The Ilovaisk pocket: two years without answers

Celebratory fanfares, rehearsals of the Independence Day parade, fiery speeches and Ukrainian troops entering Ilovaisk – these were the defining features of August 2014. In the second half of August 2014, official sources released daily reports of Ukrainian troops’ piecemeal advance in this small town which was nonetheless strategically important due to its position at a road junction. By the time of the Ilovaisk disaster, our military had already suffered a few debacles, particularly in Zelenopillia, where Russian rocket artillery destroyed our positions by bombarding them from its emplacements across the border in Russia, and with the shootdown of a Ukrainian IL-76 by a MANPADS as it approached the Luhansk Airport. While across-the-border attacks from Russia were almost totally unexpected, even though the presence of reinforced Russian units near the border with Ukraine had been known in advance, the IL-76 tragedy demonstrated the military leadership’s clearly unprofessional treatment of intelligence data. Ukrainian troops’ offensive against reasonably well-fortified Ilovaisk was another manifestation of its tendency to ignore obvious dangers.

Two years later, walls of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery are covered with photos of dead Ukrainian soldiers, including those killed at Ilovaisk, that battle was followed by the Debaltseve pocket, the public is still discussing the advisability of holding parades in wartime, but those guilty have not been identified yet. The government’s chief excuse is blaming Vladimir Putin for the disaster. The current Verkhovna Rada was elected almost two years ago, but it has not continued the work of the previous Rada’s parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Ilovaisk tragedy, which was chaired by Andrii Senchenko. And this is despite the fact that some battalion commanders who broke out from that pocket went on to enter the legislature a few months later. What is the matter, then? Why the punishment of those responsible is being delayed? We discussed these issues with Senchenko, who served in Verkhovna Rada of the 5th, 6th, and 7th convocations, including as chairman of the commission of inquiry into the Ilovaisk tragedy, and is now head of the Power of Law NGO.

“Our commission of inquiry proved that such bodies can work efficiently. Restarting it in the new parliament is the moral duty of all MPs, and especially those MPs who were themselves involved in those events. I remember very well the behavior of Andrii Teteruk and Boryslav Bereza when they came to be interviewed at the commission’s hearings. Personally, I have the impression that they were unwilling to tell everything then as well.

“Of course, the military prosecutor’s office should continue its investigation of the Ilovaisk tragedy. MPs should not put undue pressure on the investigation, but they should not allow the authorities to silence some facts either. The first thing we had decided on when launching the commission was the need to try and understand the preconditions of what happened. These preconditions were created during the preceding month in the D Sector. And so, we must study carefully the actions and failures to act on the part of military and political authorities of this country during the period immediately preceding the Ilovaisk tragedy. July 23, 2014 saw the transfer of command powers from one sector commander to another and the situation in the sector as it stood on that date was recorded in detail. We had tracked all developments that happened there until the sector was disbanded on August 24. We now have to examine operational planning for the Ilovaisk offensive. There are many unanswered questions regarding that as well. Thirdly, after our troops turned out to be encircled, there were two attempts to break the encirclement from without. This is what the government is silent about, because our soldiers were sent to their deaths twice for the sake of public relations. It was a battalion tactical group of the 51st Brigade on the first occasion, and a composite battalion tactical group of the 93rd Chuhuiv Brigade from Kharkiv region on the second attempt. I emphasize that the government is silent about these facts and does not want to take into account these losses when compiling its Ilovaisk reports. The next question concerns everything about the negotiations with the enemy on the opening of corridors for evacuating the pocket. There are a lot of lies being spread about it as well. The final episode is the breakout from the Ilovaisk pocket.

“You know what? At first, the military prosecutor’s office did not investigate these two attempts to break the encirclement at all. Then I, as chairman of the commission, sent a letter to the prosecutor general (Vitalii Yarema held the office at the time) and drew his attention to the importance of this episode. Yarema replied that indeed I was right, and he instructed the prosecutor’s office investigation team to include the two episodes in the general plan of the investigation. But still I hear those numbers that the government releases to the public, and they fit well with our investigation only regarding one episode, the breakout from the Ilovaisk pocket. Accordingly, they are still playing games with the numbers of fallen. In fact, our total losses throughout these events were much higher than officially released.

Photo by Mykola TYMCHENKO, The Day

“We as citizens will be able to evaluate how effective the official investigation is only when an open trial starts of those guilty of the Ilovaisk tragedy. Blaming Putin and his clique for it is very obvious, but it is not a complete answer. Putin, of course, should be sent to The Hague Tribunal for it. However, the Ukrainian society should also take interest in adequateness of decisions made by our military and political leadership. I can add also that we need to pay attention to the trial of Major General Viktor Nazarov. He is now on trial in Pavlohrad for what was in my opinion a criminal order which sent three IL-76s to the Luhansk Airport. This general, who was then chief of staff of the anti-terrorist operation (ATO), was found by our commission to bear a lot of blame for what happened in Ilovaisk. I think that had he been promptly punished for the IL-76 that went down in Luhansk, the Ilovaisk tragedy might have been avoided. He ignored the intelligence data when ordering the assault on Ilovaisk just like he ignored earlier the intelligence data on MANPADS presence in the enemy-occupied area where the IL-76 was then shot down. The totally inadequate behavior of this figure was a major factor contributing to the tragedy.

 “Moreover, the tragedy was caused by inadequate decisions of the political leadership, I mean the president as our commander-in-chief, and the military leadership that tried to please the president and ‘cleaned boots’ preparing for the parade even as the aggressor’s troops were starting to enter Ukraine en masse. The press should look closely at the Pavlohrad trial and clarify what Nazarov’s defense position is. This defense position illustrates the military and political leadership’s approaches to what happened. Nazarov was also the first deputy chief of staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in 2014, and he keeps making statements in the court which allege that we did not deal with a foreign aggression in the summer of 2014 and fought no external enemy, but rather some disgruntled miner groups whom he did not expect to be armed with MANPADS which were used to shoot down the IL-76. When he will go on trial for his role in the Ilovaisk debacle, I believe he will choose this same defense strategy again. Moreover, his strategy finds support from the fact that this war has been called an ATO, and so nobody has been assigned specific responsibilities.

“Summing up, we have to say that the Ilovaisk tragedy arose from the failure to impose martial law in the country, and the responsibility for this lies with the commander-in-chief.”

TO THE POINT

On August 18, Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko promised “a sensational development in the Ilovaisk case.” “We have discovered some sensational evidence when searching apartments once used by former Defense Minister Pavlo Lebediev,” Lutsenko reported, linking this “discovery” to the Ilovaisk case. Senchenko responded to it in a Facebook post: “We do not need sensations but rather certainty of punishment for crimes.”