ON THE morning of October 19th thousands of people in Donetsk, the main city occupied by the Russian-backed separatists of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, attended the funeral (pictured above) of a notorious warlord assassinated two days earlier. Arsen Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was a Russian irregular who boasted of killing Ukrainian prisoners-of-war and had started to act independently of Moscow. He was the latest of a half-dozen unruly separatist commanders to be eliminated in recent months, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Ukraine expert at the University of Bremen. That evening, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany met in Berlin to discuss the region’s stalled peace process, known as Minsk-2.
The two events were both signs that Russia is trying to establish firmer control over the lawless Donbas. Though it has stopped trying to spread the conflict to other parts of Ukraine for now, it still wants to cement Donbas’s special status inside Ukraine. As part of Minsk-2, Moscow demands that Ukraine hold a local election in the rebel-held territories. Kiev has refused to do so until shooting stops and international monitors from...Continue reading
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