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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Kateryna hung up her dresses, Oksana and Stanislav put down their lawyers' briefs and Oksen slammed shut his philosophy textbooks. Alongside thousands of their fellow citizens, they strapped on armour, picked up weapons and chose to risk their lives for the freedom and independence of their homeland. Many would never return. Journalist Tom Mutch woke up in Kyiv on 24 February to a world changed for ever. Making a fateful choice to stay and cover the invasion, he witnessed the forging of an 'iron generation' of young Ukrainians. With first-hand reporting from all the major battlegrounds and front lines, The Dogs of Mariupol recounts the war's notorious encounters, such as the Battle of Kyiv and the Siege of Mariupol, but also uncovers untold stories, like the 1st Tank Brigade's desperate defence of Chernihiv and the civilian guerrilla army fighting overwhelming odds in Sumy. This is not a triumphalist account of Ukraine's fight, however. It painstakingly documents the immense human catastrophe wrought on Ukrainian society and the divisions between those who fought and those who fled. It also delves deeper into events to answer important historical questions: could the Russian plan to capture Kyiv have succeeded? Did Ukraine make a fatal error by committing for so long to the defence of Bakhmut? And with more western support, could Ukraine have won this terrible war outright?
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For Arman Soldin and the other countless dead heroes
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‘We have shared the incommunicable experience of war. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.’
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr
‘The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.’
– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the Westviii
Contents
Maps
Control of Ukraine as of March 2025
xii
Greatest Extent of Russian Control of Ukraine in March 2022
xiii
Close-Up of Major Front Lines
Glossary
AFU: Armed Forces of Ukraine, the umbrella term for the Ukrainian military.
APC: Armoured personnel carrier, commonly confused with a tank. A tank has tracks, an APC has wheels.
ATACMS: Army Tactical Missile System, a long-range US missile system, fired from a HIMARS rocket launcher.
Banderite: A derogatory term used by Russians for supporters of Ukrainian independence. Refers to followers of Stepan Bandera, a nationalist leader from the Second World War era.
FPV: First-person view, usually used in the context of a drone which the pilot directs through goggles linked to a camera on the machine itself.
Grad: From the Russian/Ukrainian word for ‘hail’, it is a truck that fires up to twenty unguided rockets at a single time. To be caught under it is utterly terrifying. xvi
HIMARS: M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, a ground-based mobile missile system mounted on the back of a truck with high range and accuracy.
Holodomor: A devastating famine caused by Soviet state policy in the early 1930s that killed as many as 4 million Ukrainians. Widely considered a genocide.
Hryvnia: The Ukrainian unit of currency – 100 hryvnia is roughly £2.
JFO: Joint Forces Operation. This was the name for the parts of Donbas, still controlled by Ukraine, that the Ukrainian Army controlled between 2015 and 2022. It was home to the most experienced Ukrainian soldiers, and destroying it was a key early objective of the Russian Army.
LDPR (LPR/DPR): Luhansk/Donetsk People’s Republics. The two self-declared states in the parts of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts controlled by Russian separatists in 2014.
Left bank/right bank: Refers to which side of the Dnipro River a particular place is. Confusingly, this follows the river downstream, so it is the opposite of what it looks like on a traditional northwards-facing map of Ukraine. Left bank is east, right bank is west.
Oblast: Ukrainian/Russian word for ‘region’.
Orc: A deformed evil creature from The Lord of the Rings, used by Ukrainians to refer to Russian soldiers. xvii
OUN: Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, a movement that fought for Ukrainian independence in the Second World War. Still lionised in Ukraine, it is controversial abroad due to its participation in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and Jews.
Palianytsia: A type of flatbread, and a difficult word to pronounce for non-native Ukrainian speakers. Used as a password to root out Russian-born spies.
Ruskiy Mir: A phrase that can be literally translated as either ‘Russian World’ or ‘Russian Peace’. Used by Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians to refer to a Russian cultural world and by most Ukrainians to refer ironically to the damage done by Russia.
Separ: Short for a ‘separatist’, a supporter, either Russian or Ukrainian, of Donbas secession from Ukraine or joining with Russia.
Surzhyk: A mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, spoken in a variety of dialects throughout Ukraine and in small parts of Russia. From a word for a mix of rye and other grain.
USSR: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Moscow-dominated communist state that Russia and Ukraine were members of until 1991.
Zhdun: From the Russian word ‘waiting’, a zhdun is a pro-Russian Ukrainian, mostly in the Donbas, who stays in war-torn cities waiting for the Russians to come. xviii
Author’s Stylistic Note
I have used Ukrainian, rather than Russian, spelling in most cases for people and place names. This means Kyiv instead of Kiev, Odesa instead of Odessa, Mykolaiv instead of Nikolaev, Kharkiv instead of Kharkov and so on. The exception is where I am quoting an original source that uses the now out-of-favour Russian spelling, particularly in Chapter Eight. The same applies to the name ‘Ukraine’. Some Russian sources refer to ‘the Ukraine’, which is a designation Ukrainians find offensive, as it implies that Ukraine is a region rather than its own country.
Ukrainians prefer to call the war that broke out on 24 February 2022 the ‘full-scale invasion’, to remind observers that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine began in 2014, and thus to distinguish between the smaller war and the larger one. For the sake of brevity, when I refer to the war or invasion, I am talking about events from 2022 onwards, except when otherwise specified.
Where possible, I have used people’s full names. However, there are several important exceptions. Generally, when writing about members of the Ukrainian military, the custom is to use only their first name or a callsign for security reasons. Some people in Ukraine have family in Russian-occupied territories who could face retaliation if their relatives were identified speaking to the western press. In some cases, their names have also been redacted either in full or in part. xx
Prologue
Ruskiy Mir
NOVOPETRIVKA, KHERSON OBLAST, NOVEMBER 2022
On closer inspection, the body was filled with sand and straw, not blood and bone. Clad in dark green and brown soldier’s fatigues, he reclined lazily against a tree, head slightly askew.
The mannequin was staring at the twisted wreck of a Russian armoured vehicle whose remaining metal tracks and spokes were scattered around the clearing I was standing in. Whatever arrow from the varied quiver of Ukrainian artillery that had struck this trespasser scored a direct hit. Ukrainian locals here cheerfully admitted they would give their army the coordinates of any Russian military equipment nearby, and the results were clear as day.
Since I’d grasped the cold, clammy hand of my grandfather as a child, the first body I had seen was six months ago, a soldier lying prostrate, his face in the dirt, on a highway leading to Bucha, a portent of the horrors that we would find littering that town’s streets. The dead were a routine sight in this most violent of wars. They were wrapped in bags and stacked in warehouses waiting for burial; they floated down the streets turned canals of Kherson after the flooding of the Dnipro; they were dug up after months of putrefying in the ground in a mass grave near Kharkiv. Yet somehow the neatness of xxiithe figure’s dress and his tidy placement against a tree caught my eye as a quaint contrast to the surrounding carnage.
The occupants of these trenches had left in a hurry. Full belts of ammunition were lying on the ground, and there were a few army uniforms still hanging on clotheslines pegged between the deciduous trees, stripped of their leaves by the freshly arrived winds of a mild winter. Anti-tank mines were neatly stacked next to the wooden slats that held up the entrance to a dugout in which the occupiers had lived. The six-month Russian tyranny over Novopetrivka, a tiny town in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, had been presented to its inhabitants as a ‘liberation’. At first, the Russians had an uneasy peace with the locals, but as their military situation deteriorated, it devolved into an orgy of bloodletting and robbery.
It was a figure in miniature of events all across Ukraine. During that time, this series of muddy ditches just metres in front of the village had been the front line. After months of vicious fighting, the nearby Ukrainian Army had finally broken through Russian defences. They were threatening to squeeze the Russians here in the Kherson region against the right bank of the Dnipro, cut off their supply routes and ultimately slaughter them. Before departing, they had left decoys like the mannequin beside me all over their positions to fool the drone teams scouting from the sky into thinking that there were still soldiers present. That way, they could slip back over the river unnoticed. Overnight, the villagers said, they had vanished like smoke in the wind.
Novopetrivka is probably not a name you’ve heard before. It wasn’t the location of a headline-grabbing massacre or grungy attritional battle. After nine months of war, the sight of atrocities in Ukraine had become routine. They were blurring together, and people outside the country were tuning out the stacks of broken xxiiibodies and minds as footnotes to be filed in a human rights report or as colour to spice up a short news story. Mostly, they mattered only to the victims and their loved ones. As Joaquin Phoenix’s cynical journalist in HotelRwandasays of the genocide he’s filming: ‘People will say, “Oh my God, that’s horrible” and go on eating their dinner.’
There are dozens of these devastated towns scattered across the steppes of Ukraine. Bilohorivka, Posad-Pokrovske, Borohodychne, Kamianka, Selydove. These specks on a map used to be homes and communities for hundreds or even thousands of peaceful people before the Russian invasion reduced them to cinders. When I’d previously been to Bucha, the site of the Russians’ most infamous murders, I’d been in a large press bus full of forty or so other reporters and escorted by Ukrainian Army minders. We’d been herded around like cattle from grave to grave. The scenes of murdered bodies hastily thrown into shallow pits had shocked us and the world. But when my colleagues and I had turned up, we knew in advance what to expect. The people in these towns also quickly tired of telling their personal stories of grief to the endless queues of reporters, most of whom came in for a few hours to grab a heartfelt quote or a gruesome photo and then left. I realised why the loose community of war reporters I had joined called themselves the ‘Vulture Club’, as they swarmed over carcasses, devouring every morsel of suffering, before moving on to the next story. These trips had an uncomfortable air of spectacle, as if we were paparazzi gatecrashing a funeral.
Novopetrivka was different. Our small team had stumbled upon these trenches and the village neatly tucked behind them by chance while looking for a back road to recently liberated Kherson. The Ukrainian Army itself had not been here yet, so the rough country roads were still strewn with metallic debris, unexploded xxivammunition and unspent rifle bullets. The Russians had pulled out less than two days ago and the once-terrified population were just beginning to realise their freedom. Here was the raw, unfiltered emotion of people who were telling their stories for the first time.
Viktor Afanov, a spirited and affable elderly farmer, ushered us into his house, poured generously from a jug of homemade wine and told his tale. ‘We had just held a funeral for two young men the Russians had taken,’ he said, his eyes shuddering, gesticulating firmly to emphasise each point. ‘They were found drowned in the swamp; hands tied behind their backs,’ he continued, describing a telltale sign of abduction and murder. ‘The faces of the dead were blue, and it was clear to see they had been tortured.’ Nobody knew for sure why. The Russians often suspected that young men here could be spies, giving the Ukrainian Army information on their positions, or saboteurs ready to stick bombs under their cars or knife them in the streets. But the Russians didn’t have to give a reason: they were fickle and drunken masters, a law unto themselves. Viktor continued, swilling his wine, a thick, sickly sweet burgundy, while making sure our cups stayed topped up. He explained that some of the soldiers were incredulous at their living standards, having come from poor regions of Russia, seeing that the village had Wi-Fi. ‘You have internet here?’ they asked in shock. They then looted the whole town, he said. ‘They took fridges, toilets, washing machines. It was total lawlessness!’
Viktor spat and exclaimed, ‘That is the RuskiyMir!’
I’d first heard this phrase nearly a year ago in Borodyanka, a city in the Kyiv region that was nearly destroyed in the early days of fighting. ‘Look!’ my Ukrainian companions would say as we walked around, pointing at another patch of rubble that had once been a xxvcherished home or centre of a community, ‘That is the Ruskiy Mir!’ Ruskiy Mir is a curious phrase that can be translated as either ‘Russian World’ or ‘Russian Peace’.
This concept was used by the Kremlin and its nationalist allies to refer to a shared cultural space encompassing literature, religion and language that they believed stretched through every part of the world that spoke Russian, including most of Ukraine. Their propagandists had justified their invasions, first in 2014 and now in 2022, by saying that the people living in these places were under threat from ‘Nazis’ and they needed to be ‘liberated’, brought back into the bosom of Mother Russia by force. When Russian troops hadn’t been welcomed with the flowers they expected, they had lashed out like jilted lovers, taking their rage out on civilians and soldiers alike wherever they had managed to take control. This is what had happened in Novopetrivka. Now, ‘RuskiyMir’ was used ironically to refer to the mass aerial and artillery bombing of cities, the levelling of schools and hospitals, the torture chambers and mass graves the invaders left in their wake.
Further down the road, we were invited into the farmhouse of an exhausted, pale-faced woman in her thirties I’ll call Tatiana. After her family had run out of bread, she had sent her teenage son to walk to a neighbouring town to buy more. On the way back, he had been accosted by a group of Russian soldiers, drunk as usual, in the middle of the day. They demanded money from the boy, but he had spent the last of his money on his family’s rations. So they beat him, then demanded at gunpoint he take them to his home, where they proceeded to threaten Tatiana to show them where they were hiding the money. She protested they had none. ‘Well,’ one of the soldiers had told her with a crazed smile, ‘if you can’t pay with xxvimoney, you can pay with your body’ to a burst of laughter from his comrades. Her face went blank, and she stopped speaking. The welling of tears in her eyes and shaking of her hands told the rest.
Yet the villagers in Novopetrivka told us all these tales of woe while speaking in Russian, or to be precise ‘Surzhyk’, that colloquial mix of Russian and Ukrainian that varies by region. As recently as ten years ago, many in Ukraine had still believed in the RuskiyMir. They spoke the Russian language, read the works of Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, worshipped following the rites of the Russian Orthodox Church. Near this town, as all over Ukraine, was a monument commemorating the Second World War, or what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War, when both nations sacrificed millions of their young men and women to free the continent of the Nazis. Many Ukrainians had family and friends in Russia, travelled between the two countries and spoke Russian as fluently as anyone from Moscow. The concept of ‘brotherly nations’ was not just a figment of Russian propaganda. But Cain and Abel were also brothers. Now the Ukrainians called Russians ‘orcs’, because their behaviour seemed to mark them out as beasts, incapable of kindness, rationality or anything except brutish destruction.
When we followed the trench lines, moving slowly to check for mines or booby traps, what we found in the sleeping quarters showed a few wrinkles in this narrative. Among the scattered ration packs, discarded cigarette butts and muddy jackets, one soldier had left a journal behind. It describes the make-up of his unit, the Russian 2nd Motor Rifle Company, and the daily tasks and routine of the fifty-seven men in his unit. But it also reveals the soldier’s growing disgust and anger towards their fighting conditions and their far-off superiors. ‘Fuck you, I fought hard,’ the soldier writes, xxviislamming the ‘civilian guys on their fancy motorcycles’ who had stayed in Russia and not come to war but nevertheless ‘got buckets of unearned medals’. This was a possible reference to the widely despised Defence Minister, Sergei Shoigu, who was notorious for pinning his uniform with dozens of awards for gallantry despite never having seen a day of action in his life.
I was fascinated and frustrated in equal measure with these finds. Lying next to the journal was a page ripped from a Russian edition of Paulo Coelho’s mystical novella of self-discovery, TheAlchemist. ‘Whoever interferes with the destiny of another will never discover his own!’ reads one line on the page. I wondered if the soldier reading that had taken a moment to reflect on what that said about him being here. I longed to talk to the young man who’d left these scattered pages, who was clearly literate and intelligent. Did you really think you’d be welcomed as liberators? Were you motivated by patriotism, coercion or something as banal as cash? What did you think about the atrocities you witnessed or participated in? But I never even discovered his name.
INTRODUCTION
In the days before 24 February 2022, most inhabitants of Ukraine lived lives anyone in the west would recognise. The seed that grew into this book was planted by the woman in the red dress I met in a cafe just before the Russians invaded. Her name was Kateryna. She was a blogger and looked to be in a rut, swilling a glass of wine while she tapped on a laptop, a look of boredom and ennui etched on her face. I remember clearly her painted nails. She’d still have them when I saw her again just over a year later in the trenches, on xxviiithe front line near the embattled city of Bakhmut and standing next to an artillery cannon, now a proud officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
My subject is war, but it is not, as Wilfred Owen put it, just the pity of war. Owen was the great poet of the First World War, which he recognised as a pointless slaughter that cost the continent millions of lives for nothing. Posterity has largely agreed with him. There is much that connects these wars, especially in imagery. Muddy, murky trenches stretching for hundreds of miles, huge artillery barrages followed by infantry charges towards almost certain death. Shellshock, wastelands, despair. There is a great deal of pity in these pages, but I also highlight the life, happiness, determination, inventiveness, heroism and bravery in the story of Ukraine’s resistance.
I grew up, like many young men of my generation, playing first-person shooter (FPS) video games, set in a variety of historical and futuristic battlefields. They seemed at the time to be escapist fantasies, but the battlefield looks scarily similar to those games, down to the men with controllers, their eyes fixed on screens or into goggles, piloting deadly drones into men and machines thousands of times per day. When I crept down the stairs of a farmhouse in eastern Ukraine, I saw a group of young men who looked just like me and my childhood friends did, controllers in hands, snacks and energy drinks on their tables, killing pixelated figures on their screens. But the men they were killing were real. None of the players in this game would respawn.
One old role-playing game, Planescape:Torment(from which the name of Chapter Six is taken), posed the question: ‘What can change the nature of a man?’ My answer is war. In these pages, I cover much of the politics and military history of the invasion, but above all, this book is about what war does to ordinary people thrust into xxixextraordinary circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians like you or I slammed shut laptops, downed construction tools and swapped suits and dresses for combat armour to defend their country. I tell the stories of such people over the book’s ten chapters, which are arranged thematically but in a roughly chronological order.
The first covers Ukraine’s turbulent history and its relationship with Russia, as well as the weeks-long build-up to the war, focusing on two key cities, Kyiv and Mariupol, which suffered wildly different fates. Although it is not a comprehensive account, it provides crucial context for the events of the invasion itself.
The next two cover the shock of the initial invasion and the disaster of the Russian campaign of northern Ukraine that attempted to capture the capital, Kyiv. Then, I explain the Russians’ significantly greater success in the south and east, in the Battle of the Donbas. They shed light on some lesser-known battles in the war, such as those for Chernihiv, Sumy and Lysychansk. These stories are forgotten outside of Ukraine but contained as much heroism as the more famous encounters.
The next three chapters cover the story from the perspective of three Ukrainian cities that were the sites of some of the crucial encounters of the war, namely Kharkiv, Kherson and Bakhmut, each possessing cultural and geographic differences that affected the outcome of the fighting. They show how Ukraine and its partners scored great victories but failed to capitalise on this success and got bogged down in a grinding war of attrition.
The seventh and eighth chapters cover civilian life both in war and in peace and contrast the experience of those living in Kyiv after the battle with those in Russia and under Russian occupation.
The final two cover the most difficult periods of the war for Ukraine – the failed counteroffensive of 2023 and the grinding war xxxof attrition in 2024, when, more than once, it seemed all was lost. An epilogue brings the story through 2025 at time of publication, examining the extraordinary political changes that have occurred after the election of Donald Trump and locating the war in a wider historical context.
I will also draw attention to some of the more uncomfortable aspects of life in Ukraine that reflect the flawed reality of a poor and often unstable country. Examples include the rampant corruption at many levels of officialdom and the brutality with which young men were forcibly enlisted off the street or their lives sacrificed in pointless battles. When the tide of the war slowly shifted against Ukraine, there was a reluctance to criticise Ukrainian command or their strategy. This book will try to correct that balance, while still making the case that Ukraine is one of the most important moral and political causes of our time.
The leadership and cohesion of Ukraine’s western allies was initially essential to Ukraine’s survival but became gradually overshadowed by the cowardice and naivety of world leaders who failed to grasp the nature of the Kremlin’s threat to the world outside of Ukraine. But even as the United States seems content to sell out an ally it had promised to stand behind ‘as long as it takes’, Ukraine continues to stand strong, taking advantage of a huge drone production industry and a wealth of talented people that are determined to keep resisting. As I write this, air raid sirens ring out in the streets of cities and the bright orange flashes of missiles and air defence cover the sky. ‘Ukraine has not yet perished,’ says the national anthem. God willing, it never will.
Tom Mutch Kyiv, March 2025
Chapter One
The Dogs of War: Ukraine’s Turbulent History and the Build-Up to Russia’s Invasion
‘Only God prepares in this country.’
– Oleg Budnikov, Donbas villager
A MONUMENT TO ALL OUR SINS
POBUZKE, KIROVOHRAD OBLAST, AUGUST 2021
‘Stretched out huge in length the Archfiend lay,’ John Milton says of the defeated Devil in Paradise Lost. Milton’s great villain was God’s creation, but the Devil in front of me was manmade, an eighty-foot behemoth of steel and electrical wire built to hold rocket fuel and nuclear explosive. The ‘Satan II’ intercontinental ballistic missile was given its terrifying name because it could carry the highest yield nuclear warhead humanity’s best scientific minds had devised. Travelling faster than the speed of sound, this missile and thousands like it would have streaked through the atmosphere and when they detonated over their targets in the United States, they each would have become towers of flame with temperatures as hot as the sun. The Satan II infernos would release more explosive 2energy in a second than all the weapons dropped in the Second World War combined. If the command to fire from Moscow had been given, most people on earth would have had about twenty-three minutes to live.
For nearly fifty years, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a Mexican standoff, and here was the bullet in the gun pointed at the head of the world, kept on hair-trigger notice, to be fired from a forty-metre-deep chasm nearby. The firing protocol was not based on the ominous big red button from Cold War fiction but a small, rectangular grey piece of plastic that could have easily been the control panel of an industrial waste disposal system. ‘Go on, press the button!’ Olena Smerychevska, our smiling black-haired Ukrainian guide, urged after taking us in through the huge steel doors guarding the silo and into a cramped and creaking elevator that slowly dropped us eleven floors down. This facility had been converted into the Ukrainian Strategic Missile Forces Museum, the only one of its kind in the world, and its main attraction was to let groups of adventure tourists pretend to be the commander to start the Third World War. Sitting so far underground, you would likely survive the nuclear holocaust. In the living quarters below were bunkbeds and forty-five days of provisions, intended for survival until radiation levels outside dropped to something safer. If you couldn’t live with the guilt of having participated in the end of humanity or simply found life in the post-apocalyptic wasteland on the surface not to your liking, there was a loaded pistol left in your personal safe to take care of that.
If the missiles had ever been fired, Major General Valeriy Kuznetsov could have been the one to do it. Nestled in the bunker, he would have been one of the last people alive. An officer in the 46th Division of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces, he was stationed 3here decades ago, where he and two other officers prepared to receive orders. ‘It would have been my duty,’ he smiles. ‘What would have happened to my family, my relatives, my country, all that was a secondary thing. We had to be there in that bunker till the end of life on earth.’
Protected by six-foot-thick metal walls, the capsule was fitted with shock absorbers and seatbelts, enabling those inside to survive the impact of a direct western nuclear strike. It would then have been Kuznetsov’s duty to type a set of codes into a keyboard, then push a button marked ‘Start Up’. They had regular drills on how to fire the missiles, and several times in their careers they were told it was the real thing. It was a test from their superior officers, to see whether they would still push the button for real – each time, they did just that.
Milton’s Satan ends ‘chained on the burning Lake, nor ever thence Had risen or heaved his head’. The Satan missile is now equally useless; today, it lies harmless, neutered, on a grassy field in the steppes of central Ukraine. The apocalypse that was feared for decades is yet to arrive. But this is where the rules-based international order died – and with it, the possibility of these missiles rising from their resting place. In exchange for security ‘assurances’, which turned out to be worthless when Russia invaded, Ukraine signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, which gave over the vast nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the Soviet Union to the tender care of the Russians.
‘We are glad we have a museum; it is unique,’ Olena said. ‘But we are not pleased to have such pain in our history. It saddens me because Ukraine has a lot more to show to foreigners.’ Ukraine developed a reputation for grungy ‘dark tourism’, based on reliving the horrors of the twentieth century. Most famous was the Chernobyl 4exclusion zone, another monument to the perils of the nuclear era. She hoped that as these events faded from view, the country would welcome tourists to the stunning cave monasteries in Kyiv and Sviatohirsk, the ski resorts and hot springs of the Carpathian Mountains or the cobbled streets and church domes of Lviv and Chernivtsi.
The history of the twenty-first century has been just as cruel to Ukraine.
MEMORY LANE
KYIV, AUGUST 2017
I first touched down in Ukraine in 2017 with Alex, an old friend from school in New Zealand. My first impression was of the sway that the dour Soviet-era bureaucracy still held. An inexplicably exasperated border guard refused to accept my visa form until I camped outside his office door for half an hour and finally thrust it on his desk. An Uber driver charged me triple the local price for a taxi from the airport, clocking me as a gullible foreigner. But after I’d got used to Ukraine’s rough edges, it began to sink its claws into me. The city had a frenetic, vibrant and grungy energy. The people, men and women, were beautiful and stylishly dressed. Some visitors have described Khreshchatyk, Kyiv’s wide Soviet-era central boulevard, as oppressive and grey. I thought it imposingly grand, especially as a short walk over a hill would take you down to the charming old town of Podil, with its winding medieval alleyways, hipster cafes and electronic music clubs. I thought much of Kyiv’s appeal came from its clash of architectural styles, where turning a corner could take you straight to a new period of Ukraine’s history. I was surprised that Kyiv did not have the recognition of Kraków, Budapest or Prague. I was fascinated by this country, which I’d 5previously written off as a backwater, and began to delve into books on its rich and tragic history.
Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe, the most thorough account of Ukraine’s past, begins with Herodotus, the father of history. Herodotus wrote extensively on the land of Scythia, an ancient precursor of Ukraine. He described the Dnipro River that flows through Ukraine as providing ‘the finest and most abundant pasture, by far the richest supply of the best sorts of fish … No better crops grow anywhere than along its banks … The grass is the most luxuriant in the world.’ This is no mere historical footnote; international officials stress about how best to ensure the safe passage of Ukrainian grain from the country’s Black Sea ports, fearing widespread famine in developing countries if the Russians blockade them.
This wealth of resources gave rise to a great kingdom, known to history as ‘Kyivan Rus’. In the eleventh century, Kyiv was for a time the grandest city in Europe, while Moscow was still a patch of arid and uninhabited swampland. Anna Yaroslavna, a princess from Kyiv who ruled France as Queen Regent, was reported to have introduced advances such as cutlery and private bathhouses and invested heavily in schools and libraries in Paris; she was literate at a time when the King of France could not sign his name.
Yet the kingdom disintegrated due to factional squabbles over succession, and what civilisation remained here was almost destroyed by the Mongols. Borders would shift back and forth significantly over the centuries, and a truly sovereign, independent Ukraine in its modern form would not be established until 1991. Ukraine’s turbulent relationship with Russia began in the seventeenth century. At this time, most of these lands were dominated by the Cossacks, a proud, self-governing and warlike people who are now revered as the founding fathers of Ukraine. The Cossacks had a brutal side, including 6penchants for raiding, slave-taking and pogroms. After a series of military defeats against Polish nobles, the most powerful Cossack, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky, swore fealty to the Tsar of Russia. Khmelnitsky had wanted protection from the west but believed that his treaty with the tsar, signed in 1654 at the town of Perieslav, would preserve Cossack rights and freedoms.
Moscow instead saw any subject under the tsar as owing him total and unquestioning obedience. In the coming centuries, the Ukrainian lands would be gradually ‘Russified’. The Russians enforced the use of their language in public life, and ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars would be killed or deported to make way for Russian settlers. At the end of his life, Khmelnitsky was said to have broken into tears and cried, ‘This is not what I wished,’ but by then, it was too late. Most of Ukraine would remain under Russian domination, as part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, until 1991.
In 1954, commenting on the 300th anniversary of the signing of this treaty, historian Isaac Deutscher wrote that ‘the image of the weeping Hetman has haunted Russo-Ukrainian relations ever since’. Dominated by a much larger and richer neighbour, Ukrainians for the next hundreds of years ‘hired themselves to the Polish gentry, to the Turkish Sultan … to Austro-Hungary and Germany; and each time they were disillusioned with their new masters, vanquished by Russia and forced back into dependence’. Foreign powers sought access to Ukraine’s vast resources, and Ukrainians would then use these resources as a bargaining chip for military support. When Volodymyr Zelensky thrashes out a deal with Donald Trump that would give the US access to Ukraine’s rare earth mineral resources in exchange for security aid, he is drawing on a long historical tradition. 7
The most notorious of these alliances was a brief one in 1941, when the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) led by Stepan Bandera declared an independent state in the western city of Lviv. He originally wanted an alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Considered horrific now, it makes more sense in historical context. Stalin and his underlings launched a genocidal famine against Ukraine in the 1930s, the Holodomor, killing around 4 million Ukrainians. The Allied victory in the Second World War ensured Russian domination of Ukraine, which would spend most of the next fifty years as part of the Soviet Union.
In 1986, a meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caused the world’s most serious nuclear incident in history. The Moscow-directed cover-up helped reawaken a nascent Ukrainian nationalist movement. Within four years, masses of students poured onto the streets and the Maidan Square in Kyiv demanding autonomy for Ukraine, which soon morphed into wider political demands for complete independence. It became known as the ‘Revolution on Granite’, and it was the first of several popular protest movements here to wield significant political power in Ukraine. The heads of the Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian republics met in a prototypical smoke-filled room in the Belovezha Hunting Ground in December 1991, where they plotted to dissolve the Soviet Union and strengthen their own power. But when the Ukrainian parliament voted to secede, they had made a fateful decision. They would give the final decision to the Ukrainian people in a democratic referendum.
On 1 December 1991, nine in ten Ukrainians of the 84 per cent of eligible voters opted to declare independence. The results in the traditional nationalist heartland of Galicia – the western cities of Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk – were no surprise. These places had only come under the Russian thumb after the Second World 8War and had experienced a flowering Ukrainian cultural movement when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the capital of Kyiv, as well as the Russian-speaking cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk, and the Crimean Peninsula also voted in favour of leaving. The break-up of the Soviet Union in Ukraine was therefore a curious mix of secretive elite scheming and popular democratic mobilisation. This tension between elite and popular politics is one of the themes that recurs in Ukrainian history. Others include a general rebelliousness and scepticism towards centralised authority and a respect for the participation of ordinary people in the politics and culture of everyday life, which is almost entirely absent in Russia. These circumstances set independent Ukraine on a very different course from that of its larger neighbour.
A TROUBLED INHERITANCE
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent nation of Ukraine inherited the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal. Sitting in silos and hangars like the one Olena had shown me were hundreds of nuclear warheads, now the property of a fragile state suffering an economic crisis. While many in the west celebrated the end of the Soviet Union, bloody conflicts such as those in Nagorno-Karabakh and the former Yugoslavia were a warning of how fragile peace in this region could be. A potential conflict between countries with nuclear weapons would raise the stakes dramatically.
Ukraine wanted to enter the world as a forward-looking nation, a good global citizen with friendly relations with all its neighbours, and it was willing to work towards a diplomatic solution. There were more prosaic motives as well. The Ukrainian economy was 9collapsing after the end of the Soviet Union, and the government allowed its short-term priority of needing quick cash to win out over its long-term national security interests. Experts still debate over whether Ukraine could have kept these weapons working or refashioned its existing stocks into a working nuclear deterrent – the launch codes were stored in Moscow – but their presence was a concern to world leaders.
At a summit in Hungary in 1994, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the UK and the US signed the Budapest Memorandum. In this document, Ukraine agreed to hand its nuclear weapons over to the care of the Russian Federation – the Soviet Union’s successor state and therefore one of the five states allowed by the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty to possess an atomic arsenal. In return – alongside an injection of ready cash – the powers agreed in the text of the memorandum ‘to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine’. Bill Clinton thanked the Ukrainians, saying, ‘Ukraine’s decision will allow the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom to extend formal security assurances to Ukraine … People around the world admire you for your wisdom in leading your country towards a non-nuclear future.’ The country had given up its missiles because it wanted to become part of the west and be a responsible global actor. Now Ukrainians bitterly regret their naivety. It was, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, the most useless piece of paper signed since the one Chamberlain had waved at Munich. Ukraine put its faith in international order rather than brute power and was betrayed.
In a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled ‘The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent’, John Mearsheimer warned that the decision was folly, saying, ‘Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression.’ He predicted, with alarming clarity, that 10
a conventional war between Russia and Ukraine would entail vast military casualties and the possible murder of many thousands of civilians … [They] have a history of mutual enmity; this hostility … could entail Bosnian style ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This war could produce millions of refugees clamoring at the borders of Western Europe.
Looking back now, it is as if he had a crystal ball.
But this danger was far in the future. In the 1990s, Ukrainians were simply trying to get through one day at a time. After the end of the Soviet Union, the economy collapsed, with GDP falling by nearly 40 per cent by the end of the millennium. Two political poles emerged in response to this crisis, one pushing for greater European integration, the other wanting to resurrect ties with Russia that resembled the former Soviet Union. Ukrainian politics was beset by all manner of ills that we associate with dictatorships or banana republics – the attempted killing of political opponents, threats against and murders of journalists, blatant ballot rigging and mass demonstrations, both peaceful and violent. Yet somehow, democratic politics survived. Elections were often neither free nor fair, and transfers of power could be far from peaceful. Yet whereas Russia has now had a single leader for twenty-five years, Ukraine cycled through five Presidents and countless Prime Ministers in this time.
Russians speak about Ukrainian politics with incredulity. Their popular revolutions are said to instead be CIA coups, and they called the Zelensky government a ‘proxy’ or ‘puppet’ of the US. Plenty of Ukrainians, especially oligarchs and politicians, played negative roles, but they were genuinely independent actors, which meant that politics was never consolidated in a particular person or faction. The Kremlin became scared that the Ukrainian example 11was a threat to the centralisation of power under Putin in Russia. It was a kind of violent democratic anarchy of which the Cossacks would have approved.
The 2004 election was particularly chaotic. The leading pro-western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, barely survived a disfiguring poisoning attempt, likely on the orders of Moscow, and the winning pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych was found to have committed electoral fraud, which caused the Ukrainian Constitutional Court to order a rerun of the election. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested in what became known as the ‘Orange Revolution’ after the Yushchenko team’s colours. The defiant Yushchenko won handily. But his administration failed to tackle major issues in Ukrainian society, such as the corruption that has devastated the economy and public affairs since 1991. Yanukovych rehabilitated his image, rose from the political ashes and went on to win the 2010 election fair and square.
Ukrainians of this period generally had a positive view of Russia. This did not mean that they wanted Ukraine to be ruled again from Moscow, let alone be invaded. Taya Shchuruk, a Ukrainian actress, explained: ‘People in most major cities, overwhelmingly spoke Russian in daily life. They watched Russian movies, read Russian books (even by Ukrainian authors) and had friends and family in Russia.’ But on a personal level, most of them truly didn’t care all that much about Russia. ‘There was no deep fascination with Russian politics, in the way that Russia was obsessed with everything in Ukraine.’
‘LIKES’ DON’T COUNT
TORETSK, DONETSK OBLAST, APRIL 2018
The crack of rifle fire sounded out in the distance, and the nearby 12trees were beginning to blossom. The trenches near the Donetsk Oblast town of Toretsk seemed flimsy, and Vitali Krasovsky, our Ukrainian special forces escort, told us to get down immediately. The trenches were barely a metre and a half high, reinforced with a few planks of wood, which seemed unlikely to survive an artillery hit from the forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic less than a kilometre away. I was with Lord Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, researching a book about the future of the British military. We had decided to take a trip to visit a potential conflict that could draw in British troops. The UK’s training mission out here, Operation Orbital, was helping bring Ukraine’s Army into the twenty-first century.
By now, a frozen conflict had dragged out on the plains of Ukraine’s eastern regions, the Donbas, for nearly four years. A few lives were regularly lost to sniper fire or small calibre mortars. Occasionally, one side would send saboteurs to destroy an enemy dugout or even try to capture a farmhouse here, a treeline there. But there were no serious attempts at changing the facts on the ground. By 2018, the fighting showed no signs of ending, but nor was it escalating. It was becoming background noise, slowly fading from the minds and priorities of the Ukrainian people.
During Ukraine’s early years of independence, many cultural elements of Russification remained. But politically and economically, Moscow became steadily less attractive. Barely 10 per cent said they wanted a union of the two countries, a similar proportion of Canadians who would favour becoming the fifty-first state of the US. Throughout Ukraine, Moscow’s increasingly authoritarian dictatorship and corrupt oligarchy were losing their appeal. Walking through Kyiv’s main streets, you could see posters for club nights with famous Berlin DJs, and across the road the great Opera House 13was advertising for Italian operas like Rigoletto and Madame Butterfly. The economic, cultural and social opportunities of European Union membership were undeniable. The countries that had stayed in the Russian orbit – Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia – had stagnated, their economies controlled by oligarchs, their politics ranging from corrupt to authoritarian. This made many people, especially the young, turn towards Europe for a better future.
Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s most famous poet, once wrote in horror about the suggestion that ‘Kiev, decrepit, golden dome, this ancestor of Russian towns, will it conjoin its sainted groves, with reckless Warsaw?’ Having looked at both Moscow and Warsaw, this is exactly what a young generation of Ukrainians decided to do. The Polish capital is another city that impresses visitors with its spotlessly clean streets, its profusion of new skyscrapers and shopping centres full of posh western brands. Young people speak impressive English, at a level better than countries like Spain or France. The country has had one of the fastest growing economies in the world since the end of the Communist era. Ukrainians often travelled and worked in Poland, sending back remittances and earning qualifications, exposing them to the benefits of integration with Europe.
When the Soviet Union ended, the economies of Ukraine and Poland were nearly equal in size. By 2014, the Polish economy was three times as large and, along with the Baltic states, Romania and Hungary, was growing steadily richer and more prosperous as citizens travelled and worked freely throughout Europe. All these countries had joined NATO and the European Union. As their integration with the west grew, their democratic institutions strengthened.
Yanukovych was so corrupt that Ukrainians maintain a museum to his greed. Around an hour’s drive outside Kyiv, I visited his old 14private residence, a modern Versailles called Mezhyhirya. His greed shocked even Transparency International, whose staff are usually inured to corruption. They called it ‘a palace of cartoonish opulence’ with a cryotherapy chamber, a private zoo with animals as exotic as bears and peacocks, an $11 million gem-studded chandelier and a personal lake where he had a model pirate ship to entertain guests for lavish parties. This all cost a fraction of the $37 billion his clan is believed to have stolen from the coffers of the Ukrainian people. In late 2013, when President Yanukovych pulled out of an integration agreement with the EU after an offer of a bribe from Moscow, Mustafa Nayyem, a young journalist, the son of refugees from Afghanistan, made a Facebook post calling for a mass demonstration on Maidan Square. ‘Well, let’s get serious,’ he wrote. ‘Who today is ready to come to Maidan before midnight? “Likes” don’t count. Only comments under this post with the words, “I am ready.”’ Thousands gathered, but Yanukovych was terrified of a repeat of the Orange Revolution in 2004. So, he cracked down hard, sending in Ukraine’s feared riot police, the Berkut. For many Ukrainians, the Maidan defined their national consciousness and political awakening. This was a revolution against corruption and for democracy. As Illia Ponomarenko, a young Ukrainian journalist, described it:
We were a generation open to the world around us as never before, unlike so many of our parents, whose lifetime’s greatest journey was the Soviet Army conscription service in Central Asia and maybe even the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. We wanted clean streets, polite police, and government officials that resign because of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start a business without passing money under the table and to trust that the courts of law would render justice. We did not want irremovable, 15lifetime dictators who packed their governments at every level with corrupt cronies flush with ill-gotten cash.
Yanukovych tried to suppress the protests with deadly force but fled the country after the Maidan massacre threatened to trigger his violent overthrow. He tried to call in the army to put down the citizen rebellion, but they were stymied by popular resistance. A soldier at the time, codenamed ‘Yakut’, remembered: ‘The government had decided to call in the army, not just the police. However, we never made it to Kyiv because unarmed civilians blocked the train tracks and cut the brakes to stop us from moving forward.’ Many of the men and women of this brave and patriotic generation would join the armed forces when Russia invaded in full eight years later, and thousands would die.
Nayyem looks back on the Maidan with pride, but his expression and tone betray a wistful sadness: ‘The country was pregnant and ready for change,’ he told me in Kyiv more than ten years after the uprising. ‘Our aspiration was the European Union, and the values shared with these countries, their level of life, prosperity and democracy. I was just the trigger, but it came from the people.’ Russia wasn’t the focal point of these protests, but the demonstrators were pushing against laws based on the Russian model of repression. In the end, just over a hundred protestors were killed, a fact Nayyem reminded me of.
‘It is important to know that today, we are meeting on the anniversary of the Maidan massacre.’
These events were not popular everywhere in Ukraine. There were large-scale protests against the Maidan in 2014 in majority Russian-speaking cities throughout Ukraine, including Kharkiv, Odesa, Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin saw an opportunity in the 16chaos and used unmarked Russian troops to annex Crimea. This was done almost bloodlessly and was the first seizure of territory by military means on the European continent since the Second World War and a brazen repudiation of international norms, not to mention international agreements like the Budapest Memorandum that Russia had signed with Ukraine.
Russian proxy forces and local rebels then captured large swathes of territory in the east, including the regional capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. They declared independent states, the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’, which remained unrecognised by any country until the eve of the February 2022 invasion. The Ukrainian Army was parlous, hollowed out from years of corruption and underfunding. Its regular troops were in a poor position. Leonid Ostaltsev, a veteran of the Donbas war, told me:
Our soldiers were cleaners and painters, not soldiers. In my country, our government had sold almost everything we had after the fall of the Soviet Union. I was in the regular army for one year, and I know the army was fighting against Russians in 2014. We didn’t know anything. It was men and women in very bad uniforms without any combat experience or useful skills that could help in a battle. When I went to fight for the army in July 2014, I bought my own uniform and wore New Balance shoes. My friends all pitched in to buy me body armour, which was in terrible condition. In one whole year of military training before the war, I shot only six bullets, two times. The training was so poor that I had to Google ‘how to set up a checkpoint’ so that our friends wouldn’t get killed if we had to fire at the enemy. Funny, but not funny. It is a big difference now. 17
Yakut said that for years, Russia had waged a propaganda war in Ukraine, particularly targeting Donbas and Crimea, and said it was most shocking to see his fellow citizens suddenly treat him as if he were the enemy – ‘blocking roads with their cars, shouting curses and throwing stones’. He explains that both they and the separatist forces were poorly equipped. When he and other Ukrainian troops tried to recapture the eastern city of Slovyansk, in the war’s first major battle, the Russians and their separatists resorted to desperate measures to fight back, including stealing a Second World War-era T-34 tank that had been put on a plinth as a monument and firing it at the Ukrainians. ‘I don’t know how they managed it, but they somehow got it to work and shot at us – it was very surreal.’
Eventually, the Russians sent regular forces in to reinforce the rebels, who trapped many of the best Ukrainian troops near a city called Debaltseve. ‘The battle was brutal,’ Yakut recalls, ‘especially when we were surrounded. The Russians shelled us almost constantly, and we couldn’t escape. All our vehicles were destroyed, and we barely managed to flee on foot.’ In February 2015, with Ukraine losing militarily, it was forced to sign an agreement in Minsk, intended to secure a ceasefire in the region, but it never fully took hold. NATO began supplying equipment and training soldiers. Since then, the agreement has been a cornerstone of Russian propaganda, which has claimed that Ukraine never respected the agreement, although neither side honoured their obligations.
But while it didn’t bring lasting peace, it did calm the situation down. By the time I visited in 2018, the sounds of war were faint. In the capital, the war was far from the average person’s mind. People were still talking mainly about the economy and ongoing problems with corruption. We can see what people’s concerns were by 18looking at one of the most popular TV shows of the era, a product of the politically ambitious actor and comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Born in a rough, mainly Russian-speaking industrial city in the south called Kryvyi Rih, he had cut his teeth as an entertainer and producer both in Kyiv and Moscow.
Here, the father of history makes another unexpected appearance in the story of Ukraine. In a dream scene in the satirical comedy Servant of the People – created by and starring Zelensky – Herodotus and fellow ancient historian Plutarch look down at the recently elected schoolteacher turned President, Vasyl Goloborodko, as he snores and talks in his sleep. They are discussing the situation in Ukraine, and the President gives a good summary of Ukraine’s potential but how its rulers were failing its people: ‘[Presidents] come, they steal, then successors come and steal more.’ He points out that Ukraine was number one in the world in sunflower oil production, number three in grain production and its thriving industrial sector made airplanes, combine harvesters and cars. Yet the country was one of the poorest in Europe, its economy facing default and the Maidan protesters’ dreams of reform and joining the EU looked decades away. The fighting in Donbas doesn’t feature in the show at all.
In an early episode, the newly inaugurated Goloborodko is introduced to his body double, who he is told ‘will take a sniper bullet for you’, but the team laughs that off as something that will never happen. The baby-faced, clean-shaven Zelensky looked faintly ridiculous in his expensive suit and surrounded by the pomp and opulence of the presidency. This was true both when he played the part of the President on TV and when he assumed the office for real.
When I finally met him many years later, his appearance had been scarred and deepened by the horrors. By then, he had long 19taken on the characteristics of the world’s most famous war leader – the stubble, the olive-green military fleece, the piercing stare and gravelly voice.
He was elected President in 2019, riding a wave of popular anger against the establishment, in part on a platform to end the war in Donbas, which he apparently expected to be simple. ‘Just stop the shooting’ was his slogan. After negotiations with the Russians quickly broke down, he realised from bitter experience just how difficult it would be to do a deal with the Kremlin.
The Ukrainian military had not forgotten the threat from Russia, and they continued to rearm and prepare for what many saw as an inevitable larger war. During this period, Ukraine also developed a deep and complex relationship with the west. Ukrainian intelligence began co-operating seriously with the CIA against Russia, and western troops began training Ukrainian forces, who in turn provided their real-world experience fighting Russia and its proxies in Donbas. The war was an ideal training range – tough live fire and real combat, without being dangerous on the scale of a hot war. The tens of thousands of soldiers who cycled through here became the backbone of Ukraine’s resistance in 2022.
Civil society also became more cohesive and patriotic. ‘The Maidan was the moment of awakening, the activation of young people who had a totally different approach and vision,’ Nayyem said. ‘And during these next eight years, thousands of people grew up who started to believe the country belonged to them, not to government. And that was one of the reasons why, when invasion started, people [were] so well organised and proactive.’
Our research team met in Kyiv with Lieutenant General Serhiy Bessarab, then deputy head of the Ukrainian armed forces. We asked what Russia’s plans were. He drew an oval on a piece of scrap 20paper to represent Ukraine. He started adding a series of arrows to represent various directions of attack. North-west, from the swamplands and forests of Belarus. North-east, from the plains of Kursk towards Sumy and Kharkiv. From the south, like a dagger into Ukraine’s ribs, from occupied Crimea, and from the eastern Donbas territories that they were already fighting over.
Lord Ashcroft thanked the general for his insights and then said, with a wry smile, pointing at the rough squiggles, ‘But one last piece of career advice. Please do not consider a career as an artist,’ and the room burst into laughter. We were worried. Bessarab was not describing ‘Russian hybrid warfare’, the buzz-phrase of the day in European Defence Ministries, defined by deniable operations salami-slicing small pieces of territory, cyberattacks, propaganda and misinformation campaigns to destabilise democracies. This was a fully-fledged mechanised assault that hadn’t been seen since the Second World War. It was politically unthinkable in the enlightened twenty-first century. Yet nearly four years later, those hastily drawn arrows would morph from being smudges of ink on a page to being tens of thousands of soldiers, tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces barrelling towards every major Ukrainian city.
A TALE OF THREE CITIES
MARIUPOL, DONETSK OBLAST, FEBRUARY 2022
‘Only God prepares in this country,’ laughed Oleg Budnikov. A gregarious villager in his late sixties, his main concern was getting enough fodder for his animals and fertiliser for his crops. The Russian Army massing just over the border would have to wait. Occasionally, we heard a few shots of automatic rifle fire pinged back and forth between Ukrainian and Donetsk People’s Republic forces. 21
