Russian's 'Imperial Dream' Faces Last Stand in Donetsk
Muscovite Heading Separatist Movement in Ukraine Seeks Return of Empire
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The prominence of Mr. Borodai and other Russian citizens at the helm of the insurgency makes any negotiated peace with Kiev harder to attain and poses an image problem for Moscow, which has argued that separatism in east Ukraine is a grass-roots movement.
"I have no idea what this person from Moscow is doing here," said a local separatist official, who, like several other senior homegrown activists, found himself sidelined with Mr. Borodai's arrival. "It was a raider's takeover."
Andrei Purgin, a Donetsk man who has been agitating for separatism for more than a decade and now serves as a deputy to Mr. Borodai, says "revolutionaries don't necessarily make good administrators, so we had to rely on specialists from outside, on parachutists so to speak."
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