The killing on Oct. 16 of Arseniy Pavlov, a Russian warlord who headed one of the armed gangs that have taken over parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, has sparked fears of an escalation in the war in eastern Ukraine.
Pavlov, know widely by his nom de guerre Motorola, was killed by a remotely activated device that detonated as he entered the elevator in his nine-story block of flats in Donetsk, where Kremlin-backed militias have seized control from the local authorities.
The leaders of the Kremlin-backed armed groups are calling Pavlov’s death a “terrorist act,” and say it was carried out by Ukrainian special forces. Oleksandr Zakharchenko, a Kremlin-backed leader in Donetsk, says he will take revenge on Ukraine and accuses the country’s president, Petro Poroshenko, of declaring war.
But in Kyiv the message is radically different. No claims of responsibility are being made, with a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, Artem Shevchenko, instead writing on his Facebook page that Pavlov had likely been killed by his fellow “partners in crime.”
Zorjan Shkirjak, an Interior Ministry adviser, posted on social media that he believes Russia’s security services, the FSB, killed Pavlov as part of a professional “clean-up” operation, and that other leaders of pro-Kremlin armed groups will come to the same end.
“Motorola couldn’t have been assassinated by Ukrainian intelligence,” Taras Berezovets, Director of International Security Programmes at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, told the Kyiv Post. “It was either FSB or local warlords who plotted this murder. Motorola has been eliminated as [Russian President] Putin seeks a new more controlled region and local gangsters are seen as an obstacle.”
According to Berezovets, as a result of Pavlov’s death Ukraine “can expect new terrorist attacks on its territory.” This, he says, is a danger which Ukraine’s security services are already well aware of.
String of killings
Meanwhile, a video has surfaced on social media purporting to show four men from a far-right Ukrainian group admitting to Pavlov’s murder. The clip has, however, been widely labeled as a fake.
Pavlov, 33 at the time of his death, was a Russian citizen born in Ukhta, a town some 1,600 kilometers northwest of Moscow. He came to Ukraine in February 2014, declaring himself a volunteer and fighting against Ukrainian forces on a number of occasions. He was head of the Sparta Battalion armed group during the battle for Donetsk airport, one of the key confrontations in the Kremlin-backed war in the Donbas. He was on the wanted list in Ukraine, accused of committing crimes against the country’s territorial integrity. In an April 3, 2015 interview with the Kyiv Post, he claimed to have murdered prisoners of war.
Pavlov’s death is the latest in a string of killings of commanders of Kremlin-backed armed groups. These include that of Alexei Mozgovoi, who was killed in May 2015. At the time, Ukrainian authorities said Mozgovoi was likely murdered due to a power struggle between separatist groups. Officials in Russia suggested Mozgovoi was murdered with the help of the Western intelligence services, though without providing any evidence to back their claim.
As for Pavlov, one Russian MP has already suggested renaming a school in St. Petersburg in his honor. Should that step be taken, the information war over events in eastern Ukraine will surely resonate long after Russian President Vladimir Putin has left office.
Security fears
Ultimately, the truth behind who killed Motorola is unlikely to ever be definitively established. It remains to be seen if pronouncements of revenge from the leaders of armed groups who have survived him, like Zakharchenko, will translate into anything real. Their response has been aggressive, but this likely masks very real doubts that are now surfacing regarding their own security and the security of the territories they occupy as a whole. If the man they called Motorola can be killed just meters from his own home, then surely no one is safe.
The natural reaction of the Russian-backed leaders in such cases has been to make bombastic threats toward Ukraine. But the frequency of attacks on the lives of prominent Kremlin warriors suggests they would be better off spending time looking after their own safety – and making sure they stay useful to Moscow.
