Mozgovoi: Warlord of Donbass
Part 4: The Assassination Addendum
Previously on Mozgovoi:
The final part in our series on Mozgovoi speculates on the details of his assassination by Moscow. The militia commanders were eliminated one by one and the author of the book comes to some grim conclusions on who may have done it all, specifically.
This series took a long time to compile and edit and I hope that you will support the blog (Dr. Livsci’s efforts and my own), by reading and sharing it.
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The Murder Campaign of the Militia Leaders
There was one assassination attempt on Mozgovoi before the successful second attempt and his death occurred in the middle of a systematic murder campaign conducted against charismatic commanders in both the LNR and DNR.
On the 4th of March 2015, an article appeared on the site politnavigator which is a sort of pro-Kremlin news aggregator. The article was anonymous and detailed the pre-planned cleansing operations of the LNR of troublesome field commanders. Zhuchkovski doesn't outright say it but he implies that this was written by Alexander Chalenko, who was a lackey from Surkov’s press pool.
Remember: we met Chalenko when he wrote about Surkov and Mozgovoi disagreeing during their closed meetings. This was when Surkov told Mozgovoi he should let have let Prizrack be surrounded and wiped out in Lichansk because “that’s just war, buddy!”. Surkov was Putin’s right-hand man in charge of the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy at the time, remember? He got fired after the SMO failed and is trying to work on his PR image to get back into Putin’s good graces nowadays.
It is worth quoting some of that fateful article referenced in the biography (since scrubbed from the internet) to kind of get a sense of what the Kremlin wanted the Russian people to be thinking as the murder campaign unfolded. It was a statement of Kremlin orthodoxy regarding the planned assassinations, if you will:
The LNR is using the ceasefire to snatch the tails and finally get rid of various red anarchist and Cossack freebooters who have very little in common with romantic images in literature and more in common with racketeers.
At a time when all DNR field commanders have either left the Republic, left the earth all together, or joined the 1st Army corpus in the LNR to this day there is a sad picture.
Scattered gangs of people who fancy themselves Cossacks are avoiding battle. Instead they are deep in the rear controlling small cities and towns where they are extorting, looting, selling coal and robbing government aid convoys. Witnesses and local civilians say that settlements in the LNR are basically set up as personal fiefdoms headed by Cossack Atamans.
These armed gangs refuse to submit to LNR authorties and manage however they fancy, robbing and killing the local population as they see fit.
In the Republic, we have the relatively strong formation of Mozgovoi operating who despite not engaging in racketeering refuse to subordinate to LNR authorities and even have pretenses of engaging in politics in the LNR. Regardless of Mozgovoi’s undoubted bravery and service today his formation doesn't fit very well into the overall picture in the LNR. Now authorties in the LNR have started to absorb the positive experience of the DNR and began implementing steps to clean out Cossack Formations controlling small settlements and integration of Prizrack into the formal military structure of the LNR.
It is obvious that in the near future, steps will be taken to destroy armed bands terrorizing local civilians in the rear and extorting government humanitarian missions. When it comes to Mozgovoi’s brigade they were already experiencing serious problems with supplies of food and equipment at the end of last year. With such non-violent methods the Leadership of the Republic have been trying to force Prizrack towards integration.
That article was posted 3 days before the first assassination attempt on Mozgovoi and was entitled "Cleansing Brigands From the LNR, Mozgovoi’s Prizrack Next in Line".
On March 7th, 2015 Mozgovoi’s Toyota was targeted with an IED which lightly wounded him in the head. Some of the security detail riding with Mozgovoi were convinced that had the driver slowed down when the explosion went off as untrained drivers often do under stress that then everyone in the car would have been killed. Other members of the security detail with him in the car think that if the assassins had wanted them dead that they would have been killed instead of just rattled and wounded.
Zhuchkovski:
If the passengers were lucky that that the driver didn't slow down or if the assassination attempt was actually just a warning is unknown. Prizrack soldiers investigating the incident came to the conclusion that the assassination was either planned unprofessionally or it was meant to intimidate and warn instead of kill.
This specific mechanics of the attack aren't that important, but personally I think the warning theory isn’t baseless. When we get into who likely did it I’ll go over why I think so exactly. While Mozgovoi wasn't sure if the driver saved them all or if the assassins were just giving a warning, one thing all of them were sure of is that it wasn't the work of the Ukrainians.