The career of Sergei Yeliseyev helps to explain why Ukraine’s armed forces gave up Crimea almost without a fight — and why NATO now says it is alert to Russian attempts to undermine military loyalty in its eastern European members.
His rise to become No. 2 in the Ukrainian Navy long before Russia seized Crimea illustrates the divided loyalties that some personnel in countries that once belonged to the former Soviet Union might still face.
Yeliseyev’s roots were in Russia but he ended up serving Ukraine, only to defect when put to the test.
NATO analysts believe Moscow regards people with similarly ambiguous personal links as potentially valuable, should a new confrontation break out with the West.
In 2014, Yeliseyev was first deputy commander of the Ukrainian fleet, then largely based in Crimea, when Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms took control of Kiev’s ships and military bases on the Crimean Peninsula.
Instead of resisting, Yeliseyev quit and subsequently got a new job — deputy chief of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
Yeliseyev, 55, did not respond to questions sent to him via the Russian Ministry of Defense.
However, in Kiev there is no doubt where his loyalties lay.
“When he took an oath to Ukraine, these were empty words for him. He has always been pro-Russian,” said Ukrainian Navy Commander Ihor Voronchenko, who once served with Yeliseyev.
In fact, the Russian soldiers were pushing at an open door in late February 2014 — Yeliseyev was just one of many to defect and almost all Ukrainian forces in Crimea failed to resist.
Russia annexed Crimea the following month, prompting a major row with the West which deepened over Moscow’s role in a rebellion in eastern Ukraine that lasts to this day.
At the time, Moscow and its allies in Crimea exploited weaknesses within Kiev’s military to undermine its ability to put up a fight, according to interviews conducted by reporters with about a dozen people on both sides of the conflict.
Years before the Crimean annexation, a Ukrainian appointment panel appeared to drop its guard when it interviewed Yeliseyev for the deputy naval commander’s post.
Yeliseyev was born near Moscow, graduated from a Soviet naval school in the Russian city of Kaliningrad in 1983 and served with the Russian Pacific Fleet.
Relations between Russia and Ukraine dived as Kiev moved closer to NATO and eight years after his appointment, with the countries on the brink of conflict over Crimea, Yeliseyev quit.
Russia’s actions were not the only factor in the Crimean events. Ukraine’s military had suffered years of neglect, there was a power vacuum in Kiev after the government was overthrown, and many Crimean residents felt more affinity with Moscow.
Still, Ukrainian service personnel with Russian ties switched sides when the annexation began and some officers pretended to put up resistance only to avoid a court-martial. Moscow also intercepted orders from Kiev so they never reached the Crimean garrison.
“There was nothing spontaneous. Everything was organized and each fiddler played his role,” said Mykhailo Koval, who at the time was deputy head of the Ukrainian border guard and is now deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Council.
Voronchenko, who was another deputy commander of the Ukrainian Navy at the time of the annexation, said he received invitations to defect to Moscow’s side soon after the Russian operation began.
These, he told reporters, came from Sergei Aksyonov, who was then-head of Crimea’s self-proclaimed pro-Russian government, as well as from the commander of Russia’s southern military district and a deputy Russian minister of defense.
Asked what they offered in exchange, Voronchenko said: “Posts, an apartment ... Aksyonov offered to make me defense minister of Crimea.”
Voronchenko, in common with many other senior Ukrainian officers, had been in the Soviet military alongside people now serving in the Russian armed forces.
He had spent years in Crimea, where Russia leased bases from Ukraine for its Black Sea fleet after the break up of the Soviet Union.
“Those generals who came to persuade me ... said that we belong to the same circle, we came from the Soviet army,” he said. “I told them I am different ... I am not yours.”
Former Ukrainian Navy commander Denis Berezovsky did defect, along with several of his top staff, and was later made deputy chief of the Russian Black Sea fleet.
At one Ukrainian signals unit, service personnel were watching Russian istelevision when President Vladimir Putin appeared on the screen.
“To my surprise, they all stood up,” said Svyatoslav Veltynsky, an engineer at the unit. “They had been waiting for this.”
The majority of the unit defected to the Russian side.
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