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The Fearsome Tanks That Fought Saddam Hussein May Soon Come for Vladimir Putin A report on Balkan media claims that Kuwait may have begun transferring some or all of the 149 M-84AB tanks it purchased from the former Yugoslavia back to the Croatian Djuro Djakovic factory where they were first assembled in the 1980s. There, they’ll supposedly receive refurbishing—and possibly upgrades—before going to battle against Russian forces invading Ukraine. Reports of the arrangement appeared in Serbian media, and six of the tan-colored Kuwaiti M-84ABs have reportedly been seen transported on trailer trucks through Slovenia to Croatia. However, the alleged transfer has not been confirmed by the involved parties. It is also reported that 6 M-84/T-72 tanks were spotted at the Barje transfer point in the Slovenian city of Ljubljana about 4 days ago. It is worth noting the desert camouflage of the tank, which most likely alludes to Kuwait, which, according to recent rumors, was supposed… pic.twitter.com/e8HAxrfTtp — Ukrainian Front (@front_ukrainian) January 30, 2024 If the report is accurate, that will be these tanks’ second war to liberate territory from an invading army bent on conquest. In 1991, they were used by exiled Kuwaiti troops to help liberate their country from Iraqi occupation. The M-84 was Yugoslavia’s license-built take on the Soviet Union’s mainstay T-72 tank. That means it would be relatively easy for Ukraine to integrate into service, as it already operates many different T-72 variants. A major M-84 transfer could be a shot in the arm for Ukraine’s forces, as deliveries of Western tanks slow down entering the third year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Furthermore, Kuwait’s M-84AB variant boasts a significantly more powerful engine, tougher armor, and a superior fire control system as compared to early T-72s. Ironically, in the mid-2010s, Kuwait planned to replace the M-84s (70 of which remained in active units, with the remainder in storage) with new Russian T-90MS tanks. But in 2019, Kuwait “indefinitely postponed” the purchase. For now, Kuwait’s 218 M1A2 Abrams tanks can hold the line, should it sell off the M-84s. Supposedly, Croatia’s upgrading and donation of the Kuwaiti M-84s will be paid back in kind by Germany, which may transfer 24 Panzer 87 tanks (newly purchased from Switzerland) to Croatia. Croatia’s Air Force, meanwhile, has also reportedly transferred two Antonov An-32 light cargo planes to Ukraine, which have been in storage at Zagreb’s airport since 2014. One of two Croatian Air Force An-32Bs acquired in 1995 landing in Prague in 2006. Used to transport humanitarian aid, paratroopers and peacekeeping forces, both were grounded in Zagreb in 2014 due to funding shortfalls, leaving Croatia reliant on NATO partners for air transport. These two aircraft have now reportedly been given to Ukraine.Alan Lebeda (GNU FDL v1.2) - Wikimedia CommonsMore Ukraine’s State Emergency Service was known to operate at least three An-32s. These have likely been busily ferrying aid to Ukraine—and, on one occasion, Turkey, which required earthquake aid in February of 2023. Ukraine will definitely find uses for more of these machines. Early in the Cold War, neutral Yugoslavia imported hundreds of Sherman, M47 Patton, T-34/85, and T-55 tanks from both sides of the Iron Curtain. But by the 1970s, Belgrade wanted modern tanks that it could manufacture domestically. During a 1978 visit to Moscow, Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito convinced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to sell a license that would allow for the manufacture of the latest Soviet mass-production tank—the T-72—for $39 million. But the legal permissions and schematics still left a lot of legwork for the Yugoslavians to figure out, with their smaller industrial sector. Ultimately, over 250 companies spread across the Yugoslav Republic contributed components, with final assembly taking place at the Djuro Djakovic factory in Slavonski Brod, Croatia. A prototype T-72MJ vehicle completed in 1983 was followed by 10 pre-production vehicles and mass-production in 1985. The first series of 370 M-84 tanks had most of the same basic characteristics as the T-72M export tank: a low-profile (2.18 meters high) tank with a three-man crew, a 760-horsepower V46-6 diesel engine, and a powerful (if not especially accurate) 2A46 125-millimeter gun fed by a rotating carousel-style autoloader with 20 rounds and 22 more spares in the crew compartment. All of this was backed up by coaxial and turret-top machine guns, and a 12-shot smoke grenade discharger. While the M-84’s hull used composite materials for enhanced protection, its turret was pure cast steel. Serbian M-84A tank during the 2020 exercise in Pešter in October 2020. Note the thermal jacket on the 2A46 gun, and the top-turret 12.7-millimeter heavy machine gun, use of which proved unpopular in Balkan wars due to need for the tank commander to expose himself to enemy fire while operating.Srdjan Popovic However, the M-84 differed from the original in one critical regard: its superior indigenously developed sensor and fire control system. The gunner’s DNNS-2 sight had a 7x day magnification and 8.5x magnification night vision, and the commander had an independent night sight that could also engage the main gun. The M-84’s fire control computer, meanwhile, was rife with features for its time: a meteorological sensor to account for windspeed and humidity, and computers designed to account for both the movement of the tank and its target. Adjustments to the improved M-84A model, however, reduced the parts shared with the T-72 to just 40 percent. Protection was significantly enhanced, thanks to the addition of layers of spaced steel and textolite spaced armor, with quartz sand filling the gap between them. That increased the effectiveness of the front armor from the original 380 to 450 millimeters (the higher figure represents defense against shaped charge warheads) to over 700 millimeters RHA equivalent in places. RHA stands for “Rolled Homogenous Armor steel,” and its an effective or equivalent measure of thickness, rather than a literal one. A more powerful 1,000-horsepower V46-TK engine was also swapped in, bumping maximum speed up from 37 to 45 miles per hour. Kuwait’s Army was intrigued by the M-84A, and pitted one against an American M1A1 Abrams in desert trials. The Abram’s fuel system broke down, leaving Yugoslavia to win the contract for 200 tanks (including 15 recovery tanks and 15 command tanks) at $1.58 million apiece. Kuwait’s customized M-84ABs had 200 small changes, including different radios, an added searchlight, desert adaptations, and an auxiliary power unit fitted to the M-84ABK command tanks. Depending on how you look at, the Kuwaiti order was either tragically or fortunately too late. Only a handful of M-84As had arrived when Iraq invaded and overran Kuwait in two days, and subsequently paraded the captured factory-fresh tanks. However, Kuwaiti troops in exile continued to receive dozens of the remaining M-84s. These equipped Kuwait’s 35th Shahid (“Martyrs”) Brigade, which famously held the line against Iraqi tanks in the Battle of the Bridges before withdrawing over the Saudi border. The 35th’s soldiers were trained to operate M-84s by U.S. special forces, as well as Yugoslavian trainers, and fought alongside the U.S. and Saudi troops that liberated Kuwait in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Two tanks were knocked out, but later repaired. Due to fears they’d be mistaken for Iraqi T-72s, these M-84ABs had three white stripes painted on their side armor as an identification measure, and were employed conservatively. Kuwait Army M-84AB tank advances down a lane cleared of mines during Operation Desert Storm on March 1, 1991.Staff Sgt. Dean M. Fox/U.S. Army - Wikimedia Commons Just a few months after Kuwait’s liberation, ethnic separatism resulted in the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia—interrupting the Kuwaiti order at 150 tanks delivered. The Yugoslav People's Army (usually abbreviated JNA) had seven brigades with M-84s when the war began: three based in Serbia, and one each in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and North Macedonia. These were soon snatched up by the separating parties alongside older, more numerous T-34s and T-55s. JNA M-84s were first deployed in the 10 Day War of June/July, 1991—unsuccessfully attempting to stamp out Slovenian independence. Then, from August to November, JNA M-84s battled Croatian national guardsmen in the brutal, three-month-long urban battle of Vukovar. Though the JNA ultimately prevailed, it lost an estimated 100 tanks to ambushing anti-tank teams and mines. Those included around 20 M-84s, four of which were knocked out in a single ambush on Trpinjska Road. However, entrenched JNA M-84s did defeat a counterattack by Croatian T-55 tanks, knocking out three. M-84s were also used in the Krajina region by Croatia, and in the Siege of Sarajevo by both Serbian Srpska troops and (in smaller numbers) Bosnian forces. In that theater, with its mountainous terrain, its insufficient gun elevation/depression proved problematic. Chinese HJ-8 anti-tank missiles supplied by Pakistan to Bosnia also proved a threat. Nonetheless, according to an article by Nikola Isidorovic, the M-84’s front armor was “never penetrated” during the war. Instead, munitions hitting the lower-side armor and mines penetrating the belly armor caused fatal detonations of ammunition stored in the crew compartment, often leading to turret pop-offs—an infamous vulnerability of the T-72 family of tanks. Isidorovic estimates that roughly 40 M-84s were lost by all sides during the five-year civil war, though some proved repairable. Serbian M-84s latter battled Kosovar separatists from 1998-1999, with nine M-84s lost to the subsequent NATO air campaign. Serbia’s M-84s last saw combat in 2001 in the battle of Oraovice, during the Presevo Valley campaign against Albanian insurgents. There have been several attempts to market further-upgraded M-84s—most notably, the Croatian M-84D and Serbian M-84AS series, featuring much of the equipment of the Russian T-90A tank (the Shtora active protection system, French Catherine FC thermal sight, and Kontakt explosive reactive armor). The M-84 Tank and Ukraine While photographic evidence shows that Russian tank losses outstrip those of Ukraine by a more than 3 to 1 ratio, Russian factories produce several hundred new tanks annually. Presently, Ukraine’s cannot. Thus, sourcing more tanks from abroad is vital to Ukraine—especially those that it can easily integrate into its existing training and maintenance systems. Thus, M-84s from Kuwait—or elsewhere—are undoubtedly of interest to Ukraine and its allies. Serbia retains roughly 200 M-84s tank in four battalions, and has plans to upgrade at least 40 to the new M-84AS2 model. Meanwhile, Slovenia and Croatia both retain 46 and 74 M-84A4 Snajper (“Sniper”) tanks outfitted with improved Slovenian Omega-84 fire control systems, including improved gun stabilization, better night sights, and new laser range finders. Bosnia and North Macedonia may also have dozens of M-84s in storage. While Serbia is politically unlikely to export tanks for use against Russia, in 2022, it seemed that Ukraine might obtain some or all Slovenia’s M-84A4s (all but 14 of which are in storage). But that fell through, as Slovenia’s leadership was dissatisfied with the promised compensation from Germany. That could change now that Germany is acquiring Swiss Panzer 87s (ie. Leopard 2A4s) that it could potentially shuffle over to Slovenia or Croatia to compensate for donated vehicles. If Kuwait’s M-84s are indeed being overhauled in Croatia prior to delivery in Ukraine, it’s worth considering the extent of that process. On the low end, these efforts may simply involve restoring the tanks to useable condition—particularly as 75 of Kuwait’s tanks are reportedly no longer in service. But on the higher end, it’s possible that the M-84ABs could be refitted with the further enhanced fire control systems that were introduced on the M-84A4 Snajper. Any M-84s entering Ukrainian service will also surely receive explosive reactive armor (ERA) tiles to improve their survivability against shaped-charge armor-piercing weapons (including nearly all infantry anti-tank weapons). Overall, the Balkan take on the T-72 is a bit tougher, faster, and far-sighted than the original. And, most importantly, significant numbers may become available in what could prove a difficult year for Ukraine, as American military assistance remains stymied by political machinations in Congress. https://www.yahoo.com/tech/fearsome-tanks-fought-saddam-hussein-195500712.html

"Russia's plan is luncheon meat somewhere on the Vistula. They want to continue after Ukraine" [SROCZYŃSKI'S INTERVIEWS] Grzegorz Sroczyński 20/11/2023 11:57 Western governments and the US government already know about the plan to conquer all of Europe. The problem is that societies still do not believe it or deny it, because people want to live a normal life - Grzegorz Sroczyński talks to reserve major Michał Fiszer. Sroczyński's interviews Grzegorz Sroczyński: Where are we exactly? Michał Fiszer: In September 1939. At that time, there was no general awareness that a world war was already underway. The fighting took place in one place - Poland - and European societies believed that Hitler would be satisfied with that. He won't go any further, because what's the point? Is it like that now? Just like then, we deny the fact that World War III has started. Even though the Russians don't really hide what their goal is. Recently, an interview with one of the main Russian commanders, General Andrei Mordvichev, was published. "When will this war end?" "Not soon, it will continue, first in Ukraine, and then beyond." "So Ukraine is just a phase?" "Of course." But what does "and then next" mean? West. When my son and I - because the two of us are preparing our war analyzes for "Polityka" - wrote this a year ago, there was a huge wave of indignation: what nonsense are they saying, why are they spreading panic?! And just listen to Biden. He already knows. Know? That the Russians will not stop in Ukraine, he said this in a speech in Israel . Moreover, now the Americans are intensively informing their allies about this. President Duda also said this clearly on November 11. Duda said: "Can we be sure that Russian imperialism will stop there, on the Russian-occupied lands of Ukraine? Well, let me tell you straight - not only can we not be sure that it will stop, we can be sure that it will not stop." Do you agree? It's not about whether I agree. Duda is not saying this because he read my analysis in "Polityka", but the Americans made him aware of it. Biden has access to intelligence information and professional analyzes that we can only dream of. This team of people in the US knows that the Russians want to conquer Western Europe. Recently, Politico and the New York Times described leaks from the US Department of Defense: the Americans approached the Russians to enter into negotiations, they were offered something. There was no response at all. The Russians are not interested in any negotiations or stopping the war. According to them, it's going well: they've dug in and are waiting. They believe that at some point, Western aid will end, Ukraine will fall, and they'll move on. If Biden didn't know that this was Putin's plan, what would be the point of all this? Insisting on further packages for Ukraine do not gain him electoral points at all. Quite the opposite. Same with Duda. Why would he care? People don't want to hear such things and be afraid. So politicians know? The governments in Europe know and the US government knows. The problem is that societies still do not believe it or deny it, because people want to live a normal life. And Russia will not hesitate to attack Poland? Why would she hesitate? Because he will get a fifth from NATO. Will not get. From who? From the USA. The Americans have half the army of Russia. And if Trump wins, I don't know if they will send anything here. They will send. All right. Let's say that Biden wins, or that Trump only talks like that and he sends troops. How much can Americans send to Europe in an emergency? I don't know. They need to maintain reserves in case of war with China, so they will send a maximum of seven or eight divisions. And the Russians have about 30 divisions, including the conversion divisions, i.e. three brigades as one division. How many soldiers is that? A division consists of 10-15 thousand people. So the US will send a maximum of 100,000? 100,000 soldiers in combat units, 50,000 in logistic units, 50,000 in aviation units. With the Navy, I don't think it would be more than a quarter of a million. That's probably a lot. And wouldn't that be bull****? The Russians now have 800,000. Well, during the war in Ukraine we learned that technological advantage and the quality of weapons are decisive. Modern equipment is a hundred times more important than masses of cannon fodder. The thing is, we ended up finding out the opposite. Ukraine received Western weapons much better than Russian ones, but this did not play a major role on the battlefield. A technological advantage can somewhat compensate for a smaller military force, but only within certain limits. If the quantity difference is large, the quality cannot cope with it at all. And this is the real lesson from this war. If there was a war between Russia and NATO, it would not involve any sophisticated operations or brilliant strategies that the West had imagined long ago during the Cold War, but something similar to what is happening now in Ukraine: a mincemeat somewhere on the Vistula River. Meatball on the Vistula River? They would attack, sending tens of thousands of people every day to attack from that shore. Because before the reinforcement forces reached us, before we acquired fighting skills, they would definitely have reached the Vistula, no matter what we did. A country that has not participated in a war for a long time always makes a lot of mistakes at the beginning of the fight. Only then does it start to work better and adapt to the conditions and draw conclusions. The Russians have already done this, because at this point they are veterans. However, we would be newbies. But why would they attack NATO and go further West? Because in order to play a role in the world, they cannot have competition in the form of healthy countries. They themselves are a criminal, mafia, corrupt state, full of terrible chaos and carelessness, so they will always be pariahs in the surroundings of Western European countries. And they don't want to be pariahs, but a dominant country. That is why they wrote in their new doctrine that Russia's goal will be to create a multipolar world, and although it is not stated directly, it can be read between the lines that it is about such a division: Russia takes Europe, China takes Asia, both share Africa , and Let the Americans linger on those two continents, let them mind their own business in the North and the South. In such a world, the Russians would be able to emerge as a superpower and cannot compete with the West. They hate the West. And they want to invade the West? Eliminate it in its current form. And introduce Russian peace. Then there will be peace, no one will compare that people have it better in the West, and if they have it better, why is the government doing what it is doing in our country, why is there dishonesty and corruption in our country? This normal environment needs to be abolished and then everyone will think that the whole world is constructed this way. But how do we know that if they win in Ukraine, they want to move on? What are the signals? For example, they talk about it on TV every day. Just watch their programs. "Solovyov Live". "60 Minutes". Or Margarita Simonian, who outdoes herself. But I recommend Sołowiow, he leads interesting discussions. For example, he invited Russian professors, including President Putin's adviser on military affairs, and the discussion went like this: "Okay, Ukraine, then Poland, that's already known, but then Germany or the Balkans? What do you think?" "Professor, after Poland, should we take Berlin or Sarajevo first?" Russian professors discuss things this way. This is a deliberate scare, propaganda! Sure, you can console yourself that way. They made the same threats against Georgia, right? So, did they enter or not? Then they threatened Ukraine in the same way... They say what they will do. When will we finally learn this? How will they approach Brussels? How are they doing in Ukraine now? I already said: they think it's good. They hold on to their positions, send further attacks on the Ukrainians, the Ukrainians are losing strength, they are losing strength too, even faster, but they don't worry about it, because they have much more. Let Trump win in the United States and say that Europe should defend itself, because we don't care about Ukraine - and withhold aid. Europe will not be able to cope on its own and Ukraine will eventually fall. Then the Russians move on without stopping. Without stopping? They started preparing for war with the entire NATO. They want to do it right away, because they know that with each month of downtime after the annexation of Ukraine, the advantage of the West - terrified and desperate - would increase. Because if an arms race were to start seriously, the West would have a much more efficient economy, more innovative, and we would have a much better industrial and scientific base. That's why they want to do it right away in Ukraine and aim to march to the West in 2026 or 2027. Their plans for developing the armed forces go far beyond the needs of the war in Ukraine. They create new military districts, new armies based on corps, in these corps they transform former brigades into divisions, i.e. they triple their size, and they admit a huge number of students to officers' schools. After the presidential elections next year, they will probably announce open general mobilization so that over the next two or three years the newly formed forces will become more polished and combat ready. They introduce old types of weapons into production. Why the old ones? They are no longer able to make newer ones because they used many imported components, so they decided that they would switch the factory lines to the production of old models, all the iron that can be thrown at the front. If it is possible to produce an old tank again that does not need modern technologies, then they produce it. They will bombard us with numbers, they will create a large army, when Ukraine falls, all this can be thrown at Poland and continue the mincemeat until the end. And we will see how long the Belgians will endure in the trenches. Trump leads in the polls. In the few states that decide the presidency, he has a solid lead over Biden: 10 percentage points in Nevada, five points in Arizona, five in Michigan, six in Georgia, four in Pennsylvania. What would happen if Europe were left alone with Russia? Can't cope without the USA? 27 countries won't send a decent army to defend themselves against invasion? He'll put something up. But what armed forces does Germany currently have? Well, they have half of the Polish army. Even less. They have a special division, which includes an airborne brigade, a mountain infantry brigade and a special forces brigade. In addition, they have two semi-mechanized armored divisions. And that's all. We in Poland will be building six divisions, and now we actually have four. But France, Italy, Spain? It's been counted. Together with America, we can put up about as much as Russia throws at us. And without America? We will have less and the Russians will have a quantitative advantage at the start. Turkey has the strongest army in Europe, almost as many troops as the rest of Europe, but it is unclear how Erdogan will behave. He will probably send troops, but the question is how many. Greece has a large army, but pro-Russian sympathies dominate there, we don't know how they will behave. The Italians, Spaniards and French have armies the size of Poland's, the British a little smaller. We slept in Europe for 30 years, we were fooled. "Putin only scares." "Putin is not dangerous." "You can do business with the Russians." And it ended up that we are almost defenseless. The Russians are constantly creating new units, Europe is also slowly waking up and expanding its own forces. What would have to happen for you to be able to write a text saying that everything is fine? The point is that the Ukrainians will manage to do the job for us and save Europe. So that it becomes the Poland of 1920. European governments - as I said - fortunately know what is coming. The Germans allocated huge amounts of money to the army, the French canceled the great army reform in order to redo it for the war with Russia, the Swedes explicitly wrote in their defense doctrine that, as a NATO member, they would probably have to send troops to defend their allies in Europe, because in the event of the fall of Ukraine, the Russian attack is inevitable. So governments have woken up, but societies are still unaware and think: it's impossible. And what to do? Provide Ukraine with far-reaching support. After all, this support is provided all the time. Too little and too slow. The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny, said what they need to gain an advantage on the battlefield. Firstly, they need planes to take the initiative in the sky, secondly, they need faster training of troops and faster equipping of soldiers with equipment, thirdly, help in developing techniques for overcoming minefields and breaking fortifications, fourthly, more precision missile systems, and the last point is systems for electronic closeup. These points are interconnected, because a greater possibility of interference and electronic warfare means support for aviation - interference makes it more difficult for the Russians to defend themselves against aircraft. But all this - all the help Załużny is talking about - seems to be within the reach of Western countries. Yes. And this is not done? How many tanks will Ukrainians get in 2023? About three hundred. And the Russians provided their troops with almost seven hundred tanks. You can't win this war like that. Shouldn't NATO just stop pretending it's not a party and send the army there? Not yet. But if the Russians somehow started winning decisively, it would be in NATO's interest - instead of waiting for them to come here - to organize defense on the Dnieper. And then the West must tell Russia: not one step further. Take advantage of our technological advantage and the increased number of joint troops together with the Ukrainians. And then, together, start retaking the areas lost by Ukraine. Will Putin then drop nuclear weapons on these joint troops? He won't cum. Because he is aware that if he uses nuclear weapons against NATO troops, he will receive such blows that would lead to the annihilation of Russian troops. Strikes with nuclear weapons? NATO would respond at the same level. But the Russians do not have to resort to nuclear weapons, they simply believe that a soldier from Norilsk will survive a much longer winter in the trenches than a Belgian soldier from a villa on the outskirts of Brussels. So what should we do now? Understand that we are next in line and not delude ourselves that Putin will negotiate. Because there are voices like: okay, let him take what he already has, the rest of Ukraine will be accepted into NATO, the Ukrainians - so that we can accept them - will give up these areas and there will be peace. But the Russians are not interested in such a thing. They are not interested in Bakhmut or Severodonetsk, they are interested in Warsaw and Berlin. We need to ramp up arms production in Western countries. New units need to be formed, the armed forces and infrastructure need to be expanded. And we must always remember that investing in Ukrainian troops is an investment in our own defense. This is not a gift to Ukraine. Western planes should have been flying there a long time ago, there were still fears that the Russians would treat it as an escalation and start escalating themselves, but meanwhile they don't need any excuse. And so they escalate whenever they want. So we have a situation where Russia has de facto declared war on NATO, and NATO is pretending that this is not the case? They haven't formally declared it, but yes - they have a plan to attack Western countries, i.e. NATO, after Ukraine. For Russia, this is an ideological war, a modern version of the Great Patriotic War, they are convinced that they are fighting for their own survival as a country important in the world. And they assume that at some point they will fight the entire NATO. They keep telling their citizens about it on TV. They prepare them for this. Where would you send your youngest son if anything? Recently, after an article in "Polityka", a man from Białowieża, who is building a house there, wrote to me in this spirit. "A beautiful place to live, but does it make sense?" I myself push away the thought of what I would do if they came here to Poland, occupied the areas leading to the Vistula, then dug in, set mines and they couldn't be kicked out. In Ukraine, they have built such a tangle of trenches and minefields that they can sit and fight until they die. What did you reply? Well, I don't know what to reply to him. Something like we have to believe that we will defeat them in Ukraine and do everything to make it happen. So where? Kids? To Germany. To buy time. And then further. We keep pushing it away from each other and I push it away in the same way, but when writing about Ukraine I have to analyze it all, put two and two together and it always comes to four, I don't want it any other way. Four means what? That they want to come here right after Ukraine. And how will it end? Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Still, an optimist. What is the reason for my optimism? Paradoxically, these scary statements made by politicians. Because if they already know, they will act. And let's hope something comes out of it. They will expand the armed forces, ramp up arms production, and will not let Ukraine fall. If Ukraine has the entire West behind it, maybe the Russians will exhaust their resources first. *** Michał Fiszer (1962) is a former military pilot and instructor on Su-22 supersonic aircraft. Lecturer at Collegium Civitas, columnist for military specialist press, regular collaborator of Polityka.pl. He is the author, together with his son Jacek Fiszer, of a series of articles in "Polityka" commenting on the war in Ukraine. https://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/7,114884,30422174,plan-rosji-to-mielonka-gdzies-na-wisle-po-ukrainie-chca-z.html?fbclid=IwAR2BZ3urOaUSXzTzex4KWJAtBslMkDGcUH7Hue6_IFcT8z1n7uObdetzabY

PART 1 The secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier: learning to kill An anonymous fighter prepares for war Oct 6th 2022 By Anonymous (with Oliver Carroll) When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Vladimir Putin turned life on its head for every Ukrainian – but none as much as for the soldiers themselves, including the many thousands who have joined Ukraine’s armed forces. First-time soldiers have come from every part of the country and every walk of life. This is the diary of one of these soldiers from his month at a training camp. A man in his mid-30s, he had never seen himself as a fighter. Before the war he worked in the arts, had a taste for exotic cuisine and swanky clothes – often picked with the help of a stylist – and was averse to “taking orders or dumb-assed machismo”. But he felt compelled to enlist “to stop this ****ed-up evil that’s invited itself into our homes”. He has since gone to the front line. Day 0 Mum can’t stop crying. Any sign of emotion or tenderness and the tears start flowing. She cries when I hug Fiona, our dog. She cries when Dad hugs me. I tell myself I’ll visit them more often when the war is over. Mental note: take Dad on a trip to Portugal. I was afraid our goodbyes would be too final, too fast, too brutal. I tell them that I’m going to be away for a while. That I’ll be studying. I try to find a way of doing it that’s less painful. I hug them in the car park outside the military registration office. Then I walk on, alone. The army officers tell me there’s been a change of plan. I’m no longer headed to artillery school and am going to a different military academy in the mountains. They’ll fill me in on the details later. In the meantime, I should stock up on wet-wipes for cleaning up “down there”. There won’t always be showers where I’m heading. We board a yellow bus for the overnight trip to our new base. A senior lieutenant breaks the news to us: “You’re joining the air assault forces, lads.” He cracks some joke about maroon berets. I register only a few words, and I couldn’t tell you the punch line. For the first time in four months I’m overtaken with fear. Everyone I spoke to before I joined up told me I needed to avoid the assault units. Day 1 The morning begins with a sludge of rice porridge, plastic cheese, carrots, sausage and an apple that has seen better decades. Good food is for when the war is over. In the meantime, I have other things to think about. First, I have to pick a specialisation: forward reconnaissance or assault forces – not a great choice. Reconnaissance sounds just a bit too scary, so I choose the assault forces like everyone else. I undergo a blitz-medical. “Are you ok, healthy?” they ask. Yeah, I’m fine. Really, I’m fine. A soldier from another regiment asks what my specialisation will be. “Assault forces? You’re gonna DIE” For the next 45 days, I’ll be sharing our dugout with two dozen others. Imagine a hole in the ground with high ceilings and boarded-up walls. Almost the entire space is taken up with bunk beds. The guy next to me snores, of course. It’s unbearable, so I go outside. I bump into another soldier from the neighbouring bunker. He’s being sent to his unit in a few days and has been drinking. He asks me what my specialisation will be. “Assault forces?” he says. “You’re gonna DIE.” I’m told half of the first intake has already been killed in action. Day 2 Team-building. The smoking facilities provided at the base aren’t well thought out: pallets dug into foliage, with just a shallow hole to protect you from shrapnel. We decide to do a better job. By the time we’re finished, our smoking hut is twice as deep, with a neat staircase, and covered with cut branches. We huddle together to see how many of us can fit. Soldiers coming back from the firing range are full of praise for the new construction. “It will be easier to collect the bodies when there’s incoming fire,” they say. The course officer runs through what we’ll be learning in the next few weeks. It’s a mind-blowing programme, he says. We’ll get to handle weapons supplied by nato, we’ll be “run over” by tanks (hopefully the tracks will pass either side of us) and we’ll be training using lasers. We’re excited, like little kids. It’s a bit pathetic. Dad went back to Granny’s village to retrace some of the walks we used to do together. He’s sent me photos of ravines and wheat fields. I can see how hard he’s finding it, but he’s trying not to show his feelings and upset me or Mum. I show him our bunker on WhatsApp. I try to reassure him by telling him all about the other guys. I say the food is OK and I’m sleeping alright. “I don’t know what to say,” he writes. “I don’t want to live like this.” There’s good news about my cousin, who has made contact for the first time since being deployed in the Donbas. Dad tells me by text. “Lyosha called to say he’s alive, healthy, but that things are difficult out there,” I sense Dad is depressed. I’m not going to tell him about the assault forces. Dinner is stewed meat and potato, bread and butter, plain biscuits and heavily sugared tea. I never thought a reasonably tasty hot meal could make me so happy. Day 3 The unexpected news of the day is that our training has been cut from six weeks to four. They announce the change during the morning line-up. I won’t tell my folks. Training doesn’t start well. I’m old enough to know motivation comes from inside, but the first instructor doesn’t waste any time in being truly awful. He doesn’t even bother to tell us what he’s teaching (military tactics, we eventually work out). We check if he’s in the timetable for the rest of the week. Fortunately not. The next guy is a change to the schedule. He’s supposedly here to talk about ethics and leadership but he’s like a hyperactive pastor. We’re treated to a sermon about the virtues and faults of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the armed forces’ commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny, about the rules-based system of law and the real reasons for the Russia-Ukraine war. Christ. Colonel Pepper, a short, red-faced man with a permanent smile, is in charge of firearms training. He marks his arrival with a thunderous boom, firing his words like bullets into the sky. The years of service have made him a bit deaf, he explains. He pulls a Makarov pistol out of his holster and unloads it. “This pistol has three safety levels built in,” he says. “First, the safety guard; second, finger not on the cock; and third, ready to fire.” He injures himself while reloading, and blood starts running down his finger. He pays no attention to it. At night the boots are brought inside and the foot-smell of an entire airborne platoon wafts around the dugout. The colonel is very serious about wanting us to know he’s a very serious kind of guy. He calls Roman, a two-metre-tall trainee, to the front of the group. He demonstrates fighting pressure points. Judging by Roman’s reactions, not all of the points are painful. Pepper tries to break a few other trainees by shouting at them. I’m his last victim. He presses the palm of his bloodied hand against my nose. “It’s not sterile!” I say. He ignores me and presses his fingers into my chest. Day 4 It’s baking! We were lucky that it was overcast the first few days, but now we’re going to burn. The next day of training is better. The topography instructor is the best we’ve had so far. A focused officer who you really don’t want to mess around with. We learn how to work out where we are from local features. How to interpret contours and determine map co-ordinates. But half way through, the class is interrupted by an air-raid siren. We aren’t allowed to be inside so we complete the class under a tree. That has its uses: we learn how to determine where we are using the sun. So much information, so little time. Every day is a step closer to being at the front. After lunch, we dismantle a vintage dshk heavy machinegun. The first of these things were produced in the 1930s, but they say it isn’t a bad piece of equipment. I find it hard to accept we’re still using weapons that require a hammer to dismantle. Some trainees are quick on the uptake and can do the job in no time. The more tender of us find it harder. At least one person breaks a finger. I resolve to make sport part of my daily routine. It’s too hot to run before dinner, and not a great idea to do so with a full stomach, so that leaves the mornings. I’ll get up at 6am. Pull-ups, press-ups and planks in the evening. Intuition tells me the routine will save me. My friends at home are asking how I feel. Honestly? Right at home. Day 6 We’ve been issued with a very basic kit: gun holdalls, helmets and tactical plate-carriers with ceramic plates. On the plus side, nothing is very heavy. On the minus side, it’s not a great fit. Most of my squad have their jackets hanging around their waist. Not exactly convincing warriors. I readjust things for them so that at least the plates cover the heart and vital organs. Our international-law classes are unique. “International law is for countries that work nine to five, and have coffee breaks,” says the training officer, who struggles to speak in Ukrainian. “We may say we are so tolerant, but in life all of us are bull****ters.” There follows a monologue about how “America never sends cash just for the sake of it”. After the class, a few guys come up to me and ask what it was all about. “He might as well be in the Russian army,” one says. We aren’t allowed outside after 10pm, so we make chit-chat in the dugout. Sanya, a smart, cheery fellow with a story for any situation, suggests we make memorial shot glasses out of our cartridge cases. The idea is that we all engrave our names on them, then swap with each other. After the war, we’ll meet up and return the glasses to their proper owners. I almost cry. I can tell I’m not the only one. Day 7 I want to be on my own so I head out of the bunker for an early jog. Ukraine is so beautiful. I meet three blackbirds, a hare and a magpie on my rounds. After the run I take a shower and wash my clothes there too. There are washing machines inside the bunkers but our digs are humid and stale at the best of times. Maybe I’m romanticising war. But the alternative is too frightening. Day 8 The sun beats down unbearably and there’s nowhere to hide. We’re in full body armour, helmet and backpacks. Our training officer barks out the instructions for the first exercise of the day. We have to walk in a column along a ditch, falling and freezing whenever a car passes. Then we have to outflank our imaginary enemy by breaking through the groves. Fall, freeze. Fall, freeze. Fall, freeze. I adore lying on the ground. The smell of warm clay and wild flowers consumes me. This is heaven, I think to myself, as I chew on the cereal bars I’ve stuffed into my combat trousers. Reality strikes as I get up and try to fight my way through the foliage. Tree branches hit my face. Thorns prick my hands. I use my helmet as a battering ram. We got our weapons today. My rifle and pistol have been in storage since the 1950s. I wonder if the guy who filled my pistol with grease ever stopped to think about the circumstances in which it would be removed. I have to clean out all the grease from the deepest cracks, then I have to lubricate and polish the weapons until they gleam. It’s the first time I’ve ever cleaned a gun. It takes all evening until lights out. A blond, chubby guy from my platoon – I still don’t remember all their names – is surprised by the lack of ceremony. “You’d have thought they would have told us how to take care of it,” he says. “But no, they’re like, take the ****ing thing and be off with you.” Day 10 The stink of boots is especially strong in the morning. During the day the boots are either on people’s feet or drying outside the entrance. At night they’re brought inside and the foot-smell of an entire airborne platoon wafts around the dugout in the heavy, humid air. We sleep on bunks 30cm apart. My neighbour on the left has begun to snore uncontrollably. The snorers seem to have a deal: if one goes quiet, someone from the support group will automatically fill in the silence. “You’d have thought they would have told us how to take care of the gun. But no, they’re like, take the ****ing thing and be off with you” In the afternoon an instructor treats us to a lecture on how great the Soviet Union was. How cheap the petrol was. How happy people were. I can’t stand any of this bull****. We still have to clean up the mess that dictatorship left us. We still suffer from the rot that permeates our state structures. The army. People’s brains. It makes me angry when some of the cadets here sing Soviet army songs. As far as I’m concerned, the Soviet military songbook is full of contempt for the value of human life. I’m surprised when I realise most of my fellow trainee troops actually think the same. Day 11 The skinny colonel teaching us how to survive a chemical attack tells us he is certain his lesson will come in handy during this war. Russia will not only use chemical weapons, he says, but tactical nuclear ones too. “People were saying on February 20th that there would be no war. And I kept telling my wife: trust me, there will be.” He tells us there is no point looking up survival statistics for a nuclear attack nearby. But we do have a chance of surviving if we are one and a half kilometres away. Reassuring. We pull on the protective gear: green elephant suits. In a battle situation we will have to do it quickly, without breathing and with our eyes closed to prevent toxins entering the body. None of this is pleasant in the sweltering heat. The rubber gas masks drip with sweat from their last use. But the worst thing is putting on the gloves. The sweat of previous cadets drips down your fingers off the black, thick, moist rubber. Day 12 We jump in trucks to head to another training range. Rainwater pours down onto us from the tarpaulin roof. The longer we ride, the more water ends up on our heads. We engineer a makeshift solution by stretching the cover and shoving our helmets into the holes. The new structure is held in place by the butt of a machinegun. We’re resourceful if nothing else. The task today is to learn how to drive armoured infantry vehicles. I’ve been driving for years but this piece of hardware flummoxes me. Levers everywhere. A completely unclear gearbox system. It’s like being on the factory floor at a metal plant sometime in the 1940s. I try to remember the instructions about the manual parking brakes. (If you forget to turn them off, the engine will overheat and smoke.) The training officer says he prefers driving these monsters to cars. “Every time I get behind the wheel, the traffic makes me jittery. But if I’m in a tank or an apc, everyone gives way.” On the way back from the range we count the number of people who wave at us from their cars as they pass us. A guy in his 20s, standing by a broken-down car, holds out cigarettes as we drive by. Another driver throws a couple of packs into the truck. When two kids catch sight of us, they salute us and start a march. An elderly lady crosses herself repeatedly. Day 13 I woke up in the night feeling like I couldn’t breathe. The dugout was filled with a kind of fog – the breath of two dozen bodies, the dampness from being underground, the odours of badly washed socks, towels and T-shirts. My head was boiling, things were floating in my eyes. Then I realised – someone had shut the door of the dugout. One of my squad, Bohdan, has some good news today. His girl is pregnant. “Scored a goal, **** me,” he says. But his excitement soon turns to fear. “They’re there. I’m…I don’t know where the **** I am.” He isn’t married and that has to change. He decides he’ll buy a ring with his next pay cheque and the two of them will get hitched in the nearest town. Bohdan sits down next to me. He scrolls down his messages to a photo of a petite, smiling girl with round cheeks and a snow-white face. Next to it is a photo of her pregnancy test and the socks his girlfriend’s mother has already bought the baby. I catch my reflection in a mirror hanging in the hallway. Some bearded brute in uniform is looking back at me. Day 14 We learned how to shoot today. My inner teenager squeals with excitement when I’m told to run and jump through thickets, work out a plan of movement, attack and defend. But I’m appalled when I’m told to fire at anything. The only thing that attracts me less than shooting is grenade-throwing. And guess what the training programme has lined up for us next? Things start well: a training grenade explodes while our instructor is holding it. It’s an almost controlled explosion, so not a huge deal. But that’s enough for me to lose any confidence I had. My body pumps with adrenaline when it’s my turn to pick up a training grenade. I manage to hit the targets easily enough. But when it comes to handling a real grenade, I hurriedly throw the thing to get it as far away from me as possible. I’m miles off the target, but I feel relief, not embarrassment. As long as you have two arms and two legs, you’re an ideal paratrooper. My mother has sent me a drawing my niece Vavara did for me, showing a bearded pensioner in military uniform. Too much hair, at least if the man in the picture is supposed to be me. The beard will take another year or so to get to that state. But Vavara has the sky right. The clouds are the same colour as those flying over my range. “I love you,” she wrote. “Glory to the Ukrainian army.” Day 15 The truck is unbearably hot. The tarpaulin overhead has created a sauna of rubber and fine dust. Sweat streams down my arm and drips from my wrist to the floor. I do my best to find some positive way of looking at the heat. “Let the pain be,” as my yoga teacher used to say. We’re on our way to the military hospital to get our chest X-rays. The doctor inspects me more thoroughly than I’m used to. “I don’t want our army to be full of cross-eyed cripples,” he says. But his professional approach is the exception rather than the rule in my training so far. As long as you have two arms and two legs, you’re an ideal paratrooper. It comes as a relief that we are in and out of the hospital quickly. It’s a heavy kind of place and you can easily get emotional. Time slows down when the injured pass by on crutches. It’s quiet, eerie. I watch a fragile girl with straight black hair helping a short man in uniform who can barely move thanks to his battered legs. His face is covered with scars, his eyes are expressionless – they seem to be saying that a crippled man can only focus on getting from A to B. Then I realise: the man isn’t much older than I am. Day 16 Assault course. We have to overcome an imaginary obstacle along wooden planks stretched on metal cables three metres above the ground. There’s another wire above to hold on to. We’re in our flak jackets and helmets. Some of us have bellies sticking out. Some are too short and struggle to reach the wire. Many are out of breath, red-faced and dripping with sweat. I feel in my element. I give my comrades a hand up to the course, and when it’s time to go myself, I scuttle across with no problem. “You can see who climbed trees as a boy,” the instructor says. I try not to smile too much. We practise parachuting – to the extent that you can in a country where flying is too dangerous. Instead, we make our tactical descent from trucks. The height is not the important thing: it’s being able to communicate clearly and to take up the proper positions. We lie down in the grass, remembering not to go near the back of the truck, where the helicopter rotor would be: none of us wants to be turned into imaginary mincemeat. A combat officer gives some advice about taking defensive positions in the field. “Dig deeper,” he says. “That’s the way to keep your men alive.” We’re told to dig using anything we have: spades, knives, whatever. When our hands are tired, we should use our feet. “Trust me. It’s easier than looking parents in the eye when you have their son in a body bag.” Day 17 We’re going to come into contact with some pretty nasty mines, the kind that have long been banned under international treaties. Almost certainly, one of us will be unlucky enough to run into something known as a “witch”, an anti-personnel mine that flies upwards before detonating at human height. No chance of surviving that. Even the lucky ones among us will have to deal with tripwires. In training, we do a bad job of protecting ourselves, blowing ourselves up left, right and centre. Our problem is that we walk like “ordinary civilians”, the instructor tells us. On our smoking break, Vlad sits down next to us. He used to be an accountant. “Do the people who start wars ever calculate how much cruelty they create?” he asks. The answer, unfortunately, is yes they do. Much better than we can imagine. The people who took the decision to invade Ukraine don’t care how many Ukrainian accountants, pr guys and doctors have to retrain as airborne assault soldiers. “I can’t understand it,” says Vlad. The most dangerous munitions are made from improvised devices. They can look like rusty toys that roll around under your feet. Like a rock in the middle of the field that someone sometime will feel the need to lift up. We have to learn how to find and avoid this **** – and how to teach others to do the same. As commanders, we’ll need to be able to draw up mine-clearance maps. I enjoy this type of task. These are important documents. The training officer says he’s sure Ukrainian sappers will be in demand for some time to come. “Every year of war needs ten for de-mining,” he says. Day 18 We’re asked to work through a plan to counter-attack and liberate the Russian-occupied south. In the real world, our boys are pressing there all the time, and it looks like something big will start soon. I’d like to be there when it happens. I want to push the bastards out of Kherson. I will drag them out of the Kinburn peninsula with my teeth. I used to spend summers there with my friends. Tents, morning swims, tasty food on an open fire. Stunning. Things are different now. The Russians have set fire to everything, people say, including the national park. Your family gets $400,000 if you die and have all the correct paperwork “The smart learn from their mistakes,” our instructor tells us, “while the wise learn from the mistakes of others.” We analyse the lessons from Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait. The pace of our training is increasing. We are sent out to dig trenches immediately after the morning session. “When will we have time to rest?” we ask. “When you are dead,” comes the reply. Usually, our training officers don’t speak this way. Death is an extremely sensitive topic for everyone. They have fought, they have lost friends. But this is now our reality. My friends on the front waste no time in adding me to messenger groups for soldiers. I get sober accounts of what they’re going through – and quite a bit of sensible advice. One of my friends used to bake the best chocolate brownies in Kyiv. Now he’s fighting in Kherson. “Don’t be a ****ing hero, whatever you do,” he wrote. “The less romance, the more likely you are to survive. Learn to kill from a safe distance. Don’t forget your helmet and flak jacket. Keep your distance from dickheads and mother****ers. And write a will.” A will? I’ve no idea how this even works. I left my credit card with my parents. My friends have the key to my flat. I’ll have to tell them how to log in to my bank account and how to split whatever is in there. “You also have to work out what to do with the 15 million,” read another message. Fifteen million hryvnia, or $400,000, is how much your family gets if you die and have all your paperwork in order. Day 19 Today is the day we’ve been waiting for: getting “run over” by tanks. You jump forwards into a ditch, then “fire” into the tank’s sight glass to “blind” it. As the vehicle approaches you throw an anti-tank grenade at it. Then, at the last moment, you lie down in the ditch so it can pass over. In real battle we won’t be throwing grenades at tanks. There are far less risky ways to engage them these days. A Javelin missile can destroy a tank from over two miles away. It’s also unlikely that a Russian tank driver would allow you to lie down between his tracks. But the point is less to re-enact battle than to make us frightened of enemy hardware. If you’re afraid of spiders, get in their cage. I haven’t opened a proper book in weeks. My vocabulary is down to about 30 words, most of them military commands. I’m reading, but it’s not what you’d call literature. I want to survive and I want to keep the people under my command alive. So I take in anything I can get my hands on: combat manuals, technical documentation for military equipment and books on tactics. Just before bed, I take a look from the dugout. A full moon hovers over the barracks. An owl flies past, slowly, about a metre away from me. It sees me, but it doesn’t want to change direction. It’s a big, beautiful thing. Day 21 The whole dugout has stuffy noses. We’ve all caught the virus, whatever it is. Most of us are weak and just want to sleep, but getting released from classes involves registering with the duty officer and reporting to the medics. The medics perform only two types of diagnostic procedures here: they either check your temperature or verify if you have all your limbs intact. I’m sick of the kindergarten around me – the moaning, the lack of application. I can feel my aggression boiling. I want to be a good person, so I take a deep breath. It’s difficult for some of the guys, I tell myself. Some people are still processing what’s happening to them. Their brains are screaming hysterically: “Where the **** am I? What’s going to happen to me? Will I live or will I die?” Part of the problem is the training itself. And the contrast. More than half the instructors are good at what they do. They care. I’d pay to be taught by them in peacetime. But there are also the stale, good-for-nothing, Soviet-brained officers, with their ridiculous love of military pomp. Sure, none of them is going out of his way to justify Stalin. They all speak Ukrainian and they hate Russians. But they are still “Soviet” people deep down: closed-minded, insecure, anti-human. Day 22 I take in the strong smell of wormwood as we sit outside: relaxed, dreamy and talking about the American rockets that have been destroying Russian supply lines in Kherson. If only the whole war could be like this. Lying on the grass with good people, taking in the sunshine. If a missile had my name on it, I’d like this to be the way I go. Today we pretend to be prisoners-of-war. I spend almost an hour with my hands tied behind my back, my mouth and hands taped. Hostage situations lend a different sense of time, and with your eyes covered it’s hard to get your bearings. I’m separated from my squad and I get thrown on the floor. They punch me in the liver, but not that hard. I’m waterboarded and they pretend to cut off my little finger. “Congratulations,” the instructor says at the end of the exercise. I struggle to see the point of it all. I said some stupid things on the phone this evening. I was too outspoken. Too open. Too anxious. Did I ruin everything? Perhaps I did. Day 23 Some of the training officers dismiss our tactical medicine classes. I don’t know why – they’re some of the best-organised sessions. It’s all about thinking under stress, minimising losses, reducing the number of injuries. Important, right? We sprint before every practical activity. The idea is to simulate a situation where the heartbeat and stress are increased. “The injured body is your workstation,” says the instructor. “You should be comfortable around it.” I go through the checklists on the model in front of me. I fix what I can see. I tighten a training tourniquet above the bruising. Hopefully I’ll never have to use one in real life. My vocabulary is down to about 30 words, most of them military commands Today they hung a sign that read “The last supper” above the door to the canteen. Very original. Given what they serve up, it’s probably a good thing. Awaiting us on the table is a soulless, overcooked rice dish. Food is just food here. Calories to consume. If you think about it that way you can just about make yourself eat it. They give you apples at lunchtime sometimes. And half a banana if you’re lucky. Day 25 A serious, short, sunburned marine colonel is here to give us the lowdown on breaching water obstacles. As an afterthought, he offers tips on dealing with Russian assault forces. Their methods are already fairly clear, he says. First they send in their proxy forces, often conscripted from occupied territories in the Donbas. These poor buggers are cannon fodder. The regular units crawl in behind them, hoping to go unnoticed, trying to get up close while you’re busy dealing with the first wave. We’re told each squad (seven men) will be attacked by at least a platoon (21-plus). The Russian doctrine says you need a three-to-one ratio in any offensive. We’re warned that there will usually be many more than that. The colonel tells us not to forget about health and nutrition. But he warns us that figs and nuts can cause cold feet. “You didn’t know?” he says. “They make your dick stand up, and that pulls the blanket up, leaving your feet to freeze.” O-kay. Day 27 Bohdan got married today. He shows everyone in the smoking dugout footage from the wedding. There’s a video of the bride, which she filmed herself with a selfie stick, and a video of Bohdan opening a bottle of bubbly. He bought a new pixel camouflage uniform for the day. He looks really happy, bless him. In the excitement, he loses a magazine full of rifle ammunition. We promise to help him look for it later. First we have the task of liberating a fictional village that has been surrounded by fictional minefields. My squad carefully crosses a minefield, keeping the enemy busy under fire, while the other two squads take up positions on the flanks. I communicate in gestures. We’ve been warned that our radios won’t work in a real battle – the Russians can jam them easily. As we take our positions, we realise the third squad has a problem. A herd of cows are grazing where they should be starting out from. The farmers, who appear from nowhere, are friendly enough. “Glory to Ukraine,” they say. They joke about our failed operation, but ask if there is anything we need. We return to our base in complete darkness. Vova suggests leaving our boots on overnight. “We’ll need to put them on tomorrow in any case,” he says. He’s a practical man, Vova. No silly suggestions. Day 28 The head of the academy appears in the morning. The general, we call him, though he isn’t actually a general. He’s a mythical figure – we’d heard of him, but never seen him. I tell myself I don’t want to take part in a circus. I try to slip away to sit on the grass and mind my own business. But the general sees me, and calls me over. He asks me what I think of the training. Did I understand everything? More or less, I say. I reel off what I know about assault checklists, fire cover, communication rules and defensive positions after battle. He says I’ve got a good military career ahead of me, that I’ll rise to become a battalion commander. Well, **** that, is what I say. There’s too much to learn and understand. I’ll leave the operational level to the professionals. After a 10km run, I call home. It will be difficult for them to understand what comes next. I’ll be on the front lines within weeks. Perhaps even a few days. But I believe in what I’m doing. This isn’t a war that can be fought with military professionals alone. The thought I have is simple: Russian tanks at one point in March were less than 60km from my parents’ home. You might need more arguments. That’s enough for me. This is our last Monday as trainees. Next Monday we’ll be real soldiers.■ These diaries have been edited and translated by Oliver Carroll, correspondent for The Economist in Ukraine. ************************* PART 2: By Anonymous This is the second part of a diary kept by an anonymous soldier. July 24th 2022 I’m graduating today from a course that was supposed to turn me from an office manager into a platoon commander in four weeks. Our tactics instructor gives us a valedictory speech before we are sent off to our new units. “I wish you the best of luck, that we are victorious, and I hope you will survive,” he says. “The enemy will judge just how good you are.” Roman looks puzzled. He can’t quite understand the randomness with which we are assigned to particular units. “How can they know who to pick? They haven’t even seen us.” This uncertainty is more unsettling than the prospect of being sent to the front line. “It’s like we’re a box of puppies,” says Roman. “Waiting for our owner to come and pick us.” One of the high-ups has decided our graduation is missing pageantry. So we are ordered to line up on the parade ground and subjected to some more speeches. One bigwig looks and sounds as though he’s been imported from the Soviet Union. A priest urges us, in very un-Christian terms, to find “our inner rage”. Then a group of officers starts singing a paratrooper song called “Nobody but Us”. They sway in rhythm as though they are playing Wembley stadium. I don’t understand what is going on. What the hell is this cabaret in aid of? The process of assigning us to our units is over in a flash. We are told which brigade we are being sent to: half of us will be with the marines, the other half, including me, are to be assault troops. Roman is summoned first. He leaves without even having a chance to say a proper goodbye. Soldiers are whisked away in cars, almost as quickly as the vehicles arrive. Viktor has excused himself and is sitting on his own by our dugout. He lowers his battered, sun-wrinkled face. “It’s just so sad,” he says. “I have a lump in my throat.” July 25th The first step of my official military career is to go to my new brigade’s headquarters in eastern Ukraine, where I will be introduced to the men under my command. I tell myself I won’t be fighting for some time yet. The unit needs to be equipped and we’ll surely receive a few more weeks of training. Our chaperone, a fat, grumpy officer in his 50s, clears the corridor at the railway station. “These aren’t any old guys; they’re servicemen,” he chides a group of girls who are trying to sell us drinks. In the sweltering heat, we jump at the chance of pouring ice-cold Coke down our throats. It wasn’t on the menu at the training camp. I feel as if I’m headed to my first music festival. I’ve got front-row tickets at this show. Booming bass. Blazing pyrotechnics. I know I’m not going to like it. We’re travelling on the night train. My perch for the journey is the top bunk in a 2nd-class sleeping carriage. I have a mattress, though no sheets – these aren’t included in a soldier’s fare. But I can’t complain. The conditions are a massive improvement on the dugout I’ve been sleeping in for the past month. I have my own bed, rather than wooden planks. I’m not sharing with a dozen other men. Here no one can roll over in the night and smother me. Two guys from my training course are travelling in the same compartment as me: Dima, 28, and Max, who is 42. Max has two children, and he tenderly shows me their photos. He is evidently fearful and doesn’t understand why everyone else his age has been assigned to reserves, but he is headed for a combat brigade. I’m also scared. My greatest fear is losing my girlfriend. We’ve only been together a month, but it already feels serious. Who wants to be with a man who can be sent to the front line at a moment’s notice? I ring her. The line is terrible. I hear hissing instead of the voice I love. When we manage to speak, I strain to control my emotions. The reception is too bad for us to talk properly. Afterwards, I try not to cry. July 26th We’re met on the platform by Dima’s father, a gentle man with a neat grey beard and kind eyes. He has driven up from Zaporizhia to spend some time with his son before he goes into battle. He hands me a piece of shrapnel. “This is what you’ve got to watch out for,” he says. The small, chipped piece of metal is a lot heavier than I thought it would be. I shake his hand, and thank him for raising a fantastic son. Dima is his only child and his father can barely hold back his tears. (A few months later, Dima was struck in the head by shrapnel. I don’t know if he survived.) I get a reality check when we arrive at the brigade headquarters. So much for keeping us away from the front lines: a young staff soldier tells me we’re off to Bakhmut in two days. The town is being pummelled by Russian artillery fire. Mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a bloodthirsty private army run by a friend of Vladimir Putin, are among the enemy forces. Many of them have been plucked from the criminal underworld. “What’s my battalion commander like?” I ask the soldier, a studious-looking man busy filling out forms. “Good reputation, though the rumour is he got injured. Have you been given a flak jacket?” “Affirmative.” (My friends gave it to me.) “A helmet?” “Affirmative.” (It was donated by a policeman I know.) “Well get yourself down to the stockroom and pick out what else you need.” “Affirmative.” (I know there won’t be anything in my size, so resolve to buy the rest myself: shirt, combat trousers, sunglasses, a torch, rucksack, thermals, balaclava, you name it.) I ask where I’m supposed to sleep. We’re not allowed to stay in the barracks given the likelihood that they will be subjected to missile attacks. “Go wherever you like,” he answers. “In the forest, a hotel, wherever. Just don’t be late on Friday.” July 29th I arrive at the deployment office as instructed. I’ve put all my gear in one backpack and tried not to take anything unnecessary. I place my helmet on the top and hang my sapper shovel for digging foxholes on the side. My sleeping bag dangles uncomfortably underneath. I can barely lift the thing onto my shoulders and look like a clumsy tortoise. I feel as if I’m headed to my first music festival. I’ve got front-row tickets at this show. Booming bass. Blazing pyrotechnics. I know I’m not going to like it. As I huddle in the corner of the smoking hut, everyone can sense I’m green. My travelling companions are experienced soldiers, and it’s clear that the war is beginning to eat them up. One man, significantly older than me, says, “I’ve started fighting in my dreams.” We head towards the front line on cramped yellow minibuses. Within an hour, everyone is too exhausted to talk. Those who are returning to the front try to get some sleep. They know there won’t be much opportunity further on. As we approach Bakhmut, I see a wheat field burning. July 30th “How the **** do you get blood out of a flak jacket?” asks Mario, a short, black-haired sergeant I got to know on the minibus. Mario is not very happy with his new armour. He lost his last set when he got wounded in April. Soldiers in need of replacement equipment don’t have much choice. You have to rummage through the left-over kit piled haphazardly in the back of your company’s support truck. What we have left over once belonged to the wounded or dead. I hope Mario will be better protected than they were. I’m issued with a modified Kalashnikov rifle. It’s supposed to be more adaptable than the ordinary one. In reality, it’s the same metal tube that spits lead and rusts before your eyes if you don’t clean it religiously. I set off to introduce myself to the company commander, who is stationed in one of the many abandoned homes on the outskirts of Bakhmut. As I enter the bungalow, I see someone who looks like a boy sitting on the floor. He’s tall, very thin and has a shaved head. I realise this is the man in charge. There are rumours the Russians destroyed our battalion’s headquarters. There are rumours they have already entered Bakhmut. There are rumours Russia is about to launch tactical nukes. It’s all bull****. Despite appearances, Raccoon is 25 years old. He graduated from the same training centre as me, just before I arrived – we even lived in the same dugout – and has been rapidly promoted. A few days ago, the company to which I’ve been assigned was heavily depleted in a Russian attack. The company commander was wounded and the acting commander received a concussion. Raccoon had to step up. Raccoon asks me what my call sign is. “I don’t have one,” I reply. “Only just got here.” “That won’t do. You’ll need to respond when you’re out in the field.” Navigator, a sergeant, tells me in a loud and irritating voice that the company will call me “The Writer”. “I’d prefer to be called ‘Kevin’,” I say, after the ingenious booby-trapper played by Macaulay Culkin in the “Home Alone” films. I don’t get my way. Navigator continues to call me “Scribbler”, just to piss me off. There are rumours the Russians destroyed our battalion’s headquarters. There are rumours they have already entered Bakhmut. There are rumours Russia is about to launch tactical nukes. It’s all bull****. Rumours in the army go viral in no time. There is a rumour our battalion commander isn’t just wounded, but dead. This one turns out to be true. July 31st We tune in to lnr Radio, the mouthpiece of the Luhansk People’s Republic, a breakaway statelet with a puppet government backed by the Kremlin, which was created when war began in eastern Ukraine in 2014. It’s top-class broadcasting, as you can imagine: several reports on the opening ceremony of a new park and some patriotic music that feels like it could have been written a century ago. Every 30 minutes, an advert urges people to sign up for the republic’s armed forces. “Excellent benefits and rewarding work,” it claims. The lads leave the station on since it’s the only one we can pick up around here. A pause in the bombardment and the heat of summer makes me sleepy. I lie on a mattress, looking up at a carpet hanging on the wall that has been decorated with a spent rocket-propelled grenade suspended on top. The peace is broken with an order, barked from the streets outside. “Time to move. One hour to get your things together.” Why do we have to move? The thud of rockets provides a quick answer. Each successive volley lands closer. I wonder aloud if we should not get out of here quicker. “We’re not pigs,” insists Misha, our quartermaster. “We clean up after ourselves.” A blue-and-white bus draws up alongside our base. The windows are missing and it is covered in shrapnel scars. We throw our rucksacks into the metal carcass and then our comrades jump in. It’s a miracle the bus restarts. I check that no one has left anything in the yard, and toss an artillery shell we’ve been using as an ashtray into the ammunition truck. My men laugh at me for doing so, but in time the shell will become our company totem. As we drive away, the rumble of gunfire fades behind us. When we arrive at our destination – another small, abandoned, godforsaken village – we hide our trucks and the bus in the bushes. Our new base is a dilapidated hut. There are holes in the walls and the veranda has tilted to one side. You hit your head whenever you walk through the front door. But it’s fine. We can rebuild the walls. We’ll settle in. August 2nd The heart of any self-respecting Ukrainian military base is the kitchen. Walter, our machinegunner, is a dab hand at bricklaying, so he is building a stove. I took the decision early on to forgo the standard fare provided by the battalion headquarters. The cooking isn’t great and it always arrives at our camp cold. We get our own ingredients instead. Some of the men are excellent chefs. Sasha, who has suffered several concussions under Russian bombardment, is finding conversation difficult. After the last concussion, he forgot how to write the letter K, he says – somewhat of a problem since it’s the first letter of his surname. I realise that I find it hard to talk with soldiers who have been in the heat of battle. As for those who have been wounded, it’s even harder. August 6th If a unit has a spare day it’s supposed to train and recharge. We’ve been assigned a training officer called Vlad. He’s 22, but he joined the army when he was 17, so has experience. His specialism is reconnaissance. He is thin with a shaved head and looks like the kind of hoodlum you’d find hanging around street corners in my hometown. We practise working as a platoon in defence. Everyone learns their positions and how to camouflage themselves to prepare for an attack. Vlad lays out a few scenarios for us. The rules say we have access to basic weaponry and the support of an artillery battalion. Mario, who has a turn commanding, makes his task more complicated than it needs to be. “Enemy infantry,” says Vlad. “1,800 metres away.” “Roger, continue to monitor,” says Mario. “So cover them with mortars,” Vlad suggests. “We don’t have mortars.” “I told you we had basic weapons.” “We never have mortars! And even when we do, they never fire. ”Mario’s eyes turn red. I can see he is re-living the battle in which he got injured. If things didn’t work out to plan then, why should they work out now? “I’m not going to command people,” he declares. “I’m not going to take that kind of responsibility!” When the exercise requires Mario to evacuate wounded soldiers under his command, the poor guy simply throws down his radio and walks off. August 15th Reinforcements arrived today from training in Britain. Seven lads. There are two twins among them. Originally, and a little confusingly, both take the call sign Twin. Max gives them the last of our automatic rifles. August 16th Our truck driver is called Uncle Lyonya. He is the other side of 50 and gangly, with a braid sprouting from his shaved head, Cossack-style. “I had to pick up two boys from my village today,” Lyonya says. “One of them was a corpse and the other crippled.” The men weren’t just fellow soldiers. Lyonya knew their families well, and their relatives had asked him to look after them personally. You can tell the big guy is really hurting. He’s actually wounded himself – there’s shrapnel stuck in his shoulder – but he won’t go to hospital until he has delivered the boys’ effects back to their relatives. “I had to pick up two men from my village today. One of them was a corpse and the other crippled” I’m getting used to the grimness of war. Today we are sorting out the belongings of some of our fallen comrades and those who have been wounded. We’ve been driving their things around for a while and they have been soaked through with rain multiple times. Bags and backpacks are full of dirty clothes. I’m not sure anyone needs them. I open one of the bags in the hope of finding documents or a name scribbled on the inside. I find a prayer book, a dirty towel, a notebook inscribed with pages of rap lyrics, a letter to Mum and Dad. The soldier who owned the bag was clearly a Russian speaker, but you can see from his writing that he was trying to switch to Ukrainian. He’s still not entirely fluent. I can’t make out his surname. August 21st The neighbouring village was hit by cluster munitions. Some of our guys were hurt. The artillery is getting louder with every passing day. There are reports of Russians nearby. We step up security on the checkpoints and add patrols. I forgot to wish Mum a happy birthday yesterday. The days are merging into one. August 23rd, morning Raccoon wakes me in the middle of the night. “The order has arrived. We leave in two hours.” We line up under the walnut trees. Raccoon reads out the formal combat order with all the jargon. Then he translates it into ordinary Ukrainian. We are being transferred to support another brigade and will arrive at our new position, on the front line north of Donetsk, at dusk. “Anybody who is not ready to follow the order, get out of line!” he says. Two men step forward. Moses, predictably enough, is one of them. He’s the most problematic character in our company: always ill and grumpy at the best of times, and that’s when he’s not drinking. The other refusenik is Teacher. He’s one of the grown-ups among us. Teacher has three children under 18, so is not legally required to fight. He’s filed a request to be demobilised, which is entirely in his right. We arrive at woodlands on the outskirts of town and wait. It’s almost daylight, but we’ve not been ordered to advance to our positions yet. The town wakes up before our eyes. Locals scurry around. There is no plumbed water here so people draw it from wells. They pass by on bicycles and carts. A woman approaches us. “Tell your bosses that I’m ready for any government,” she says, “as long as we don’t have war.” She keeps repeating it, like a mantra. Another man rides by on a bike. He’s talking on the phone. “The place is swarming with soldiers,” he says. To whom he is speaking, we don’t know. One soldier remarks that the locals who have stayed are clearly not rooting for Ukraine. I try to sleep in the truck, but just as I nod off a girl approaches us. She’s crying and says that we have already been betrayed. She heard one of the townsfolk talking about our positions. I immediately hide all our equipment in the bushes and disperse the men. We’re almost invisible. Then – boom, boom, boom – the mortars start flying in. A few of them land nearby. Raccoon arrives after lunch. He’s been trying to scope out our future position. His report isn’t encouraging. Our troops aren’t where we were told they would be. That part of the front line is under enemy fire from machineguns and small arms just a few hundred metres away. Raccoon says he’s already seen the body of one of our men. The plan will have to change. Most likely, we’ll have to approach in small groups and drive the enemy out. Reconnaissance by fire. I thought it was just the Russians who did that. Only volunteers will go. I put myself forward, even though I’m filled with fear. August 23rd, night We get the order to move. It takes a while to gather the men together in the dark. They complain and squabble. “Our commanders are ****ed in the head,” Vova shouts. Incoming! A fiery hail of rockets lands just 70 metres from us. “To the ground!” I shout. The men scatter. As soon as the shelling stops, we jump into the trucks. We get lost several times in the dark, before reaching the designated point where our advance will begin. My head isn’t working properly. I don’t understand what is happening, how it is happening, why it is happening Someone has decided I will be in the rear guard, not leading from the front. The decision infuriates me. Still, I take a caffeine gel and try to focus, as I walk through the forest to gather my squad. I explain that we will advance and secure positions wherever we can. It’s not a full-on assault, I say, trying to reassure them. The battalion commander asks me to report how many haven’t volunteered for the attack. Thirteen, I say. You can appreciate their reluctance. The guys don’t understand where they are going and are not ready to attack when the plan keeps changing. August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day I speak to the fighters who don’t want to go. I’m nervous but I try to sound sure of myself. I’m honest with them, and admit that I’ve never been in a battle before. I just explain the plan, patiently and in detail, again and again. Believe me, this is not something that I do naturally. At 5am I report to the chief sergeant of the battalion. My voice trembles with pride. “Everyone is going,” I say. “Wha—? Balls of ****ing steel. How did you do it?” “Happy Independence Day,” I reply. We jump into the pickup trucks, and drive at full speed along roads pockmarked with missile craters. At our destination we quickly chuck out our gear. The less time our vehicles stay with us, the less likely we will be spotted by drones and therefore hit by enemy artillery. We break through the brambles and then wait in silence for further orders. The advance group is being led by Contractor, a 21-year-old professional soldier from near Kharkiv in the north-east of the country on the border with Russia. They are about 600 metres ahead of us and have begun to establish their positions. Suddenly, I hear shelling and a barrage of missiles. The Russians are targeting the advance group. This is my first battle, but I can only hear and imagine what’s happening up ahead. The radio does not stop chattering. I think that everyone in that team must be wounded. A 4x4 that’s been turned into an ambulance drives past us back and forth. Drones buzz overhead. My heart is pounding. I practise breathing exercises. “I lost my whole group,” says Contractor, whom I accompany as he retreats. His face is frozen. “I lost my whole group.” We receive an order to establish a new position. I dig my first real trench, something I had only ever done before in the cadets at school. I didn’t get to practise this in officer training. Unsurprisingly, my one is ugly, oval and has uneven walls. I’m ashamed of myself when I come to inspect Chestnut’s effort. Before the war he worked as a decorator, and it shows. All he needs to do is put up some wallpaper, and he could rent it out for the price of a one-room apartment in suburban Kyiv. I throw my sleeping mat down and stretch out hoping to get at least an hour’s sleep. I’m there for, at most, 15 minutes when the radio near my ear crackles repeatedly: “Forward, forward.” Other soldiers are replacing us, and we are being moved elsewhere on the line. August 25th I head out with Raccoon to scout our new position. We scuttle through a dense forest and fields, moving quickly so as not to be noticed. The Russians have been in control of this area since 2014. They know it like the backs of their hands. Contractor heads out to meet some reconnaissance officers. They’ve been in the area for some time, so they will surely be able to tell us everything. But they don’t even show up for the meeting! They don’t answer calls. There isn’t a soul around. This war is a bull**** mess. I return to pick up the rest of our men. The long column of soldiers resembles a line of ants. They are tired and walk slowly under the scorching sun. We don’t just have to consolidate our own position. Another unit is advancing into the forest ahead, and we have to send a group to support them, our commander says. My group doesn’t get far before coming under mortar fire. “Rollback! Rollback!” comes the order over the radio. Less than half return. My head isn’t working properly. I don’t understand what is happening, how it is happening, why it is happening. I sit down to catch my breath. A mortar volley lands from the other side, trained on the positions taken by Contractor’s group. He returns with his men a minute later. They look frightened and are covered with earth and leaves. The machinegunner sits down next to me and starts vomiting. “I’ve two kias [men killed in action],” says Contractor. “Twin and Clover. Everything is burning.” I ask for two volunteers to help evacuate the bodies. The other Twin is staring at me, dumbfounded. What can he be feeling right now? What is he thinking? We reach Clover first. He’s lying on his chest with his hand underneath his head. He looks like he is resting. But his grey face is tinged with green. Neither Clover nor Twin had the time to dig a proper dugout. I take pictures of the bodies, making sure it’s clear both were wearing the proper armour. Not that it helped in Twin’s case: the shrapnel pierced his helmet. I’ve heard stories of families who were denied compensation because they couldn’t prove their loved ones had protective gear on. I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s better to be sure. I try to avoid handling him in places from which he’s been bleeding, but it’s impossible. My trousers, body armour, shoes and gloves end up smeared with blood I’ve never touched a dead person before, let alone carried one. Clover is tall and heavy. I try to avoid handling him in places from which he’s been bleeding, but it’s impossible. My trousers, body armour, shoes and gloves end up smeared with blood. A female medic called Bouncer arrives in a pickup to help with the evacuation. We load the bodies onto the truck. Their legs stick out as she drives away, leaving a puddle of blood on the tarmac. I don’t feel much, just empty. Mechanically, I reach into my pocket for a biscuit. I realise I haven’t eaten for more than a day. I munch away without noticing I’m still wearing the same gloves I wore to handle the bodies. Swish! Boom! I drop to the ground. Several missiles crack the earth near me. The soldier next to me seems to be shouting something, but I can’t understand a word. My hearing’s ****ed. Medics rush to the scene. Blood is spurting from one man’s leg. They save his life with a tourniquet, but the leg will have to be amputated. As the sun sets, fatigue catches up with me. My head gets heavier. My eyes start failing. I’ve heard you can get hallucinations from fatigue, but this is the first time it’s happened to me. At night, trees start looking like the graphics in a creepy version of the computer game “Minecraft”. I start to see outlines of people coming towards me. I hear them. I sense the branches crackling under their feet. I see Russian uniforms and assault rifles. I clench my teeth, close my eyes and shake my head – anything to make the visions disappear. August 26th My men are asking when we will be rotated out. We’ve done what was asked of us: consolidate a position. The battalion commander promises that replacements will arrive by 6pm, but I don’t believe it. I’m pleasantly surprised, therefore, when, after lunch, a couple of guys emerge from foliage behind us. They look the part. Built like Rambo, they have the coolest helmets, headphones, and are filming everything on a GoPro video camera. The commander introduces himself as Tiger. “We’re supposed to be replacing you right now, but we decided that it would be more sensible to check things out beforehand,” he says. We agree that we’ll switch over at twilight, when the drones can’t spot us. Tiger goes to inspect the unit alongside us – these men, too, are due to be replaced – and we prepare to retreat. A small group of us heads off to retrieve some machinegun ammunition. On the way back, we pass our neighbours’ observation point. They offer us coffee. It’s comforting to think that hospitality still exists, even on the battlefield. Bang! Mortars hit the road ahead. We fall to the ground and run to the trenches. Then comes a second volley and a deafening third one. I hear someone screaming behind me. A soldier is holding his leg. I jump out of the trench and try to drag him into the pit. Now comes Russian rifle fire. Their assault has begun. We keep our heads down. We can’t see the Russians advancing but we hear reports of their movements over the radio. I hear a Kalashnikov machine gun nearby. This is a very bad sign. My unit uses a German machinegun. It’s clear the Russians are already among us. We fire grenades in their direction, which seems to have the desired effect. Their assault peters out. We check the battlefield. It is important not to move around in large groups, so we can’t all be ambushed at the same time. I head off by myself, though this means that I’m screwed if the Russians are lying in wait. Just a few hundred metres from my trench, I see a corpse, naked and face-down on the grass between two maple trees. I call out to some Ukrainian soldiers I see approaching from the opposite direction. Carefully, we step closer. Don’t move the corpse, we’d been taught, it could be mined. But I don’t have to be standing over it to see that it’s Tiger. We drag Tiger away with a rope. The Russians didn’t have time to mine the body but they have taken his equipment. His GoPro included footage of our positions. We won’t be rotated out that evening and the enemy has our co-ordinates. The men are understanding, but I still feel they blame me. I gave them my word, after all. Will we be lucky or not? I’m so tired that I don’t even have the strength to be afraid. August 27th Raccoon radios me at midnight and I make my way over to him. He is trying to look composed while clearly on his last legs. He tells me to collect the unit that is relieving us, the one that Tiger had led. The rendezvous point is 5km away. We have to get there at night, while Russian reconnaissance teams are probing our positions. Not exactly a stroll in the park. Sumy, a short, good-natured guy with uneven teeth, volunteers to come with me. I plot a route along disused railway tracks and hope for the best. A pink moon is shining brightly. As I run, I try to land on the concrete sleepers so as not to twist my ankle. We’re almost there. Just a steep descent and several hundred metres of forest to go. The foliage scratches my face and sharp branches slice through my trousers. The Moon illuminates our rendezvous point in the middle of a wheat field. Two black figures emerge from the shadows. I hiss the password to them, just like in the spy films. “Don’t celebrate just yet,” one of them replies. It’s Petrukha, a commander in the unit alongside ours. He’s here for the same reason as I am – to accompany a rotation to the front. Don’t move the corpse, we’d been taught, it could be mined After half an hour of standing around, a nervous voice whispers in the radio. We have a new rendezvous point, much closer to our original positions. We run back the way we came, exhausted, dripping with sweat and with an extra helping of scratches. No one is waiting for us at the new spot either. I’m damp and freezing. I wrap my arms around myself and try not to shiver. When the new unit finally arrives at day break, I move them into position, group by group, doing my best to avoid the Russians’ attention. After a while incendiary shells start landing near the position we occupied. But I’m relieved. I’ve already got the last of my men out. Anyway, the field is so wet from the rain we’ve had recently that not even Armageddon could ignite it. As we drive back, I look at myself in the wing mirror. A weather beaten figure looks back, smiling like a maniac. At the camp, I begin to feel a bit more human. A bowl of hot soup awaits me and I wash myself in cold water from a makeshift shower. My legs are bruised all over. My feet are cracked like honeycombs. There are ugly, white zits all over my shoulders and back. My helmet has left a deep furrow across my head. It’s a six-hour car journey back to our brigade headquarters. We are taking Twin to attend his brother’s funeral. He’s sitting alongside me in the front seat. “Why didn’t you tell me my brother was dead?” he asks placidly. “I told you right away, when I was asking for help with evacuating the bodies.” It turns out that Twin was so disoriented that he hadn’t realised what had happened. He had kept asking the guys where his brother was, and they just lowered their eyes. August 28th Our company is being redeployed. Raccoon doesn’t say where we are headed, but I have good sources. Over a dinner of falafel in my favourite local restaurant, Navigator tells me the battalion’s rear support has already been sent to the Kharkiv region. We’re headed there too. Several of the bridges along our route have been blown up. Google Maps isn’t aware of this and so tries to get us to cross them. Heavy rain has washed away tracks through the forest, making them unusable. By trial and error, we reach our destination in the middle of a wood. I don’t have the strength to unpack my sleeping bag so I fall asleep in the truck, under the pine trees. “What are we here to do?” I might have wondered, were I not so exhausted. This diary has been edited and translated by Oliver Carroll, a foreign correspondent for The Economist ************************** PART 3 The secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier: on the counter-offensive As troops blitz through Russian lines, they see the trauma of occupation and the relief at freedom Sep 6th 2023 This is the third part of a diary written by a Ukrainian paratrooper. When war broke out in 2022, he was a civilian. He volunteered to fight and, after cursory training, found himself on the front lines, in charge of a platoon of equally unprepared men. He made new friends but lost comrades in chaotic early battles in Donbas, a region in the east of the country. This instalment begins in August 2022, as our diarist was recuperating in the forests of the north of the country, waiting to begin a secret new operation. Day 67. August 29th 2022 Never in my life have I slept so deeply. When I wake, I inhale the scent of pine needles. Everything that went before feels like a dream: the shelling; the shooting; the dead; the base in Dnipro; scoffing four pieces of cake; the drive through the night across marshlands; the sight of new artillery pieces lining the roads going east. Clickety click. Someone is tapping on the window of the truck. It’s Raccoon, my company commander, who has come to wake us up. I last saw him yesterday lunchtime. It feels like a month ago. Raccoon asks us to remove our unit’s insignia. If anyone asks us, we are members of a territorial defence battalion from the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine. “The First Somali battalion”, we joke, taking off any badges that might identify us as assault forces. It’s not that difficult a legend for me to absorb. I am from Cherkasy and the idea of being a professional paratrooper still feels pretty weird. There are a number of units dispersed in the pine forest. This is the place where we are massing our forces before the battle begins. If the enemy spots us, God forbid, it’s better that we aren’t all in one place. I know this isn’t the time to relax, but I can’t help it. The warm sun of late summer has melted away my circumspection. My fellow soldiers too are resting on the ground. With their little camps scattered among the trees, they look like overgrown boy scouts. We haven’t been taught what we should be doing during the waiting phase. I try not to get worked up with thoughts of a bloody apocalypse. I dig a foxhole. It’s a quick and easy job. I remember what they told us during our training: the ideal depth of any trench depends on the density of the soil. If you dig too deeply into soft ground, and a shell lands nearby, you will be buried alive. The whole world seems to be talking about a counter-offensive in the Kherson region in the south of the country. We’re right at the other end of the front line. I’ve no idea what I’m meant to be doing. So I keep digging. Day 68. August 30th 2022 I sleep like a log for the second night in a row. The soft sandy floor of my foxhole is better than any mattress. I congratulate myself for getting the size right, too: I can stretch my legs fully and there is still room for a rucksack and an assault rifle. The armoured vehicles are supposed to be arriving today. For weeks, Raccoon has been telling me that we are to get British Spartans, armoured personnel carriers with tracks, and bmps, Soviet-made amphibious fighting vehicles. I’ve yet to see either outside a training range, and I can’t believe I’m about to take charge of one of them. I’m not a real soldier, after all. I know this isn’t the time to relax, but I can’t help it. The warm sun of late summer has melted away my circumspection The vehicles begin to appear. First comes the bmp I’m to take command of. You can hear it from the other side of the forest. As it roars up alongside us, a filthy, soot-covered hatch opens on the top, and a no less grubby chap, with red hair and beard, emerges from it. He looks shattered and stumbles as he dismounts from the vehicle. The two seem made for each other. Soon afterwards a column of Spartans emerges. They maintain a perfectly even distance from each other. Compared with my bmp, these are small, nimble things – the Mini Cooper of armoured personnel carriers. A tank follows behind the Spartans. It’s the first time I’ve seen so much armour in one place. “Pay attention to the combat order.” Our battalion leader has called together his company commanders for a presentation about what is to come next. He’s laid twigs, stones and bricks on the forest floor. Ukrainian troops are the bricks. Hazel branches indicate the paths we will clear through our minefields. And a little bit farther away are the paths we will clear through the Russian minefields. We were given instructions like this when we were training. But never in my life did I think someone would actually explain a battle order with such props. According to the plan, we are to manoeuvre through the minefields once the main strike group has passed through. All being well, that first group would capture a Russian-controlled village and engage the enemy on the outskirts of Balakleya, a large town with a barracks. Our task is to blockade Balakleya from the north. If the first strike group fails to gain a foothold, we will have to defend against the Russian counter-attack. The operation’s end point is Izium, a crucial hub 40km away, and one that the Russians fought months of bloody battles to capture. Everyone understands it’s an “impossible” ask. The commanders aren’t being honest with us, I think to myself. We spend two hours watching drone footage of the terrain that lies ahead of us. The Russians have deep trenches that look like those I saw in textbooks. There doesn’t seem to be a soul in sight. There’s either not too many of them, or they are really disciplined, and hide whenever they hear the buzz of our drones. Day 69. August 31st 2022 We receive an order to paint white crosses on our vehicles. We make them as big as we can and daub them on all sides. You don’t want someone to have to put on glasses in order to decide whether to shoot at you or not. When we are done, we look like some medieval order of knights. Unfortunately the Russians appear to be expecting our crusade. Social-media channels are filled with reports about an accumulation of tanks in our sector. I don’t know what lies ahead, or how to prepare myself for it. I find myself carving words into the magazines for my rifle. These are the names of those who helped me along the way: friends and colleagues; the staff at the gym where I train and at the restaurant I once worked in. They’ve all been sending money and badly needed equipment for my soldiers. The pick-up truck we’ve been driving was also a present from my friends. The ideal depth of any trench depends on the density of the soil. If you dig too deeply into soft ground, and a shell lands nearby, you will be buried alive Our battalion’s machinegunners join us in the evening. Another group has been sent over from territorial-defence units. Quite a few of them seem to have been drinking and their behaviour is unruly. But they have been assigned to my company for the operation. I’m going to have to take responsibility for them whether I like it or not. Are we ready? Our commanders apparently think so. Formally speaking we have everything we need: the correct number of men, the equipment, the guns and the combat order. But wars are never fought on paper. Day 70. September 1st 2022 Another of the Soviet bmps arrives in the middle of the night. It makes a noisy entrance, running into a pine tree and chopping it down with its sharp prow. Were it not for the hysterical screams, I might have had another full night’s sleep. The falling tree really spooked a hardened reconnaissance officer going by the nom de guerre of Hightower. To be fair, it almost fell on his head. Hightower was meant to be a reinforcement. On paper, he is an experienced soldier who could assist our young commander if we had problems with discipline. But he doesn’t feel like much of a backup. I would not be surprised if the real reason he was transferred to us was that his previous colleagues had grown tired of his endless chatter. His moniker –inspired by Moses Hightower, the taciturn comic hero of the Police Academy films – must be ironic. We get a delivery of a box of grenades. “Take as many as you like, boys,” we are told. One thing I’ve discovered is that juggling them is a perfect way to deal with the endless waiting. Three at a time is easy enough. It’s when you add a fourth that things become difficult. I can’t stop wondering why we are still hanging around in the forest. We’ve already got the combat order. The Russians know we are up to something. It’s surely time to move. Day 71. September 2nd 2022 My guys are itching to go. Every time they open their mouths they seem to ask: “So when is it?” There is nothing worse than bored soldiers. We officers have to be careful to keep them occupied with training exercises. The rumour is that we are waiting for ammunition for the new M777 howitzers to arrive. Some of us have taken to using military slang for these British guns – the “three axes”. We all understand we are showing off to look more experienced than we actually are. None of us has actually seen these things in real life. During the night, the Russians fire cluster munitions near our positions in the forest. I hear a loud whistle from my dug-out. Pieces of sharp metal pierce the nearby trees – you can tell this by their characteristic racket. “Can you take us in?” shout Odessa and Farmer, two of my guys who had until that point been sleeping under a canvas tent. They had teased me for digging such a large foxhole. Now it doesn’t seem such a bad idea to them. Day 72. September 3rd 2022 Pryshyb is a small village which has the misfortune of falling right on the demarcation line between the two sides. Most of its residents have left. The only visitors are Russian mortars, which explode at regular intervals in the middle of the abandoned gardens or vegetable plots. And, for one day only, a small group of novice Ukrainian soldiers. The three of us – me, Panda and Navigator – have been sent here to conduct drone reconnaissance. We need to see if there has been any change in the Russian positions since the videos shot a few days ago. If the Russians spot us, we will know about it pretty quickly. We hide our car under the cover of an overgrown apple tree that bears small, sour fruit in abundance. We get a delivery of a box of grenades. “Take as many as you like, boys,” we are told. One thing I’ve discovered is that juggling them is a perfect way to deal with the endless waiting Once we’ve completed our mission, we pass by another village on our way back through the forest. There are still a few functioning shops here, so we stop to stock up on Snickers and Coke. An old man queuing in one of them asks me when the war will end. I struggle to answer. The shopkeeper seems to sense my befuddlement. “Soon! Not long now,” she says. “These guys know what they are doing. The Russians will be gone in no time.” The locals insist I skip to the front of the queue. A woman opens the door for me. Kids outside shout “Glory to Ukraine!” I feel awkward. This feels like a propaganda movie. We give the youngsters some chocolate as we leave. Day 73. September 4th 2022 I’ve got used to the forest. It feels like I’m reliving my childhood. There is a huge lake nearby. The lads are allowed to swim there if they are accompanied by an officer. I’m not keen on swimming, but I agree to supervise so they can enjoy themselves. They jump and bomb into the water from a long wooden platform. We decide to turn my foxhole into a fully fledged dugout. It’s now three times the size, and a whole shovel-width deeper. We cover the new digs with pine logs and dry leaves. From a distance, you’d be hard-pressed to guess anyone could be living here. To make things even more comfortable, we line the walls with plastic and lay down camping mattresses and sleeping bags. My new neighbours take no time in settling in. Farmer, who, appropriately enough, used to be a farmer in central Ukraine, has a wife and son waiting for him back home. Odessa, a school teacher from Odessa, fell in love with another school teacher when doing military training. He’s always talking about her, and planning the rest of their life together. He wonders whether she will ever agree to move to Odessa. I light a candle in the dugout. Things are cosy. I feel at home. Day 74. September 5th 2022 We are woken in the middle of the night. The operation is beginning. It’s time to jump onto the armoured vehicles and “Go, go, go”. We wrap blue tape around our arms. This is supposed to distinguish between friend and foe. It is still a bit abstract to me. I’ve never yet had to make a call to shoot or not to shoot based on the colour of the tape on someone’s sleeves. It’s also the first time I’ve ridden an armoured vehicle in convoy. Not to mention in the pitch dark. The tank is the first to leave, shortly followed by the tracked infantry vehicles and all the Spartans. My bmp is at the end of the column of armoured vehicles. Immediately behind me are the wheeled vehicles: cars and an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a truck. My job is to keep proper distance from the heavy armour in front, while checking on the wheeled vehicles behind. One of them is sure to break down or get stuck in the sandy soil of the forest road. My guys are itching to go. Every time they open their mouths they seem to ask: “So when is it?” There is nothing worse than bored soldiers We join another military column at a rendezvous point on our way. Suddenly, it has become extremely difficult to determine where my guys are – everyone now looks the same. It’s a miracle we don’t lose anyone. Judging by the growing din of artillery, we’re close to the point where we are supposed to break through their lines. We grope around for a place to sleep until the morning, or the order to move arrives. We find a narrow gully set a few metres off from the road. I sleep in a makeshift tent that I’ve made from a poncho. I could dig a foxhole, but decide it’s best to get as much sleep as I can. I hope that Russian artillery won’t find me in the meantime. When dawn breaks, I see that the forest ahead of us has been burned to the ground, leaving an opening. Raccoon is still asleep, snoozing with his back leaning against a tree. I decide to inspect the combat groups in his place. At each stop, the groups of soldiers offer me food. I have breakfast with each one of them. Coffee and chocolate; fresh, cooked pasta. Contractor’s group is playing gypsy music out of a Bluetooth speaker. One of his soldiers – a round-faced, chubby guy – is dancing on top of an armoured personnel carrier (apc) to keep warm. Another is rummaging through an infantry vehicle trying to find something among the clutter. Our battalion feels like a travelling circus. Day 75. September 6th 2022 The combat order says it is here that we will have to cross Russian minefields near Pryshyb. My company is part of the battalion reserve, so we aren’t in the first wave. I don’t know if that group has managed to blast a passage through the minefields for us. I’m only a platoon commander, after all. No one tells me about the big picture. While we wait I try to prise open the door of an abandoned wooden house. I sense the place hasn’t been lived in for some time – certainly since long before the invasion. I can feel the house crumbling as I push on the door. The flimsy construction just can’t stand it. I push harder with increasing desperation. But the door, which is reinforced with a layer of metal, won’t give despite all my efforts. If I can’t break into a wooden hut, I ask myself, what hope do I have against Russian defences? There is no time to brood. My company commander Raccoon is radioing me to hurry and he sounds increasingly frustrated. There is news. The plan has changed. “You’re going on alone now,” he says. It turns out that the first wave has broken through Russian lines and penetrated deeper than anyone expected. The Russians are fleeing. I recall the lessons of military training: when the enemy is running, you chase after them. We have to step on the gas, and fast. Now I’m in charge of my own group. I have several combat teams operating on Spartans, two grenade-launcher crews, one anti-tank crew armed with Javelin missiles and a tank. That’s right, folks: my own tank. Commanders assure us everything will be made safe ahead of us. There is, after all, a well-worked algorithm here. A mine roller goes first. When it hits mines, it stops, and a mine-clearing vehicle called the zmiy-gorynych – named after a magic dragon in Slavic folklore – steps up. The dragon throws out a hose of explosives, and clears a lane up ahead. “If you stay in the corridor, it’s safe to drive” – or so they tell us repeatedly. If I’m honest, the mantras don’t do much to calm someone about to cross a minefield for the very first time. The battalion commander has arrived to take us through the minefields himself. This turn of events suggests to me that things are going well. He surely wouldn’t take the risk otherwise? Still, the picture ahead is terrifying. Our path to the other side is narrow – just ruts that our colleagues have dug into the weedy fields. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of anti-tank mines either side of them. One careless move and we will turn into cans of sardines in tomato sauce. It’s already dark by the time we enter Yakovenkove, a village that is our target destination. The outermost house is in flames. I can see a petrified man in his 60s, leading an equally petrified cow out of the yard. If it wasn’t for him, the animal would surely have been burned alive. We find out that this large house served as the Russian headquarters. When they fled, they set the building on fire, leaving a web of tripwires. Our evening sweep doesn’t last long. After checking the first few houses, the futility of the task becomes clear. First, the darkness means that it is much more likely we will blow ourselves up on tripwires than catch any remnants of the enemy. Second, we understand that the offensive has, if anything, gone too well. We aren’t the only Ukrainian unit here. Artillery men and scouts from neighbouring battalions, all driven forward by the good news, are hiding under every bush. We don’t want to shoot our own guys in pursuit of Russian stragglers. We set up positions for the night in the far end of the village. As we look for a place to sleep, we frighten an old lady, one of the few remaining residents. She can’t understand who we are, or why we are asking permission to let our soldiers sleep in her barn. We’ll have to apologise to her tomorrow, I think to myself. Day 76. September 7th 2022 I wake up after a night of sleeping on a hard floor. I can tell the owners of the house I’m sleeping in had plenty of time to leave. The carpets are rolled up and stacked neatly; the windows are covered; the clothes they didn’t need for the journey are wrapped neatly in a jacket. The war damage – a mine blew a small crater in the yard, damaging the minibus parked outside – obviously came later. “Boss, erm, the owners have arrived,” says Misha, a short infantryman aged 45 or so. His naive and earnest nature make him an unlikely soldier. “Will you talk to them?” I feel shame as I remember we entered someone’s home at night without their permission. I might be the commander of an airborne platoon, but I am completely in the wrong here. I feel like a boy caught stealing apples from a neighbour’s garden. I recall the lessons of military training: when the enemy is running, you chase after them Blushing, I prepare to deliver words of apology to the two women standing with their hands on their hips at the gate. The older one is wearing a brown jumper, the younger one red. “We…erm…needed somewhere to sleep,” I mutter. They don’t let me end my sentence, and instead pull me towards them, embrace me and start crying. “Boys, boys! What took you so long?” I’m numb. Nothing prepared me for this. I don’t know what to say or how to react. The women insist they cook dinner for us. But it’s against the rules to accept food from the civilian population. Yes, we are on home soil. Yes, it’s obvious that these people are on our side. But rules are rules. The mobile networks are down, and we have no access to the internet. For the time being we have no news, just rumours. And what are those rumours saying? They say the first battalion broke through lines so speedily that they drove over Russian trenches without even noticing them. They say terrified Russian soldiers stayed in their pits until the next wave of attackers captured them. I decide to break the rules and allow the boys to accept dinner from the ladies of the village. Day 77. September 8th 2022 Misha clearly is not a man designed for war, but now at least he has a purpose. We’re putting him in charge of our domestic arrangements. One thing I’ve found is that as soon as you give a soldier a particular area of responsibility, he becomes a new man. Misha takes great care in keeping the house spotless. He reminds everyone of the importance of regular meals. He makes sure that the food is hot and there is enough for everyone. He glows with pride from the praise and the feeling he is needed. The boys decide to cook borscht tonight. For whatever reason, they want to have it with mayonnaise. Some might describe this as a war crime: sour cream is, as is well established, the only acceptable condiment. But Snake nonetheless has resolved to head down to the local shop to buy it. About 30 minutes later he comes back with a machinegun, a hand-held anti-tank grenade launcher, ammunition and delighted cries of “There’s loads more!” He’s forgotten the mayonnaise. There are indeed plenty more treasures where the machinegun came from. The Russians left behind another two machineguns, five rocket-propelled grenade launchers, half a dozen hand-held flamethrowers and under-barrel grenade launchers for Kalashnikovs. There are loads of Soviet-made helmets and Russian bulletproof vests. The Russians appear to have dropped everything heavy when they scarpered on foot. Why didn’t he tell me he was from here? I’d have brought him to his son’s birthday party personally – on an APC I find clues about the Russians in a notebook that my opposite number – a platoon commander from the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic – has left behind. You can see the commander was a responsible kind of guy. His notebook resembles that of a classroom swot. The entries are neat and colour-coded. This platoon was mobilised in the Luhansk region about six months ago. Ever since they have been training and patrolling, first at home and later here in the Kharkiv region. Every one of these moments is recorded meticulously. We sweep the treelines and cast our eyes around. Scorched fields. The remains of metal bed frames and burned equipment. The evidence of retreat and escape. Later in the evening, I return to the large house that had been the local Russian headquarters. The yard is being swept by an elderly couple, their daughter and a young boy. They say that the owner of the home has asked them to clean up after the Russians, even though the place is still full of tripwires and unidentified boxes of equipment. The child keeps his distance from us, and barely says a word. He follows the adults while clutching a dog in his arms. “He gets frightened whenever he sees a soldier,” explains the old man. The boy started wetting the bed because of the fear. The gossip in the village is that his mother was raped. I choose not to listen to the rumours. Even if they are true, it strikes me that gossip makes things worse. My guys test the Russian bulletproof vests. They report that the plates actually withstand the bullets and cannot be easily penetrated. I’ve attached one of the under-barrel grenade launchers to my rifle. My already clunky Kalashnikov is now even heavier. But it looks epic. Day 79. September 10th 2022 We wake to the realisation that gophers have eaten much of our food. These hyperactive rodent bastards jump from branch to branch, and gnaw through packets of biscuits and packets of dry rations. They’d robbed us before daybreak. There is quite a bit of commotion on the radios this morning. Another part of our company tried to approach Savyntsi, the village that is next on our hit-list, and saw a car driving through it with a white cross. Our troops have already taken it without a fight, it seems. The only danger facing us there are the mines scattered on the streets. From there we move on quickly across the fields towards our next target village, Vesele. We can finally breathe a bit more freely. Not so our Spartan apcs. On the way, sunflowers get stuck in their radiators and they begin to lose power. We are overtaken by a Soviet-made infantry vehicle. The locals who remained in the village happily open up their neighbours’ houses so that my soldiers can rest. We know we are headed for Izium in the morning so it’s important they are fresh. Everyone wants to tell us something. About how the Russians built two checkpoints: one manned with Ossetians from the Caucasus and another with soldiers from occupied Donetsk. They tell us how the Ossetian commander would mock the Donetsk fighters: he beat them and made them shout “Donetsk is a ****hole.” I ask everyone to go home to sleep. Tomorrow is an early start. But two of the local men don’t want to leave my boys in peace. They continue chatting in the yard of the house where we are staying. “Relax, these are our guys,” says one of them. “Yeah, we’re back home. In Ukraine,” replies the other. “No, no, what I’m saying is one of the guys really is local. He’s from Savyntsi. We’ve known each other since we were kids. ”I wonder what it’s like to find yourself on an operation to surround the village you lived in your entire life. Where, perhaps, your wife and son are living right now. Where it might even be your son’s birthday. I find myself getting angry with my soldier. Why didn’t he tell me he was from here? I’d have brought him to his son’s birthday party personally – on an apc. Day 80. September 11th 2022 Our convoy flies down the beautiful highway towards Izium. I feel elated. It’s easy to breathe. There’s a light drizzle. The air is fresh. We pass tank crews resting on the sides of the road. They wave to us. They did the hard work. Our job is now to sweep up any Russians left. As we approach Izium, I see two Russian corpses still lying across the road. We call them “sheep”. I’ve got nothing but contempt for the people who came to invade my country. They aren’t people to me anymore. Just bodies. A tall stele with the inscription “Izium” marks the entrance to town. My heart wants to jump out of my chest. I feel triumphant. I might not have fired a single shot yet, but it feels like my victory. I grin when I see my reflection in a mirror. My face is covered in the soot that the apc in front had sprayed onto me. Across the way, an old woman is riding a bicycle. She gazes towards the soldiers gathered around the stele. But she isn’t looking where she needs to be looking – by her wheels, which is where anti-personnel mines are lurking. A jumping mine can tear your foot off if you step on it. In slow motion, we catch sight of the woman, tottering towards the mines. We shout at her. She doesn’t hear us. When the mine explodes, the old woman falls over the handlebars of the bicycle. We help her to her feet. Thankfully, she isn’t seriously injured, just a little frightened. A stand outside the building explains that “Russia never attacks anyone”. And even if it ever did, it was “forced to do so”. It feels absurd to be reading this in ransacked Izium Every time, I ask for residents’ permission to enter their houses. I explain that I will do so only with their say-so. Although it would be hard to refuse a filthy, soot-covered bloke armed from head to toe. I can see the residents are tense and don’t understand what is happening. They have been cut off from the world beyond the village for months. They do not immediately realise who we are. The colour of our armbands means nothing to them. I don’t think they expected to see Ukrainian troops here so soon. Izium means raisin in Russian – and it’s not hard to understand why the town got its name. The grapes are everywhere. There are giant, green ones with a sweet taste. And small, sour bunches. Picking one at a time, I eat kilos of the stuff. “A tank! Tank!” All around me, soldiers grab their weapons and jump to join the hunt of a Russian tank. It’s the first time I see everyone running towards a tank, rather than away from it. It turns out that the vehicle is not, in fact, a tank, but an armoured vehicle. A disoriented Russian soldier had tried to escape from a nearby hideout, but instead headed straight for our sector. He didn’t get far. The guys up ahead have run into a Russian sniper. Some ****er is shooting from a tower in the industrial estate. Our guys return machinegun fire. One shot from a grenade launcher and suddenly the shooting stops. When we reach the sniper’s position, we see a Russian uniform thrown onto the floor. It seems he managed to flee, disguised as a civilian. We discover a ton of abandoned equipment at the far corner of our sector. There’s a completely intact tank, covered with explosives that the Russians never got around to detonating. More loot is waiting at what had been a repair point. We claim two extra amphibious tracked vehicles, two brand new anti-aircraft guns still in their packages and a rare apc configured as a comms vehicle. The rest of our haul goes to other units. Day 81. September 12th 2022 We’ve set up in a house recently abandoned by the Russians. A Russian tricolour hangs at the entrance. I think about keeping it as a trophy, but by the time I’ve returned from setting up our monitoring posts, my soldiers have already ripped it off the wall and burned it. The Russians left piles of documents behind. There are A4 forms stamped “secret”. One contains a list of soldiers injured in artillery battles. Another, dated the next day, contains handwritten refusenik statements. Each member of the unit – the platoon commander, his deputies and the lowliest privates – has written that they refuse to take part in the “special military operation”. Everyone has come up with their own reason: because they have not been granted leave; because they are ill; because they are tired or in bad psychological condition. Over the last few days, we’ve heard stories of of rape and torture. Of people who have disappeared We also find a pile of letters written by Russian schoolchildren. They offer support and motivational stories for “this not very good predicament”. Even kids are afraid to use the word “war”. Astonishingly stupid propaganda litters the fancy house that Russian commanders used as their headquarters. There are cheap anti-Semitic caricatures of President Volodymyr Zelensky – as either a rabbi, the devil or an American puppet. Joe Biden is also a target for their teenage minds. A stand outside the building explains that “Russia never attacks anyone”. And even if it ever did, it was “forced to do so”. It feels absurd to be reading this in ransacked Izium, 160km from the Russian border. Day 84. September 15th 2022 Getting a mobile signal in Izium isn’t easy. The only place where it’s possible to speak is at the top of Mount Kremenets, which overlooks the town. If you are lucky, and a 4g connection somehow dribbles through, you can make the call. But do not dare move. Half a metre to the left or right and you will lose reception. At any moment you can find dozens of locals at the top of the hill, in varying degrees of frozen frustration. The residents soon get wind that the military has a secret communications weapon: Starlink, a satellite-powered internet service. I don’t think it’s a great idea to have locals surrounding your headquarters with dozens of phones. It’s against the rules for a start. But how can you deny people who have spent so many months without hearing from their loved ones? Day 85. September 16th 2022 The full extent of Russian atrocities in Izium is beginning to be revealed. The world’s press has already published photos from the mass grave at the entrance to the town. There are several hundred people buried under the sandy soil there. Many of them will have been Ukrainian sympathisers. We don’t talk about it much. We just ask each other: “You saw it?” And we silently nod. Over the last few days, we’ve heard stories of rape and torture. Of people who have disappeared. Of a disabled man whose adapted car was stolen and who was shot dead when he tried to retrieve it. The testimonies of those we meet near our positions is shocking enough. One man would not let his son out, fearing he would be detained by Russian soldiers looking for people with pro-Ukrainian sympathy. So his 16-year-old never left the confines of their small yard for five and a half months. Another neighbour, known for pro-Ukrainian sympathies, was taken away by Russian soldiers one day. He was never seen again. Day 87. September 17th 2022 Everyone’s focus is now on Lyman, the next major town 48km down the road. Every hour we check for updates from there and the nearby urban conglomeration of Lysychansk/Sievierodonetsk. The Russians have gathered a huge force if our information is correct. But if our guys can manage to advance around them, there is a chance of trapping them. In my heart of hearts, I want them to keep running. I want the next few days of our raid to be free and easy. For it to be like it has been in the Kharkiv region. No losses and no direct clashes. But a gnawing feeling in my gut tells me the party might be coming to an end. Everyone believes our next departure is tonight. The rear guard are already here in Izium. We won’t be staying here for long, that’s for sure. ■ This diary has been edited and translated by Oliver Carroll, a foreign correspondent for The Economist

Economist 1843 magazine | Ukraine How Ukraine’s virtually non-existent navy sank Russia’s flagship The Moskva was the most advanced vessel in the Black Sea. But the Ukrainians had a secret weapon, reports Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova July 27th 2023 On the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, a flotilla of warships from the Russian Black Sea Fleet steamed out of its base in Sevastopol in occupied Crimea towards a small island 120km (75 miles) south of Odessa. This solitary speck of land, known as Snake Island, had strategic value beyond its size. If it were captured, the Russian navy would dominate the west of the Black Sea and threaten Ukraine’s coast. Snake Island housed a radar station and was garrisoned by a few dozen Ukrainian marines and border guards – no match for Russian ships. Russian jets screamed overhead. A patrol boat began shelling the island, and smaller vessels full of Russian marines approached the jetty. The Ukrainian defenders knew they had little hope of resisting. They were armed only with rifles and a few rocket-propelled grenades. Over the horizon appeared the great shadowing hulk of the Moskva, the Russian flagship, 186 metres long and bristling with missiles. It demanded over the radio that the garrison surrender. “Snake Island! I, a Russian warship, repeat our offer. Lay down your arms and surrender or you will be bombed. Have you understood? Do you copy?” On a recording of the exchange, one Ukrainian border guard can be heard remarking to another: “Well, that’s it then – or should we reply that they should **** off?” “Might as well,” said the second border guard. The first then uttered the riposte that would become a clarion call of Ukrainian resistance: “Russian warship, go **** yourself!” The Russians stormed the island and all communications with the defenders were lost. The following day, a medical team set off to the island to retrieve the bodies of the Ukrainian soldiers, all of whom they presumed were dead. As they approached, their rescue vessel was hailed by a Russian ship and ordered to stop. Soon, a dozen members of the Russian special forces boarded their boat and detained those on board. A Russian officer pointed over his shoulder at the dark grey outline of the Moskva in the distance. “Do you see her?” he said. “You see how large she is, how powerful? She can destroy not only Snake Island but all of Ukraine!” “Do you see her?” he said. “You see how large she is, how powerful? She can destroy not only Snake Island but all of Ukraine!” Meanwhile the Russian army advanced from Crimea westwards along Ukraine’s southern coast. Everyone expected that the Russian navy would support it with an amphibious landing, either in Mykolaiv, a naval base and shipyard that was now on the front line, or – the great prize – Odessa, which housed the headquarters of the Ukrainian navy. The navy mined possible landing zones. In Odessa volunteers filled sandbags and strung bales of barbed wire to defend the beaches. Russian warships appeared so close that people could see them on the horizon. In Berdiansk, farther to the east, the Russians had captured a dozen Ukrainian ships. The Ukrainians didn’t want to risk any more falling into the hands of the enemy. With a heavy heart, Oleksiy Neizhpapa, the head of the Ukrainian navy, ordered the scuttling in Mykolaiv harbour of his two largest ships, including his flagship. “This is a difficult decision for any commander,” he told me. The Ukrainian navy was now reduced to around three dozen vessels, mostly patrol and supply boats. Russian warships manoeuvred close to the coast, seeking to draw fire in order to make the Ukrainians reveal their artillery positions. Then they retreated out of range and targeted Ukrainian defences and command posts with missiles. The Moskva, the largest vessel of the Russian attack force, provided air cover which allowed the other ships to operate unmolested. Commercial shipping was throttled by the presence of Russia’s ships and mines. Ukraine, the fifth-largest exporter of wheat in the world, was unable to transport any grain. Neizhpapa lost a number of officers and men in those perilous days. Crucially, though, radar installations, which allowed the Ukrainians to identify the position of Russian ships, escaped unharmed. Neizhpapa realised that he had one, untested weapon that might drive the Russian threat away from the coast. “We were counting on this being a factor of surprise for the enemy,” he said. “I was very worried that the enemy would know about it. After all, the enemy had a lot of agents on the territory of Ukraine. I was concerned about keeping it as secret as possible – and then, of course, using it.” The Moskva, launched in 1983 under the name Slava, was one of three warships in her class to enter service. They were built in Mykolaiv in the last decade of the Soviet Union and designed to sink the ships of us navy carrier strike groups. Its American equivalent has a wider array of weapons but the Slava-class has missiles with a greater range, rendering her potentially more dangerous in a duel. The Soviet navy was proud of the Slava-class ships and sailors vied to serve on them. The cabins were comparatively large and there was a swimming pool in which the crew could decompress during the months at sea. A messy process of disentangling naval assets began after Ukrainian independence. Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet between them. Russia got 80% of the ships, Ukraine 20% The Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which welcomed the Moskva, also employed Neizhpapa’s father, who served as an officer on a rescue vessel. Neizhpapa himself was born in 1975 and grew up in Sevastopol. As a child, he drew pictures of warships and dreamed of becoming a sailor too. The Soviet Union was collapsing as Neizhpapa entered adulthood. He chose to stay in Sevastopol for naval school, rather than go to St Petersburg to study. Neizhpapa means “Don’t-eat-bread” in Cossack dialect. The name identified him as Ukrainian at a time when national identities were re-emerging. Ukraine became independent in 1991, and Neizhpapa was certain where his loyalties lay. “I realised that I did not want to serve Russia,” he said. During Neizhpapa’s first year at naval school, Russians and Ukrainians studied together, but when the cadets were required to take an oath of allegiance, those who chose Russia left for training in St Petersburg. A messy process of disentangling naval assets also began after Ukrainian independence. Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet between them. Russia got 80% of the ships, Ukraine 20%. The two countries continued to share naval bases and there were even cases of brothers serving on different sides. Relations between the cohabiting fleets shifted according to the politics of the day, becoming more strained in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange revolution in 2004 and warmer when Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president, came to power in 2010. There were tensions over money – salaries in the Russian navy were much higher – and sometimes with the local authorities. (The Ukrainian police would let off Ukrainians for traffic violations but fine the Russians.) In 2012 Neizhpapa, by then a captain, was invited on board the Moskva, which had become the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. He remembers the imposing size of the vessel, its foredeck canted upwards to attack. It was armed with 16 huge missile-launchers, as large as aircraft fuselages. The command tower was flanked with the domes, curved dishes and antennae of several radar systems, and the deck swooped towards a helicopter pad overhanging the stern. When he stepped aboard, Neizhpapa “felt pride and tradition and also a certain power in the cruiser. I would have never guessed that within a couple of years my naval forces would sink it.” On April 13th 2022, Neizhpapa received information that the Moskva had been located 115km off the coast. The vice admiral is tall and imposing with steel close-cut hair and bright blue eyes that seem to reflect some distant, sunny sea. Mild-mannered but military-correct, he would not be drawn on how the Ukrainians found the Moskva. “I can’t answer your question in much detail, but I can tell you that it was identified specifically by the Ukrainian naval forces,” he said. It’s difficult to find warships at sea, not least because they are designed to hide. A ship can go quiet – turning off communications equipment so broadcasts cannot be intercepted – or use camouflage to make it difficult to see from above. Satellites can spot a ship only when their orbit passes overhead and most of them cannot penetrate cloud cover. Even when skies are clear, large warships are mere mites of grey on a vast grey ocean. Most radar is limited to a range of 20-30km. It can transmit and receive electromagnetic pulses from objects only in its direct line of sight. Anything below the horizon remains invisible, in the radar’s so-called shadow. The Moskva remained on the other side of Snake Island, over 100km away. Neizhpapa and other naval sources were understandably reluctant to furnish details on when and how they found the Moskva. According to their version of the story, low cloud cover that day meant that radar pulses were reflected in such a way that extended their reach far beyond their normal range. “The warship was found by two radar stations on the coast,” an insider told us. “We were so lucky.” But Chris Carlson, a retired captain in the us navy and one of the designers of the naval-war game, “Harpoon V”, which is used to train armed forces around the world, believes that other methods were employed. “I have a hard time attributing it to just plain old luck,” he told me. He suggested that, even if a coastal radar station managed to ping the Moskva, the information relayed by the echo over such a distance would have been insufficient to identify the ship or target it effectively. Carlson pointed out that in 2021 Ukraine had announced that its advanced over-the-horizon radar system, called the Mineral-U, had completed factory testing. It’s possible that the navy rushed it into active service, even though the Ukrainians – given the need for wartime secrecy – have never admitted that they possess this capability. Neizhpapa said that this was not the first time the Ukrainians had spotted the Moskva and other warships. The Ukrainians had also deployed Bayraktars – Turkish-made drones that became cult icons in the early months of the war – against the Russian fleet for observation, distraction and attack. It’s possible that a drone may have spotted the Moskva. In private, Western military sources have hinted that the Ukrainians had more help in locating the Moskva than they like to admit. American military sources have confirmed that they were asked to verify Ukraine’s sighting of the Moskva, which they probably did through a maritime-surveillance aircraft. It was clear, however, from the predictable changes of position made by the Moskva, that her crew believed she was invisible. The Ukrainian navy went into the war with a depleted force. After the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia seized much of the Ukrainian fleet, including 12 of the 17 ships moored in Sevastopol at the time. Training schools, artillery batteries and munition stores were claimed by the Russians. A cohort of Ukrainian naval officers, including three admirals, defected. Neizhpapa, who was at home in Sevastopol, was recalled to Odessa. He made it across the new de-facto border crammed into a car with his wife, two sons, the Ukrainian navy’s head of military communications and all the belongings they could fit. As they crossed to safety, Neizhpapa had a “feeling that I had been in captivity and was free at home”. The Russians began to modernise their newly strengthened Black Sea Fleet; the Moskva was upgraded and ship-to-ship Vulkan missiles installed. These had a range of over 500km, which allowed them to target cities too. The Ukrainian fleet had been reduced to a handful of ships: one frigate and a few dozen smaller craft. The war in Donbas between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists stagnated into a stalemate and sucked up much of the armed forces’ attention and resources. When Neizhpapa was made commander of the navy in 2020 by President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had been elected the previous year, there was no money or time to build new ships. Neizhpapa decided that what he needed most of all were radar systems for surveillance, minefields for coastal defence and long-range missiles, which Ukraine had also lost in Crimea. The Luch Design Bureau in Kyiv, a state-owned munitions developer since Soviet times, had begun work on the Neptune, a subsonic shore-to-ship missile system, shortly after the loss of Crimea. Based on an old Soviet design, the Neptune would have a range of over 200km. It was ready to be tested around the time Neizhpapa assumed command. A technical expert involved in the design, who didn’t want to be identified, showed me a video on his phone of one of the first live-fire tests. An old rusty tanker had been towed out to sea as a target and a small crowd of engineers and naval officers gathered in a field close to the launcher to await the results. When the news came that the tanker had been successfully hit, they clapped and hugged each other. Yet the government dragged its feet on funding production and it took an intervention by Zelensky himself for manufacturing to begin. “I was in this meeting,” said the technical expert. “He was intelligent, he understood that we had only three or four [operationally effective] ships in the Ukrainian navy and that it was not enough to protect the coastline.” Production began in early 2021. The first battery – comprising two command vehicles and four launch vehicles, each able to transport and fire four missiles – had been built in time to join the annual military parade in Kyiv on August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day. That December, Neizhpapa announced that six batteries would be deployed to the southern coast the following spring. On the morning of February 24th 2022, the technical expert woke to the sound of “shooting everywhere, helicopter attacks everywhere”. Russia had invaded and the Neptune batteries were still parked near Kyiv; they were in jeopardy from seizure by Russian soldiers. The technical expert’s superiors told him to transport the missile systems to the south of the country. It took three days for the launch vehicles to reach the coast. “We were worried because they were very visibly military vehicles,” said the expert. The missiles themselves were sent later, hidden in trucks. The Neptunes were first fired in March 2022 at Russian landing craft. In April, they probably targeted a Russian frigate called the Admiral Essen – that month she was retired from service for a few weeks, suggesting that the damage sustained was slight – and at smaller ships threatening Mykolaiv. A number of sources suggested the Neptunes were not wholly successful. The system was untested in combat and there were teething problems: with the radar, with parts failing, with the software for identifying targets. The technical expert told us that the missiles had been launched from the west of Odessa at a high altitude, which would have made them more easily detectable by Russian radar. “We don’t know exactly what happened,” he said, “but it seems the missiles were intercepted.” Engineers were dispatched to fix the problems. Once the location of the Moskva had been confirmed on April 13th, Neizhpapa ordered two Neptune missiles to be fired at it. The technical expert showed me a video on his phone of what he claimed was the launch of the missiles that day. The launcher truck was parked in a thin line of trees with bare branches. At ignition, the cap of the launching tube, which looks like the lid of a rubbish bin, was dispelled from the barrel and crashed into a field of green spring wheat. A fiery roar and a trail of black smoke followed. Then the second missile was launched. A fiery roar and a trail of black smoke followed. Then the second missile was launched. Silence reigned in Neizhpapa’s command centre. The Neptune, which is five metres long, flies at 900km per hour and is designed to skim ten metres above the surface of the sea in order to avoid detection. Neizhpapa watched the clock tick through the six minutes that it was supposed to take to reach the target. For a long time nothing seemed to happen. Then Russian radio channels erupted in chatter. It was apparent that smaller ships were hurrying towards the Moskva. The radio traffic was garbled and panicked. Neizhpapa inferred that the ship had been hit. It didn’t take long for news to spread. “People started calling me from all over Ukraine,” Neizhpapa said. “There was only one question: ‘Did it sink or not?’ I said, ‘I can’t answer that!’ Hours passed. I was constantly asked the same thing. I joked I wanted to get on a boat myself and go and look. I said, ‘Do you realise that this is a very big ship? Even if it was hit by both missiles, it wouldn’t sink immediately.’” Some hours later, satellites spotted a large red thermal image in the middle of the sea. Officials from nato phoned Neizhpapa, he recalled, “to say that they saw something burning beautifully”. The only publicly available film taken of the Moskva after she was hit is three seconds long. The sea is calm, the sky pale grey. The full length of the ship is visible as she lists sharply to one side, thick black smoke billowing from the foredeck. Her life rafts are gone, suggesting that surviving crew members had been evacuated. The camera falls away sharply as a voice is heard saying, in Russian, “What the **** are you doing?” It’s apparent from the film that the two Neptune missiles struck the Moskva near the foredeck on her port side, just above the waterline. The fire may have been caused by the missiles themselves, or fuel tanks or ammunition magazines in that part of the ship which ignited. We may never know exactly what happened but the attack clearly caused the Moskva to lose power and propulsion. Sometime in the early hours of April 14th she rolled over and sank. Why had the Moskva, which had capable radar and surface-to-air missiles, failed to detect and intercept the incoming Neptunes? Carlson, the naval expert, has dug into the possible reasons. The ship was in dry dock for repairs several times over the past decade but upgrades to her weapons and operating systems seem to have been delayed or done piecemeal. A readiness report, briefly posted online in early 2022 before being removed from the internet, showed that many systems were broken or not fully functional. “All her major weapons systems had gripes,” said Carlson on a podcast last year. Moreover, the Moskva’s radar and targeting tools were not entirely automated and relied heavily on well-trained operators. But over half the ship’s crew, which numbered 500, were conscripts who served only a year. In consequence, the sailors “had extremely limited training which would be considered woefully insufficient by Western standards,” said Carlson. “The Moskva was not properly prepared to be doing combat operations.” This was yet another example of complacency by the Russian armed forces that has been evident throughout the war. Even so, Carlson was astonished that none of her radars appeared to have spotted the incoming missiles. Officials from NATO phoned Neizhpapa, he recalled, “to say that they saw something burning beautifully Once the Neptunes struck, the crew seems, in a panic, to have left watertight doors unsecured. Studying a screenshot of the Moskva on fire, Carlson observed that “you can see smoke coming out of the shutter doors for the torpedo tubes...That tells me that the smoke had a clear path, and if the smoke had a clear path so did water and so [did] flame.” The Russians have never admitted that Neptune missiles were responsible for sinking the Moskva; they claimed she suffered an accidental fire at sea. But only a few days later, they bombed a Luch Design Bureau facility in Kyiv in apparent retaliation. The Russian authorities have also never been open about the number of casualties, but up to 250 sailors may have died. On November 4th 2022, more than six months after the sinking, a court in Sevastopol declared 17 of the missing dead. Despite the reports of their heroic deaths, the defenders of Snake Island were in fact alive. They were taken captive and held in prison in Crimea before being transferred to a prison in Belograd, a city near the border with Ukraine. Conditions were brutal. Temperatures fell to -20°C, yet the prisoners were housed in tents for the first few days. Frequently, they were interrogated, beaten and electrocuted. They had no news of the outside world, beyond the names of the cities captured by the Russians, with which the guards taunted them. One day, the prisoners overheard a news report on the guards’ radio saying that the Moskva “was not floating properly”. The expression puzzled them for a while, before they realised that it was a euphemism for “sunk”. They began to cheer. “The Russians increased our torture,” said one of them, who was later returned in a prisoner exchange, “but this was a great moment of happiness.” The sinking of the Moskva was a turning point in the war. Neizhpapa said that “our fleet, which was considered non-existent a year ago, is now winning against the larger force, thought to be unbeatable.” nato allies began to take the Ukrainian navy seriously. Ukraine has limited stocks of Neptunes but the Danes and Americans are supplying Harpoon missiles, which are similar to the Neptune but carry a bigger warhead. Previously, Neizhpapa admitted, this kind of weapon and support would have been a “dream”. Sometime in the early hours of April 14th she rolled over and sank. Having destroyed the air-defence umbrella that the Moskva provided, the Ukrainian navy was able to harass the Russian navy in the west of the Black Sea with drones and missiles, damaging and sinking supply ships, and destroying air defences and radar stations installed on gas platforms. In June 2022 Ukraine retook Snake Island and the Russian Black Sea Fleet withdrew towards Crimea, leaving the Ukrainian coast safe from amphibious assault. Turkey and the United Nations were able to broker a deal to allow ships into Ukrainian ports to export grain. “Now,” said Neizhpapa, “they keep their ships outside of the range of our cruise missiles” – even state-of-the-art frigates that are armed up to the gunwales. The Ukrainian coast has been secured. Neizhpapa pointed out an area of 25,000 square kilometres where neither the Russians nor Ukrainians can now operate freely. “There’s a certain kind of status quo that we need to take over,” he said. Neizhpapa maintains that the only way to secure peace in the Black Sea is to throw the Russians out of Crimea. “In imperial times, all of the emperors always said that whoever controls Crimea controls the Black Sea. In Soviet times, they called Crimea the aircraft-carrier that cannot be sunk. Nothing has changed since then.” I asked Neizhpapa what he missed about his home. He gazed upwards for a moment. “Honestly, I miss the sea near Crimea the most. It’s not the same as here. It’s brighter, more transparent.” Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage here. Marta Rodionova has worked as a television journalist and creative producer. https://www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2023/07/27/how-ukraines-virtually-non-existent-navy-sank-russias-flagship

Europe | Ukraine’s counter-offensive The jury is still out on Ukraine’s big push south Gains are modest so far, but the troops are confident Jul 30th 2023 | LYMAN “We can’t draw big conclusions yet,” said the senior Ukrainian military officer. Although Ukrainian forces had broken through heavily defended Russian lines on July 26th in the southern Zaporizhia sector (see map) and had since made modest advances in two areas, he said, it was too early to claim more than modest success. “It can’t change the big picture for the moment,” he added. His caution looks justified. The idea that at the first breach the Russian lines would crumble, setting off a wholesale retreat of the kind that happened last September when Ukrainian forces stormed through the Kharkiv region, was never realistic. “It is fifty-fifty,” the officer said. “Sometimes we have successes and sometimes we have had to take our units back.” Having had six or seven months to prepare their lines for the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the Russians have constructed formidable barriers. Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general, describes the Russian obstacle design as being “much more complex, and deadly, than anything experienced by any military in nearly 80 years”. Tens of kilometres deep, it is intended to break up or slow down even the most competent combined-arms teams and separate them from their logistical support. What the Ukrainians are trying to do on the southern front—to drive south to the occupied city of Melitopol and the port of Berdiansk, aiming to cut the Russian occupation forces in two and sever Russia’s land bridge with Crimea—is incredibly hard. Ukrainian forces are facing a lethal combination: millions of mines, fpv drones that transmit live pictures back to their operators, Lancet loitering munitions, the jamming and disabling of Ukrainian drones, long-range rockets and attack helicopters, all knit together by a dense network of sensors and data links. Even when mines are cleared, aircraft or artillery quickly re-seed the fields with scatterable munitions. Breaking through such well-prepared defences, says Mr Ryan, requires combined-arms operational skills of the highest order. That is something the Ukrainians have not yet demonstrated at scale, says Michael Kofman, a military analyst who visited the front line earlier in July. Moreover, the techniques and the technology for breaching defences have barely evolved in 30 years. Even the best-trained nato armies enjoying air superiority might struggle to overcome such obstacles. “We need to break this combination,” says the Ukrainian military source. On the other hand, the Russian manpower behind these lines has clearly been severely stretched by Ukraine’s strategy of attrition. Russian units, says the source, are “becoming smaller…companies that used to be 150 men are now only 20-30 and battalions of 500-600 are now 200 or 250.” If the breaches in the line that the Ukrainians have achieved can be carried farther, the Russians may have difficulty finding reinforcements. Both sides are constantly probing for weaknesses along the 1,000km-long front. The Ukrainians are making potentially important advances around the ruined city of Bakhmut into the Klishchiivka area, where the Russian occupiers have not had time to build strong defences. For their part, the Russians still have hopes of regaining Ukrainian territory they have annexed but do not control in the Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk regions. They have found Ukrainian weak points in the north and the east. Russia is shelling from across the border the north-eastern town of Vovchansk, forcing the evacuation of its remaining residents. On the eastern front the fortunes have been mixed. For months the Ukrainians aimed to capture Russian-held Kreminna, but in the past few weeks they have been driven back from their forward positions in a nearby pine forest. Between Lyman and Kupiansk, Ukraine lost three small villages last week and the little town of Borova is now in Russian sights. If it falls the Russians will have made considerable progress towards the Oskil river. The Ukrainians’ situation in the town of Avdiivka, 10km north of Donetsk, is also reported to be perilous. Meanwhile, Russia struck Odessa and its ports with missiles for five consecutive days, hitting a cathedral in the city on July 23rd. Ukraine is striking back: on July 28th it appears to have hit the building of the interior ministry in the occupied city of Donetsk. An explosion in the Russian town of Taganrog, 110km from the nearest Ukrainian front line, was attributed by Vasily Golubev, the regional governor, to debris from a Ukrainian missile that was shot down. Another was reported shot down near the city of Azov, even deeper inside Russia. Several Russian Telegram channels reported heavy Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk and neighbouring Makiivka in occupied Ukraine. For now the front line is a bloody shoving match, with both sides making small advances and retreats. Despite the lack of major successes, Ukrainian morale seems to be holding up. The troops realise that they are in for a long, hard slog, but Western officials familiar with the situation report that they remain highly motivated. Near the town of Kupiansk, Pavlo was one of four soldiers heaving giant salamis, bottles of cola and other supplies into the back of their car. Although they had been under constant artillery attack, Pavlo said, “we kill more of them because our artillery is more precise.” Friends had already begun using cluster munitions recently supplied by America, he said, but “we don’t know the result yet.” In Lyman a bushy-bearded commander going by the call sign “Pokémon” said his men were preparing their defences. This was a good thing, he explained: Russian troops will move forward, exposing themselves and allowing the Ukrainians to hit them with artillery and force them back. He seemed undiscouraged by the slow progress. Victory, he said, would come to whichever side was “better in deception operations”. Several Ukrainian missiles streaked overhead towards the Russian positions. “We just want to smash those ****ers!” Pokémon shouted. “Everyone is in a good mood!”

The Ukrainian army commits new forces in a big southward push After eight of weeks of slow progress, it is trying to revive its counter-offensive Ukraine's President Zelensky visits frontline positions in the Berdyansk direction. Jul 27th 2023 After eight weeks of slow progress, Ukraine’s counter-offensive entered a new phase on July 26th when Ukraine’s army committed a big part of its reserve forces in the south. There was heavy fighting reported around the village of Robotyne. Ukrainian officials say their units are attacking in the direction of Melitopol, a city that dominates the “land bridge” linking Russia to Crimea, and Berdyansk, a port on the Sea of Azov (see map). Ukraine’s hope is that Russia’s army, roiled by dysfunctional command and a drumbeat of Ukrainian missile attacks against its logistics, will break under the new pressure. But for that to happen, Ukraine must overcome the problems that hobbled the first phase of its offensive earlier this summer. The counter-offensive began on June 4th when Ukraine launched attacks near Velyka Novosilka and around Bakhmut in Donetsk province, as well as a prior thrust in Zaporizhia province in the south where it is now intensifying its assault. Its new Western-equipped brigades got bogged down, sometimes in minefields, and were targeted by Russian artillery, anti-tank missiles, attack helicopters and loitering munitions. Ukraine responded by changing tactics. It held back armour and sent in smaller units of dismounted infantry, often no more than 20 soldiers, to proceed slowly and haltingly. “The various wargames that were done ahead of time have predicted certain levels of advance,” conceded General Mark Milley, America’s top officer, on July 18th. “And that has slowed down.” In part, the slow progress reflects the scale of the task. Russian defences are 30km deep in places, bristling with tank traps and spattered with mines. Most nato armies would struggle to punch through comparable lines without complete dominance in the air, which Ukraine does not enjoy. Another problem is that Russia has mounted a stronger defence than expected, conducting rapid, mobile counter-attacks in response to Ukrainian advances, rather than remaining confined to trenches. Rob Lee, an expert on Russia’s armed forces who recently visited the front lines, notes that they have not just executed their doctrine competently, but also innovated, for instance by stacking multiple anti-tank mines on top of one another to destroy mine-clearing vehicles. Ukraine’s inability to breach Russian lines is partly to do with equipment—it needs demining kit, air-defence systems and anti-tank missiles capable of blunting Russian counter-attacks from a greater distance. It is also to do with tactics. Mr Lee describes an occasion when a brigade’s advance was delayed by a couple of hours, until dawn. That not only negated Ukraine’s advantage in night-vision systems, but also meant that the accompanying artillery barrage lifted hours earlier than it should have done. Russian infantry and anti-tank squads, who should have been suppressed by well-timed shellfire, were free to attack. This lack of proficiency in co-ordinating complex attacks involving multiple units and different sorts of weapons is hardly surprising. Ukraine’s new brigades were put together in a hurry with unfamiliar equipment. Newly mobilised men were given a month of training in Germany. They have struggled with tasks like reconnaissance, says Mr Lee, with new units becoming disoriented at night time. Co-ordination has also been a problem, with confusion around where friendly units have placed mines. Ukraine’s allies do not seem troubled by the slow progress to date. “It is far from a failure, in my view,” said General Milley, when asked whether the offensive had stalled. “I think that it’s way too early to make that kind of call.” Optimists point to three factors in Ukraine’s favour. One is that it need not fear a serious Russian counter-attack, despite minor Russian gains in northern Luhansk province in recent days. “There appears now to be little prospect of the Russian forces regaining momentum,” said Richard Moore, the head of mi6, a British spy agency, on July 19th. That may be one reason why Russia has torn up a grain deal and resumed strikes on Ukraine’s ports and grain stores. Second, Russia’s decision to defend forward, rather than falling back to prepared defences, has slowed down Ukraine’s progress but also left Russia with little mobile reserve in the rear, a point underscored by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s unhindered march to Moscow in June. The third factor is that Ukraine has been chipping away at Russia’s combat power. On July 11th a Ukrainian strike reportedly killed Oleg Tsokov, a Russian general, in Berdyansk, suggesting that Ukraine was successfully targeting command posts. In recent days Ukraine has also used British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to strike air bases and ammunition depots, including in Crimea. Meanwhile, America’s decision to provide cluster munitions, allows Ukraine to keep up the offensive for longer than originally planned—certainly beyond the summer if necessary. These factors explain why General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, decided to throw in fresh legs on July 26th. He has been forced to adapt his original plan. Brigades from Ukraine’s 9th Corps had been expected to fight their way to Russia’s main line of defence. Then the 10th Corps, in essence a second echelon, including three Western-equipped brigades, were to be deployed to fight their way through the strongest defences. Finally, light, fast-moving air-assault units were supposed to exploit any breakthrough, pouring through the hard-won breach. In the event, 9th Corps struggled. Advances that were supposed to be completed in days ended up taking weeks. Ukraine was unable to deploy whole brigades, instead breaking them down into smaller units. Some experts worry that 10th Corps has now been thrown in prematurely. The main Russian line is still kilometres away and 10th Corps’s units might be worn down before they get there, leaving them too exhausted to punch through. Western officials play down these concerns. “I think they timed it well,” says one. Ukraine is in a “very strong operational position”, says another, pointing to the turmoil in Russia’s senior ranks, including the decision in early July to sack General Ivan Popov, who commanded a big portion of Russian forces in southern Ukraine. Russian military bloggers have described heavy losses of Russian artillery pieces in recent weeks. However, a fluid war of manoeuvre is likely to remain a stretch for a force cobbled together in a few months. The Russian verb peremalyvat (to grind through) is invoked on both sides. But Ukraine’s junior commanders, having seen their units gutted over the past 18 months, refuse to send their new citizen army into a meat-grinder in the way that Russia did in Bakhmut. As Ukraine has become more European, Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence minister, recently suggested, it has acquired “a Western European caution”. Some American and European military officials argue that Ukrainian commanders have in fact been too slow to strike with their new brigades, a mistake that they think Ukraine committed last year in Kherson, when tens of thousands of Russian troops withdrew east over the Dnieper river with their equipment. Ukrainian commanders chafe at the idea that they should gamble their army in circumstances that nato generals have never faced. The 10th Corps’s assault is a break with that hesitation. And the upside of the aversion to casualties thus far is that many Ukrainian units are in better shape than planners had assumed. Brigades that assaulted Russian positions were expected to be left with only a third of their original strength. Thanks in part to well-armoured Western vehicles, they have taken a lighter knock. Even so, the commitment of 10th Corps is a fateful moment for General Zaluzhny, a cautious commander with the weight of Ukrainian and allied expectations on his shoulders. “This is the last big decision for Zaluzhny to make this summer,” says the Western official. “The die is cast.” ■ This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline "Hunting for a breakthrough"

It worked. Thank you VERY much!

Apologies for somewhat unrelated question but how do you do that in WhatsApp?

Satellite data show Ukraine’s forces are testing Russia’s defences https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b--Uodoj0rdjZ7ZaXwOYS9qLaasT5fwE/view?usp=sharing https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/25/satellite-data-show-ukraines-forces-are-testing-russias-defences?utm_content=article-link-3&etear=nl_today_3&utm_campaign=r.the-economist-today&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=5/25/2023&utm_id=1613001

Perhaps he did not have a watch or a wallet or a gold wedding ring?

Nice! Ukraine gets US-made ADM-160 decoys https://defence-blog.com/ukraine-gets-us-made-adm-160-decoys/

Gandolfini would be too tall to play Putler.

The cricket ball weight is 155.9 to 163 grams in Men’s Cricket while in Women’s cricket, its weight differs from 140 to 151 grams. Commonly used RGD-5 hand grenade is egg-shaped without ribbing, except for a lateral ridge where the two halves of the grenade join. It weighs 310 grams (11 oz), is 117 millimeters (4.6 in) in length and 58 millimeters (2.3 in) in diameter. The surface has a few small dimples with green or olive drab paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGD-5 In the former Yugoslav Army, we had a similarly looking and domestically produced hand grenade and called it an "offensive" hand grenade because it was lighter than another so called "defensive" hand grenade.

A lot of practice makes an expert. Baseball and cricket balls are quite lighter than the average hand granade.

Rampant corruption is reported to have rendered Russia's ballistic missile early warning system virtually useless. Scams by contractors are said to have led to unsuitable foreign-made components being used on a wide scale. The VChK-OGPU Telegram channel reports that a scandal is about to break over a component substitution scam that it says has crippled Russia's early warning radars. Such scams have been widespread in Russian military procurement, often with the collusion of corrupt officials.

No. Ukrainians mostly play football (called soccer in USA) and team handball (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handball).

Damning NYT story about how @amnesty commissioned an independent review of its deeply flawed Ukraine report published last year, and then lobbied to soften the review and buried it when the findings showed the human rights org had badly botched the report. pic.twitter.com/Ks9nbSli8o

Please send a link.

Ok, maybe some good points but still too little done: MESSAGE TO THE WORLD FROM INSIDE A RUSSIAN PRISON BY ILYA YASHIN FEBRUARY 10, 2023 4:00 AM EST Yashin is a Russian dissident and political activist. After condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was arrested in 2022 and is currently serving an 8.5-year prison sentence. Soon it’ll be a year since the start of the war that the Kremlin unleashed against Ukraine. It has taken thousands of human lives, destroyed entire cities, and turned millions of families into refugees. Vladimir Putin, as the one responsible for this tragedy, has become a true symbol of evil, cursed around the world. But it also seems that, more and more often, the Russian people are treated as enemies. The main claim against the Russians: You did not resist the aggressive policies of your government, and that makes you accomplices to crimes of war. My name is Ilya Yashin, a Russian opposition politician, whom the Kremlin has kept in prison since the middle of last summer. I’ve been sentenced to 8.5 years of incarceration, because I publicly spoke out against the war in Ukraine. But today I want to say a few words in defense of my nation. First: We did resist. Since the start of the war and throughout 2022, the police in Russia arrested almost 20,000 opponents of the war. According to human rights groups, protests have taken place almost every day in different cities since February 24, 2022, and only 18 of those days have passed without arrests and detentions. Against this background, we have seen astonishing examples of civil courage. For instance, Vladimir Rumyantsev, a provincial fireman, got three years in prison for building a ham radio to broadcast reports against the war, while Alexei Gorinov, a member of the Moscow city council, got seven years after he called for a minute of silence during a meeting of that chamber to honor the Ukrainian children who had been killed. Second: People are fleeing from Putin. In the past year, around 700,000 citizens have left Russia. The majority of them have emigrated, not wanting to be involved in military aggression. I want to draw attention to the fact that this is twice as many people left the country than were drafted into the army. Sure, you could probably blame those who chose to escape instead of choosing the path of resistance, prison, and torture. But the fact is that hundreds of thousands of my countrymen left their homes behind, having refused to become killers on the orders of the government. Third: Those who remain in Russia are living with the rights of hostages. Many of them don’t support the war, but they remain silent, afraid of repressions. But the silence of a hostage who has a terrorist’s gun to his head does not make him an accomplice to the terrorist. I want to appeal to the wisdom of the international community. Do not demean the Russians, as that kind of rhetoric will only strengthen Putin’s power. By shifting the blame for war crimes from the Kremlin junta onto my fellow citizens, you are easing the Putin regime’s moral and political burden. You are giving him a chance to hide from the just accusations of people who have in essence become a human shield in this situation. I see that as a serious mistake. Putin has brought enormous suffering to the Ukrainian people. But with this barbaric war he is also killing my country—Russia. I believe that Russians can become allies of the free world in resisting this tyrant. Just extend a hand to my fellow citizens. -Ilya Yashin Detention Center No. 1, Udmurtiya, Russia https://time.com/6254450/ilya-yashin-a-message-to-the-world-from-inside-a-russian-prison/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc&utm_campaign=newsletter+brief+default+ac&utm_content=+++20230210+++body&et_rid=206404041&lctg=206404041

... “Please imagine how Ukrainians understand negotiations,” former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko told the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday. “You are sitting in your own house, the killer comes to your house and kills your wife, rapes your daughter, takes the second floor, then opens the door to the second floor and says, ‘OK come here. Let’s have a negotiation.’ What would be your reaction?” ...

https://twitter.com/KramarenkoMari3/status/1593507377881432066?s=20&t=9DJBGGx-zuEXlCuUDJRz2w https://twitter.com/KramarenkoMari3/status/1593507377881432066/photo/1

https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/10/10/putin-might-lose-the-war-what-would-that-look-like-for-russia-ukraine-and-the-world/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Paid&utm_campaign=FB-Paid-Putin-Loses&fbclid=IwAR186FUA6WuTs3ccp2ADQxHo_xYtHw8i7wJjVJxa-egwZBILmZM5sfSy8W0 Putin might lose the war. What would that look like for Russia, Ukraine and the world? A former CIA leader on the cataclysms that may lie ahead — and how the U.S. should deal with them. John McLaughlin Special Contributor October 10, 2022 In October 1989, I was in what was then West Germany. It was one month before the Berlin Wall was breached — a stunning moment that would lead in short order to the collapse of communist East Germany and the reunification of the German state less than a year later. In hindsight, the discussions I had in West Germany that fall were almost as remarkable as the globe-changing events that followed; every German leader I met with then — to a person — insisted that Germany would not and could not be reunited in their lifetimes. I was there with then-CIA Director William Webster, meeting with senior intelligence and government officials to better understand the changes sweeping across the Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe. These people simply could not conceive of a reunified German state and an effective end to the Cold War, nor could they envision the path that might take them there. Never mind that CIA analysts were telling me that the “German Question” — a phrase implying reunification — was back on the table. I share this history to make two points. First, as the physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “prediction is difficult — especially about the future.” Second, I think we have arrived at a moment in the Ukraine War that shares much in common with 1989 in West Germany, in that this is a time when all of us have trouble imagining the future with any certainty, and some of us may be looking ahead with too much certainty, just as those German officials did in 1989. And as a result, many of us may look back and wonder how we missed what was coming. Such forward thinking may be especially difficult for the Russians themselves. I sensed this in recent off-the-record meetings with very knowledgeable, internationally minded Russians, people who strongly oppose the war (”off-the-record” meaning I can discuss what they said, but not who said it). These are sophisticated policy analysts who left Russia as President Vladimir Putin went to war. While they fully understand that the war in Ukraine is going very badly for their country, and that Russia might actually lose, they can’t quite get their heads around how that would look and where it might lead. In particular, the idea that Putin’s regime might collapse is almost impossible for them to visualize. Putin and his system are so deeply embedded in their experience of Russia that even the most clear-eyed Russians I have spoken with believe that even if the Russians lose (I can’t speak to whether they think a win is still possible), Putin would hang on to power in some weakened state. They may be right. But increasingly, such assumptions look as shaky as the assumptions made by those West German officials more than three decades ago. We — and they — should not be surprised by a Ukrainian victory, and if that happens, we should not be surprised to see some startling changes within the Kremlin itself. Back in April, when the war was still young, I wrote for Grid that having watched Putin closely for 20 years, “this is the first time that I doubt his ability to survive politically.” I stand by those words now, particularly given what we have seen since: Russia’s catastrophic defeats on the battlefield, Putin’s narrowing of diplomatic exit ramps with his sham annexation of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine, an emerging opposition in Russia, new reservations expressed by Putin’s foreign allies, the desperation shown by his highly unpopular “partial mobilization,” and the stampede for the exits that the mobilization has inspired. This weekend’s explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge is both a symbolic and strategic blow to Putin and his war. Symbolic, because the bridge — which links the Russian-held Crimean peninsula to Russia — was a point of pride for the Russian leader. He attended the opening in 2018. It’s a strategic nightmare because the bridge is a critical supply route for the Russians in Crimea. It’s only the latest in a series of events that raise questions about what a Russian defeat might look like — and then what it will mean for the region and the world. These are questions as profound as those the world wrestled with when the Berlin Wall came down. Perhaps more so. Might Russia lose? There is no question: Ukrainians have the battlefield momentum right now. Their forces are advancing on two fronts, either taking or threatening territory that Putin announced just 10 days ago would be Russian territory “forever.” The U.S. and NATO weapons flow continues. Reports of chaos and even anger within the Russian army come almost daily. I believe some version of defeat is increasingly likely for Russia. I base that on all that we now see, and on my own and others’ experiences with war. Militarily, the Russians have failed in their theater-level strategy — unrealistic estimates of the force required, an absence of senior enlisted leaders empowered to make decisions at the front, and a gross underestimate of the Ukrainian and NATO responses. The Russians have also failed on the logistical front — here, I take my cue from University of St. Andrews scholar Phillip O’Brien, who has studied World War II logistics more extensively than anyone I know. He believes that Russia will not be able to train its new raw (and perhaps unwilling) recruits adequately, nor equip them properly, in time to swing the battlefield momentum. Then there is the more elusive metric: the will to fight. My own understanding of this comes from direct engagement in one war (Vietnam) and indirect involvement in two others (Afghanistan and Iraq). Ultimately, any war becomes very personal and its success rests heavily on whether individual soldiers are ready to risk their lives to defeat an opponent. An army arrives at that readiness through some combination of strong identification with a cause, a government that commands respect, and a conviction that one must destroy the adversary to save oneself and one’s comrades. By now, it is clear that on all these fronts, the Ukrainians hold the overwhelming advantage. So a Ukrainian victory over the vaunted Russian army is increasingly possible. What defeat might look like How to define a victory for Ukraine? Or, from the other side, what would defeat look like for Russia? To some degree, only Putin himself can answer that — given that he has shifted his war aims and narrative multiple times since the first troops rolled in. But I think he would see it as a defeat if his forces were driven back to the small areas of Donetsk and Luhansk where Russian proxies held sway as Putin’s invasion kicked off on Feb. 24. That said, the way things are going, “defeat” could look worse from the Russian perspective; Ukraine may push further and expel Russian forces from those territories Putin held prior to the war. It is harder perhaps to imagine a Ukrainian recapture of Crimea, which Putin seized in 2014, but even this is no longer out of the question. It would be hard for Putin to spin any of these outcomes into “mission accomplished”; as Grid has reported, some of his most stalwart pro-war propagandists have begun questioning Russia’s performance and demanded that more territory be taken, no matter the costs to Russian soldiers. For many vocal and influential Russians, any of the above scenarios would be seen as an unacceptable humiliation. Several analysts have argued that Russia still has a vast military that it has yet to commit, and which dwarfs the Ukrainian capability. But where is it? Is Putin saving this card for a larger battle with NATO — even though he calls the battle with Kviv “existential”? And if he really holds that military strength, why must he mobilize 300,000 untrained and unwilling Russians to continue the fight in Ukraine? Something doesn’t add up. The nuclear fears If the Russians lose, or appear on the verge of losing, then what? Putin has pointed repeatedly to his nuclear arsenal and called its potential use “no bluff.” Whether he would go this far is simply unknowable, perhaps even to Putin himself. Russian doctrine does allow for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the event its conventional forces are overwhelmed, but this has never been tested on the battlefield. The White House and Pentagon have surely been gaming out such scenarios and potential responses; no doubt their European counterparts have been as well. Perhaps the best odds anyone can give regarding Putin going nuclear is that the chances are not zero; the West would be foolish to rule it out. If Putin did resort to nukes, what would the U.S. and its allies do? I have no “inside” information, but I suspect the answer would depend on factors such as where Putin strikes, and with what kind and yield of weapon (ground attack or air detonation, e.g.). There would be no shortage of potential retaliation targets — as suggested by some retired U.S. military officers — ranging from supply depots to Black Sea bases and many others. The U.S., which has impressive conventional capabilities, would not have to “go nuclear” to make its point in a devastating way. So, while I do not know what the U.S. contingency plan is, I’m confident there is one. What should the U.S. do in this nightmare scenario? My own advice — in the event Putin deploys a small tactical nuclear weapon: Don’t be hasty. Condemn the act in the most serious terms but hold any retaliation long enough to let the world and his fellow Russians absorb what he has done. How long to hold fire would depend partly on how the world reacted; for one thing, a Russian nuclear attack would confront China and Putin’s other enablers — all of whom oppose any “first use” of nuclear weapons — with an act they would almost certainly deplore and probably condemn outright. U.S. retaliation might be essential eventually, but an instant response would raise unprecedented questions of nuclear escalation. It would probably also be twisted by Putin and some of his foreign backers who’ve argued that he was pushed to war by U.S. and NATO policies. The fall of Putin? It is no longer unthinkable that Putin will lose power in the event of a catastrophic outcome in Ukraine — the collapse of the Russian military or its expulsion from the country. Exactly how this would unfold is not clear, which helps explain why even those sophisticated Russians I spoke with find the scenarios so hard to fathom. Under Putin’s own last round of constitutional changes, in the event that a sitting president leaves office, the prime minister (currently an obscure former taxation official hand-picked by Putin), would become president for 90 days or until a new election can be held. Of course, the problem with this orderly scenario is that no one sees Putin allowing it to happen. But if Russia suffers defeat in Ukraine, the Russian elite and all those ultranationalists who dominate the media would have to contemplate a world in which Russia and many of its leaders remain under Western sanctions, with a weak and globally isolated leader at the helm, and Russia carrying little weight on the world stage. Would they accept that? Their capacity for sycophancy has been almost boundless, but it is already fraying; calls for a more competent and brutal campaign have filled the airwaves lately, and public criticism of the mobilization has been heard all over the vast reaches of the Russian Federation. One possibility is that as the bad news persists, Russian military and security service leaders might act as a kind of informal “politburo” and inform Putin that they can no longer support him, and that it is time for him to retire to his dacha with some honor intact. That may prove to be wishful thinking as well. Other outcomes are possible — including a breakdown of public order — but with Russia’s highly centralized system and the security services willing so far to brutally put down all forms of protest, that scenario is even harder to imagine. Finally, some Russians — struggling to imagine the aftermath of a Russian loss — sketch yet another scenario, one that might be described as a slow fading away for the Russian leader. A weakened Putin would cling to power, many more Russians would leave the country, and Russia would for a time simply exist as a dispirited and weak country. This is what Putin’s monumental miscalculation has wrought for a country that, whatever its shortcomings, has no shortage of proud traditions and gifted citizens, and which during his early years in power had attained a place of significant influence and respect in the world. Russia has arrived at a critical, even existential, crossroads at least three times since World War I — during its 1917 revolution, facing the German onslaught on its territory that began in 1941, and then in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These were huge and very different challenges, and Russia is in some ways still working its way through the consequences of all those upheavals. With his Ukraine invasion, and the folly of his many moves since, Putin appears to be driving the country toward another crossroads. The outcome looks every bit as uncertain and potentially destabilizing as those earlier cataclysmic events. Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article. John McLaughlin Special Contributor John McLaughlin is a former acting director of the CIA and a distinguished practitioner in residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Also: 09-30-22 SEPTEMBER 30 AT 12:48 AM We need to talk about the anti-mobilization unrest in Russia Why the Russians running from mobilization are not refugees, not Ukraine’s allies, and not anti-war What happened? On September 21, Putin declared “partial mobilization” in Russia, planning to conscript from 300,000 to 1,200,000 Russians to strengthen the Russian positions in Ukraine. This sparked panic and unrest among many Russians as the government had repeatedly told for months that there was no need for mobilization and that the situation in Ukraine was “under control”. Protests, sabotage, and mass exodus came in the first week of the decision. More than 260,000 (mostly male) Russians fled to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and other countries. Multiple arsons were reported at military enlistment offices, and many local protests emerged as well. Mixed signals followed The Baltic states and Poland quickly reacted by saying they will not grant asylums to Russians fleeing mobilization because "A refusal to fulfill one’s civic duty in Russia or a desire to do so does not constitute sufficient grounds for being granted asylum in another country" – as Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Reinsalu commented. Germany’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, however, claimed that they would welcome Russians because "Anyone who courageously opposes Putin's regime and thereby falls into great danger, can file for asylum on grounds of political persecution." There seems to be disunity in the question of how should the democratic world view the fleeing Russians. So let’s unpack the situation. Anti-mobilization, not anti-war Probably the most important takeaway that everybody should keep in mind: Russians fleeing mobilization are not anti-war. Some of them might be, but the vast majority are simply running away because they are scared to be drafted and sent to the battlefield. These people were not protesting or opposing the war (sabotaging the military actions, voicing their political positions, doing anything meaningful in response to the war) for 7 months – even after the mass massacres in Bucha and Mariupol. They were fine with their country committing genocide as long as it didn’t affect them personally. Also, no policy in Russia targets these people for who they are and what they think. The only people truly targeted are the colonized indigenous people. Mind that out of all mobilized people in occupied Crimea, around 80-90% are Crimean Tatars – people who have already experienced numerous attempts from Russia to wipe them out throughout the last two centuries. So no, ethnic Russian urbanites are not targeted by Putin’s regime. They are simply afraid of what might come next as they agree to fulfill their civic duty. Now that more Russians will try to run away and ask for asylum in different countries, it’s important to keep in mind that they are not politically repressed members of an anti-war movement – they are men afraid that their comfortable, peaceful lives are about to be seriously disrupted. They are men who have nothing else to do in response to their government’s outrageous actions apart from running away. Not (war) refugees Look, I’m not even going to go into details about why it’s morally wrong to compare Russians running away from mobilization to Ukrainians running away from shelling and genocide. Even though Czech President Milos Zeman said that the country “should grant visas to these people in the same way as to Ukrainian refugees,” it seems obvious to me that these two categories of people are experiencing incomparable levels of injustice. They cannot and should not be viewed as the alike victims of Putin or war. Because the people running away are not running from war – they are running from conscription. Remember, there is no war in Russia: their towns are not getting shelled, and their residents are not hiding in bomb shelters. There is only war waged by Russia, outside of Russia. Mixing up Russian anti-war activists, Ukrainian refugees, and Russians running away from mobilization fails to distinguish the aggressor and the victim. It’s tone-deaf and, frankly, immoral. Not allies of Ukraine Okay, so if Russians fleeing mobilization are not politically repressed activists or war refugees, then who are they? Aren’t they at least on Ukraine’s side in a way that they don’t want to take part in Russia’s war? Ukrainians remember how silent practically all Russians were after Bucha and Mariupol. We know that if the same people are told to murder civilians by their command, they will do that – all while saying how Putin is responsible for all of this. We’ve been there. Ukrainians are also too weary of countless “good Russians” who claim to be our allies but then reveal their toxic imperialistic xenophobia as soon as topics like Crimea, Chechnya, or Georgia are mentioned. The best Ukraine can offer to Russians who get mobilized against their will is that it is happy to take in those who surrender or desert on the battlefield. As Zelensky’s Head of Office Andriy Yermak recently tweeted: “The mobilized Russians who will surrender will save their lives. As to the rest, their odds will betray them.” Should we support Russians fleeing mobilization? Isn’t supporting the Russian runaways good for the end goal – making Russia lose the war and break Putin’s regime? Well, not really. The runaways’ lives would not be in danger because there’s a war on their land or because the regime is threatening their lives. Paradoxically, they are running away to not be rightfully killed by Ukrainians defending their land. Praising the current exodus as an act of “courageous opposition” and encouraging it fails to see what Russians are really trying to escape from – responsibility. Responsibility to stand up and fight against the oppressive regime – if not in an act of solidarity with Ukrainians, then at least as a way to save their own lives. It’s time for Russians to own what their state is doing – and stop running away. More disruption in Russia is a good thing But the more Russians run away, the fewer of them will be sent to kill Ukrainians, right? Well, no. First of all, Russia will not run out of human cannon fodder any time soon – and that’s exactly how the conscripts are planned to be used on the frontline. Even if millions flee, millions more will be conscripted instead of them – most probably from the colonized indigenous populations of non-European Russian lands. The exodus will not weaken Putin’s regime in any significant way. In fact, it might even be a good thing for the stability of the regime. Until Russians feel the discomfort of war in their daily lives, they will remain silent supporters of the war. The more discomfort is brought by the war, the more their financial stability and the daily lives of their loved ones are affected – the more damage is done to the social pact between the regime and the (urban) people. I’m talking about the social pact of “you keep out of politics and we make sure war doesn’t affect your lives” pact that is still very much alive. Russians running away from mobilization means there will be fewer distressed families and communities, thus more of the same passiveness and obedience that we’ve seen for the past 7 months. More urban Russian men staying in Russia, on the other hand, will increase the distress and discomfort, which could potentially build up into serious social unrest. The good sign is that, with the arsons and the shooting of a conscription officer, the unrest is already building up. Just like the #visaban movement, the restrained approach toward the anti-mobilization of Russians may appear irrelevant to the war in Ukraine, but it is actually an important step in breaking the social pact that made the genocidal invasion possible in the first place. AND SEPTEMBER 24 AT 4:03 AM #21 Is Ukraine the real Rus’? Explaining Ukraine’s search for its name and identity, Russia’s imperial appropriation of history, and the complicated legacy of Kyivan Rus’. A couple of important disclaimers: The terms “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” became widely used only in the 19 century. Whenever I refer to “Ukrainians” and “Ukraine” in the context earlier than the 19 century, I actually mean “the people who lived in what is now Ukraine” and “lands that are now Ukraine” respectively. The same logic applies to the words “Russia” and “Russians.” Finally, I ask you not to draw mental links between the words “Rus’” and “Russia” from the beginning. Let’s view them completely separately and make connections only as the article progresses. Only by completely deconstructing the modern meanings we can understand how they came to be. Okay, let’s dig into it. What does Rus’ even mean? The background of the word Rus’ is still murky. The most viable hypothesis claims that Rus’ was the name of the Nordic people coming to Constantinople for trade and to serve as mercenaries somewhere around 8 century AD. These tribes had a route “from Varangians to Greeks” going from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea through a system of rivers – and the Dnipro river was their key route. These Scandinavians called themselves “Rhos,” meaning “rowers” in old Swedish – because that was their profession. This name consistently reappeared in Arabic and Byzantine accounts referring to Scandinavians. Note: For more info about the connection between the Norse and the Rus’, check out this lecture about the origins of the term Rus’ and the history of Kyivan Rus by Jackson Crawford and Vicki Grove. As these trade routes were growing, the Scandinavians took control over many city-states along them and established the Rurik dynasty that ruled over the feudal system of duchies spreading from the Baltics to modern-day central and western Ukraine. That’s how Kyiv became a powerful medieval city at the time: as a major trade hub between Constantinople and Northern Europe. Who were the Rus’ people then? It’s unclear when and how the name of the Scandinavian rowers transitioned into the proto-ethnic identity of the Slavic tribes. It was probably a result of two processes: the Scandinavian rulers assimilated into Slavic culture, and, in turn, their political power influenced how Slavic tribes identified themselves. The former process is evident in the names of the ruling Rurik dynasty members: typical Scandinavian names like Helgi, Ingvar, and Helga gradually shifted into Slavic names like Svyatoslav, Volodymyr, and Yaroslav throughout the 9-10 centuries. By the end of the 10th century – when Orthodox Christianity was established on a state level – Rus’ became the main pre-modern identity marker widely used across the territory of modern Ukraine, Belarus, and Western parts of Russia. Rus’ was a very vague identity: it encompassed religious, ethnic, linguistic, and political meanings. For instance, the Orthodox Christians of Poland and Lithuania were widely referred to as the people of the “Rus’ faith” (“Rus’ka vira”). At the same time, Rus’ identity had nothing to do with the modern term “Russia” – because Russian identity was not yet formed then. The modern “Russian” identity came later in the 18-19 centuries when the legacy of Rus’ was monopolized and appropriated to form the basis for the imperial narrative of Russia. Still, many people living across the entire North-East Europe who spoke Slavic languages and were of Christian Orthodox faith would consider themselves Rus’ folk up until the 19th century, referring to their religion, language, or culture. What is the Kyivan Rus’ then? The “Kyivan Rus’” is a pretty recent term – it was first used by the Russian historians of the 19th century to distinguish the Kyiv-led Rus’ of the 9-13 centuries from the rest of what they called “Russia” (I’ll talk about the appropriation of this later in the text). In reality, nobody ever called that medieval state “Kyivan Rus’” – it was just Rus’, and Kyiv was its capital. Kyivan Rus’ was a feudal political structure consisting of multiple principalities and spreading from the Baltic Sea coast to the Black Sea in its heyday in the 10-12 centuries. Rus’ was a dominant force on the medieval stage, as it controlled the trade between North-Central Europe and the Byzantine Empire. In the 11-12 centuries, Kyiv was a city of more than 100,000 people, one of the biggest and wealthiest European capitals of the time. Kyiv’s decline started in the 13 century because of a brutal internal power struggle between princes from all across Rus’ and was complete with the invasion of Mongols that destroyed the city entirely in 1240. (The oldest surviving map of Kyiv is from the 1638 book Teraturgimy by Kyiv-based monk Atanasiy Kalnofoyskyi) From Rus’ to Maloros: How did Ukrainians self-identify after Kyivan Rus? In pre-modern times, multiple ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities existed simultaneously and could be shared by essentially the same folk. That’s exactly what was happening in the scattered lands of ex-Kyivan-Rus’. Everybody knew they were Rus’, but as time went on and political powers shifted, so did the names and meanings. Still, the name Rus’ and its derivatives dominated for centuries, diverging into multiple local identities and names depending on regions and specific recollections: Chorna Rus’ (Black Rus’), Chervona Rus’ (Red Rus’), Bela Rus’ (White Rus’), and more. The vague and diverse Rus’ identity was still prevalent across the Orthodox Eastern European people: it was the most basic identity marker across Ukraine and Belarus up to the 18 century – up until these lands were colonized by the Russian Empire and their names were established in subordination to the Moscow-centered version of Rus’. In modern-day Ukraine, another important name shaped up by the 14 century – Mala Rus’ (Lesser Rus’, Little Rus’). As Brian Boeck describes it, “The term Little Russia (Malaia Rossiia, later Malorossiia) originated in Byzantine ecclesiastical circles in the fourteenth century to describe the metropolitanate of Halych (Western Ukraine) and was revived in the early seventeenth century to refer to the Orthodox Kyiv metropolitanate.” The Mala Rus’ term had no diminishing connotation until the 18 century (quite the opposite – it meant “the core” of the Rus’ land) and was often used by Ukrainians themselves to distinguish them from the rest of the Rus’ki people. However, it was later used by the Russian Empire to emphasize the empire-colony relationships between the hegemon and the subordinate nation. That’s how the Great and Little Russian terminology was established and with time turned into a colonial slur. How the legacy of Rus’ was appropriated and monopolized by the Russian Empire To build the imperial myth and feed the narrative of the ancient greatness of Russia, Moscow proclaimed itself the successor of the Byzantine Empire and the Kyivan Rus in the 16-18 centuries. Russian intellectuals of the time presented Kyiv as the “cradle” of three “Russian” peoples: Velykorossy (“Great Russians” – modern-day Russians), Belarusy (“White Russians”), and Malorosy (“Little Russians”). According to this view, when Kyiv fell to the Mongols in 1240 and gradually lost the status of a metropolis, Moscow took over and led the Russian people into greatness. Consider the case of the Monomakh cap – a monarch’s regalia worn by Russian Tzars between the 14 and 17 centuries and now exhibited in Kremlin. According to the Russian chronicle dating back to the 16 century, the cap is from the 12 century: it was a gift from the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus to Kyiv’s grand prince Volodymyr Monomakh. It was then transferred to Moscow at some point, symbolizing the historic continuity from Constantinople to Kyiv to Moscow. Except that this is a completely fabricated story. Not only Constantine and Volodymyr lived 50 years apart, but the Monomakh cap itself was actually a Tatar female wedding headdress and was most probably a 14-century gift from the Golden Horde, the overlords of Moscow at the time. Stories like these, of course, reflect the imperial desires of Russia more than the historic truth. In reality, Kyivan Rus’ disintegrated into many small feudal duchies that never associated themselves with Moscow – from the Galicia-Volhynia Kingdom in Western Ukraine to the ancient Novgorod Republic in the North of modern Russia (burnt into inexistence by Moscow in 1478). When Moscow rose to power and expanded in the 14-16 centuries, it was a completely different political entity living in a different reality. This, however, didn’t stop the Russian Empire from trying to monopolize its claim on the entire legacy of Rus’ – in written and material forms. Since the 17 century, Russia has stolen numerous archeological, historical, and religious artifacts from Ukraine. Russian Orthodox Church also took away Kyiv’s church autonomy in 1685-1722, turning it into a subordinate structure to Moscow (and not directly to Constantinople) for the first time ever since Rus’ was baptized in Kyiv in 988. In the end, Ukrainians were cut off from their past, legacy, and name. Where did “Ukraine” come from? Simultaneously with the Rus’ identity, a separate name for Ukrainian lands under the Polish crown emerged: Ukraine. The word “Ukraine” first appeared in 1187 referring to a borderland region in the center of modern-day Ukraine. According to Boeck, the term was later revived as “a borderland or frontier used by Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, the term ukraïna came to encompass the Cossack lands of the Dnieper River basin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Because Ukraine was torn between bigger empires, both Maloros and Ukrainian identities coexisted together without the real agency of Ukrainian people who would largely self-identify as Rus’ or Ruthenian up until the 19 century. However, throughout the 19 century – in the times when many modern European nations were establishing their national identities – Ukrainian intellectuals gradually and consciously moved away from the Maloros identity and revived and established the idea of the Ukrainian identity that united various people across the Russian and Habsburg Empires. (“A general plan of the wild fields, or Ukraine” was the first detailed map of what is now Ukraine made in 1648 by French-Polish cartographer Guillaume de Beauplan. Note that the name Ukraine was already used to describe this area of land – although without any ethnic or linguistic connotations.) Why Ukraine, not Malorossiia or Rus’? Ukraine had to transform and rethink its name to separate itself from the imperial idea of Russia and from the Polish and Habsburg influence in the western regions. You see, by the 19 century, Russia had already built its imperial identity by monopolizing the succession rights to Rus’, appropriating the Kyiv statehood’s history, and rewriting their own history altogether. This deeply colonial worldview already had a prescribed place for the ruling “Great Russian” nation, for the non-Slavic colonized people, and for the “younger brothers”: White Russians (Belarusians) and Little Russians (Ukrainians). That’s why trying to revive the Rus’ identity and compete for it against Moscow was impossible at the time: Russia controlled most of Ukraine and imprisoned anybody who spread such “dangerous” ideas. To continue with the Maloros identity would mean to accept the Russian discourse and accept Ukraine’s place in the larger imperial narrative of Russia. Moreover, since western Ukraine was a part of the Habsburg Empire up until 1918, the “Maloros” identity would fail to include that part of the population – despite the fact that it shared language, culture, and history with the Russia-colonized lands of Ukraine. Finally, although only local intelligentsia proudly identified as “Ukrainians” in the middle of the 19 century, they saw the unifying nature of the term “Ukraine”. This was not just an ethnic marker – it was a political term. According to the 19-century Ukrainian intellectual Mykola Kostomarov, “Ukrainian” was “not used in the meaning of a people, it only means the resident of a periphery, it makes no difference whether he is a Pole or Jew, he is an ukrainets if he lives in Ukraine.” Of course, the word “Ukraine” has gained a lot of new meanings in the last two centuries, but it still carries the civic meaning up to this day – you can be Ukrainian no matter what your ethnic or religious background is. So, who owns the legacy of Kyivan Rus’? In a way, the answer to this question is being decided on the battlefield right now. Since the 18 century, Russia has pushed the narrative of Rus’ as the cradle of three “brotherly nations” with Moscow taking succession from Kyiv as the center of the “Russian World.” While it may sound quite egalitarian and nice on the outside, this view basically says that Russia has the sovereign claim over the Kyivan legacy and that Ukraine and Belarus are forever tied to Russia through these “brotherly” bonds. This view is a cover for a deeply imperialistic worldview, a justification for colonizing and controlling the people of two sovereign countries. And Russia still uses it: Putin refers to the “brotherly nations” narrative and to the idea of Kyiv being the “mother of all Russia cities” in his de-facto declaration of Russia’s territorial aggression against Ukraine. Ukraine’s idea of Kyivan Rus’ is different. For centuries, the people of Ukraine were cut off from any association with the Kyivan Rus’ – partly because they lacked sovereign political elites and partly because the Russian Empire had already appropriated all of Rus’ history into its own imperial narrative. But at the turn of the 19 and 20 centuries, things began to change. In 1898, Ukrainian historian and politician Mykhailo Hrushevsky wrote a long and impressive book called The History of Ukraine-Rus’ – establishing the continuity of the nation’s history from Kyivan Rus’ to modern-day Ukrainians (Note how he used both terms Ukraine and Rus’ to link these identities). With more and more history getting uncovered and reviewed, the idea of continuity between the Kyivan Rus’ and the modern Ukrainian state became the new norm. These days, Ukraine claims that, yes, the Kyivan Rus’ encompasses the histories of multiple nations – but only Ukraine carries the statehood legacy with the center in Kyiv. Russia and Belarus have their part in that story, but their part is similar to that of France or England in Roman history – it’s the part of the different people living under the hegemony of a metropolis. As Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak put it, the Rus’ and Ukraine are like “a caterpillar and a butterfly: they are not identical (caterpillar can’t fly), but there’s a direct link between them.” With that view of Rus’, Ukraine decolonizes its history and challenges the imperial myth of Russia. This view, of course, infuriates Russia – that is why it is so keen to keep its claim on Kyivan Rus’ alive. Take a bizarre incident when Russia installed an 18-meter-high monument to Volodymyr the Great in the center of Moscow in 2016 – a monument to the Grand Prince of Kyiv who had lived 200 earlier than Moscow was established. Rus’ and the Russia-Ukraine war Ukraine’s claim on political sovereignty from Russia – which is the main reason for Putin’s neocolonial invasion of 2022 – includes the claim on Ukraine’s history. Since the end of the 17 century, Ukrainians have struggled with Moscow’s colonial rule. We’ve been robbed of our chronicles, archives, art, and historical artifacts – Russia has literally drained material history from Ukraine into Moscow and St Petersburg. Unlike Russia, Ukraine doesn’t want to return to some mythical glory of the past – it looks into the future. However, like any colonized nation, we feel the importance of connecting to the history and identity that was deliberately stolen from us and appropriated by our colonizers. The victory of Ukraine in this war will make a crucial point: Ukraine is a sovereign nation with its own past and independent future. We are not a chapter in a story of the Russian Empire – we deserve our own story. Answering the question in the name of this article: “Is Ukraine the real Rus’?” – no, Ukraine is not the real Rus’, because nobody is. Rus’, with its people and language, is long gone, and there's no point in trying to revive it. Ukrainians don't want to start calling ourselves Rus’ and compete for the word “Russia” with Russia (except maybe a couple of weirdos). But we deserve to finally claim the history of our land – by decolonizing our past and defending our future on the battlefield. AND SEPTEMBER 15 AT 4:44 AM #20 Lessons from Ukraine’s counteroffensive (so far) How the war could end, what Ukrainians are fighting for, and how fragile Russia really is A summary of Ukrainian’s counteroffensive Before going through the lessons, let’s run through the basics of what’s happened so far. Since late August, Ukraine has led the counteroffensive operation on the southern and northeastern frontlines. The initial hype was focused on the Kherson direction, but then last week, Ukraine unexpectedly made an impressive push in the Kharkiv region. As of September 15, at least 4000 square kilometers have been fully liberated, and 4000 more are being stabilized by Ukrainians right now. Russians have largely fled in panic and left a lot of equipment and people behind them. As a result, Ukraine liberated Kupiansk and Izium, towns crucial for Russia’s military logistics. Russia’s official statements claim they decided to regroup from the Kharkiv direction to strengthen their Donbas frontline. However, even the top propagandists don’t seem to believe this version of the story. The counteroffensive is still ongoing, so our ability to draw conclusions is limited. Still, what are the lessons we can learn from the surprising course of the counteroffensive so far? It’s not about the land – it’s about the people As Ukrainians are liberating towns that have lived for months under Russian occupation, we’ve seen tonnes of heartwarming videos with locals welcoming them. That’s what real liberation looks like. As a Ukrainian, I get flooded with immense joy when I’m watching these videos. I’m happy that these people are alive, that they have survived whatever Russians had been doing there, and that they can now be safe and return to (relative) normalcy and safety. All these happy moments prove once again what has become clear for Ukrainians, foreign observers, and even Russian propagandists: people across all of Ukraine despise Russians and wait to be liberated by Ukrainians. And it’s Ukraine’s duty to save these people from Russia and the totalitarianism, torture, and genocide it brings to every village it occupies. Every town and village that the Russians reached had torture chambers and mass graves: Ukraine officials have already documented over 1,000 dead civilians in recently liberated Izuym, a town of 50,000. For Ukraine, this is not a war for land – this is a war for the people and for their lives. Every Ukrainian trapped under Russian occupation deserves to be rescued. Ukraine can win on the battlefield Ukraine is still very far from victory. And by victory, I mean the liberation of all Russia-occupied lands since 2014, including the entire Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as Crimea. Add to this the fact that Zelensky and other key government officials have numerously stated that the Ukrainian victory would also include reparations from Russia and an international tribunal for war criminals. Yes, there’s a long road ahead of Ukraine, but the counteroffensive has busted another myth about this war: the myth that Ukraine can’t win on the battlefield. In spring, Ukraine proved wrong most experts and analysts who had said Ukraine would fall within one week of the invasion. Now, Ukraine has proved wrong skeptics claiming that Ukraine cannot execute a successful offensive operation. The skeptics’ logic was that Ukraine showed it could defend itself – but it had no experience and capacity to re-take the Russia-occupied land. Well, they were wrong. Again. All of that leads to a clear conclusion: with the help of its allies, Ukraine is capable of beating Russia on the battlefield. Russia is not invincible. In fact, Russia seems to be a systemically overrated military power – and we have yet to discover how fragile it is as the war brings more pressure on Putin’s regime. Russia only speaks the language of force Russia will use negotiations to regroup and break any peace deal as soon as it feels powerful enough – the Minsk agreements have shown that. Russia will use land concessions as an invitation to invade further – the West’s initial blind eye on the occupation of Crimea has demonstrated that as well. The only way Russia can accept the existence of a free and democratic Ukraine is if it’s forced to accept it. And Ukraine’s counteroffensive has proved that, unfortunately, brute force is the only way to liberate millions of people from Russian occupation and make Russia stay away. Take it from Zelensky himself: “When Russia decided to invade Ukraine, the world didn’t punch them in their mugs, and so Russians went further, and further, and further. Well, we are punching them in their mugs now.” I understand that this streetfight logic could feel shocking for people living in peaceful democracies. But that’s the reality of Russia that we all have to face. And all those liberated Ukrainians in the Kharkiv region would still be living under Russian occupation if it wasn’t for Ukraine’s army. Arming Ukraine works Even before the counteroffensive, it was already clear that the concerns about sending weapons to Ukraine were misplaced. Those who claimed there was no point in arming Ukraine before and after February 24 turned out to be outrageously wrong. Arming Ukraine is the only step that saved millions of Ukrainians from occupation, deportation, arrests, torture, rape, and other horrors of Russia’s genocidal campaign. Nothing else has saved more lives than military help to Ukraine. But the counteroffensive proved yet more skeptics wrong. For months, we’ve heard occasional conspiracy-style rants claiming that the weapons sent to Ukraine will turn up on the black market and that Ukrainians are a corrupt society that can’t be trusted. The skepticism came from all sides of the political spectrum – from a ****hole of an investigation by CBS to Fox News’ far-right host Tucker Carlson. With the masterful counteroffensive, Ukrainians showed that the West’s military is put to good use. Paul Massaro, a foreign policy expert and a big friend of Ukraine recently tweeted: “Ukraine is among the most responsible and effective recipients of US security assistance in history. They deserve MUCH more. Every dollar makes the world safer.” Russians fear humiliation the most One of the surprising outcomes of the Russian exodus from the Kharkiv region was the reaction it got in Russia. Of course, Russia’s warmongering Telegram channels are outraged by the poor performance of their military and have already got armed with insane conspiracies about thousands of English-speaking NATO soldiers fighting in the Ukrainian counteroffensive. But even the most institutionalized propagandists and deeply pro-Putin figures like Chechen leader Kadyrov have expressed disappointment and concerns with how the “special military operation” is going. As Portuguese political consultant Bruno Maçaes put it, it seems like Russia has suddenly synchronized and united – not because their country committed the worst genocide in the 21 century, but at the prospect of getting humiliated. The myth of Russia’s military dominance and, subsequently, the fear of battlefield humiliation seem to be at the core of Russian imperial identity. Ukraine’s ultimate victory is the collapse of Putin The further into this war, the clearer it becomes that independent, sovereign Ukraine and Putin’s neocolonial Russia can no longer coexist. The genie is out of the box – and Ukraine will not be safe with Putin’s regime in place. Putin, in turn, cannot sustain his grip over Russia with a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. Something must go. And it’s Ukraine’s and the rest of the democratic world’s duty to make sure Putin’s regime falls. It may be a new and scary thought, but this idea has been circulating in Ukraine since February 24 – as soon as everybody realized that Putin decided to higher the stakes. Once he did that, there was no going back to the previous status quo. Taras Chmut, the head of the Come Back Alive foundation, recently tweeted: “Ukraine’s ultimate victory is not the return to our 1991 borders. It is also the disintegration of Russia into dozens of independent republics stripped off nuclear status.” Because, at this point, this is the only way Ukraine and many other nations can live safely. And the recent counteroffensive showed how Putin’s collapse might not be as unrealistic as many experts believe. What’s even more surprising is that the most potent opposition to Putin might emerge from even more fascist and pro-militaristic groups. But instead of fearing “destabilization,” the rest of the world should prepare for the fall of the Russian fascist regime. As Anne Applebaum recently wrote, “now is the time to ask about the stability of Russia itself and to factor that question into our plans. Russian soldiers are running away, ditching their equipment, asking to surrender. How long do we have to wait until the men in Putin’s inner circle do the same?” Ukraine will need more help to defend itself Ukraine’s success is a sign that the current strategy of supporting Ukraine works. But it’s not a sign of Ukraine’s inevitable victory. I’d love for that to be true, but it’s not. The counteroffensive brings us one step closer to victory, but there’s too much yet to be won: from Kherson to Luhansk, from Donetsk to Crimea. Another dangerously wrong conclusion from the counteroffensive is that the world can slow down on military and political support because, apparently, Ukraine can take it from here. Unfortunately, Ukraine’s capacity to lead the war of attrition is completely dependent on the support coming from outside. If the counteroffensive carries any conclusion about military support, it’s this: if Europe and the US had been less afraid to arm Ukraine since 2014, the full-scale invasion would have probably not happened. If the Western leaders had sent weapons in the first days of the invasion, tens of thousands of civilian deaths could have been averted. The counteroffensive has shown that the world should continue supporting Ukraine to prevent more human suffering. Let’s wait until the counteroffensive ends The counteroffensive is still happening. Yes, it has slowed down, but it is not over yet. It’s too soon to draw definite conclusions about the successes and failures at this point. I know there are a lot of discussions right now about the counteroffensive being a “potential turning point of this war.” Well, it could be a turning point – or it could not. Wars are nonlinear and poorly predictable. I think it’s crucial for all of us to stay put and wait for more updates. Until then, let’s just enjoy the feel-good videos of happy folk getting liberated and wish them well. AND SEPTEMBER 6 AT 12:00 AM #19 Why Ukraine was never really that polarized The story of Ukrainian identity, Russian propaganda, and a troubled Western perspective, or why everybody thought Ukraine was a divided nation Ukraine’s unity following February 24, 2022 When Russia broke the months-long suspense and invaded Ukraine, Ukrainians held firmly to their ground. For many international observers, the united resistance of Ukrainians was as surprising as Russia’s back-to-1939 style of invasion. After all, Ukraine had always been described as a troubled, polarized society with pressing linguistic and ethnic divisions and a critically low level of trust in government. How could such a divided society create a nationwide volunteer resistance overnight? How can it keep resisting for six months with no visible signs of division? I mean, after all the horrors of war and personal tragedies, 90% of Ukrainians believe in victory over Russia. To answer these questions, we need to step back and review the entire notion of Ukraine being a polarized society. The fundamental values of Ukrainians The point here is this: Ukraine is not nearly as polarized as it had often been portrayed. Mainstream media outlets usually mention Ukraine in times of crisis, unrest, and political turmoil. But despite being consistently depicted as a divided nation, Ukrainians’ fundamental views and attitudes are quite consistent across all regions. Here’s a brief description of Ukrainians’ values map by Kyiv-based sociologist Tymofii Brik (this Twitter thread of his is an absolute goldmine!): “Low trust to gov, high trust to family and friends, moderate openness and Self-Enhancement. High Conservation and Self-transcendence, lower "openness to new experience" but caring for others (WVS).” Ukrainians “care about their closest and value safety & survival before hedonism, trying new, innovations.” Those are universal features for people from the Carpathians to Donbas – there aren’t “two Ukraines” when it comes to some of the most fundamental values. Even the electorate of Zelensky and Poroshenko scored pretty closely on these indicators during the 2019 elections – showing that political divisions in Ukraine are not different sets of values colliding – and more about personalities and trust. But we’ll get there later. Languages and ethnicity in Ukraine No other topics have suffered more from manipulations than the languages and ethnicities of Ukraine. So let’s just run through some of the loudest myths and facts. Yes, Ukraine is a deeply bilingual country. Practically all people know both Ukrainian and Russian languages, and most speak both languages all the time, depending on the context. In 2021, 46% of the population mainly spoke Ukrainian in their daily lives, 26% spoke mostly Russian, and 27% spoke both languages. So 27% of people use both languages every day of their lives – it is a huge number of totally bilingual people. No, the language you speak says nothing about your ethnicity or political views in Ukraine. With 26% Russian speakers nationwide and 27% bilinguals, there were just ~15% of ethnic Russians in Ukraine in 2011. Also, the largest pro-Russian political party had only 9.5% of public support in February 2022 (and yes, this party was assembled from the ruins of the infamous Party of Regions – the one that was led by Victor Yanukovych). On a personal level, I get furious when someone mixes up language and ethnicity. I am a bilingual Ukrainian raised in a Russian-speaking family – and our family has always identified as Ukrainian and never felt Russian in any way. Linking Russian speakers to the “Russian world” is an old colonial trick used by Moscow to justify its territorial claims. Russia, however, shouldn’t have a monopoly on the Russian language. Note: If you want to know more about how Russian-speaking Ukrainians appeared – I told a detailed story of how my family of Ukrainian-speaking farmers turned into Russian-speaking Kyivites over the last 100 years in this Twitter thread. No, there is no Russian-speaking East and Ukrainian-speaking West. The truth is more nuanced. Western Ukraine is predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, the center is mostly Ukrainian-speaking with many bilinguals, and southern and eastern are mostly bilingual with many Russian speakers. In regions with high bilingualism and Russian-speaking rates, another distinct pattern emerges: cities are significantly more Russian-speaking than rural areas. Russian was the language of education, career, and public use – it was imposed as the language of the elites for centuries under the empire and for decades under the Soviets. Although the Ukrainian language has made tremendous progress in cities in the last 20 years, the echoes of the old colonial legacy are still there. And no, Russian is not spoken across Ukraine because of intertwined ethnicities and histories – it is the direct result of Russia’s centuries-long assimilation policies that tried to destroy Ukrainian identity. Ukraine is a mix of different folk with large communities of Russians, Crimean Tatars, Armenians, Poles, Bulgarians, Jews, Greeks, and other ethnicities. Still, 82% of the population identified as Ukrainian back in 2011 (unfortunately, we don’t have more recent reliable data that would include Crimea and all parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions). Because of all the mixing up and shared colonized past, the Ukrainian national identity is more civic in nature than that of many other European nations. Locality and trust in Ukrainian society The idea that the West and the East of Ukraine are dramatically different is a brutal simplification. There are no “two Ukraines” – because there are many of them. All across our country, multiple regional identities flourish all while viewing themselves as parts of a larger Ukrainian nation. Locality does not mean division. This locality could be explained by our colonized history: because Ukrainians have been in the middle of larger powers for the last 500 years, we have learned to never trust anyone in power – and to always identify with and rely on the people nearby. Because people in power always wanted to profit off of us, and only locally elected leaders could be trusted. That locality also explains why Ukraine has always had such a low rate of trust in government. Paradoxically for many foreigners, Ukrainians have always valued their right to choose their representatives and be suspicious of them the second the new government is voted into office. That has enabled Ukraine to quickly react to any politician's attempts to usurp power (wink-wink, mister Yanukovych), but it has also been a huge obstacle to creating sustainable trust between the people and the state. Unfortunately, Ukraine’s local diversity has often been weaponized to seed more suspicion toward nationwide politicians of any sort. Ukraine’s polarized geopolitics and how Russia fixed that Probably the only aspect where Ukraine became truly polarized by the early 2010s was the question of geopolitics. Should we integrate into the European Union, or are we better off with Russia? For many Ukrainians in the southern and eastern regions – because of the deeper history of colonialism there and intertwined family ties – this was a tough choice before 2014. Western Ukraine, falling under Moscow rule only after 1945, had more ties with the neighboring Eastern European states. And for years, Ukraine has been at a crossroads – always declaring its European ambitions but also always stressing the need to keep the “brotherly friendship” with Russia. Of course, all politicians tried to manipulate this divide to their electoral advantage – and demonized the other side of the argument. In 2011, 52% of Ukrainians supported joining the EU, and only 24% supported NATO membership. But then Yanukovych's authoritarian ambitions and Russia’s direct aggression fixed this debate. Support for Ukraine joining the EU has grown from 49% in 2014 to 91% in 2022. Support for joining NATO has grown from just 34% in 2014 to 68% in 2022. Ironically, Putin has consolidated all Ukrainians the way nobody had ever done before. So why was Ukraine believed to be deeply polarized? As I have outlined, Ukraine is a diverse, complicated nation. And where there is complexity, there is manipulation. Especially if there’s a giant neocolonial power planning to destroy you. The myth of Ukraine’s polarization was propelled by two forces: Russia and the Western ignorance of Ukraine. Russia has long weaponized the questions of history and identity to reinforce division and fear in the colonized societies. It has continuously done so in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia, and many other states. Ukraine itself never suspected it was polarized until way into the mid-2000s. But around the time of the Orange Revolution, the Party of Regions and other pro-Russian forces started putting up billboards and TV ads spreading fears that the “Westerners” want to ban the Russian language and cancel everything Soviet, especially the great WWII victory of “our grandfathers.” Political talk shows – huge in Ukraine in the 2000s – began to talk about the East and the West, focusing on scandalous, fearmongering topics. As the 2010 elections approached, people in Kyiv were worried that the “Donetsk people” would raid Kyiv once Donbas-born Yanukovych was in power. The peak polarization was probably in 2010 when Tymoshenko and Yanukovych went for a tight presidential race, winning majority votes in the North-West and South-East, respectively. Yanukovych won by a fine margin: 49 to 46 percent. We all know how his term ended. We now know that Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was practically a Russian force penetrating Ukrainian politics. Russia pushed Yanukovych to suddenly turn away from signing an agreement with the EU in the autumn of 2013 and then directly assisted in evacuating Yanukovych to Russia on February 21, 2014 – when the police turned the months-long Maidan protest into a bloodbath. Through control over Ukraine’s politicians, oligarchs (remember: up until recently, Medvechuk, one of Ukraine’s most powerful oligarchs and media tycoons was literally a godfather of Putin’s daughter), and oligarch-owned media outlets, Russia attempted to create culture wars and moral panics, thus stagnating Ukraine’s progress into a European democracy, and keeping it a subordinate state. Look no further than Lukashenko’s Belarus for a perfect reference of what Putin wanted Ukraine to be. And until February 24, 2022, Russia pretty much succeeded in spreading the “divided Ukraine” narrative. Western (mis)understanding of Ukraine Russian propaganda is only part of the problem. Another part boils down to this: Western experts failed to see Ukraine as a political subject rather than Russia’s long-term satellite state. Without attributing agency to the Ukrainian people, it’s pretty easy to ignore the complexity of Ukraine’s past and present, and to keep telling a simplified story about a country being ripped apart by the West and the East, by Ukrainian and Russian speakers (or maybe those are ethnic Russians? Who knows? Let’s ask our Moscow-based correspondent). In that sense, the Russia-centered studies of Eastern Europe have dramatically failed to see Ukraine as an independent society deciding its path and to recognize Russia for what it has become – a fascist autocracy. That’s why Ukraine’s pro-European advancements were often seen as a result of the geopolitical influence of the West and not as a genuine desire for a free and sovereign nation. That’s also why Ukrainian-Russian bilingualism was so hard to crack without getting stuck in the narratives created and promoted by the USSR and then Russia. The only good news here is that, finally, Russian colonialism and the agency of Eastern European nations are slowly being reconsidered. For instance, we finally see toxic and deeply biased reports on Ukraine get absolutely smashed by Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians. Yes, I’m talking about Amnesty International’s now infamous “But Ukrainian soldiers are endangering ordinary people by resisting Russian occupation” piece. What fills me with optimism is the new sense of solidarity and agency that has emerged across all nations that experienced Russian colonialism at some point in their histories. I do hope that this inherently anti-colonial force will shape the West’s future policy and ideology regarding Russia. How Russia used the polarization myth to invade Ukraine In 2022, it’s easy to forget how long Russia denied any involvement in other countries’ businesses and staged internal crises to legitimize its concerns and, in the case of Georgia, direct military involvement. Ukraine has suffered from these tactics since 2014. Russia first faked a referendum in Crimea in 2014 to “legitimately” break it away from Ukraine and “apply” for becoming a part of Russia. All this was done to create an image of divided people seeking sovereignty and self-determination – all while Russian special forces occupied all administrative buildings in Crimea and gave direct orders to local authorities. In Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Russia played the polarization card to first deny its involvement (“it’s the locals rebelling against the Kyiv tyranny!”), and then to justify it (“we had to stabilize the situation and defend the Russian-speaking population of Donbas”). Time and again, Russia managed to trick a large portion of the world into “bothsidesism” and “West vs East” narratives when describing what was clearly an act of territorial aggression. To understand what I’m talking about, take a look at this BBC “deep dive” into the Donbas war from 2015. Notice how much focus is dedicated to the “rebels” and “pro-Russian activists” and how Russia is portrayed as almost a mere observer of these events? How Ukrainians felt unity following February 24 Ukrainians – after living through two revolutions and an invasion in the last 20 years – like to describe themselves this way: Ukrainians can’t agree on anything in their everyday life but almost automatically unite on all levels once they face a serious crisis. I think there’s some truth in that. Ukrainian identities are diverse, highly localized, and equally don’t trust any authority – but all these identities are united by a universal will to decide for themselves how to live on their land. Once there was a force willing to wipe out everything we had built and take away our right to choose our fate, Ukrainians united against this force. There’s still a lot of work to be done to foster trust in Ukraine. And I hope that Ukrainians will find a way to trust our representatives and institutions – and our politicians will also raise their standards as a result of this war. I also hope that the Russian invasion will once and for all put an end to the myth of the divided Ukrainian nation. Stas

I was born and grew up in former Yugoslavia (not Serbian) which does make me quite partial to Ukrainians. I checked with my former coworkers of Ukranian origins and they fully endorse the following: https://www.patreon.com/uaexplainers 21 HOURS AGO 9 things people still don’t get about Ukraine Thoughts from a bunch of stubborn Ukrainians after eight months of the invasion. Feel free to share this with people who still find it hard to understand why Ukrainians think or act in certain ways. 1. Ukraine will never surrender. This is an existential war for Ukrainians. If we stop fighting, our homes will be turned into rubble, our children will be taken away, and our people will face mass terror. Every place that experienced Russian occupation in Ukraine has a similar story to tell: a story of mass graves, torture chambers, filtration camps, and forced deportations. All that means that Ukrainians are prepared to fight no matter how long it takes – because they are fighting for survival. Nobody “makes” Ukrainians fight – not the government and most certainly not the Western arms. With or without military or political support from the democratic world, Ukraine will keep on resisting – because we are fighting for our right to exist. For us, the reality of perpetual military resistance is more acceptable than the reality of the Russian occupation. 2. None of us is okay – even if we say we are. In the first weeks following the February 24 invasion, Ukrainians were in a state of shock and terror. The shock passed, but the collective trauma never started to heal. Every day people across Ukraine keep dying from Russian shelling. Every week new stories of horror of Russia’s genocidal campaign emerge. Each week brings a new little catastrophe – and every week a little part of us quietly dies inside. This has become the new norm Ukrainians are learning to navigate. So, when you ask a Ukrainian friend or colleague whether they’re okay, keep in mind that this question has lost its meaning to most of us. We are not okay and we don’t know if we’ll ever be okay again. But we keep holding on. In a way, trying to be okay as Ukrainians is the final act of resistance against Russia’s attempt to wipe out everything that is Ukraine. 3. Ukraine is fighting against Russian colonialism, not just Putin. Putin may have pulled the trigger, but the root of the invasion lies deeper than the current regime in Russia. For centuries, Russia has led colonial conquests from Eastern Europe to the Pacific Far East. It conquered and assimilated multiple indigenous peoples – and exterminated those who resisted. Russian colonialism remained largely under the radar this whole time, and its crimes are much less studied. As a result, the Russian imperial worldview has remained unchecked and unchallenged – and has expressed itself in multiple invasions since 1991: Transnistria, Ichkeria, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria. The war might be paused when Putin’s regime implodes, but Ukrainians know all too well that a lasting peace is only possible with a decolonized and disarmed Russia that rethinks its past and future. Until then, the untamed beast of Russian colonialism will seek to continue its imperial conquest in Ukraine and elsewhere. 4. Russian-speaking Ukrainians are not “more Russian.” Yes, most Ukrainians are bilingual. Yes, 26% of Ukrainians are Russian-first speakers and 27% speak an equal amount of Russian and Ukrainian in their daily lives. But do you know why? While some foreigners still believe that it has mostly to do with ethnicity and political ideology, the widespread use of the Russian language in Ukraine is mostly the result of centuries-old Russification policy. Since the 19th century, Ukrainians were deliberately banned from using their language in education, labor, and public spheres of life. The Russification process prevailed throughout Soviet rule. As a result, millions of Ukrainians switched to Russian and deliberately hid their Ukrainian traces. And Ukraine learned to exist successfully as a nation of bilinguals. So, if you meet Ukrainians who speak Russian in their daily lives, do not assume they are “more Russian” than any other Ukrainian or that they support Russia in any way. They probably have a more interesting story to tell about language and identity – just ask them. 5. Ukraine never had a Nazi problem. Not only Nazis in Ukraine had nothing to do with Russia’s invasion, but the entire notion of Ukraine being run by the far-right is and always has been ridiculous. The story of a “dangerous Nazi regime in Kyiv” has always been nothing more than a Russian propaganda myth. The idea of “Banderites” running amok was first voiced on Russian state TV when Ukrainians went to the streets to protest against a corrupt dictatorship in 2013. As Russia invaded and destabilized parts of Ukraine in 2014, it kept weaponizing and feeding the Nazi myth thus justifying its involvement and legitimizing the occupation. Ukraine’s far-right movements have always been marginal and never had more than 5% of public support combined. Unlike many European states that do have a problem with far-right populism or Russia – a country running on aggressive fascist ethnonationalism for decades – Ukraine never really had a Nazi problem. There is nothing humane or intellectual in trying to justify a brutal genocidal campaign by parroting propaganda claims crafted by the Kremlin. At this point, anyone trying to counterbalance Russian war crimes by appealing to the “Nazis in Ukraine” narrative is either a paid Russian shill or just a useful idiot. There is no point talking to these people anymore – we just need to stop providing them with a platform for spreading fascist propaganda. 6. Ukraine is a democracy. Zelensky acts as our representative. Ukraine is not perfect. The issues with social trust, corruption, and poor state management have persisted for decades and hurt our country in various ways. But Ukrainians always fought back whenever authoritarianism loomed over: they protested in 2004 after a rigged election, and overthrew a corrupt wannabe dictator in 2014. And yes, Ukraine still has a lot to improve – which would have been a lot easier if we didn’t have to constantly defend ourselves from Russia’s territorial aggression since 2014. But despite an external threat, Ukraine remained devoted to democratic values and reforms. Not many people understand that Zelensky – a President who received 73% of the public’s vote in 2019 – always speaks and acts on behalf of the Ukrainian people. Following the full-scale invasion, Zelensky’s actions received praise and support from 91% of Ukrainians. There has never been such a clear connection between the President and the people in Ukraine – and there are probably not a lot of examples of such political unity in modern-day democracies. All notions of Zelensky forcing anything onto Ukrainians are completely out of touch with reality. 7. We will not shut up. Not anymore. For too long, the Ukrainian perspectives were silenced by Russia and pro-Russian sentiments around the globe. Like many other nations colonized by Russia, Ukraine had to shut up and, at best, politely debate whatever Russians had to say. This colonial legacy has stayed long after 1991. Ukrainians were consistently denied agency: their pro-EU and pro-NATO choices were explained through conspiracies about the “US and NATO aggressive expansion.” Discussions about Ukraine often happened without Ukrainians themselves but with well-established carriers of the Russian colonial views on Ukraine. All of this must remain in the past. We will not shut up and listen to another round of Russian imperial bull****, casual tone-deaf Westsplaining, or another Russian state-sponsored gaslighting campaign. As the genocide against our people continues, we will remain unapologetically Ukrainian – and we will make sure our voices are loud and clear from now on. 8. Yes, we think all Russians are responsible for the war. Ukrainians do not blame just Putin or the elites for the war – we blame the entire Russian nation. Putin and his cronies do not personally launch high-precision missiles at residential buildings. They don’t torture and mutilate civilians living under occupation. They don’t take away Ukrainian children and don’t try to “re-educate” them. They don’t loot, rape, and murder us. They don’t attack Ukrainians abroad or online. Ordinary Russians do all those things. All while the rest of them are silently and passively going along with the genocide for 8 months – or running away from their country and responsibility. Those who fight against Putin’s regime carry the burden of responsibility as well. Even if they tried to make it right – they failed, and that’s just a fact. They failed as a state, as a society, and now millions of Ukrainians are suffering from genocide because of this ongoing collective failure. Until Russians recognize and own this political responsibility, there is nothing for us to talk about. Ukrainians have the right to a safe space without Russians – without their point of view, narratives, or offers to help. And there’s nothing hateful about that. It’s a matter of personal safety and healing trauma. Keep in mind that, unlike most people around the world, Ukrainians have lived close to Russians for centuries. We speak and understand their language – and we can follow their conversations on social media and in real life. We know how xenophobic, chauvinistic, and cynical the average Russians are. And we perfectly realize how their imperial attitudes have made this war possible in the first place. 9. Ukrainians are afraid of what comes next. But we won’t surrender to our fears. Some people think that Ukraine’s stubbornness may lead to a full-blown world war or a nuclear catastrophe. What these people fail to understand is that Ukrainians want peace more than anyone in the world. It’s our homes getting pillaged. It’s our children being murdered. The only country that tries to occupy a sovereign state all while blackmailing the rest of the world with nuclear catastrophe is Russia. Like it or not, the genie is out of the box – Russia is already a fascist dictatorship on nukes that invades its neighbors. It is already a threat to global security – and this has nothing to do with the way Ukraine resists. The entire notion that Ukraine can “escalate” the war by defending itself from an invasion within its internationally recognized borders is just absurd victim-blaming. Ukrainians are afraid every night as we go to sleep and every morning while reading news of more death and destruction. But if we let our fears consume us, Russia will most likely win, and its illegal invasion, genocide, and nuclear blackmail will be rewarded. And this outcome is exactly what leads to another world war. As Dmytro Kuleba recently said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, “It’s absolutely normal not to have fear, yet to be afraid.” And that is exactly how it feels to be Ukrainian these eight months.

Yes. Thus my question from a couple of weeks ago why Ukranian infantry was riding on the top of their APC.