One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most endearing friends and visible advocates of Russian expansion said that the conquest of Kyiv will follow the Kremlin's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean peninsula.
Alexander Zaldostanov, the leader of “Night Wolves,” Russia’s largest motorcycle club, said that “Crimea is only the beginning, we shall ride into Kyiv,” during a visit to Sevastopol in late March just days after the unrecognized referendum. His interview was recorded by Censor.net.
The avid supporter of joining Ukraine and Russia has an enduring friendship with Putin, who has buttressed his macho image by staging publicized meetings with the biker known by the nickname of “Surgeon.”
The two first met in 2009 in Crimea. The former KGB colonel once came hours late to a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yanukovych, because he had gone on a motorbike ride with Zaldostanov.
The Muscovite biker was a regular fixture in Crimea when pro-Russian forces took over the Ukrainian autonomous republic. In early March, he led a mass ride across Ukraine to deliver supplies to the invading Russian forces in Crimea.
“We were preparing for military operations, but things went in a different way,” Zaldostanov said of the virtual bloodless takeover of Crimea.
He has denounced the EuroMaidan protests that eventually toppled Yanukovych from power as “radicals and provocateurs,” according to the Night Wolves’ website. In late January, the motorcycle club took guard in the predominantly Russian-speaking cities of Simferopol, Kharkiv, and Luhansk.
“We have not given any opportunity for the ‘cannibals,’ who started the riots in Kyiv, to behave outrageously,” said Zaldostanov.
In 2013, Putin awarded him the Order of Honor for “active patriotic education of youth.”
The motorcycle club’s website also says that “wherever the Night Wolves are, that should be considered Russia.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Iryna Yeroshko can be reached at [email protected].
