And if we look further afield, then one can compare the DPR and the LPR with the partisan republics in Latin America, such as the narco-guerrillas of the FARC in Colombia; the Maoist ‘Sendero Luminoso’ (Shining Path) and ‘Túpac Amaru’ in Peru; the Túpac Katari guerrilla army in Bolivia; and the Red Sun in Ecuador (the Communist Party, also known as Puka Inti). All these groups also love left-wing rhetoric, ‘people’s justice’ and racketeering under the guise of ‘revolutionary justice’; and they have a passion for black balaclava masks. And it is no coincidence that one of the heroes of the ‘Russian spring’, the field commander Arseny Pavlov, who went under the nickname of Motorola, used to wear a bracelet with a portrait of Che Guevara.[25]
What do the fighters of the FARC, ISIS and the DPR have in common? First and foremost, traditionalist anti-globalist ideas. Their ideologues are inspired by examples from the past, be it Islamist theocracy in the Middle East; the bizarre mix of Maoism, Trotskyism and Bolivarianism in Latin America; or the crazy cocktail of monarchism, Stalinism and ‘Orthodox civilization’ in the minds of the separatists in Eastern Ukraine. Their enemy is not governments, but contemporary society itself, with its free market, the emancipation of women, its temptations and permissiveness, and its social inequality, liberal values and domination by America. They proclaim the armed struggle under the flag of national, territorial or religious liberation; but in reality they are fighting against the anonymous tide of globalization, which erodes everything. They are trying to put up dams, having taken the local population hostage.
Twenty-five years ago, at the start of the 1990s, when the whole world was expecting ‘the end of history’ as predicted by Francis Fukuyama, the American political theorist Benjamin Barber wrote a book called Jihad vs. McWorld. In it, he foresaw the basic type of conflicts that would follow the fall of the Berlin Walclass="underline" fundamentalists rising up against globalization. And under the term ‘jihad’, he meant not only the Islamist movement for the purity of the faith, but the wider protests by the remnants of traditional society against the global tide, from Osama bin Laden to Subcomandante Marcos. In this sense, the leaders of Donetsk and Lugansk also have their own local jihad. These are depressed industrial regions with high levels of unemployment and a poorly reformed mining sector with barbaric mining technology (including mines that they have dug out themselves), which does not fit the post-industrial world. Under the banner of Orthodox sharia law, these leaders are standing up to the advance of Western civilization and its agents, ‘the Kiev junta’. This is why, in its listing of ‘Agitators’, Foreign Policy puts these men on a par with the Islamic terrorists of ISIS and Boko Haram.
What unites all these phenomena is that in Nigeria, Syria and Iraq, as well as in Donetsk and Lugansk, similar zones have emerged where there is uncontrolled violence. They are examples of what the British sociologist, Mary Kaldor, has called ‘new wars’. These are new types of organized violence, in which the boundaries are wiped away between the traditional type of war, in which states and armies take part, and organized crime, terrorism and the systematic violation of human rights. ‘New wars’ are like whirlpools that suck in people, territory and resources. Their existence is fuelled both by external military and humanitarian aid, as well as by their own ‘economy of violence’, based on robbery and murder as well as trade in arms, humanitarian aid and people. For the local ‘entrepreneurs of violence’ (field commanders and political leaders), violence is a profitable business that demands constant new investment. Many economists who examine modern wars see them not as ‘ethnic conflicts’, ‘struggles for national liberation’ or ‘decolonization’, but simply as a type of organized crime.
The ‘hybrid war’ in Eastern Ukraine, of which Russian military theoreticians are so proud, has become another of the ‘new wars’ as defined by Kaldor. Donetsk and Lugansk today remind one of Chechnya between 1996 and 1999: a bandit state, a ‘black hole’ of violence, contraband and terrorism, which almost pulled in the whole of the North Caucasus. It is no coincidence that among the ranks of the militia bands in the Donbass there are Chechen battalions. These are not simply warriors sent by the Chechen President, Ramzan Kadyrov; they are also fighters for the purity of the faith against the hated West. The paradox of this situation is that Vladimir Putin, who came to power and gained popularity at the peak of the struggle against terrorism, blood and money that fuelled the hotbed of terrorism in Chechnya, has now created with his own hands a second Chechnya even closer to the centre of Russia, right on the border with the Rostov Oblast. All sorts of mercenaries are undergoing a military baptism, and the mad ‘re-enactors’ of historic battles are living out their bloody fantasies. Here we have yet another similarity with ISIS, which attracts fanatics and scumbags from all over the world. Some 15,000 foreigners are fighting in their ranks, including up to 2,000 citizens from Western Europe, such as ‘Jihadi John’, who beheaded journalists and became one of the ‘heroes’ on Foreign Policy’s list.
A social and humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in the Donbass, and violence is becoming a way of life. This violence cannot be contained within the region’s borders. More and more frequently, it is bursting out into the outside world, as happened with the destruction of flight MH17. The global community has already shown that Russia was responsible, having provided the separatist fighters with modern weaponry. This violence is already being felt in Russia itself, as shown by an incident that happened on 3 November 2014, when four drunken militia fighters from the DPR who were taking a break in the Moscow region and celebrating election day in Donetsk, shot up a traffic police patrol in the Solnechnogorsky District. Three of them got away. Apparently, they were all from the ‘Ghost’ (Prizrak) brigade led by the Lugansk commander, Alexei Mozgovoi. Mozgovoi himself is given huge support in Russia, where he holds meetings with leaders of the parliamentary parties – the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and A Just Russia – and travels around Moscow in a four-by-four with number plates decorated with the Novorossiya symbol. As he himself acknowledges, if traffic police inspectors stop him and recognize him, they wave him on his way, wishing him well.
According to rumours, the brains behind these pirate republics meet not in the frozen wastes of Donetsk or Lugansk, but in Moscow, in a separate room in the ‘Kofemaniya’ café on Bolshoi Cherkassky Lane,[26] exactly halfway between the FSB building on Lubyanka Square and the Presidential Administration headquarters on Staraya Square. Alexander Borodai, ministers from the DPR and senior representatives of the Presidential Administration have been spotted there. It seems that these ‘global thinkers’ of the twenty-first century, the postmodernists, can slip away from their cosy Moscow offices to bless the jihad with military Orthodoxy and modern weaponry. They have not yet managed to build their ‘Russian world’; but they have succeeded in tearing Russia away from developments going on around the world, just as their like-minded thinkers who cannot cope with globalization have done in Nigeria, Colombia, Iraq and elsewhere.