1,401 words
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
A company covers a two to three kilometer stretch of the front. A battle group, five to six kilometers, but only if the men in their dispersed positions receive enough fire support and know what is happening in the neighboring sector. They hold the line exactly as long as the enemy attack lasts then they move to a new position. If they stay too long, the glide bombs will come.
A position lost today may be needed again next week or next month. So they keep digging new trenches. And they move between them in their new Estonian-plated cars. And they dig again.
This is not a war of fighting to the last man. This is a war of ambushes. The advantage belongs to those who have somewhere to hide. If a position becomes too difficult to hold, no more men are sent to reinforce it – it is abandoned. And then, artillery does its work.
But the constant movement between positions exhausts the soldiers. A brigade takes hit after hit until it can no longer hold. A few dozen men can defend a kilometer-long front for only so long. The enemy comes again and again. Eventually, they will break through. Every defense plan takes retreat into account. Positions are not fortresses – they are traps. And when the enemy steps into them, he pays dearly.
Anyone who thinks battles are commanded by generals behind a map table is mistaken. Fate is decided by those who fight here, in the mud. Through the night, through drone attacks and assault teams, through tank fire and mortar barrages, until the next shift arrives. Victory belongs to those who move faster and strike harder, over and over again, until the enemy line collapses.
In the end, it is always the infantry – the stormtroopers. The brave ones who charge first into the critical points of the front. Even after artillery has done its cleansing work, someone must step onto that ground and make sure it belongs to them.
Time and again, it must be remembered: excess words have no place on the front. Is it the will to endure? Love of homeland? Duty? Don’t ask the men of the assault brigade about that. The men of the assault brigade don’t talk about such things. If you were to ask them why they fight, they would only give you a puzzled look. As if the question itself made no sense. As if the answer were too simple to explain.
There is no place for heroic tales on the battlefield. No room for stories told in warm rooms, far from the front. Here, there is only the pressure to survive. And survival is a cold thing. It does not ask for honor, it does not care for speeches. It is in every soldier – in his movements, in how he holds his weapon, how he sleeps when he can, eats when he must, and digs when there is nothing else to do.
Wars are not won by grand plans or lofty ideals. They are won in the mud, by the hands of men who do not ask why. They know only what is directly in front of them. The next trench. The next building. The next battle.
Nothing else matters.
There is nothing more to say. We hand them a vehicle. They take it without ceremony, just as they take everything else they need – ammunition, food rations, yet another position in the night. We shake hands, say farewell, and watch as they disappear into the ruins. Then we drive on.
We pass burned-out cars and broken roads, through villages where the last old men sit in their doorways, waiting for something that will never come again. The brigade stays behind, holding the line. The fight does not stop. Shells fall onto the fields, drones hum in the sky, and the night swallows men by the unit.
Later, we hear what happened after we left. In the darkness, under falling shells, a Russian prisoner was pulled from a crater. He raised his hands before he could say anything. His face was smeared with dust and fear. They took him to the same house where we had stayed, tied him up in the cellar. They fed him by hand.
But we are already moving forward – to the next unit, the next sector of the front.
Throughout the journey, it is difficult to escape the subconscious echoes of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At least one sector of hell has now been passed, but does purgatory and paradise lie ahead?
The soldier with the callsign Dantes stayed behind, waiting for our return to Odessa. Our Vergil is an Odessa bartender, Viktoria, who rides with us for the entire delivery run. She coordinates meetings with soldiers from different units and provides us with the next destination each day. Navigation, using an offline map downloaded in advance, is my responsibility.
The road stretches onward, and the steppe wind carries the scent of scorched earth. At the border of Donetsk Oblast, a sign stands. Once, it was just a landmark, a point on a map. Now, it is something more. A shrine, a monument, a summary of battlefields. All kinds of flags have been brought here. They wave above the oblast border – tattered, but proud.
These are not ordinary flags. Each one bears a name, a crest, a message. These are the colors and symbols of the brigades that have fought and bled here. The wind takes hold of them, making them ripple against the sky. The city of Donetsk remains occupied – it has been for over a decade. But here, on this land, Ukraine’s blue and yellow still flies defiantly.
Soldiers stopped here. They cleared rubble from the sign, restored its foundation, welded poles into the ground, and fastened these flags to them. They left their signatures on the sign – messages scrawled in black marker across its surface. A vow, a challenge, a testament.
Everyone who passes stops here. Fighters on their way to the front. Doctors, chaplains, volunteers. Some are heading into battle. Others are returning from it. They take pictures, stand beneath the flags, write their unit names into fabric and steel.
The wind does not stop. Neither does the war.
The road leads through Dobropillia. The city is quiet, the silence after destruction. A Shahed drone struck here. The upper floors of an apartment building no longer exist, just piles of rubble, shattered concrete, and twisted metal. The lower floors remain, but they are only a shadow of what, just weeks ago, had been home to many families.
In the ruins, volunteers distribute bottled water. The people taking it move slowly, their faces exhausted. These are the ones who survived. They saw what came in the night. They heard the drone’s hum overhead, then the explosion – and now, where their home once stood, there is only wreckage.
The Muscovite method remains unchanged: indiscriminate bombing and the slaughter of civilians. Shahed drones were originally Iranian-made, but now Russia produces them itself in Tatarstan. They are assembled by the hands of African workers, recruited to Russia as cheap labor, seen as nothing more than disposable cogs in the war machine.
The volunteers keep working. The people drink their water. Somewhere, far from here, the next Shahed is already in the air.
Aftermath of a Shahed attack in Dobropillia.
Kramatorsk. Sloviansk. The road winds through places where the war has never truly left. The wounds of 2014 are still etched into the landscape.
This was where the front was held. The first assault from the east was stopped here – in these streets, in these fields, among these shattered buildings. Here, the men of the Azov and Aidar battalions fought. They dug in. They bled. But they did not break. It was in the defense of these cities that their resolve became legend.
Now, these cities remain under the same sky, waiting. The silence carries the memories of the first battles, the first victories. For ten years, there has never been peace here. Only pauses between battles.
The frontline is slowly creeping back toward these cities. Putin’s war machine pushes forward, slowly but relentlessly, clawing its way ahead. He wants all of Donetsk Oblast. What he failed to take in 2014, he is trying to seize again. The people here know what that means. They have seen it before. And they know it will come again.
10 comments
In this war of attrition, is there really hope for the people of Ukraine? Or will they simply be bled to the last man? Is prolonging the war really helping the Ukrainian people, or merely consigning them to further death and a diminished future?
I sometimes think of the black fools who continue kicking at and spitting on the police who are trying to arrest them. They only manage to delay the inevitable, and in doing so make their ultimate fate far worse. (You can imagine the police as corrupt to make the analogy more apt, but that only heightens the foolishness because they’d be even less restrained.) Would it be good to stand on the sidelines, encouraging that black man to keep kicking? To toss him a drink of water so he can keep spitting? Is that going to help or hurt him in the end?
In nature, when rivals fight, the weaker combatant retreats when loss becomes inevitable. That way he can “live to fight another day” instead of being killed in an act of stubborn hope against the odds for an unlikely win. Does that apply here?
As the saying goes, Europe will defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian, if you give them the chance…
In nature, when rivals fight, the weaker combatant retreats when loss becomes inevitable. That way he can “live to fight another day” instead of being killed in an act of stubborn hope against the odds for an unlikely win. Does that apply here?
At certain point spite is a viable substitute for hope. You start fighting more against the Enemy than for your Homeland. Besides, despite the rhetoric, this is not an existential total war, if you happen to be around Ukrainian expats in Europe, you will notice how many of them move on with their lives. Sure, they spit on Russia, but they become less and less preocuppied with the conflict emotionally and they are certainly not itching to volunteer. From my own anecdotal experience, I remember Ukrainian students being hopeful around the time of Maidan, but growing disillusioned few years later as the usual rot set in. Something similar happened during this phase of the war, but as the prospects of projected victory became dim the grey prose of life inevitably returned and the usual pathologies of Ukrainian public life continued unabated.
The support from the West will continue because Europeans painted themselves into a corner. There is no Sarkozy this time to negotiate peace behind the closed doors while Eastern European leaders grandstand in the public on the other side. Britain has been invested in the conflict from the beginning and won’t break ranks with the USA, Macron’s France decided to take a lead in the EU with the weakening of Germany’s position (as the French have been lobbying for a common military policy for decades), other states have no real say in the conflict anyway while everything hinges on the whims of the American hegemon for whom the conflict is ultimately peripheral and an instrument of policy.
At any rate it is too late to obtain a satisfactory armistice, the diplomatic capital is gone and the EU has turned into a Sick Man of Europe, further weakening its position.
“The Muscovite method remains unchanged: indiscriminate bombing and the slaughter of civilians.”
These words could have come from the mouth of Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy himself.
I do think the claim has to be justified by more than an apartment building hit. I.e. we need statistics. After all, Ukraine has hit some apartment buildings in Russia too, but no one would say that therefore their MO is the indiscriminate bombing and slaughter of civilians.
This is whole series has been extremely well-written, but it remains jingoistic war tourism.
The Estonian statelet is irrelevant. The clownish Kaja Kallas may as well be Zelensky in drag. If she is an accurate reflection of Estonian sentiment and not merely a globalist puppet, the Estonians are in big trouble.
The criticisms voiced on this site regarding Russia are not without merit, though I have always disagreed from the conclusions that were drawn from them.
But those criticisms do not outweigh the stupidity of Ukranian nationalists allowing a Jewish comedian to lead them by the nose into an unwinnable conflict with the Russians, all in order to serve the interests of degenerate western globalists.
If I were playing Estonia, I would do nothing to antagonize the ethnic Russians who remain their fellow citizens. I would begin to display flashes of independence in the EU, in the manner of Orban or Fico, in order to increase my influence and relevance. Finally, I would be waiting until late September or early October to announce and pursue a new policy, something akin to Brandt’s Ostpolitik.
I doubt anything like this will happen. In these situations, Europeans tend to behave in a self-destructive manner barely distinguishable from the Congolese.
Russia’s “unloseable” war is now in its fourth year.
It has gotten so bad for Russia that now even purveyors of Russian propaganda have to pretend they are anti-Russia.
One wonders how they will react when Ukraine starts hitting Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Hungarian military analists and number crunchers say the Ukrainian side of the frontline is practically empty. There’s no infantry there any more. KIA, WIA, deserted.
The frontline is held by 30-50,000 drone operators. The drones are transported to within 10-15 km of the front, and operated from IT guys in home office in Kyiv and Lviv. They use Musk’s Starlink for communication with the drones.
The Russians still haven’t been able to break Starlink. But for good measure Ukraine started to assasinate leading Russian EW engineers.
In February 2022 the Russians moved in with a light force for a quick regime change. Not to downplay Ukrainian competence and bravery, but it was probably US intelligence that saved Zelensky’s skin.
The truth is, the army that has been fighting in Eastern Ukraine is the best that “the collective West” can raise at the moment — and in the foreseeable future. Ukrainian personnel, and US satellites, projectiles, encryption, intelligence.
The fact that the Russians are still not beaten, that they made a first class fighting force from their Buryats and the prison population, their level of technical and organizational innovation is impressive. They are slow to gear up, but when they do, they are formidable.
Downplaying the enemy’s strength and dehumanizing them is good when you want to take a piece of land from savages. This is very much in the American DNA. But if you want to win against powerful, intelligent enemies, _slightly_ overestimating their strength is a better strategy.
“the stupidity of Ukranian nationalists allowing a Jewish comedian to lead them by the nose into an unwinnable conflict with the Russians, all in order to serve the interests of degenerate western globalists”
This is a complete inversion. The conflict started in 2014 on the Maidan. I won’t go into the details of what happened there, as it wouldn’t pass moderation on this site. Do your own research.
Then in 2019 Zelensky, a Jewish comedian (but also a lawyer by profession) ran on a peace platform. He won with over 70% of the votes.
He then set out to implement the de-escalation agreements. The Ukrainian nationalists, by that time embedded in Ukrainian military, simply refused to take his orders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbtom7rXz3o
(What is the English word for the situation when a faction of the military refuses to take orders from legitimate civilian authority? Isn’t it called a …?)
Zelensky turned out to be an almost infinitely flexible political player, so he went along with the nationalists and survived. Even today his political maneuvering is probably based to a large extent on fear of the various far-right armed factions. Ukraine is a tough place.
Ukrainians may serve the interests of degenerate western globalists.
They also defend their country against foreign aggression.
They also serve the interests of Ukrainian nationalists, who never got more than low single digit political support among the population.
Every thing in the universe is multi-faceted.
So then what will be the near-future fates of both Russia and Ukraine when the killing is done?
Russia will be settled by the Chinese and other Asians, the rest of Ukraine will be settled by the Bengalis and other Asians.
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