Reportaje The Economist, 22.06.2023 Liz Cookman, periodista de la revista 1843 Magazine que cubre la guerra en Ucrania
-
Despite a slow start to the counter-offensive, morale remains high
At just 21, Lucky has already lost more friends than he can count. His phone is full of defunct numbers. “Many of my contacts are either dead or unreachable. Perhaps those ones are also dead,” he said, opening a can of Non Stop, a Ukrainian energy drink. His boyish looks belie his experience of war: since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Lucky has fought at Mariupol and Bakhmut, two of the conflict’s deadliest battles. In Mariupol he endured the siege of the Azovstal steel works. He’s been seriously injured twice and spent time as a prisoner-of-war.
We were sitting in a café in Kostyantynivka, a city on the front line in eastern Ukraine. It’s 17 miles (27km) from Bakhmut, which fell to Russian forces in May after nine months of fighting. The distant rumble of artillery hinted that another battle was under way: last week the Ukrainians claimed their soldiers had already broken through several defensive positions to the north of Bakhmut.
Sipping his drink, its sickly scent of lemon gummy-bears wafting through the air, Lucky joked that Non Stop ought to be the sponsor of this war: “Every battle in Mariupol was fought on this.” Lucky is a sniper with Ukraine’s Rapid Operational Response Unit (popularly known by its acronym, KORD), a part of the Ukrainian police force that supports the army. Its remit is wide, from identifying Russian saboteurs and soldiers on reconnaissance missions to urban combat. One member of KORD described its role to me: “When the regular army can’t do something, we do it.” He was quick and controlled with his rifle, stalking through corridors with feline ease.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive, believed to have started in early June, has been slow to make gains, but Lucky’s team has already helped to liberate Neskuchne, a village in Donetsk. When Ukrainian soldiers hoisted a blue-and-yellow flag over the ruins of a supermarket, Lucky and his colleagues were right behind them. Their job, as he put it, was to “clean up”. He described how they searched basements for any remaining Russian soldiers, detained the ones who surrendered and “fought with” those who refused to. They evacuated an elderly Ukrainian woman: the only villager left after more than a year of occupation.
While Lucky and his colleagues wait to hear where they will be sent next, they train for close-quarter fighting in abandoned buildings near Kostyantynivka. I wasn’t allowed to watch an official session, but Lucky simulated some of the exercises for me and a photographer. He was quick and controlled with his rifle, stalking through corridors with feline ease. Sewn onto his flak jacket was a badge with crossed rifles and an ace of spades, circled by the words: “From a place you will not see comes a sound you will not hear”.
Although Ukraine’s counter-offensive is still shrouded in mystery, it is widely believed that one of its main goals is to sever the land bridge between Russia and Crimea. That could involve liberating Mariupol and Berdyansk, cities in southern Ukraine which are currently occupied by Russian forces. Lucky is hoping for an order to push forward to Mariupol. He has unfinished business there.
Lucky is not his real name – it’s his call sign, a military identifier, and was given to him by his colleagues when he joined the Mariupol branch of KORD in late 2021 after attending police-training college in the city. He didn’t want me to use his real name and revealed few details about his past. He is from the Donbas, a region in eastern Ukraine that contains the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, both now annexed to Russia, and has an older brother who is fighting on the front line. Why Lucky? Some people just are – as he was at the battle of Mariupol.
Soon after Russian tanks rolled over the border, Mariupol was subjected to a brutal siege. Whole neighbourhoods were reduced to burned-out shells, with residents targeted in attacks on shelters and hospitals. Lucky fought to defend Mariupol until Ukraine ordered its forces to surrender last May. He lost many friends, including his sniper partner; some were killed in front of him. (He’s not allowed to say exactly how many men died defending Mariupol.) Lucky reckons over 30,000 civilians were killed, substantially more than the official toll.
Injured by a grenade, he had to run the gauntlet past Russian snipers to get help – “luckily, they kind of sucked”
The first time he was injured was during a grenade attack. Suffering from a wound to his arm, he had to run the gauntlet past Russian snipers to get help – “Luckily, they kind of sucked.” His other narrow escape came after the city centre fell to Russian forces. The Ukrainians were pulling back to the Azovstal steel works, an enormous concrete-and-steel fortress with a network of underground bunkers: the perfect place for a last stand. As Lucky’s unit made its way to Azovstal, the car behind was hit with an anti-tank missile. The man sitting next to him took the brunt of the explosion and died shortly afterwards. Lucky escaped with cuts and bruises and made it to the factory.
For a month, he hunkered down at Azovstal with soldiers and civilians as heavy artillery and air strikes pummelled their hiding place. “Sometimes they dropped three-tonne bombs over a bunker and you could tell right away everyone had died,” he said. Food and water were in short supply and few expected to get out alive.
When the order came to surrender, Lucky, who was ready to keep fighting, felt disappointed and scared. “We knew how Russians treat prisoners-of-war,” he said. A commander from Mariupol’s Azov Battalion had received a photo from one of his men’s phones, showing the soldier dead with his eyes gouged out. The message underneath read: “You’re next”.
Lucky and some of the other captives were taken to a dilapidated building in Olenivka, a notorious prison in Donetsk. More than 600 people were kept in a room big enough for only a third of them. They slept on a concrete floor, were given just a small cup of water each day, and were forced to listen to the Russian national anthem frequently. The Russians made the Ukrainians “do their dirty work”, said Lucky, sending them to Mariupol and Azovstal to collect dead bodies.
Prisoners were beaten, tortured and killed. They cut one man’s veins and left him to bleed. Lucky lost 20kg but escaped the worst of the beatings. “I guess I was lucky,” he said. After four months he was released in a prisoner exchange (the terms of the release prevented him from giving any further details about the horrors he witnessed). Many of his fellow fighters are still locked up in Olenivka.
“We have to go back and win, any way we can,” he said. “I dream of vengeance”.
After a few months of rehabilitation in Kyiv, Lucky returned to work in February. He was thrown right back into the thick of it: a tour of Bakhmut, which was experiencing its most intense period of fighting to date. Two of his eight-man unit were killed, while Lucky had another near-miss. He and his colleagues were on the third floor of a five-storey building when they spotted a Russian soldier in a window over a mile away. He showed me the picture they took with a night-vision camera, pointing out the soldier: a tiny white square against a dark cityscape. They shot at him and missed, only by a metre. Then a helicopter came after them. It fired at the floor above and they were able to run away.
Lucky can’t rest until Mariupol is liberated and thinks Ukrainian troops could reach the city this year. “We have to go back and win this chapter, any way we can,” he said. “I dream of vengeance.” The counter-offensive has so far failed to deliver the lightning gains seen during last summer’s push, when Ukrainian troops won back Kharkiv province. The Russian army had ample time to reinforce its defences before the operation started, while the Ukrainians appear to be moving tentatively to limit losses. Lucky isn’t allowed to say much about the counter-offensive, but there’s one thing he’s keen to stress: we’ve seen just a small fraction of what Ukraine’s forces are capable of.
His confidence is shared by other soldiers I met in the countryside around Kostyantynivka. Men from artillery and drone units lurk in thickets, biding their time before the order comes to return to Bakhmut. They’re itching to settle old scores: everyone has lost something or someone. “We spent a lot of time defending places…It’s really unpleasant to pull back,” a soldier called Oleksandr told me. As we spoke, the air was thick with sulphur from artillery fire. “We will take [Lysychansk, Severodonetsk and Bakhmut] back, and Crimea too, by the end of this year.”
There seems little doubt among these young men that the counter-offensive will be a success and that Ukraine will eventually triumph. They just want the West to send more weapons and ammunition. Lucky isn’t scared of what lies ahead, although he’s keen to avoid another stint in captivity. As long as he has bullets, he plans to keep shooting, even if he’s the last man standing.
“Maybe I’ll kill them or maybe they’ll kill me, but there will be no surrender,” he said.
