ON THE morning of October 19th thousands of people in Donetsk, the main city occupied by the Russian-backed separatists of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, attended the funeral (pictured above) of a notorious warlord assassinated two days earlier. Arsen Pavlov, better known as Motorola, was a Russian irregular who boasted of killing Ukrainian prisoners-of-war and had started to act independently of Moscow. He was the latest of a half-dozen unruly separatist commanders to be eliminated in recent months, according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Ukraine expert at the University of Bremen. That evening, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany met …read more
Source: The Economist
