Diverse Aidar fighters united by goal of defending Ukraine

These range from Russian speakers hailing from Donbas to Ukrainian speakers from the west of the country, from revolutionary youth to gray-haired elderly men, from nationalists to members of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and from businessmen and journalists to mayors.

Only one idea unites them: defending the country from Russia’s ongoing war, now in its 10th month against Ukraine.

At the northern entrance to Shchastia, a major Ukrainian stronghold north of Luhansk, there is a checkpoint where people going to and from Luhansk are registered and inspected by Aidar fighters and police officers. Soldiers joke that such checkpoints, which are sometimes called “filtration points,” have given fodder for the myth about alleged “filtration camps” or even “concentration camps” popular among pro-Russian locals.

But nothing unusual happens at the checkpoint, with bus passengers going through the routine of document checks and then being allowed to leave. Aidar fighters say that they are not even allowed to detain people with St. George ribbons, the symbol of the Russian-backed insurgency.

Soldiers unanimously confess that most locals in Shchastia dislike them, with some even publicly calling them “punitive squads” and saying “why did you come here?” They say that locals effectively constitute an extensive separatist underground that gives information to insurgents.

Even when it is clear that a building was shelled from the separatist side, many locals accuse Ukrainian troops of shelling the city, soldiers say.

One of the fighters, Anatoly Hatsko, is, ironically, a member of the Party of Regions, the former pro-Russian ruling party once led by ousted President Viktor Yanukovych and now often accused of supporting separatists. Hatsko is also a member of the Luhansk Oblast’s legislature and used to be the head of the region’s ecology department.

Hatsko’s career seems to be at odds with Russian propaganda, according to which Russian-speaking residents of Donbas are supposed to be against Ukraine.

“All my relatives are in Russia,” he said. “Before March 1, I was ready to join separatists and fight the Right Sector. If the Right Sector had come to us first, I would have done that.”

But it was Russian subversive groups and Kremlin-backed insurgents who came first last spring. “They came to me and said: ‘either you are with us or we’ll kill you’,” Hatsko recalls. Now he has even come to respect Right Sector members fighting in Donbas.

He then had to join the local pro-Ukrainian underground in Luhansk and fight against pro-Russian insurgents and subsequently became an Aidar soldier last summer.

Since then, he has been burning with the desire to return to Luhansk. “They call me “domovoi” (the Russian for hobgoblin, from “dom,” home),” Hatsko said. “You know why? Because I’ll return home eventually.”

In August, his dream almost came true when Ukrainian troops seized parts of Luhansk as part of a major offensive. “We were sure we would seize the city,” he said. But, when Russian regular troops entered Ukraine in the same month, the offensive halted, and Ukrainian army and police units fled.

Aidar was the only unit holding its ground near Luhansk, Hatsko said. “If not for Aidar, Shchastia would have been surrendered,” he added.

He says that even now he’s sure Ukrainian troops can take Luhansk. “Russian mercenaries are fighting for money, and we are fighting for Ukraine. That’s why every Ukrainian soldier is worth five Russian ones.”

The biography of Ivan Makar, a 57-year-old Soviet-era dissident from the Lviv Oblast and a member of Ukraine’s first Verkhovna Rada (1990 to 1994), seems to be the exact opposite of Hatsko’s. He was Ukraine’s last Soviet political prisoner.

In the 1990s, he was the editor-in-chief of an opposition newspaper critical of then-President Leonid Kuchma. In 1996 he was given a two-year suspended sentence in what he believes to be a politically motivated libel case.

In July he also decided to join Aidar. “The choice was inevitable because my father served in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” he said.

Makar considers himself a liberal and wants Ukraine to become the “Switzerland of Eastern Europe” – a neutral country having good relations with all of its neighbors.

While Makar represents the older generation of Ukrainian patriots, Ivan, who also hails from the Lviv Oblast, belongs to revolutionary youth who took part in the EuroMaidan revolution, which overthrew Yanukovych on Feb. 22. Ivan did not give his last name for security reasons.

Ivan says that he did not care much about the EuroMaidan movement initially. But a turning moment came on Feb. 18.

“When (authorities) started shooting people, I headed for Kyiv,” he said. Ivan became a member of the Spilna Sprava group of protesters and fought on Vulitsya Institutska on Feb. 20, when about a hundred EuroMaidan demonstrators were killed by police and pro-government thugs.

In May he joined Aidar because it was the only volunteer battalion supervised by the Defense Ministry. Ivan said that he did not want to join Interior Ministry units, given his bad attitude to police officers stemming from his life experience, including clashes with them during EuroMaidan protests.

“How can I have a good attitude to cops?” he said, adding that police officers are often sent to relatively safe places in Donbas for brief periods, are supplied well and then receive all the benefits of war veterans. In contrast, Aidar fighters and regular army units have to risk their lives in trenches and are often badly supplied.

Aidar fighter Vadim, who did not give his last name for security reasons, also supported the EuroMaidan movement. Unlike Ivan, he hails from Luhansk, where he was a businessman and produced heating boilers before he joined Aidar.

When the pro-Russian insurgency began in the city last spring, “it became impossible to live in Luhansk,” Vadim argues.

He said that he once stumbled upon a pro-Russian rally and saw bizarre people who were looking for the Right Sector and believed everyone who disagreed with them to belong to the group. “Their whole thinking is based on myths,” he said.

Vadim said that, as a businessman, he interpreted the current ceasefire negotiations between Ukraine and insurgents as caused by the impossibility to break economic ties that have been around for decades. He added that he expected economic relations with Donbas to be restored.

But most Aidar fighters interviewed by the Kyiv Post share a negative attitude to the Sept. 5 Minsk ceasefire with insurgents and subsequent ceasefire negotiations. They say the ceasefire has never worked because only the Ukrainian side has tried to enforce it.

Like Vadim, Aidar soldier Mykola Grekov is also a local. He was the mayor of the Luhansk Oblast city of Aleksandrovsk and is currently an advisor to Luhansk Oblast Governor Hennadiy Moskal in addition to being a soldier. He became an Aidar fighter after his city was seized by insurgents last spring.

Nobody actually seized administrative buildings, Grekov said. Police officers and Security Service employees just opened their doors and joined insurgents, he added.

The problem still persists, with the police, prosecutors and the Security Service routinely sabotaging the war effort and releasing separatists, he said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].