Overreach, page 30
The industrial city of Kharkiv, just 30 kilometres from the Russian border and a Russian-speaking town with a notably pro-Russian mayor, should have been the Kremlin’s easiest target. In 2014 the city saw some of the largest anti-Maidan demonstrations, and was a major target for Sergei Glazyev’s influence operations to attempt to foment a pro-Moscow coup. In the first week of the 2022 invasion, massive Russian shelling and rocket attacks destroyed part of the main administration building on Kharkiv’s main Freedom Square. But instead of capitulating, Mayor Ihor Terekhov came out fighting, posting images of himself on social media holding a pistol and vowing to resist the invaders. ‘The Russian aggressors are trying to turn Kharkiv into a pitiful city, like the ones they have in Russia,’ Terekhov told journalists – in Russian. ‘But they won’t succeed. And, as you see, the people of Kharkiv are defending their city, weapons in hand.’41
Just days before the invasion, Russian private Ivan Kudryavtsev had been told that his unit was about to embark on a training exercise. Kudryavtsev called his mother on 20 February and asked for money to ‘buy food’ before ‘exercises’. He told her that his motorised rifle unit was on the border with Belarus. The next day he told his brother that they were ‘moving out’, without specifying where. It would be Kudryavtsev’s last direct contact with his family.
Kudryavtsev was born in August 2001 in Omsk region, central Siberia. Like many of the soldiers who fought in Ukraine, he was a child of the Putin era – and had grown up in poverty in the deep provinces. When Ivan was seven his father left his mother, who, in turn, abandoned her three children – two sons, and a daughter who suffered from cerebral palsy. Ivan’s brother, aged nine, called their uncle’s wife Nina and begged to be taken in. ‘It would have been a pity for them to be taken to an orphanage,’ said Nina. ‘Their mother refused them, their father didn’t need them either, so we took them.’ But Nina could not care for the boys’ sick sister, who disappeared without trace into the Russian care system.
Kudryavtsev and his brother went to school in the small town of Nazyvaevsk, built to service the Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs through its centre. He loved football, Soviet war films, video games, and gathering mushrooms and berries in the forest with his grandfather. Ivan appeared twice in the local newspaper, Nasha Iskra – once as the local football team’s newbie goalkeeper and again in the summer of 2020 when he and other 18-year-old locals voted for the first time. ‘The guys say that they could not stay away from such an important event for our country,’ wrote the paper. In 2021 he graduated from a course at Omsk’s Technical Railway School – and he and his elder brother were both called up in October. Two months later Ivan called to tell his aunt that he’d signed up as a contract soldier, a month earlier than the earliest supposed date that conscripts could go professional. ‘I don’t know at all how he signed the contract,’ Nina said. ‘He said that they underwent accelerated training. Looks like they were preparing them [for something]. Nobody told us anything.’
On 21 March one of the mothers of the young men in Kudryavtsev’s unit received a call from her son. He had been taken prisoner. ‘He said: “We are sitting in the basement with no food, no drink,”’ the woman told Ivan’s aunt Nadezhda. ‘“We are being fed by elderly people, Ukrainians.”’42
Five days later, on 26 March, Ukrainian Telegram channels reported that 30 Russians had been taken prisoner after heavy fighting in the small commuter town of Vil’khivka, 19 kilometres east of the centre of Kharkiv and some 50 kilometres from the nearest border crossing into Russia’s Belgorod province. The prisoners were taken to the nearby village of Malaya Rohan’ – six kilometres away from the Kharkiv Tractor Factory – for a brutal interrogation.43 According to a series of short videos posted by pro-Ukrainian military bloggers on Reddit the next morning, at least a dozen men in Russian uniform, all of them apparently wounded and several of them with sacks on their heads, were lined up on the ground in a car park with their hands tied behind their backs.44 All wore the white armbands used by Russians to distinguish themselves from the yellow or blue armband-wearing Ukrainians. A soldier in Ukrainian uniform – his face invisible in the video – calmly walks down the line shooting each prisoner in the legs with a Kalashnikov. ‘Who are the officers?’ he says in Russian as the shot men groan and scream. ‘Who are the fucking officers? Talk … What the fuck are you doing lobbing bombs into Kharkiv?’
Another Ukrainian soldier, checking one of the prone bodies, says, ‘This one’s a goner. He’s fucked.’
‘Where are the recon[naissance] units? The recon units, fuck?’ continues the first interrogator, moving down the line. The prisoner, a bloodied bag over his head, answers in a whisper.
‘They came through on the other side of the village …’ His voice dies away.
‘Talk! Come on, talk!’ says his interrogator. The soldier does not answer. The Ukrainian pokes him in the chest with his gun barrel. No response. He pulls off the hood, revealing a bloodied young face. ‘This one’s passed out.’
The wounded Russian was Ivan Kudryavtsev.
‘His voice. Even before they removed the sack, I immediately said it was him,’ said Kudryavtsev’s foster mother Nina, who was alerted to the video on 10 April by an acquaintance of Ivan’s. ‘Ivan’s voice is not broken yet, it’s childlike, even though he’s 20 years old,’ confirmed his aunt Nadezhda. ‘And his lips. Although they are bloodied and swollen, it is clear that they are his.’
Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Human Rights, claimed that the video was ‘a movie that the Russians themselves made … a fake’. Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny also announced on Facebook that Russians were distributing ‘staged videos supposedly showing the inhuman attitude of allegedly “Ukrainian soldiers” towards “Russian prisoners”’. But Oleksey Arestovich, a senior adviser to the Ukrainian president, admitted that the videos ‘might show a war crime’ and promised that the incident would be investigated. Arestovich also reminded Ukrainian troops of ‘the importance of following the laws of war’ and respecting the Geneva Convention.
For Ivan Kudryavtsev’s relatives in Omsk, the debate over alleged Ukrainian brutality towards prisoners was cold comfort. On 4 May his foster mother Nina received an official notice from the Russian Ministry of Defence stating that ‘Kudryavtsev Ivan Ivanovich, an ordinary conscript, has gone missing’ – with no mention that he had signed up as a professional kontraktnik. Kudryavtsev’s commanding officer back at the unit’s base in Yelnya, Smolensk province, told her he had ‘no information’. It was only through an informal Telegram group set up by relatives and friends of the soldiers shown in the 26 March video that Nina found out that three of Kudryavtsev’s comrades had been reported dead. In early June, Russia’s security services began to contact and question members of the Telegram chat, warning them not to talk to the press. Kudryavtsev’s aunt and foster mother ignored them. ‘We can’t keep silent about this,’ Nadezhda told journalists from Meduza in June. ‘We are ready for anything. Alive or dead, so that our souls can be at peace. At least give him a decent burial. So that he does not rot there.’45
Kherson
The city of Kherson fell to the Russians on 5 March after the local mayor arranged a ceasefire and peaceful surrender, allowing the heavily outnumbered Ukrainian troops in the city to withdraw unmolested. The following day thousands of locals turned out to block advancing Russian columns with their bodies and shout ‘Go fuck yourselves’ to frightened and surprised Russian soldiers. Such a display of mass civil disobedience – even when the troops began firing into the air to disperse the demonstrators – was an entirely unknown thing in their young Russian lives in Putin’s Russia. But the demonstrations did not stop the new Russian authorities from setting up a puppet government recruited from local pro-Russian activists and an ex-mayor who styled themselves the leaders of a new ‘Kherson People’s Republic’.
In Nova Kakhovka, 100 kilometres northeast of Kherson, Larisa Nagorskaya joined a group of friends and hundreds of residents in a pro-Kyiv demonstration on the town’s main square. Some young men climbed up to the roofs of surrounding buildings and draped them with huge Ukrainian flags. Others tied rows of helium balloons to a giant yellow and blue flag and released it into the air, to cheers. Russian troops, all with their faces covered, stood by armoured personnel carriers around the edges of the square but did not intervene.
That night security cameras recorded a group of 15 armed men showing up at the home of one local activist woman who had helped organise the demonstration. The activist had gone to stay with her daughter; the next day she escaped from Nova Kakhovka across the front lines to Ukrainian-held Zaporizhzhia. Russians seemed to have lists of people who participated in the meeting – as well as lists of veterans who had fought with Ukrainian forces. ‘Someone had betrayed them,’ said Nagorskaya. ‘They went door to door, arrested all men who were veterans and took them to a cellar somewhere.’ The phrase zabrali v podval – literally, ‘they took to a cellar’ – became a commonplace shorthand for the systematic kidnap and torture by the Russians. The verb prilitelo – literally, ‘flew in’ – came to mean incoming artillery or missile strikes. The father of a friend of Nagorskaya’s 11-year-old daughter Masha, a deputy in the regional assembly and a Ukrainian army veteran, received an urgent call on his mobile from a friend asking him to meet. Around the corner from his house, Russians were waiting and bundled him into a jeep. They kept the man blindfolded for a month in a freezing cellar, brutally interrogating and beating him regularly before eventually releasing him with his teeth, ribs and nose broken, according to Nagorskaya.
The local authorities began firing local officials who had not fled or been arrested. At Nagorskaya’s place of work at the local water utility all workers were summoned for a meeting with the new director – a well-known local politician who had been a regional deputy from Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions and had mysteriously disappeared six months before to Sochi, Russia. Now he was back with a simple message. ‘This is Russia now,’ the new boss told the water company employees, recalled Nagorskaya. ‘You will be paid in rubles. Kakhovka will stay Russian forever. Anyone who doesn’t like it is free to leave.’
Nagorskaya’s husband Igor decided to take his advice. A seat in a taxi across the front lines to Zaporizhzhia cost the equivalent of $200 – and the Nagorskys were afraid that Igor could be questioned and drafted into the Ukrainian army. They were afraid, too, that he’d be drafted into the Russian army if he stayed. So Igor took a minibus to Russian-occupied Crimea, then on to Rostov and eventually made it to Wrocław, Poland, where he found work as a handyman to make some cash as he waited for the war to end.
All the Ukrainian police disappeared on the first day, to be replaced by patrols of marauding Russian soldiers. ‘The Russians stole everything,’ said Nagorskaya. ‘Some local farmers had rented a warehouse to store 60 tonnes of sunflower seeds. Everything was stolen. We used to have the largest solar-electric station in Ukraine – but the Russians took all the panels away. Russians soldiers came into shops and helped themselves. Nobody could do anything.’
By the end of March, around 60 per cent of Nagorskaya’s neighbours had left – a few to Ukrainian-held territory, but most choosing (like her husband) the longer but safer route through Crimea. Several families from Buryatia, in eastern Siberia – relatives of soldiers posted to Nova Kakhovka – had broken into the empty houses and began living in them. ‘To us, these are modest houses of ordinary people. To the Buryats it was like they were living in a palace.’ One new family broke down a garage and used the sheet metal to build themselves a high makeshift fence around the two-storey village house they had occupied. ‘They must have been afraid that the locals hated them and would burn the house down.’
By Nagorskaya’s count, about half the people left in Nova Kakhovka were actively pro-Russian – especially the families of old communist apparatchiks and people who were relatively recent arrivals from Russia. She claimed that around ‘90 per cent’ of the local officials refused to work with the Russians. Those who did agree to collaborate received amazing promotions, such as one archivist who was appointed deputy director of the local tax inspectorate. Nagorskaya’s neighbour, who had been fired from her job at a hospital for stealing and was ‘angry at the Ukrainian authorities’, offered to return and was reinstated by the new authorities. The director of Masha’s school refused to teach the new Russian programme and was fired, to be replaced by one of junior teachers who agreed to do the job. Soon it became clear that working for the Russians was a high-risk career choice. In occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces some 35 Moscow-installed officials would be shot, car-bombed and poisoned. In August, as his city came under sustained Ukrainian attack, the new head of Kherson’s regional administration Kirill Stremousov recorded a defiant video message promising that the city would never be retaken – though it was clear from the domes of a cathedral visible over his shoulder that he was in Voronezh, Russia, rather than in Kherson.46
In Nova Kakhovka, Ukrainian channels disappeared from the TV, to be replaced by Russian-controlled channels from Luhansk, Crimea, Donbas 24 and central Moscow channels. Nagorskaya and her neighbours watched the destruction of Mariupol with horror – but their conclusion was that they were ready to do anything to avoid Nova Kakhovka meeting the same fate. ‘The attitude of most people was, just let there be no war,’ said Nagorskaya. ‘They are ready to accept anything, even Russians, as long as they don’t start shooting.’
By May a semblance of normality had returned. The Russian troops had stopped looting and were under orders to be polite. Local authorities began handing out Russian passports to pensioners, making it a condition of collecting their new ruble pensions. Russian products appeared in the shops – more expensive and much worse quality than the previous Ukrainian ones. But day and night up to 50 rockets and cruise missiles a day fired from Crimea screamed overhead on their way to targets all over Ukraine. Then, in early June, the Ukrainians began firing back, hitting a major arms dump in Nova Kakhovka, which blew up spectacularly and burned for two days. Many neighbours’ windows were blown out. Some were angry, others said it was a small price to pay for liberation. But a friend was told by some Russian soldiers that ‘if they have to leave this place they won’t leave one brick standing on another’.
Nagorskaya decided that the time had come to take Masha to safety. ‘This war will roll back over Kakhovka before it ends,’ she said as we shared a Polish train carriage from Przemysl to Krakow. ‘And I don’t want to be there when that happens.’ She scraped together the $500 fare for a provodnik, or guide, to drive them across the front lines to Zaporizhzhia. Most of the money was needed to bribe Russian soldiers at the 20 checkpoints they would have to cross, their driver explained. Leaving their cats and dogs with relatives, Nagorskaya and her daughter set off for a new life in Wroclaw. At one of the checkpoints Russian soldiers asked her why she was leaving. ‘It’s so lovely here, such a rich land – and it’s Russia now.’47
CHAPTER 10
Standoff
Everything fell apart, everything turned out to be rotten, and everyone around turned out to be traitors.
Soviet historian Yevgeny Tarle (1874–1955) on Nicholas I’s defeat in Crimea1
The Rival Armies
‘If I want I’ll take Kiev in two weeks,’ Putin told José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European commission, in the aftermath of his 2014 annexation of Crimea.2 Both the Ukrainians and Western military experts believed him. The memory of the disastrous battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltseve – where Ukrainian armoured units had been surrounded and destroyed by the Russians – meant that NATO military aid had focused on training and supplying the Ukrainian military with light weapons best suited to a guerrilla-style resistance. ‘The idea that the Russian army could be defeated in the field didn’t enter into our considerations,’ says one senior British army commander closely involved in NATO aid to Kyiv during that period. ‘To be honest, we underestimated the Ukrainians and seriously overestimated the Russians.’ When the 2022 invasion came, ‘We were expecting a powerful [Russian] competent combined arms force that had some good coordination between infantry, tanks and artillery,’ said the officer. ‘Instead we saw tanks unsupported by infantry being picked off by raiders … They had too much metal and not enough men.’3
In 2020 – the last official Russian statistics available – the total number of Russia’s professional soldiers, as opposed to conscripts, numbered 405,000 across the air force, navy and army. Of those, Russia’s total land forces strength at the beginning of the war stood at 280,000, according to NATO estimates. By adding units from the naval infantry, Rosgvardia paramilitary police, irregular units from Chechnya and mercenaries from the Wagner Group, Russia would deploy close to 200,000 men in their assault on Ukraine – to which they would add conscripted forces from the LDNR after the invasion.
At the outset of the war the Ukrainian army had about 90,000 combat-ready deployed troops, mostly stationed along the line of control in Donbas. But the overall strength of all Ukraine’s armed forces officially stood at 195,626 active-duty personnel. And over eight years of war in Donbas, a staggering 900,000 more men and women had fought on the front lines, making a vast reserve force with recent combat experience. In the first days of the war Ukraine announced general mobilisation, forbidding any men aged 18–60 from leaving the country and requiring them to register at their local draft offices. By April 2022, some 6,970,035 Ukrainian men aged 16 to 49 had been judged fit for military service, although unlike Russia there was no forcible conscription, as even in late September Kyiv reported sufficient willing volunteers. ‘For a successful attack, by all the canons of the Infantry Staff regulations, you need a superiority 1 to 3,’ according to Russian military analyst Yury Fedorov.’4 Russia’s invasion force of under 200,000 was nothing like enough men.
