The meeting
On April 15, 2014, during a meeting of the Sloviansk city council, the mayor, Nelya Shtepa, and a staff member discussed the situation in the city.
Staff member: “I don’t understand what is going on…”
Shtepa: “You don’t understand, he does all this here, he does it right here.”
Staff member: “Who do you mean?”
Shtepa: “Putin.”
City council meetings usually took place every Tuesday in the Sloviansk city administration. This time the meeting took place in an unusual place. After the city administration building had been occupied by “DPR” militias on April 12, Nelya Shtepa assembled the city council in the town’s cultural center.
“We gathered in the culture center for a meeting, and the first thing she (Shtepa) said was ‘these are not our boys,’”says one of the participants of this meeting, who was interviewed by the author but has asked to retain his anonymity.
The mayor claimed she didn’t know where the militias had come from. Shtepa asked the heads of the city’s ward councils not to help the separatist combatants, not to approach them on their checkpoints etc. According to the words of one interviewee, the mayor behaved very nervously and she seemed to understand that she had lost control of the situation.
The point of no return
When studying the circumstances of Sloviansk’s occupation, one cannot stop wondering about the reasoning of the city’s leadership. Their behavior, in hindsight, seems not so much unprofessional or shortsighted as outright childish and as if they had lost orientation and totally misunderstood the role the creators of the “Russian spring” had intended for them. The local elite took a long time to realize that they had been used. And once they understood, it was too late to change course.
Shtepa suddenly changed her opinion about the men she had called “not our boys”, who had occupied all the city’s strategic objects. A couple of days earlier she had asked the people of Sloviansk not to provoke the militias, because, in her words, they were people from Donbas, just like anyone else. She said their demands were “adequate” and she could accept and understand their ideas. Perhaps it was also with their help that she kept up the appearance of stability, when municipal vehicles blocked the city’s central square from a motorcade of Automaidan activists, who had come to the city to present their side of the argument about what had happened in Kyiv.
The frantic groups of “Self-defense”, the openly tolerated meetings with calls for an armed intervention to the president of a neighboring country, and the rather weird address to the passengers of the over-night train Moscow-Kislovodsk, may have attuned Shetpa to the cruel reality in which her personal interests had no place.
Two days after the city council meeting, on April 17, militiamen of the “DPR” arrested Shtepa and detained her in an office in the city administration until July 5, the day the city was liberated by the Ukrainian army. Its an irony of fate that during her detention Shtepa signed a decision of the city council taken on April 28 that ordained the founding of a so called “Sloviansk people’s vigilance group”. On April 30, the city council voted to strip Shtepa off her office, “at her own request”.
After the occupation of Sloviansk ended, Shtepa was arrested by prosecutors of Kharkiv oblast. She now has to stand in trial and faces the accusation of an assault on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which led to fatalities and other tragic consequences. Shtepa justified her policies with the attempt to liberate hostages held by the separatist militias. It will be hard for her to argue that she did put a lot of effort in preventing the things that happened.
Epilogue
The passivity and laissez-fair by the local government around the events that took place in spring 2014, created favorable preconditions for an attack. The city was already well prepared for an armed intervention from outside. In the beginning of April 2014, battle-ready and well-organized groups of the so-called self-defense virtually took over the city. They received access to arms, started to control all important communication lines and could rely on propaganda support.
The events that followed and that still unfold in eastern Ukraine compel one to take an unfavorable view of the local elite’s role in the events of spring 2014. Their weaknesses and political immaturity were cunningly exploited by the puppet masters in the Kremlin. The leaders of Sloviansk brought damage to their own country, the dimensions of which are still hard to estimate.
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