Vladimir Putin’s New Alter Ego Is Igor Strelkov
Russia’s president has come around to the twisted views of the man who started the conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Putin is following in Strelkov’s footsteps.
Photographer: Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty Images
Amid the carnage of war in Ukraine, one man appears to feel grimly vindicated, if not quite happy about how things have turned out — the man who played an outsize role in starting the conflict in 2014, Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov.
Few people are hated as much in Ukraine as Strelkov (I’ll use his nom-de-guerre throughout, since he prefers it to his real name). In April 2014, after Ukraine’s provisional government said it would send troops to put down pro-Russian revolts in eastern Ukraine, Strelkov crossed the border from Russia with about 50 men and wreaked enough havoc to pull the Russian military into a conflict that Vladimir Putin initially was reluctant to enter. He almost got Putin to do in 2014 what he is doing now, but Strelkov received no thanks from the Kremlin, was marginalized and became — so it seemed — little more than a bitter fringe figure.