Command Authority

52

The rally in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk drew more than ten thousand this weekend, triple the attendance of the week before. Even though it was a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon, Pushkin Boulevard was packed tight with pro-Russian Ukrainians, all out to make their voices heard.

There was nothing spontaneous about this rally. Today’s event, like all the others, had the backing of the FSB, who were all over the place here in eastern Ukraine. This was the largest of the weekly rallies this year, and it was no mystery as to why. The assassination of Oksana Zueva and the NATO action in Sevastopol — there were accusations that the CIA had been involved as well — brought the pro-Russian eastern Ukrainians out in droves.

While the men and women in the crowd held their new Russian passports high over their heads and marched behind banners expressing their allegiance to Moscow, and not Ukraine, a van moved slowly behind the last of the stragglers, south on Pushkin. Then it turned onto Hurova Avenue so that it could maneuver to get in front of the action.

Minutes later, the van rolled back onto Pushkin south of the red banners at the front of the march, and it parked along an open square adjacent to the National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theater. The square in front of the massive theater served as the midpoint of the march, and here the civilian organizers would make speeches through bullhorns and incite the crowd against the pro-nationalists in power in Kiev, before everyone set off again to march east toward the river.

The two men in the van did not get out when they parked. Instead, they sat there smoking cigarettes with stone faces and watched the crowd in the distance walk up Pushkin in their direction.

The two occupants of the van were members of the Seven Strong Men. They were both Russians by birth, but they had been living in Kiev recently and working under the orders of the FSB.

Behind them, in their van, was a single fifty-five-gallon oil drum under a canvas tarp. The drum had been filled by others the evening before, but the two mafia enforcers knew what was inside.

The explosive was RDX, Research Department Explosive, also known as hexogen. It was not a new or high-tech explosive, it had been around forever, but it was suitable for this operation.

Through the hole in the top of the drum, a shock-tube detonator had been inserted into the granular material, and the detonator was, in turn, attached to a simple timing device. The timer was set for three minutes; it needed only the flip of a switch to start the countdown, so the two men in the front of the van sat in silence, watching the crowd carefully, trying to pick just the right moment to set the bomb in motion.

Local police were out, of course, but they weren’t searching parked cars along the route. They had enough to worry about with trying to stop the protesters from breaking windows of the few known nationalist shopkeepers along the route, as well as dealing with a surprising counterprotest that had materialized a few blocks farther south on Pushkin Boulevard. Though the counterprotest was small, it had the effect of pulling police patrols away from the path of the march.

The pro-nationalists who stood along the road waving Ukrainian flags and yelling at the marchers had been set up by the FSB the evening before, meaning Russian intelligence had a hand in organizing both sides of the conflict here in Donetsk today.

When the red banner was just one block away from the van with the fifty-five-gallon bomb in the back, the two Seven Strong Men operatives opened their doors. Then the passenger flipped the switch on the timer, calmly stepped out, and joined his partner as they walked away to the east.

Two minutes later, they were picked up by a confederate driving a car with stolen license plates.

And a minute after this, when the protest marchers were still forming in the square next to the National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theater, the shock-tube detonator sent a percussive wave into the RDX, and the entire van exploded in a flash with a blast radius of eighty feet.

A few close by were spared death because the van had been parked in a lot with vehicles on both sides and this stifled some of the bomb’s potential carnage, but those in front of and behind the vehicle were torn apart instantly. Those who did not take the full force of the blast but were still within the radius of the major shock wave had their eardrums and internal organs assaulted, and several people in a second ring of victims, just outside the range of the shock wave, were killed by shrapnel from the blast.

The entire rally was pitched into chaos as the dead and maimed littered the ground and thousands ran for their lives, even crushing the fallen in their path.

Within minutes of the attack, a call came in to TRK Ukraina, a local news television station. The caller claimed to be a Ukrainian nationalist, and he took credit for the attack on behalf of the Ukrainian people and their allies in the West. He said any attempts by Russia to take over the Crimea would result in the wholesale slaughter of Russian citizens and anti-nationalists, effectively throwing down the gauntlet and ensuring more unrest between Ukraine’s two sides.

The caller was actually an FSB agent phoning from the Fairmont Grand Hotel in Kiev. The FSB had already decided that once the city of Donetsk was retaken by Russian forces, the pro-Russian marchers who died today would have a plaque erected in their name in the square next to the National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theater.