The career of Sergei Yeliseyev helps to explain why Ukraine’s armed forces gave up Crimea almost without a fight—and why NATO now says it is alert to Russian attempts to undermine military loyalty in its eastern European members.
His rise to become number two in the Ukrainian navy long before Russia seized Crimea illustrates the divided loyalties that some personnel in countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union might still face.
Yeliseyev’s roots were in Russia but he ended up serving Ukraine, a different ex-Soviet republic, only to defect when put to the test. NATO military planners now believe Moscow regards people with similarly ambiguous personal links as potentially valuable, should a new confrontation break out with the West.
In 2014, Yeliseyev was first deputy commander of the Ukrainian fleet, then largely based in Crimea, when Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms took control of Kiev’s ships and military bases on the peninsula.
Instead of resisting, Yeliseyev quit and subsequently got a new job: deputy chief of Russia’s Baltic Fleet.
