“We need a merciless, unceasing fight against the snakes hiding in hiding,” Rozalia Zemliatska told the Sebastopol Vremya newspaper. “We must exterminate them, sweep them with an iron broom, a sea of blood, everywhere.” Witnessing the Zemlyachka massacre firsthand, Russian opposition leader Sergei Melgunov said the lampposts of Crimea’s largest city are “richly decorated with corpses swaying in the wind”. In the nearby seaside resort of Feodosia, Melgunov and other officials said they noticed Zemlyachka running the town’s wells as burial pits. When the wells were clogged with tortured soldiers and civilians, Melgunov added, she tied her victims to planks, either roasting them alive in ovens or drowning them on barges in the Black Sea. “It’s a shame to waste cartridges on them,” Zemlyachka said. To be sure, Western leaders now grappling with the question of whether to encourage and fund Ukraine’s bid to seize back Crimea may not be familiar with the Kyiv-born secret police officer known locally as Demon. Yet back in Moscow — a century after Zemlyachka, at the end of the Russian Civil War that oversaw the Bolshevik extermination of a population nearly three times the size of Key West — the Demon remains a favorite of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a superstar at the center offices of the KGB, and the poster of what Russia is capable of doing if Ukraine marches on Crimea. “Ukraine will be liquidated,” are the words Putin’s famous treasurer and alleged war criminal Vladimir Solovyov uses almost every night on television to reawaken Zemlyachka’s spirit. “Russia’s military mentality is always annihilation,” says a veteran Kremlin expert who spent years in Moscow and remains attached to a Western intelligence agency. “What is remarkable since the fall of Kherson is that we have never before heard Russian politicians and propagandists promote a terrorist campaign on a level reminiscent of the Bolshevik revolution. It’s off the charts.” People who arrived from Kherson await further evacuation deep into Russia at the Dzhankoi railway station in Crimea on October 21, 2022.
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None of this surprises 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk. “The Russians can tolerate their war criminals winning,” Matviichuk told The Daily Beast at a recent dinner in Paris. “Russians can’t tolerate war criminals losing.” Matviichuk, director of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, says her organization has so far reported more than 21,000 cases of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. The desecrations in Bucha, Izium and Kherson are so horrific that she and other human rights lawyers are now imploring UN member states to “develop a new definition of war crimes and a method of prosecuting them,” she says. Olena Tregub is dedicated to making sure Putin’s war criminals are lost. She is also a woman who knows her guns and ammunition. Tregub is a vocal member of the Ukrainian government’s anti-corruption commission, and her job is to ensure that every penny of foreign aid and arms crate sustains a war effort aimed at eventually unfurling her country’s flag over Crimea. “We go a lot,” says Tregub. “We are taking Crimea back. This is the only way to punish Russia for Putin’s crimes in Ukraine.” Glorious visions of fending off Russian imperialism have galvanized the Ukrainian imagination for centuries. “The fortifications of Syvash are so strong that the Red High Command has neither men nor machines to breach them,” Vremya assured its readers in 1920. “All the armed forces of the Soviets cannot frighten the Crimea.” Indeed, General Pytor Wrangel, the German-Baltic commander responsible for the defense of Crimea, was so confident of victory that he created a new medal of honor called the Order of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, an award that was later given to Mother Theresa, the Pope John -Paul II and Kalpana Chawla, the first Indian woman sent into space. Back on Earth, French Lieutenant General and former NATO commander Michel Yakovlev says: “I am not convinced that Ukraine should take back Crimea.” In an interview with The Daily Beast beneath crystal chandeliers and murals of naked cherubs inside the French Senate, the hardened veteran of Operation Desert Storm and the NATO campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo has spent the past nine months huddled with Ukrainian politicians and military generals . The Antonovski Bridge, reportedly being demolished to prevent Ukrainian forces from crossing the Dnieper River as Russian forces withdrew to the left side of the river, is seen after the Russian retreat from Kherson, Ukraine on November 14, 2022. The only transportation road from Kherson to the Crimea was the Antonovski Bridge.
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“We are not sure how much of the Crimean population would want to return to Ukraine,” warns Yakovleff. “An internationally sanctioned referendum may be diplomatic to accommodate the thousands of Russians brought in involuntarily after Russian annexation in 2014. There will be internal problems. Retaking Crimea could be a mixed blessing.” The reaction of Andriy Yermak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, pretty much sums up Kiev’s position on which side ultimately controls Crimea. “Does anyone seriously believe that the Kremlin really wants peace?” he wrote on Twitter. “He wants obedience.” But as the winter wreaks havoc, the only certainty is that the Moscow Peninsula, or “elegantly” referred to as the Russian Riviera, is the eye of a storm brewing between Ukraine and its Western allies. “We don’t offer politics,” says the Western intelligence agent. “We know how Russia works, its military capabilities and capabilities. More importantly, the Russians don’t care about casualties and still have plenty of air power and other dirty tricks to terrorize Ukraine beyond bombs and missiles. Too many people have a hard time accepting these realities.” The irony of the situation is palpable. “Russia has also dug deep into eastern Ukraine for eight years,” he adds. “So it would actually be easier to retake Crimea militarily than Donbass.” “Putin is defeated by what has become the most powerful army in Europe.” On the one hand, allowing Crimea to remain Russian and home to the Black Sea Fleet may be the tranquilizer that calms Putin into making peace while maintaining his power. The intelligence analyst suggests that such peace will not be maintained. “Strategically, break up the Russians, because you don’t want to give them time to rebuild and come back, which they will,” he says. “The more you can force Russia to rebuild its military, the better off Europe and the rest of the democratic world.” On the other bloody side, how much more Russian-inflicted trauma can Ukraine absorb? Back in 1933, at the height of Stalin’s enforced two-year terror famine, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 a day, for a total death toll of nearly 4 million people. Yakovleff insists that history ensures a Ukrainian victory this time. “Putin is being defeated by what has become the most powerful military in Europe,” Yakovlev says. “If Putin survives, he would be the only Russian leader to survive a defeat of this magnitude. His personal fate is sealed.” On the other hand, Hanna Shelest, director of the Prism security and military analysis group in Kyiv, has reason to be concerned. “I trained NATO officers at a war college,” he explains. “The only map of Ukraine was on my desk. None of my students knew the distance between Crimea and the nearest NATO country. It’s the same thing eight years after Putin invaded Crimea,” adds Shelest. “NATO has no strategic vision for Crimea.”
