Opportunists take advantage of eastern Ukraine leadership confusion

Editor's note: This is the third in a three-part series examining the political and humanitarian situation in east Ukraine. Read the first part, on daily life in Donetsk, here, and the second part, on brain drain, here.

PEREVALSK, Ukraine — The armed camouflaged men and women immediately stand to attention when Ataman Nikolai Kozitsyn enters the salmon-hued hall of the Soviet-era House of Culture he uses as one of his three offices.

At just over 6 feet 2 inches tall with a protruding belly, Kozitsyn commands a presence, and his Cossack soldiers stare straight ahead as he addresses one of his female troops.

“You’re too skinny,” he boomed. He then turned to the young woman’s husband, who stood by his side with an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder. “Aren’t you feeding her enough?”

Kozitsyn bellowed a laugh, and the dozen or so in the room laughed nervously. Most of them wore the traditional Cossack fighter’s cap, black fur with a red center. Their hats were no match for Kozitsyn’s headwear, which was about three times the height and twice the circumference.

He has been the de facto ruler of this small mining city about 25 miles southwest of the rebel-held city of Luhansk since July. He and his Cossack fighters from Russia’s Don River basin came to the aid of the pro-Russian separatists when the Ukrainian forces fighting the rebels controlling the area began to gain ground.

In a matter of months, he has turned Perevalsk into his fief. He said he has brought stability back to a city that had been ransacked by a corrupt government “calling itself Ukraine” and took credit for getting the city’s main services back up and running, including water, heat and electricity.

Some have had names like “Shooter,” (Igor Strelkov) and “Devil” (Igor Bezler) and ruled by cruelty and fear among the locals and rebel fighters alike. But most have switched positions in the rebel governments so many times that it can be hard to figure out who remains in charge.

Operating just north of Kozitsyn’s territory, in the Luhansk region, Alexei Mozgovoi has declared himself the commander of Alchevsk, a city of about 120,000 people known for its massive iron and steelworks plant. In October, he ordered the execution of a man convicted of rape by a people’s court of fewer than 300 people. Mozgovoi later said women would be arrested for stepping foot in the city’s bars to protect their virtue.

East of Alchevsk lies Luhansk, the largest city in the region and the scene of some of the worst fighting. Its population was about 500,000 before the conflict began. By late summer, an estimated 300,00 residents had left to escape from the death and destruction after the city came under heavy shelling and mortar attacks for weeks on end.

Luhansk is ruled by Igor Plotnitsky, 50, who became head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic after the Nov. 2 rebel elections, declared illegal by the Ukrainian government. This month he challenged President Petro Poroshenko to an old-fashioned duel as way to resolve the conflict between the rebels and Kiev. In an open letter to Poroshenko, Plotnitsky said the winner of the televised duel would be able to dictate the terms of the agreement to the loser.

According to Plotnitsky, he has authority over all the rebel-held territories in the Luhansk region, including Perevalsk and Alchevsk. That’s debatable to Pavel Dremov, a Don Cossack who has dismissed the other Luhansk leaders as corrupt crooks and told the small city of Stakhanov to the north of Alchevsk that he intends to build the city into the Cossack People’s Republic.

It remains to be seen how the situation with Luhansk’s various leaders will play out. Some speak of being part of a greater independent territory called Novorossiya, or New Russia, which includes all of eastern and southern Ukraine.