#plastun

Is This The End of Putin’s ‘New Russia’ Fantasy?

Infighting, corruption and murder. Novorossia is falling prey to Russia’s old demons.

By Anna Nemtsova

Part 2: Video

On Jan. 2, seven rebels and their commander, introduced as Plastun, released a video statementclaiming that the Luhansk People’s Republic Prime Minister Igor Plotnitsky had ordered Batman’s murder. The video featured a gloomy Plastun wearing a black sheepskin Cossack hat, his nose badly broken, saying that Plotnitsky had ordered the arrest of all commanders in their division. Plotnitsky “betrays all our ideas and achievements and gives us up to Ukropy law enforcement,” he said, using a derogatory term for the Ukrainian police. The commander sounded hopeless, predicting his own approaching end: “I am not sure we can resist this for a long time, as we don’t want to kill our own comrades.”