David Patrikarakos is author of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, a Poynter fellow in journalism at Yale University and associate fellow, School of Iranian Studies, at the University of St. Andrews. You can follow him on Twitter at @dpatrikarakos.

People keep waiting for the “war” to begin in Ukraine. But a 21st century-style war has already begun here, and may be almost over – something that Vladimir Putin seems to understand even if the rest of us do not.

In a world where Youtube, Twitter and Facebook dominate, the overt “hard power” of guns and bullets is no longer as publicly palatable as it once was. Autocratic states prefer to bankrupt dissidents instead of executing them; NGO workers are not “disappeared” but their offices are shut down for zoning irregularities. Nowadays even dictators have to be “post-modern.”


Putin, schooled in the art of covert power, understands this new world, both instinctively and politically. To adequately comprehend what the Russian president is doing in Ukraine you have to travel across the occupied east, which is both a journey into a country falling apart and a gradual immersion in the realities of Russian geopolitical strategy.

Across eastern Ukraine, city centers are now deserted; checkpoints and barriers control the central thoroughfares while shops and bars are closed. In the industrial town of Sloviansk, the center of the crisis, ATMs are running out of cash and the people wait in line for bread. Gun-toting men mix with bored youths and old women while armored personnel carriers perform tricks in the road — skidding around in circles — for cheering crowds and a man can go from anonymity to self-appointed mayor in the space of a few hours.

Moscow, through its links with local pro-Russia militia and ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s former ruling party as well as its dealings with local oligarchs like billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, has ensured that normal city life has disappeared across Eastern Ukraine. What has replaced it is the perfect mix of institutional chaos and public confusion that is, day by day, separating east from west. The pro-Russia protestors are violent and determined and, occasionally, organized, but they are politically and ideologically hapless: big on rhetoric but short on ideas.

It was the same in each city I visited over the course of an intense ten days: Russian flags fluttered from barricades while amplifiers boomed out marching songs from the Great Patriotic War. Poor, unemployed East Ukrainians reveling in their rebirth as armed “revolutionaries” told me they were ready to resist the “fascist junta” in Kiev and that Putin was “strong” and Russia “great.” These emasculated men and women, all yearning to be part of a greater, dimly conceived whole, told me endless stories about attacks on the Russian language but nothing about how their lives might substantively be improved through alliance with Moscow.

In tandem with chaos comes lawlessness. In the cities of Donetsk, Luhansk and Sloviansk I saw not one policeman – not one – at any of the demonstrations I attended or occupied buildings I entered. My investigations (I became determined to find at least one cop in each city I visited) always yielded the same result: the eventual discovery of a few officers loafing in groups or sitting in cars a few streets away.

One night in Dontesk, the sheer scale of the problem became clear to me. I had spent several hours with the pro-Russia demonstrators outside the occupied Regional administration building in what had until that point been a low-key gathering, largely confined to general ill-temper and anti-Kyiv sloganeering. At around midnight one or two of the masked, bat-wielding men who had been warming themselves around fires built on the street suddenly became agitated; they had clearly received some information and began to run to a side road by the building. More and more of their comrades began to run after them and I followed.

Turning the corner I saw that what was now a mob had surrounded a bus filled with policemen parked on the sidewalk and were hurling insults at its occupants, demanding to know what they were doing there. Fearful of inflaming the situation, the police – largely young men in their twenties – remained silent until one officer tapped a text into his phone and held it up to the window. As the crowd surged forward to look, I caught a glimpse of the message: “We are with the people,” it read. “We are not going to storm the building.”

On the outskirts of Sloviansk, now the center of the east’s crisis, things reached their logical conclusion when I encountered a checkpoint on the town’s outskirts manned by both pro-Russia militia and the police. “What are the police doing here?” I asked the militia leader, a skinny man with a camouflage cap on his head and a crumpled cigarette dangling from his lips. “Oh, they’re with us,” came his nonchalant reply. “We are representatives of the people, and they are the people, too.”

The region still retains much sympathy for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Yanukoych is from the Donbass region and his son, also called Viktor, remains involved in regional politics. Personal and political loyalty to the Yanukovych family is strong in the east and both Donetsk and Luhansk are Party of Regions strongholds. Pro-Russian protesters were invariably eager to let me photograph their party sweatshirts and raincoats.

But it’s the mysteriously absent police who arguably matter more. “Yanukovych had especially strong links to the police force,” says Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist and co-founder of the independent online TV station Hromadske.TV. “The police in East Ukraine have been the most corrupt sphere of local government for a long time; they are politically controlled and on the payroll.”

Little surprise, then, that despite their numbers (Ukraine has 300,000 policemen compared with 100,000 soldiers, Kyiv mayoral candidate and former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko told me), for the most part the police have failed to even try to combat the unrest. It is merely the most egregious example of the truth at the heart of the situation in east Ukraine: What remains of Ukrainian national organizations and loyalties are cracking, dissolving, disintegrating.

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Nowhere, it seems, is a modern autocrat like Putin more sophisticated than in war: invasions that are denied, soldiers who march without insignias, war that is being fought in everything but the name of war. And behind the actual conflict is perhaps the more important fight: Russia has ruthlessly exploited the interconnected global landscape. Its lobbyists sit in think tanks and universities while its media influences both East Ukraine and its fair share of “useful idiots” in the West. International finance is now stronger than the bonds of supranational institutions, and both the City of London and Exxon and BP are reluctant to disrupt the flow of Russian cash, the West’s so-far milquetoast sanctions notwithstanding. All of this serves to excuse and thereby further Russian aggression, and it is working. Putin is winning the war, and he will continue to do so until the world acts to stop him.

His comfortable knowledge of this fact may be one reason why, on May 7, Putin sounded so relaxed about postponing the referenda on greater autonomy planned for May 11 in southern and eastern Ukraine. He even expressed support for Ukraine’s presidential election on 25 May – which Russia has done its best to undermine—calling it a step “in the right direction” (thereby contradicting his own foreign minister, who has repeatedly called it “absurd”).

This status quo comprehensively serves Putin’s interests, so why shouldn’t he fiddle for a few weeks while Ukraine burns? The separatists are going nowhere, and even their defiance of Putin on the referenda, genuine or otherwise, helps Moscow because it further paralyzes the country. The longer east and Kyiv fight, the more the conflict will intensify and the more the casualties will mount. Russian propaganda has gone into overdrive since the May 2 tragedy in Odessa, when more than 40 pro-Russia activists were killed in a fire. Its effectiveness in the east, where it retains a monopoly on the collective imagination, is unchallenged. It may yet give Putin the excuse to invade should he ever decide to.

But he needs to be careful. Putin wants Ukraine to smoulder but not explode. Continuing casualties may be useful for propaganda purposes, but if the death toll increases too much he may become trapped by his own rhetoric and have to invade Ukraine to “protect” ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. If that happens, the sight of Russians and their brother Ukrainians slaughtering each other might not play so well on State TV.

No escalation is in fact desired or needed. Russian strategy remains unchanged and clear: destabilize, destabilize, destabilize. By calling merely for the referenda to be postponed, Putin retains their threat while suffering none of the consequences that would almost certainly have ensued had he approved them. He also gets to say he has no control over them. The United States and the European Union are discussing a debating a third round of industrial and economic sanctions against Moscow and it is likely that his newfound “temperance” has headed these off for the time being.

And he has achieved this victory without offering anything of substance in return. He has made no calls for the separatists to abandon the occupied buildings and stand down, and his claim that Russian troops had been pulled back from the Ukrainian border to their training grounds for “regular exercises” has been flatly contradicted.

Apart from the activists who fight their Russian counterparts on the city streets, those with pro-Ukraine sympathies (which the polls tell us are the clear majority) are mostly now too frightened to venture out. It is hard to see many of these people going to their local polling booth for the presidential elections on May 25.

The story of a young pro-Ukrainian friend of mine from the eastern city of Mariopul is all too typical. Her family lives in the city center near the scene of the recent violence, where government forces successfully stormed the occupied city hall on the night of May 7 after heavy fighting with pro-Russia separatists before it was retaken the following day. She has fled to Kyiv while her parents and younger sister remain in the city, too terrified to leave their house. Now they are contemplating going to their country estate or even to the Netherlands to stay with an aunt until the situation cools down.

In a speech in Brussels in late March, President Obama declared that the West must not allow Russia to challenge “truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident: that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force.”

But Putin has barely needed the use of force to effectively dismember Ukraine. Crimea is gone and the state as it was is finished. A federation of what remains of the country that would prevent it from moving toward the West is most likely what he is after and what he looks likely to get.