donetsk.
Trapeznikov surfaced unexpectedly in Kalmykia, where in September 2019 he was appointed city manager of Elista. He became a protégé of the new head of the republic, Batu Khasikov, to whom Vladislav Surkov attached his former Donbas ward. The arrival of a person with no roots in the region and with a dark reputation to an important post in the national republic provoked protests from the local public. Rumors about the imminent resignation of the unpopular Donbass nominee circulated for a long time, but in the end, Trapeznikov sat in his chair until February 2022, when Khasikov took him to work in the regional government.
Less impressive was the career of another associate of Zakharchenko, Alexander "Tashkent" Timofeev, one of the curators of the "DPR" economy, who was in charge of various shadow schemes. After the death of his boss (according to one version , Tashkent could have been involved in the murder of Zakharchenko), Timofeev went to free bread in Russia, and in 2021 ended up on trial for extortion. Together with accomplice Igor Sosnovsky, a former adviser to the ex-Prime Minister of Ukraine Azarov, Timofeev promised to solve the problems of a certain Shpak and close his criminal case, citing his extensive connections with the Russian security forces. The scammers asked Shpak for $4.5 million, but he realized that they were trying to “deceive” him, and handed over the dodgers to the FSB. As a result, the former Donetsk "watcher" went to jail for 3.5 years. After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Timofeev began to ask to go to the front (and, perhaps, given the massive recruitment of prisoners to participate in the war, his request was already non-publicly granted).
Siloviki and strong business executives of Yanukovych
The most successful are the "people of the system" – former Ukrainian security officials or politicians. Apparently, the closeness of the structure of Putin's Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych is having an effect. The Party of Regions tried to copy Putin's model of governing society, seeking to achieve a political monopoly and impose it on the entire country. Taras Kuzio, a British historian of Ukrainian origin, considers this a key plot of Ukrainian political history at the beginning of the 21st century: “When the Donetsk clan tried to come to power through electoral fraud in 2004 or to emulate Russia’s authoritarian system and resocialization in 2010–2013, Ukrainians launched two democratic revolutions,” – he wrote in the book "Putin's War against Ukraine". However, locally in the Donbass, this experiment was quite a success, and the personnel of the "LPR" – "DPR" confirm this.
The former SBU officer Leonid Pasechnik, who at one time received a state award from President Yushchenko, turned out to be at the head of the "LPR". Since 2014, state security agencies in the “DPR” have also been permanently headed by people from the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. Oleksiy Dykyi, a former colonel of the Ukrainian police, serves as the "Minister of Internal Affairs". In 2011-2014, he was the head of the department for combating drug trafficking in the Donetsk city police department. In April 2014, the new Minister of Internal Affairs, Arsen Avakov, appointed Dikyi as head of the department for combating organized crime, but he soon went over to the side of the Donbass separatists, participated in the seizure of the regional prosecutor's office and the building of the Organized Crime Control Department. After the annexation of the Donetsk region of the Russian Federation, Dyky received the Russian rank of police general.
Since 2015, the “Ministry of State Security of the DPR” has been headed by Vladimir Pavlenko, a veteran of the KGB and SBU. At the time of the “Russian spring”, he was already retired and worked as an official in the mayor’s office of Slavyansk, where in April 2014 he joined the militant detachment of Igor Strelkov. He also retained his post after the annexation of the region, which indicates his close connection with the Russian intelligence services. Military journalist Dmitry Durnev notes: “The Ministry of State Security of the so-called DPR is a completely closed and independent body from local authorities, which is directly supervised by people from Moscow. The “Head of the DPR” does not have the ability to influence certain decisions of the MGB, but he can make requests.”
The "Parliaments of the DPR" and "LPR" are headed by professional politicians from pro-Russian parties. Lugansk "speaker" since 2017 is a former activist of the youth organization of the Party of Regions Denis Miroshnichenko, who oversaw youth policy. During the Euromaidan, he was known for recruiting “titushki” from the Luhansk football-related crowd for the Anti-Maidan. Almost every second deputy of the "People's Council of the LPR" until 2014 made a career in the ranks of the Party of Regions or the Communist Party of Ukraine. A similar situation is in the “DPR parliament”, its “head” since 2018 is the ex-people’s deputy from the Communist Party of Ukraine in 2012-2014 Vladimir Bidyovka. Specific local personnel are also being recruited to the leadership of branches of Russian parties that are opening in the annexed territories. The regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Lugansk was headed by Igor Gumenyuk, a political adventurer with a motley biography, back in the 1990s he was expelled from the Communist Party of Ukraine for "connection with the criminal bourgeoisie." In the future, he changed a number of parties, including being a local deputy from the liberal "Front for Change" Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
After the annexation of new territories in the Donbass, the next representatives of the former Party of Regions join the ranks of "strong professionals". For example, Konstantin Ivashchenko, the director of the local plant "Azovzagalmash", controlled by Yanukovych's friend Yuri Ivanyushchenko, also known as the crime boss "Yura Enakievsky", became the head of the administration of Mariupol. Ivashchenko was a deputy of the city council from the Party of Regions, then from Viktor Medvedchuk's Opposition Platform – For Life. According to Ukrainian media, after the Russian invasion, Ivashchenko became the organizer of a commercial scheme to loot equipment from the destroyed Azovmash as scrap metal. The metal was then transported by sea to Rostov. A man sawing his own factory for scrap turned out to be an ideal candidate for the new government.
A man sawing up his own factory for scrap turned out to be an ideal candidate for the new government
The legacy of the Party of Regions plays an important role in Donbass history: having once monopolized power in Donbass, this group literally burned out the entire political field in the region, allowing only outcasts like “Donbass separatists” or obedient satellites in the person of the Communist Party of Ukraine to exist there. At the time of the collapse of Yanukovych's power and the beginning of Russian intervention, these marginal forces, replenished with the same restless national radicals from Russia (“Novorossians”), came to the surface and even briefly became power. Later, they were joined by business groups and part of the security forces associated with various kinds of criminal economic activity, a kind of junior partners of the regionals, who were engaged in "cashing out", smuggling, illegal coal mines ("kopanks"). After the Kremlin made a bet on the annexation of Donbass, the need for the first (“ideological”) disappeared, and for the second (“systemic”), the opportunity opened up to merge into Russian realities on “conceptual” conditions. The history of the Donbass elite is instructive – as a lesson from the past for Ukraine and as a projection of the future for Russia. Remembering the Donbass of 2014 and its leaders, we can assume what will happen in the event of the fall of the current Russian system, which the Party of Regions tried to copy in its native land.