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.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS