????Barely a month ago, Sergey Aksyonov was a small-time Crimean politician. Today, Aksyonov is the prime minister of Crimea’s parliament, which declared independence from Ukraine early this week. ????LITTLE is known about Sergei Aksyonov, the pro-Russia Crimean leader who drove the region toward secession. What is obvious, however, is that he plays a key role in helping Russian annex Crimea. ????A month ago, when Ukraine’s old regime was just starting to crack under the pressure of a revolution, few people in the country had ever heard of Aksyonov. He was then a marginal figure even in the local politics of the region of Crimea. His Russian Unity party had only three seats in the regional legislature and no representation anywhere else. But that has not stopped him from taking charge. In late January, as the protesters in Kiev began seizing government buildings, Aksyonov started to form an army on the Crimean peninsula. Now he is the de facto leader of the entire region, a post that has thrust him into the center of the most dire political crisis Europe has confronted in years. ????From the beginning, the stated aim of his paramilitary force was to defend against the revolutionary wave that was sweeping across Ukraine and, ultimately, to break away from the country entirely. Its first battalion of 700 men came from the youth group of Aksyonov’s political party, and as he continued calling in the proceeding weeks for a “full scale mobilization,” hundreds of others joined his Crimean self-defense brigades. By Feb. 21, the day the Kiev uprising toppled the Ukrainian government, Aksyonov was in command of several thousand troops. “All of them,” he says, “answer to me.” ????His rise to power has made him a valuable ally to Moscow and a serious threat to Ukraine and its Western partners. On March 4, Putin recognized Aksyonov as the legitimate leader of Crimea, apparently without ever having met the man. Since then the Crimean government called for the referendum to join Russia, a move that was likely to redraw the map of Ukraine and caused a historic rift between Russia and the West. ????The 41-year-old Aksyonov, a lumbering former cigarette trader with Russian separatism in his genes, now finds himself at the center of the world’s attention. ????So far, the most revealing aspect of his time in power has been the way he came to possess it. Before dawn on Feb. 27, at least two dozen heavily armed men stormed the Crimean parliament building and the nearby headquarters of the regional government, bringing with them a cache of assault rifles and rocket propelled grenades. A few hours later, Aksyonov walked into the parliament and, after a brief round of talks with the gunmen, began to gather a quorum of the chamber’s lawmakers. ????Various media accounts have disputed whether he was able to gather a quorum of 50 of his peers before the session convened that day, and some Crimean legislators who were registered as present have said they did not come near the building. In any case, those who did arrive could hardly have voted their conscience while pro-Russian gunmen stood in the wings with rocket launchers. Both of the votes held that day were unanimous. The first appointed Aksyonov, a rookie statesman with less than four years’ experience as a local parliamentarian, as the new prime minister of Crimea. The second vote called for a referendum on the peninsula’s secession from Ukraine. Since then, Aksyonov has been holding court on the second floor of the Crimean government headquarters. ????Given the fact that he has never actually lived in Russia, Aksyonov’s affection for the country is remarkable. It has a lot to do with the line of Red Army officers in his family. His grandfather was stationed in the Germany city of Potsdam after the Soviet victory in World War II. But Aksyonov’s take on Russian patriotism seems to derive mostly from his father, whose political struggle for the rights of ethnic Russians closely parallels that of his son. ????In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union began to fall apart, nationalist movements for independence began to spring up in nearly all of its satellite states, from the Baltics to Central Asia. Aksyonov’s father, an officer in the Red Army, was then stationed in the Eastern European state of Moldova, where a new generation of leaders was demanding their rights to form an independent state. ????That left the ethnic minorities in that country, including the Aksyonov family and other Russians, in a precarious position — they suddenly had to fend for themselves on the fraying edges of the Soviet empire. As that empire was pushed out of Eastern Europe, Aksyonov’s father, Valery, became the leader of a group called the Russian Community of Northern Moldova, which campaigned for the rights of ethnic Russians in a country ruled by the Moldovan majority. In 1990, the ethnic tensions in that country erupted into war, and the Russian army came to the rescue of paramilitary groups fighting the forces of the Moldovan Government. Two years later, the conflict ended with the de facto secession of a breakaway state called Transnistria, a sliver of land that runs along the Dniestr River. ????In 1989, just before the war in Moldova broke out, those pressures convinced the 17-year-old Aksyonov to move from his homeland to Crimea, where he enrolled in a college for Soviet military engineers. But before he could graduate from the academy to become a Red Army officer like his father and grandfather, the Soviet Union collapsed. “All of us, my entire class, we were all told, ‘That’s it, you have no country left to serve. Now pledge an oath to independent Ukraine,’” he recalls. “It’s just like what’s happening now.” ????Then, as now, Aksyonov refused to serve Ukraine, which he considered an unjustly severed appendage of Russia. So he decided instead to go into business. At the time, the Crimean economy was much like the one in Transnistria — dominated by black marketeers and smugglers. Its geographic position in the Black Sea, right between Turkey, Russia and southeastern Europe, made it a perfect hub for traffickers of every sort. Anatoly Los, who is now 70, was one of the most prominent Crimean businessmen at the time. ????He remembered Aksyonov in the 1990s as a member of a criminal syndicate called Salem, which was named for the brand of contraband cigarettes they imported and dealt in bulk. “Aksyonov was a capo for them, an enforcer,” said Los. “He had a group of 10 guys that would go around collecting money.” Aksyonov’s nickname in the local underworld, said Los, was the Goblin. ????Asked about these allegations, Aksyonov said that Los “is insane, with real psychological problems.” He admited that they have known each other since the 1990s, but all claims of his links to the mafia, Aksyonov said, were part of a slander campaign initiated by his political opponents when he first became active in the pro-Russian movement in 2008. ????He insisted he never had any links to the Salem gang or other criminal groups in Crimea, but he admited that his business in the 1990s did involve the import of tobacco products. ????In 2008, as the global financial crisis squeezed businesses across Ukraine and made profits harder to come by, Aksyonov got involved in a political activist group called the Russian Community of Crimea, which has long campaigned for the peninsula to split from Ukraine and become a part of Russia. ????In 2010, Aksyonov formed the Russian Unity party and went on to win 4 percent of the vote in that year’s Crimean parliamentary elections, securing three out of the chamber’s 100 seats, one for himself. When the revolution broke out in Ukraine late last year, his party was one of the main organizers of pro-Russian rallies in Crimea, hyping the threat from the Ukrainian nationalist parties that were helping overthrow the government. But even then, he never imagined the political vistas their revolt would open up for him.(SD-Agencies) | 