I will post information about the late
Commander of Prizrak Brigade, Aleksey Mozgovoy, from Wikipedia and other
news links.
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Alexey Mozgovoy, Commander of the pro-Russian
Separatist "Ghost Battalion"
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Aleksey Mozgovoy
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Birth
name
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Aleksey Borisovich Mozgovoy
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Born
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3 April 1975
Nizhnyaya Duvanka, Svatove Raion, Voroshilovgrad Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union |
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Died
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23 May 2015 (aged 40)
near Mykhailivka, Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine |
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Allegiance
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Service/branch
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Years of
service
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1992–1998 (Ukraine)
2014–2015 (Novorossiya) |
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Rank
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Senior sergeant (Ukraine)
Kombrig (Novorossiya) |
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Unit
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Prizrak Brigade
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Battles/wars
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War
in Donbass |
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Aleksey Borisovich Mozgovoy (Russian: Алексе́й
Бори́сович Мозгово́й,
Ukrainian: Олексі́й Бори́сович Мозгови́й, Oleksiy Borisovich Mozhovyj;
3 April 1975 – 23 May 2015) was a rebel commander of the self-proclaimed
Luhansk People's Republic in Ukraine. He
was the leader of the pro-Russian Prizrak Brigade.
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The combat banner of
the Ghost Brigade of the United Armed Forces of Novorossiya.
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Biography
Born
in Nizhnyaya Duvanka, Svatove
Raion, Mozgovoy lived in its administrative center Svatove where he
participated in a local choir "Svatove Cossacks". Just before the
"Russian Spring" in Ukraine, Mozgovoy (according to Espreso.tv)
was a gastarbeiter
in Saint Petersburg supposedly as a cook. During the
conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014, he became commander of the military
formation "Prizrak" (Ghost). Unofficially his armed group is
known as the "Antratsyt Cossacks". Mozgovoy was allied with rebels
Defense Minister, Igor Girkin, and had a
reputation for infighting with other Luhansk People's Republic rebels.
Mozgovoy was known for his contacts with leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and leader of A Just
Russia, Sergei Mironov.
Death
Mozgovoy
was killed in an ambush between Luhansk and Alchevsk, deep behind the frontline,
together with his press secretary, driver, and six bodyguards. Following a
roadside bombing, his motorcade was fired upon by machine guns. The LPR
press service attributed the attack to undefined "saboteurs". While
the adviser to Ukrainian Minister of MVS,
Anton Gerashchenko, stated he was assassinated by Russian GRU special forces, citing supposed radio
communications. He survived an identical attack two months prior to his death
and was dismissive of threats to his life
Prior
to his death, Mozgovoy's Prizrak brigade had been having supply issues due to
Mozgovoy's refusal to join the formal LPR power structure. It had dwindled from
3,000 fighters to several hundred. Mozgovoy and two of his colleagues (Andrey
Kozlov and Anna Samelyuk) decided to move into politics and, with the
assistance of the OSCE, sent an application to Kiev to
register the political party Narodnoye vozrozhdeniye (National Renewal).
It was sent to Kiev instead of to Lugansk as a proper legal process did not yet
exist in the LPR for the registration of political parties. The application was
received by Ukraine's Ministry
of Justice on May 5, and accepted by May 8, thus becoming the first
and only political party registered by Ukraine that originated in one of the
breakaway rebel territories, and the only ones that Ukraine would legally
recognize according to the Minsk II peace
agreement. On May 8, there was an international "anti-fascist" forum
in the city of Alchevsk in the LPR, which included around
100 attendees, including OSCE members. By the evening, the registration of the
new party had become widely known among the attendees. The following day, the
LPR authorities denied Mozgovoy permission to stage a May 9 Victory Day
parade. Of the three founders of the new party, two (Mozgovoy and Samelyuk)
were killed in the May 23 bombing. The third, Andrey Kozlov, was arrested by
the LPR authorities the following day. After several months, his friends and
family lost contact with him. His current whereabouts and health status are
unknown.
Controversy
In
October 2014 he headed a "people's court"
that produced a death sentence against a suspect accused of rape by asking the
audience to raise hands. Answering questions from the audience afterwards,
Mozgovoy said that he ordered his patrols to "arrest any woman found
sitting in a pub or cafe". After the statement caused significant critical
response in Russian media, he had to explain that he said that because he
thought that women "should care about their safety", that the
intention of the statement was to make people think about morals and that he
was not going to arrest anyone. The statement that caused the controversy was:
If tomorrow I see in a cafe, in a pub even one young lady, she will be arrested ... А woman should be the guardian of the hearth, the mother. And what kind of mothers do they become after pubs? ... A woman should stay in the house baking pirozhki and only celebrate [meaning "drink" in this context] on the International Women's Day. It is time to remember that you are Russian! It is time to get your spirituality back!
INTERNET
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20141012154552/http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27447264
19 May
2014 Last updated at 02:26 ET
Ukraine crisis: Inside
pro-Russia militia training camp
By Paul
Kenyon BBC Panorama
An armed
militia group has given the BBC exclusive access to its training camp in east
Ukraine, where recruits are preparing to fight the country's army. Panorama has
followed the brigade's commander since the conflict began - now he has gathered
a force of more than 100 men.
In a
hidden clearing in woods close to the Russian border, men prepare for combat.
Until a few days ago, most of them had ordinary jobs - a supermarket worker, a
miner, a labourer.
Even
their commander, Alexei Mozgovoi, is new to this, he used to run a construction
company but is now ready to lead his men into battle against what he sees as
the illegal government in Kiev.
"It
is already a state of civil war. The civil war began after the first shots in
Slavyansk, and now it's in full swing. The east of Ukraine is moving steadily
towards Russia, and that's a fact," he said.
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Alexei
Mozgovoy and his Prizrak Brigade
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'Death sentence'
The spark
for their action was February's revolution in the capital which they believe
has imposed an illegal pro-European government which does not serve them.
The plan
is that when these men leave here, they will form new armed groups, until each
town in east Ukraine has its own militia. Their take on this conflict is the
mirror image of many in the West, for them, it is the Ukrainian army who are
the aggressors.
As one of
the militiamen, Sergei told us: "They're bandits and they call us
separatists, they're threatening us with life imprisonment. So far as we are
concerned, they are war criminals and face a death sentence."
Another
one, Viktor added: "My family are proud of me because they know I'm here
to offer them and other families protection and security."
The men
train together, and live together and they are flying the flag of one of
Russia's main political parties - the LDPR.
Panorama
first met Alexei in March when he was trying to drum up support for anti-Kiev
protests. The turnout was small and there was little sign of the chaos to come.
"You
won't believe it. I used to live and work just like everyone else. I'm not
hungry for power, I don't want power. I want law and order and for the people
to be heard," he told us.
He took
us to a derelict armaments factory that used to provide thousands of jobs
locally and which he said partly explained why he wanted closer links to
Russia.
He told
us: "We have given everything away - from nuclear
weapons to factories. Russia understands that if you want peace, prepare for
war."
'These are radicals'
We also
filmed him as he watched protesters take the first building in his home town of
Lughansk, the regional headquarters of the Ukrainian security services. It
contained weapons which were now in the hands of the protesters. He did not
approve of their action.
"These
are radicals just interested in seizing a building, there's nothing
constructive," he says. "Ok, they're seized a building, but where
does this take us now?" he said.
The next
time we met Alexei was when he had just returned from meetings with officials
in Moscow, just as the West was accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of
stoking ethnic tensions in the region.
While
refusing to go into details, he told us he met the leaders of two of the major
Russian parties in parliament- Sergei Mironov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
He and
his followers were now armed and in military uniforms, but he was evasive when
asked who had supplied their weapons.
"Barack
Obama. Barack Obama gave us the weapons through his politics. If he stayed at
home and ran his own country and didn't poke his nose into others, there
wouldn't be any weapons - not in Syria, not in Libya, and not here," said
Alexei.
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The revolutionary Ghost Brigade of
Novorossiya.
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://www.tumblr.com/search/mozgovoi]
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Referendums
And he
was equally evasive when asked what had been discussed in Moscow and who with.
He told us "Why are you only interested in asking about my trip to Moscow?
We're one people. Who am I to go to if not my brother? Who should I ask advice
for if not my relatives?"
There is
a serious point in what he says: US and Europe's support for the government in
Kiev has inflamed opinion in eastern Ukraine. And many who began as moderates,
including Alexei himself, will no longer settle merely for a split from Kiev -
they are preparing to fight to be part of the Russian Federation.
We also
filmed Alexei voting in the referendum which took place in the region on 11 May
- surrounded by his new armed bodyguards.
The
separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk said 89% and 96% respectively voted in
favour of "self-rule" in the referendums, held a fortnight before
Ukraine's presidential elections. Ukraine, the EU and US have declared the
referendums illegal but Russia says the results should be
"implemented".
National
elections are scheduled for next Sunday. Whoever wins will inherit a divided
country, with entire towns out of Kiev's control and many in no mood for
compromise.
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Alexey Mozgovoy, Commander of the pro-Russian
Separatist "Ghost Battalion"
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The People’s Court of Eastern Ukraine
Is
rebel field commander Alexei Mozgovoi a social revolutionary or a power-hungry
facilitator of mob rule?
December 22, 2014
One afternoon in late October,
Kalashnikov-armed pro-Russian separatists led two accused rapists into the
House of Culture in Alchevsk in the self-declared Luhansk People's Republic for
a “people's court,” twisting their arms behind their backs so they were forced
to bend over as they walked. One read out the evidence gathered against the
first man by the rebels' military police unit, arguing the 37-year-old had
threatened a 15-year-old girl until she agreed to have sex with him. Then he
asked the 340 local citizens and rebels assembled in the hall to vote to
sentence him “to the highest form of punishment according to the laws of
wartime, death by firing squad.”
The
crowd voted to send the first man to redeem himself on the front line, where
rebels continue to clash with government forces. It sentenced the second man,
accused of at least three rapes since 2008, to death. A video of
the people's court caused an uproar in the Ukrainian and Russian media,
especially one fragment in which Mozgovoi suggested that women should “sit at
home and cross-stitch” and ordered that “any girl who goes to a bar will be
arrested.”
But
while critics have accused Mozgovoi of facilitating mob rule, communist and
Marxist commentators have cited his outspoken opposition to the corrupt,
oligarchic government that has plagued Ukraine as proof that he is the best
hope to turn the pro-Russian rebellion into a social revolution. Although the
armed seizure of buildings in eastern Ukraine in April was accompanied by
frequent calls for a social welfare state, communist and other left-wing
activists have been marginalized by pro-Russian activists who are more
nationalist in their rhetoric. The Communist Party wasn't allowed to run in last
month's rebel parliamentary elections and in the end was given a
meager 3 seats out of 100 by the ruling coalition, its leader recently told The Nation. Many left-wing
activists have said the uprising has turned toward Russian chauvinism rather
than social reform.
For
his part, Mozgovoi said he does not believe in ideologies but rather “popular
democracy” and argued that the recent judicial spectacle had been
misunderstood. “To create the mechanisms for a people's government, we need to
create precedents like we're doing with the people's court,” he told The Nation.
But
the jury is still out on the leader: Is he a socially-minded revolutionary
propagating a radical form of direct democracy to eradicate years of corrupt
government? Or a populist warlord conducting reckless justice and ruling his
fiefdom with an iron hand?
A
descendant of the Don Cossack warriors who lived in the borderlands of the
Russian empire, Mozgovoi was born in the Luhansk region, studied music and sang
in a choir, served seven years in the Ukrainian army and worked in the
construction industry in St. Petersburg. Returning to Luhansk in February as
protests for European integration raged in Kiev, Mozgovoi joined other
pro-Russian activists in holding rallies and camping out in the city center,
where he first began putting together the group that would become his military
unit, the Ghost Brigade.
The
unit has now grown to almost 3,000 men, he said. It is arguably one of the most
potent fighting forces in separatist-held territory, which has made Mozgovoi a
political force to contend with in the Luhansk People's Republic, where he has
occasionally clashed with other separatist leaders. Having established a base
of operations in Alchevsk (pre-war population: 111,360), he operates largely
independently of the rebel leadership in the regional capital, which doesn't
provide him with supplies or financing, he said.
Mozgovoi
characterizes his war as one against oligarchy and corruption. He sees both in
the new Kiev government, which he derides as a pawn of US foreign policy.
“The
system in Russia and Ukraine is rotten,” he said. “In Belarus, they all say
(Lukashenko) is a tyrant but at least he destroyed a little bit of the system
that's taking over Russia and Ukraine, there is order there. Democracy is not
always good. Sometimes you need to tighten the screws, but you can't tighten them
too much.”
Boris
Rozhin a.k.a. “Colonel Cassad,” a communist and preeminent blogger in Crimea
covering the pro-Russian movement, has called Mozgovoi the “farthest left of
the (rebel) commanders,” and said the burgeoning rebel state could “have some
sort of half-socialist program if Mozgovoi's ideas win out.” Russian Marxist
political analyst Boris Kagarlitsky called him a “social democrat with a
radical direct democracy agenda.”
His
anti-oligarchic stance—and an openness to dialogue—has allowed Mozgovoi to take
on a new possible role, that of the peacemaker, in three Skype sessions with
volunteer battalion commanders fighting in Kiev's “anti-terrorist operation”
against the pro-Russian rebels. Mozgovoi
and his battlefield opponents seemed to agree upon the essential problems
facing Ukraine—poverty, corruption and oligarchy—even if they differed
drastically on the solutions.
During
the first conversation, Mozgovoi offered that the conflict could be solved if
the volunteer fighters on both sides would join together to “clean out the
parliament and the government” in Kiev, a suggestion that seemed to resonate
with the pro-Ukrainians present, several of whom spoke out against the
government of oligarch president Petro Poroshenko.
Mozgovoi's
reputation has attracted ideologically driven far-left volunteers like the
Moscow antifascist Anton Fatulayev, who was reportedly killed in an ambush in
August after joining the Ghost Brigade. According to Fatulayev's friend and
roommate Maxim Solopov, the recruiter in Rostov-on-Don who helped Fatulayev
pick a rebel commander to serve under had recommended Mozgovoi because he
“supports the idea of popular democracy, he takes an independent position, he
doesn't believe the Russian government, he's an independent person and a man of
strong beliefs who is fighting for ideals including social justice, and besides
all that he has the reputation of a good commander who takes care his
soldiers.”
But
Mozgovoi's political platform remains fluid, ill-defined and sometimes
contradictory. Although he is ostensibly fighting for the creation of a
pro-Russian “Novorossiya” state over a wide swath of southeastern Ukraine—he at
one point suggested resurrecting the Russian empire—he said the regimes of both
Russia and Ukraine run counter to true government by the people. He admitted he
is worried that the rebels in their alliance with Russia are simply trading one
oligarchy for another.
Mozgovoi
describes himself as a supporter of “rule by the people,” and, when pushed on
what that might actually mean, said he envisions a government with direct
citizen participation in policy-making, a strong social welfare component,
nationalization of key industries and a division between government and
business that is “written in blood.” He said he opposed following any one
ideology or dogma, although he admitted his respect for Vladimir Lenin and
Nestor Makhno, the controversial leader of the brief-lived anarchist communist
Free Territory in eastern Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. He has
criticized Ukraine's Communist Party for failing to “fix anything or build
anything in the socialist direction.”
The
commander's support for radical popular democracy has a darker side. By law,
Ukraine doesn't allow the death penalty such as that handed down by the
people's court, but Mozgovoi is by all accounts the ultimate authority in
Alchevsk right now. As The
Nation arrived at his headquarters in a decrepit former printing
press for the interview, a group of haggard-looking men swept the street
outside, part of the “work therapy” Mozgovoi has instituted for minor crimes
like violating the curfew or drunk and disorderly conduct.
Sitting
in an office decorated with old weapons like a saber and a WWII-era submachine
gun, the commander said his order to arrest woman in bars was “absurd” and that
the man sentenced to death would remain alive for now. “We didn't conduct that
court to shoot someone, but rather so people could feel how it is to make a
decision themselves,” Mozgovoi said.
Both
of the sentenced rapists told The
Nation—in the presence of armed guards—that they were being held in
decent conditions, although one had a black eye, which he said he got when he
slipped on a small set of nearby steps.
Oleg
Izmailov, a Donetsk-based journalist and political analyst, called Mozgovoi's
people's court a “medieval” practice, but said it was also reminiscent of the
tradition of “people's gatherings” common in Russian villages and Cossack
communities. He added that “social revolution is closer to him than the idea of
national revolution,” unlike with many rebel commanders, and admitted that
Mozgovoi's ideas have a popular appeal.
“Under
the Ukrainian regime, almost all judges earned the hatred of the people,”
Izmailov said. “Those who heard cases, especially criminal ones, were not clean
and everyone knew it, so the people of course welcomes this.”
But
relatives of the two sentenced rapists questioned the commander's methods.
“It
was awful, there was no defense, no witnesses,” Irina Karpusha, the estranged
wife of the man sentenced to duty on the front line, told The Nation when asked
about the people's court. “Some people came there drunk and decided a person's
fate without fear of God or anything else … I'm not justifying [my husband],
he's done wrong, but it was awful.”
According
to Russian Marxist Kagarlitsky, although Mozgovoi lacks an intelligible
political program, such populist military leaders are typical in times of
unrest. Nonetheless, he remains the “best show in town from a left of point of
view,” Kagarlitsky said.
“Some
are a little bandit, a little revolutionary, a little people's hero,” he said.
“Today's Ukraine can compare with the Mexico of Pancho Villa and Zapata, so
he's a people's hero with all the pluses and minuses … There were lots of such
heroes in the Russian Civil War, but then the Bolsheviks put commissars from
the intelligentsia above them. Nowadays there is no such left movement or
intelligentsia.”
Sociologist
Volodymyr Ishchenko, a pro-Ukrainian leftist commentator and a member of the
editorial board of Commons:
Journal for Social Criticism, said Mozgovoi has “ideas about
anti-oligarchic egalitarian democracy.” But the commander also has
“conservative, sexist ideas,” he said, calling into doubt Mozgovoi's ability to
influence the separatist movement to focus more on left-leaning social reforms.
“Which
precisely elements in his politics will dominate, either progressive, or
reactionary, will depend not on him foremost but on the general development of
the separatist movement,” Ishchenko said. “And generally it is developing not
in the left direction now.”
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The monument to Alexey
Mozgovoy, the late Commander of the Ghost Brigade of the Lugansk People's Militia
(sculptor Nikolay Yasnopolyan), is almost ready. Funds are being raised for
casting of the statue at the moment.
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