Former Russian rebels trade war in Ukraine for posh life in Moscow

MOSCOW — There was a time when the arrival of Alexander Borodai and his posse of camouflaged gunmen could clear out a restaurant in just minutes.

But that was in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2014, where Borodai was prime minister of a ­pro-Russian separatist government. Now, he is back in his native Moscow and, as he tells it, back to his old day job as a public relations consultant.

“When you are not on television, people start to forget what you look like,” he said, sinking into a cream-colored sofa in a tony Moscow restaurant for an interview. “And thank God for that. It was hard to go out on the street at first.”

It is an unlikely, perhaps unbelievable, transformation for the most prominent Russian citizen in the war in Ukraine and the possible target of a Dutch investigation into the missile attack on a Malaysian airliner in July last year that killed 298 people.

More