by Del Cap Tue May 23, 2023 10:40 am
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/29/two-weeks-at-the-front-in-ukraine
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Battered members of the 28th Brigade were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter Kherson. Crowds greeted them there as heroes. Before they could recover, they were sent three hundred miles northeast, to the outskirts of Bakhmut, a besieged city that was becoming the scene of the most ferocious violence of the war.
Syava’s battalion, which numbered about six hundred men, was posted on the edge of a village south of Bakhmut. The village was controlled by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization notorious for committing atrocities in Africa and the Middle East. For the war in Ukraine, Wagner recruited thousands of inmates from Russian prisons by offering them pardons in exchange for combat tours. The onslaught of expendable convicts proved too much for the Ukrainians, who were still reeling from Kherson and had not yet replenished their ranks and matériel. The commander of the battalion, a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel named Pavlo, said of the Wagner fighters, “They were like zombies. They used the prisoners like a wall of meat. It didn’t matter how many we killed—they kept coming.”
Within weeks, the battalion faced annihilation: entire platoons had been wiped out in close-contact firefights, and some seventy men had been encircled and massacred. The dwindling survivors, one officer told me, “became useless because they were so tired.” In January, what was left of the battalion retreated from the village and established defensive positions in the tree lines and open farmland a mile to the west. “Wagner kicked our asses,” the officer said.
The Russian mercenaries subsequently left for Bakhmut, to shore up other forces there, and the conventional troops who replaced them were far less numerous and suicidal. By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty per cent of his men were new draftees. “They’re civilians with no experience,” he said. “If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.”
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“I only trust Bison,” Odesa said. “If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.” He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: “Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.”
Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called “reverse natural selection”—seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone awol. “I was in a bad place psychologically,” he said. “I needed a break.” After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished—what were they going to do, put him in the trenches?—but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. “I felt guilty,” he said. “I realized that my place was here.”
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During previous reporting trips to Ukraine, I had encountered the Russian military almost exclusively as a remote, invisible source of bombs that fell from the sky. It was eerie to look across such a short gap at an actual Russian position—and to know that an actual Russian might be looking back. Artem shared my unease. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I’m not a soldier.”
He was a forty-two-year-old father of three who managed a grain elevator in a small farming community in central Ukraine. Men who have three children are legally exempt from conscription but, in December, Artem was still in the process of adopting one of his daughters when he was summoned by his local draft board. A physician, citing a skull fracture that Artem had once suffered during an ice-skating accident, deemed him medically unfit to serve; the board dispatched him to a military training center anyway. His training lasted a month and consisted of tutorials and marching drills—“theoretical stuff, nothing practical.” He shot a total of thirty rounds during two trips to a firing range. From the training center, Artem was assigned to the 28th Brigade, and a day after joining Pavlo’s infantry battalion he was on the Zero Line.
“The first couple of weeks, I was so fucking scared,” he said. “I ran whenever there was shooting.” Gunshots and explosions gave him migraines, which exacerbated his anxiety. He’d been there for six weeks and had not so much mastered his fear as accepted the illogic of running: there was nowhere to escape to. All the same, he was so timid by nature that it was difficult to imagine him repulsing a Russian attack. “I hate weapons and violence,” he said with wide-eyed incredulity, as if he still could not believe where he was. “I’m just trying to stay alive until I can get home.”
A few minutes after I met Artem, a rocket-propelled grenade, or R.P.G., screamed across the sunflower field and detonated in the ravine. Machine-gun fire clattered, and bullets whacked the trees. I ducked behind a barricade of sandbags, where the ranking sergeant—another veteran, like Bison and Odesa—was shouting at his subordinates.
“All good?”
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