Beyond the anger, there is a renewed call to see the heavily anticipated counteroffensive make tangible gains — and quickly. People want Ukrainian lands back. They want Moscow to pay. “The first thing you have to understand,” a Whitehall source recently told me, “is that the Ukrainians got all this fancy new Western kit on the promise of a big counteroffensive. They have to do it. And make it work — or more equipment might not be so forthcoming.”

Military activity is duly intensifying; the so-called spring counteroffensive appears finally to be underway. At the start of this week, Ukrainian forces attacked the area around Velyka Novosilka and Novodonetske in the Donbas region, unofficially kicking things off. But what will happen next? And what, realistically, can be achieved?

The total liberation of the occupied territories, including Crimea, is President Zelenskyy’s official position — not just because he believes it’s morally right, but because he knows that anything less allows Moscow to keep attacking. Yet a chasm remains between what the Ukrainians want and what they have the capacity to do — as they so often point out to the West.

So, rather than liberating the occupied territories, the counteroffensive’s most realistic objective is to try to split them — dividing the Russian forces fighting in the Donbas from those in the south. Key to this will be retaking the area around the city of Melitopol in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Do this and they will sever the “land bridge” that snakes all the way from Russia through the cities of Donetsk, Mariupol and Melitopol, and into Crimea. This bridge was one of Putin’s stated war aims: it allows Moscow to give some military (and thus economic and political) reality to the fiction that those lands are Russian territory. Grain now flows from Melitopol into Russia, while Russian passports flow the other way — whether the locals like it or not.

The problem with this plan, however, is that it’s obvious. Looking at Ukraine’s most successful counterattacks over the past year, deception has always been a priority (which is probably why the spring counteroffensive did not come in spring). Last year’s lightning attack around Kharkiv, that sent the Russians scuttling back across the border, was predicated on convincing the enemy that Ukraine would attack much further south. Kyiv seems well-aware of this. After Ukraine launched a multi-pronged attack in Donetsk on Sunday, Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov tweeted out lyrics from Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”, showing a video of Ukrainian soldiers putting fingers to their lips. “There will be no announcement about the start,” it warned.

Surprise, then, remains the order of the day. But to expect to consistently deceive the Russians is naive. The Kremlin isn’t stupid. Putin knows the continuing feasibility of his occupation rests on their land bridge. Russia is prepared.

Right now, the Ukrainians are making a series of small strikes across the Russian lines. Peppering the enemy like this does two things. First, it tests the lines for weakness. Second, it helps to disguise where a major strike will take place. The broader the range of Ukraine’s preliminary attack, the harder it is for Moscow to work out where they will eventually try to break through. This is partly why Kyiv has also been striking further south, including near the cities of Mykhailivka, Melitopol and Tomak (the latter probably with US-supplied HIMARS systems), all of which are critical to regaining access to the Sea of Azov. Russian channels on Telegram also reported increased fire and assault of positions near Zaporizhzhia.

If Kyiv can recover Zaporizhzhia — whether or not its nuclear power plant functions is another matter — it will sever the land bridge and drive its forces right up against Crimea. Such an advance would not only terrify the pro-Russians living inside the peninsula, but also those ruling in the Kremlin. Ultimately, it would give Kyiv an excellent base from which to try to capture either Donetsk or Luhansk — with the latter being the most likely. The coal mines in Donetsk create a three-dimensional battlefield that Russian forces can use to hide underground, store equipment or booby-trap with ease. The Ukrainians were able to hold out for five months in the salt mines of Soledar by doing the same thing, despite being vastly outnumbered.

The Ukrainians, though, are only half the equation. Many “analysts” on pro-Russia Telegram channels cite the abilities of Putin’s elite forces as a major barrier to a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive. The reality is not so simple. Consider, for instance, the elite 74th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade, which was thrown into the heart of the fighting last May when it successfully crossed the Siverskyi Donets river. Towards the end of last month, the brigade was ordered to leave Donetsk for Belgorod, just across the border from Kharkiv, to deal with new threats there. To get there, it had to take a meandering route around the Ukrainian lines — the Russians clearly have no fresh troops to send.

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The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut

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Meanwhile, there are serious doubts over how “elite” they really are. Soon after crossing the Siverskyi Donets, the forces were chewed up by Ukrainian artillery, reportedly losing over 485 out of 550 men and 80 vehicles. The Brigade is still in the field, but whoever wears their cap badge now is almost certainly not an “elite troop”.

This appears to be part of a wider trend. “In Bakhmut, the Russians recently lost not only a brigade commander, but a Deputy of Political Affairs,” a Whitehall source tells me. “When those people are there, it’s usually because the front is falling apart. The Ukrainians understand this. They’re as close as you can get to the Russians.”

Then there is the problem of ammunition. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, has spent months railing against the Russian high command, specifically Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu, and Commander-in Chief, Valery Gerasimov. “Their shelling rate is very low,” the mandarin continues. “It’s the Prigozhin problem writ large. They are dependent on massive bombardments — [when one calculates] the basic unit of fire for a BM-21 “Grad”, the mobile rocket launcher being used across the country, from what we’re seeing, they have enough for only three days.”

There are a host of other problems, too. “We’re seeing some ancient kit; so, is Russia holding back their best stuff in case of a broader war with Nato or are they simply out of things later than a T60 [tank produced by the Soviets in 1941-42]? And they’ve changed conscript regulations. They can now call up people with Type 1 diabetes, in a country of 150 million people. Just how desperate are they?”

And yet, despite the chaotic and largely ridiculed nature of Moscow’s partial mobilisations, it got the extra forces it wanted. While Western weapons flow into Ukraine, Russia is largely self-sufficient and, more than a year later, its lines still hold. And the troops populating them know a fierce battle is coming.

Yesterday morning, I spoke to a young waiter. “Smells like counteroffensive today,” he said with a grin. By the afternoon, word reached me that more offensive operations were beginning in the east. The people here are angry and increasingly expectant. “Time to advance!” said Dasha as we finished our coffee. Like most Ukrainians, she wants both revenge and progress — anything less would be a disaster.

“Ivan” pauses. He is involved in civilian resistance activities in Southern Ukraine, and he has pointed views on the occupiers, borne from first-hand experience. “Well, actually, the Russians generally just leave their dead behind in the field. So they don’t go back to Russia, in fact. We fertilise our soil with them.”

On the morning of 21 September, President Vladimir Putin went on Russian State TV to face his nation and, by proxy, the world. He told his people that there would be a mass but limited mobilisation for the war in Ukraine. He would be calling up “military reservists, primarily those who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialities and corresponding experience”. It would be Russia’s first mobilisation since World War II, which he announced on the International Day of Peace. For all his flaws, Putin does have a sense of humour.

The speech comprised Putin’s usual mix of mendacity, self-pity and delusion: a toxic combination in autocrats that invariably leads to violence (just ask the people of Iran). He began by talking about the need to protect the “sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Russia”. By this, he meant areas inside Ukraine that Russia has stolen and now occupies.

His declarations come in the wake of the recent Kyiv counteroffensive that has driven Russian troops out of much of the north-eastern parts of Ukraine. Of course, Russia could never have lost to Ukrainians. It was, as Putin explained, the West that is behind Russia’s recent defeats — not that he calls them defeats — because it “wants to destroy our country.” For that reason, the West is trying to “turn Ukraine’s people into cannon fodder”.

According to Putin — and it’s important to understand this — the West unleashed this aggression “back in 2014”. What actually happened was that Russian soldiers marched into Crimea without provocation, stole it, and then invaded eastern Ukraine. It was retaliation against the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution of 2013, which overthrew Kremlin stooge Viktor Yanukovych: Putin could not allow a democratic revolution next door to pass off without issue. Who knew what thoughts it might put into the heads of his own oppressed citizens?

Putin refers to Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan government  as “the result of a state coup”. He is, it seems a stickler for democracy. Between the 23-27 September, there will be “referendums” in the occupied territories of Ukraine over formal annexation to Russia. Pretty much the entire world has, inevitably and correctly, denounced them as a sham.

Putin now posits his unprovoked and militarily foolish invasion of Ukraine as an existential conflict for Russians: “The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia, which must be divided into numerous regions that would be at deadly feud with each other.”

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With its paranoia about Western intentions, nostalgia for a supposedly halcyon USSR, and belief that Russia must fight (ergo, conquer more land) to survive, this statement pretty much sums up the entirety of Putinist foreign policy over the last 15 or so years. The international reaction has been as expected. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was typically eloquent: “Putin wants to drown Ukraine in blood, including the blood of his own men.” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace saw it as an “admission that his invasion is failing”, and that Russia is fast becoming a “global pariah”.

Recent events have undoubtedly been a colossal setback for Russia. There have now been 7 months of fighting and Putin has failed to meet the 15 September deadline he set his army to take the Donetsk region. In that time, it has suffered. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has gone on record admitting that his people may have sustained up to 6,000 casualties. Ukraine claims the figure is over 55,000. The truth lies somewhere in between (though almost certainly closer to Kyiv’s estimation than Moscow’s). And this doesn’t take into account the hundreds of desertions from the Russian army to date.

Back in Moscow, there was even public criticism from former parliamentarian Boris Nadeszhdin. “It’s either full scale war or we get out,” he said on a heated panel discussion on state TV. Nadeszhdin is an “approved” opposition figure, so his comments were to be expected. Nonetheless, he voiced what many are thinking: the war is not going to plan, despite Kremlin claims that its retreat in Kharkiv was a tactical move.

The Ukrainians are, naturally, loving all of this. The Defence of Ukraine tweeted on Tuesday: “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was regrouping”.

Putin is not the only one with a sense of humour.

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Putin's war is just beginning

By Harald Malmgren

“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”

This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.

At first glance, Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”

Discontent is being expressed in various ways. One-way airline tickets are soaring in price and selling out fast. Meanwhile, small-scale protests are making themselves heard in towns across the country, and over 1,000 Russians have now been arrested for dissent. In a country where you can get 15 years in prison for speaking out, these are the acts of either extremely brave, or extremely fed up, people. Both are a grave danger for despotic regimes.

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Then again, Russians are often unhappy. As a Russian friend once said to me: “Yeah, politics sucks, but it’s like the weather: you can’t do anything about it.” Any claim that Putin is in imminent political or indeed personal danger must be dismissed as almost certainly false — with the caveat that in life, and especially in Russia, anything can happen.

Petya understands the truth of all this. “The future of this war depends not only on the force of the Russian army against the Ukrainian army, but also on the views and position of the Russian people.” And he is hopeful. As are most military-minded Ukrainians I speak to. Ignore the noise (or as one so memorably put it, “politician bull poo poo”) and look at what is happening on the ground. Ukraine continues to advance in the North, having retaken over 8000 square kilometres to date, and soon hopes to encircle the city of Kherson in the occupied south (a goal that might be a touch too ambitious).

Kyiv is not letting up. Zelenskyy is now focused on “speed” in liberated areas. Ukrainian forces just captured Bilohorivka, a small village in Luhansk, which is a small but symbolic achievement, as it’s 10km west of the city of Lysychansk, which fell to the Russians in July. This causes Russia more problems. In each new territory that Ukraine seizes back, more evidence of Russian atrocities emerges: more mass graves, more scenes of torture, more tales of the brutality of occupation from those who endured it.

Putin’s response is simple. “People in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, in Lugansk and Donetsk, saw and are seeing now the atrocities perpetrated by the Neo-Nazis in the (Ukrainian-)occupied areas of the Kharkiv region,” he said. It’s a simple rhetorical device beloved of despots everywhere: just deny the reality of everything. And keep denying it. Blame the victims; you know most won’t swallow the nonsense, but the crucial constituency will.

It doesn’t matter that people can see the truth on TV. It doesn’t matter that they can read it in the press and hear it on the radio. This is what totalitarianism is: the Leader controls not just your civil rights and your freedoms, but your very senses, too. What you heard you did not hear; what you saw you did not see.

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But once you go down the road to outright despotism, there is no going back. There can be no failure either, as failure can only lead to downfall or death, and usually both. “Partial mobilisation by Russia means only one thing,” continues Petya. “The defeat of the so-called special military operation declared by Vladimir Putin. And practically, it means that Putin has recognised defeat.”

But if Putin has recognised the defeat of what he thought would be a “special military operation”, he cannot accept the defeat of the wider invasion of Ukraine. In his speech, he said Russia will “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.” He was talking about nuclear weapons — his ultimate trump card. If it’s a sign of weakness (and it is), it’s also a sign of how far nuclear taboos have been eroded. Throughout the whole of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev once mentioned the possibility of nuclear strikes. The Kremlin now alludes to it on a daily basis.

The Russian establishment remains mostly united and on message. Recently, Andrey Gurulyov, State Duma Deputy, expressed a desire to end Ukraine’s existence. Russia’s largest defence company, Rostec, has drastically increased its arms production after bringing in an overtime schedule.

On the ground, though, Petya is equally determined. “Nothing has changed because we still continue to defend our country,” he says. “We see our task as still the same as it was before [the mobilisation]. Our goal is to liberate occupied territories of Ukraine and achieve victory over Russia. Every soldier understands this goal, and the military spirit [morale] is still very high.”

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But to do this, as Petya knows, Ukraine will keep needing Western weapons and support. Key to the Kremlin’s strategy is the belief that we will eventually give up and abandon Ukraine. It’s easy to see the logic behind this. Putin looked at Iraq; to Barack Obama’s failure to keep to his own redline after chemical weapon use in Syria; and most recently to the flight from Afghanistan; and he concluded the West was exhausted and spent.

So far, we have proved him wrong. The EU Council just adopted a new €5bn assistance package. When I met Foreign Office officials recently, the message was simple: full steam ahead with supporting Ukraine. Britain has a new Prime Minister, fully aligned with her predecessor. She has made this abundantly clear.

Petya is keen to emphasise the importance of this continuing support. “To reach victory we need more help from the side of our Western partners,” he says. “We need new armaments, we need new technologies. We see that Russia’s entire policy is its human potential but not technology — winning by quantity, not quality. That’s all they can do.”

Now, across the occupied territories the referendums are beginning. Putin is going to annex larges parts of southern Ukraine to Russia. But as much as he tells himself — and Russians — otherwise, this will only make Ukrainians, yet again, more determined to resist; and the Russians, yet again, more violent. Yesterday morning I received a message from a Ukrainian friend. “News from Kh [Kherson] are bad. Russians with riffles and unforms [sic] coming in villages from house to house and press people top vote. Often threaten if they don’t want to.”

The war is far from over — the violence will continue; Ukrainians will continue to die. And so the West’s involvement must continue, too. There can be no retreat — either for Ukraine, or for the international order we have so painstakingly built over the seven decades, since the last time a tyrant unleashed industrial war on the European continent.

Though just a sad anecdote, this brief exchange highlights two opposing truths about the war in Ukraine. Firstly, that the Ukrainians possess an indomitable will to win, to beat the Russian invaders and reclaim control of their country in its entirety, whatever the sacrifices involved. But the other hard truth is that the human cost to Ukraine of the nation’s resistance to foreign occupation is very steep indeed. Almost everyone you speak to asserts that the official death announcements, currently standing at 200 soldiers killed daily, are understated. “A whole generation of boys is being wiped out,” the man told me. Reporting from the ground now emphasises the losses Ukraine is suffering, as outgunned troops struggle to hold their positions under constant shelling.

A new RUSI report, based on original research on the frontlines of eastern Ukraine and excellent access to senior Ukrainian commanders, outlines the challenge in sobering detail. The Russian army, stung by its operational failures in the war’s opening weeks, has adapted its way of war, abandoning its early attempts at grand encirclements using fast-moving armoured columns. It now relies on artillery to grind down defensive positions along with the Ukrainian army’s ability to resist, and then masses infantry and armour in localised spearheads to seize the ruins with overwhelming force, currently outnumbering the Ukrainian defenders seven to one. This allows “Russian forces to make greater progress in urban fighting, with casualty rates among Russian and Ukrainian units currently approaching parity, despite the Russians usually being on the offensive”. As one Ukrainian commander on the frontline told me, “all we can do here is slow down the Russian advance”.

Instead of sweeping pincer movements, enclosing Ukrainian positions in their armoured jaws, the Russians have adopted a “bite and hold” strategy, nibbling away at small, localised targets with the seeming confidence that time is on Moscow’s side. As the RUSI paper observes, “although Ukrainian troops are much better motivated, Russian numerical superiority and the ability to kill Ukrainian forces with artillery as they manoeuvre mean that Ukrainian units continue to cede ground and to pay disproportionately on the offensive”.

At the heart of Russia’s local successes in the Donbas lie Moscow’s vast advantages in artillery firepower, making up for the lacklustre quality of its infantry, which won such mockery — and perhaps stoked a dangerous over-confidence — from Western observers earlier in the war. Man for man, the Ukrainians remain better soldiers, but they’re now being killed in unsustainable numbers without ever seeing the enemy.

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Striking an urgent note of warning, the report cautions that “several Russian advantages and Ukrainian weaknesses are leading to an attritional conflict that risks a protracted war, eventually favouring Russia”. Firstly, Russia’s artillery firepower is effective not only at reducing Ukrainian strongpoints but also in preventing Ukrainian forces from massing for counterattacks. Russia “fires approximately 20,000 152-mm artillery shells per day compared with Ukraine’s 6,000”, drawing not only from new production but from Soviet stocks, of which “by some estimates, several years’ worth still remains”. Adding to the disparity, long-range Russian missile strikes are destroying Ukraine’s defence infrastructure, eroding the country’s capacity to sustain what may become a years-long war.

Secondly, the supply of replacement materiel from Western stocks has enabled the Ukrainians to survive, but is inadequate to procure a strategic victory. Furthermore, the mash-mash of donated vehicles and weapons systems from Nato’s diverse stocks has left the Ukrainians with a complex and unwieldy supply and maintenance train.

Thirdly, Ukraine’s vast mobilisation of fighting men is providing the necessary mass to fight a high-intensity war at such scale, but at the cost of experience, so that “a shortage of skilled infantry and armoured operators is limiting Ukraine’s offensive combat power”, while “limited staff capacity is limiting Ukraine’s ability to plan and execute combined operations at scale”. As the report’s authors warn, “Ukrainian victory is possible, but only with international support.”

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It all makes for sobering reading: a necessary dose of clarity in an information space muddied by the dopamine-fuelled boosterism of each side’s social media supporters, all proclaiming their own faction’s tactical victories to be decisive, and their own defeats cunning strategic masterstrokes. But as Churchill cautioned after Dunkirk: “Wars are not won on evacuations” — and nor are they won by retweets. Indeed, perhaps the over-confident emphasis on Ukraine’s victories earlier in the war, by feeding complacency in the West and lessening the sense of urgency and threat the country still faced, helped lay the groundwork for the difficult position Ukraine now finds itself in. The hard truth is that to achieve a strategic victory, Ukraine will need to recapture and hold its lost territory, and this goal now seems to be stretching beyond the country’s capabilities.

Yet this does not mean, as Russia’s increasingly self-satisfied online supporters now boast, that Putin has won the war. The Russians too have been suffering heavy losses, and are throwing conscript levies from the separatist republics into the Donbas meatgrinder. CNA’s Michael Kofman has asserted that the “long-term trends still favour Ukraine”, though he hedges that this prediction is “conditional on sustained Western military assistance, and is not necessarily predictive of outcomes”.

In truth, the war’s final outcome is unknown. Yet the fundamental dynamics that persuaded many commentators, including me, to predict an easy Russian victory before the war began have not yet altered enough for confidence in Ukraine’s eventual victory to be absolute. Despite its heavily-publicised, staggering losses, Russia retains the comparative advantage in materiel with which it began the war. Just as dangerous for Ukraine, the country’s support from Western nations remains as piecemeal and wavering as it was from the start.

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Having abandoned illusions of a swift victory, Russia seems to have settled on a strategy of grinding Ukraine down over the long haul, banking on the weariness of the country’s Western allies to make them slowly taper down their support. As so often, Europe’s weakest link is Germany, utterly dependent on Russian energy thanks to Merkel’s willful naivety. With the German economy seemingly entering a death spiral, German politicians warning of energy rationing, and ordinary Germans causing a shortage of woodburning stoves and firewood as they stockpile for the hard winter ahead, Berlin’s already paper-thin resolve to sacrifice its own comfort for Ukraine’s security represents a major hazard for Kyiv. A united Western determination to face down Russia’s aggression is unlikely to survive the winter: to win the war decisively, the Ukrainians will need to claw back ground this summer, or face a grinding war of attrition in which the odds will become increasingly stacked against them.

Certainly, some of the Western supplies trickling into Ukraine have enabled the defenders to hold their ground and make the Russians pay as heavily as possible for the ground they take. In the south, around Kherson, the Ukrainians have been able to launch a counteroffensive, making slow but meaningful gains, an operation on which optimistic narratives of Ukrainian victory are now centring their hopes. The long-range artillery systems for which the Ukrainian government spent early summer pleading have begun to arrive, and are enabling Ukrainian forces to strike Russian munitions stockpiles far behind the front lines, somewhat denting Moscow’s advantage in artillery. Similarly, artillery platforms like the French CAESAR system have lessened the threat of an amphibious assault on Odessa, guaranteeing the survival of at least some of Ukraine’s hold on its Black Sea coastline for the foreseeable future, and forcing Russia’s retreat from the strategically — and symbolically — significant outpost on Snake Island.

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But as the RUSI report’s authors caution, “the scale and longevity of support that Ukraine requires is significant and will stretch many Western allies. These requirements cannot be met through the donation of existing stocks but will instead require the production of new munitions.” This is precisely what our new Chief of General Staff was urging when he warned last week that, due to “ammunition expenditure rates that would exhaust the combined stockpiles of several Nato countries in a matter of days”, Britain and other European nations must begin an urgent programme of wartime-scale munitions production, not just for Ukraine’s sake, but also for our own. As he warned: “We can’t be lighting the factory furnaces across the nation on the eve of war; this effort must start now if we want to prevent [a wider European] war from happening.”

But as always with Johnson, fine words were not matched by the necessary deeds. There is no point involving Britain in a proxy conflict with Russia unless we are prepared to win it. But like other Western nations, Britain is providing Ukraine with enough materiel to fight, but not enough to win. Johnson has staked the remnants of his political reputation on Ukraine yet is unwilling to do what is necessary to either stave off a Russian victory, or to rebuild our own armed forces to meet the grave demands of the moment. Who will replace Johnson, and what their Ukraine policy will be are absolute mysteries. All the high-flown symbolic diplomacy and all the publicity stunts in Kyiv are not enough to stave off the sense that we are sleepwalking into disaster.

Without a massive European rearmament programme, only the United States possesses anything approaching the spare armaments and munitions in sufficient quantities to build a Ukrainian force capable of regaining the initiative on the battlefield. Yet even here the prognosis is grim: the Biden administration, which perhaps foolishly has openly linked rising petrol prices to its support for Ukraine, is plumbing historic lows as it stumbles towards what will likely be catastrophic midterm elections. The ascendant wing of the Republican party is more or less openly supportive of Putin, projecting its distaste for its domestic enemies onto Ukraine, and prominent foreign policy realists in the American defence establishment urge a winnowing of American support for Europe to focus on the greater strategic threat posed by China in the Pacific.

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By David Patrikarakos

Back in Kharkiv, a month and a half ago, I sat in the back of an SUV with two Territorial Defence volunteers, both middle-aged businessmen from Kyiv, as we waited for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team to detonate the unexploded Russian ordnance ahead of us and clear the road to their positions. Russian forces, back then, had just been pushed back from the positions on the city ring road from which they pummeled the battered Saltivka district with artillery fire, and Ukrainian forces were cautiously optimistic while worrying about the winter ahead. “Will it be a problem, petrol prices in America?” Avden, the platoon commander asked me suddenly. “I hear all over America they are paying $5 for petrol. Putin knows this. That’s why we need to win the war quickly, before summer is over.”

But we are halfway through the summer now, and the war is nowhere near over. On my return to Kharkiv, a couple of weeks ago, the bombardments were back every night, as the Russians deployed longer-range artillery to fire randomly on the city. Even if Ukraine conducts a fighting withdrawal from the Donbas over the course of the summer, it is not clear that Russia will pause its slow but accelerating advance, or that border cities such as Kharkiv will not once again come under direct assault. The Ukrainian state responded to the invasion with greater competence and cohesion than anyone expected, and the Ukrainian people have displayed a determination to win against all odds that will go down in history.

But as the RUSI report makes clear, a strategic victory in this war ultimately depends on the will and determination of Western leaders. Fuelled by victories in the Donbas, a Russian narrative will develop that Moscow’s final victory is certain, and support for Ukraine is a doomed and pointless effort. This is not the case. A Russian victory in Ukraine is not inevitable, but preventing this outcome will require a pan-Western effort not far short of full wartime mobilisation, an effort which is so far not taking place. The relentless optimism of Ukraine’s online supporters, though understandable, does not accurately reflect the strategic picture, and may instead be hindering a popular understanding of the grave challenges that lie ahead. Ukrainians are doing everything in their power to win this war, and suffering terribly in the process: but unless their sacrifice and solidarity is matched in Western capitals, it may still not be enough.

Bars and restaurants are donating food to refugees and raising money for the army. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are fundraising for the commercial drones and night vision equipment the troops at the front desperately need. Ukrainian civil society is at the heart of this war, with evidence of the self-sacrifice and creativity of the nation’s embattled people visible at every turn. Pavement billboards display photos of troops grateful for their new night vision goggles above the bank details funds should be directed to; volunteer militias request donations for new vehicles on Telegram; one Ukrainian veteran I met a few years ago has sold his thriving café in a Kyiv hipster district to buy a new drone for his unit.

Andriy Lyubka is a critically-acclaimed young novelist from the sleepy western city of Uzhhorod. I met him 800 miles to the east of his Transcarpathian hometown in the now-frontline Donbas city of Sloviansk. He was dropping off new SUVs, food and generators to fighters from Uzhhorod’s Territorial Defence Forces, the volunteer militia now holding vital positions as dug-in infantry.

In perfect English, he spoke with the smooth, slightly bored fluency of someone used to being interviewed by foreigners, at least in better times. “Now I cannot do my regular work because I cannot concentrate, focus on the work, you know,” he told me, as sirens wailed unceasingly in the background. “It is impossible for me to write or translate. And that is why I decided that I will dedicate myself to this very regular physical work.”

His first fundraising appeal on his Facebook page raised twice as much money as he expected, enabling him to buy two SUVs for Uzhhorod’s poorly-equipped TDF forces in the Donbas. Now he makes regular trips, handing over off-road vehicles sourced in Western Europe to his hometown volunteers fighting at the other end of this vast country. A critic of prewar Ukrainian society — his widely-praised novel Carbide, recently translated into English, is a fable about smuggling Ukraine’s entire population into Western Europe through a hidden tunnel — Lyubka sees the war as having brought a divided nation closer together.

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“It’s maybe the first time I’ve visited Donbas,” he told me. “But now, we have these mutual steps towards one another, because a lot of people from Donbas are living now in our cities in Western Ukraine, and our friends are fighting here at the eastern edge of the front. And of course, it is a very fast method to create one united Ukrainian nation and it works very well. It is one of the main achievements of this war of Putin’s. It is of course opposite to what he planned.”

For the volunteer Territorials from Uzhhorod, fighting far from home in Sloviansk, the war is a difficult duty they cannot shirk. Sociology Professor Fedir Sandor, a 46-year-old father of four, left his job at Uzhhorod University to fight in Donbas. A photograph of him coaching his students through their end of term exams from his frontline trench recently went viral on Ukrainian social media. Meeting him in Sloviansk — he would not take me to his position, because of the constant casualties his fellow soldiers were taking from Russian shelling — Sandor outlined the difficult circumstances he was living in.

“So this is a totally new experience for me, because I’ve never served in the Army, never took part in any military activities and now I’m learning — I used to teach students and now I’m being taught!” A bald, burly man with a thick, fair beard, there is little trace of the Sociology professor of four months ago in the assault-vested combat veteran standing before me. “Today was cluster bombs, sometimes it’s chemical weapons,” he told me. “Yesterday the house where soldiers live was hit and three were wounded. That’s why the main weapon of a soldier is a spade!” he laughed.

The heavy casualty rate among TDF fighters is alarming, and social media videos of volunteers refusing to fight because of lack of weapons, or of wives and mothers protesting against their men being sent to the distant Donbas, are regularly shared by pro-Russian social media accounts. I asked Sandor if he felt well-prepared, as a completely untrained volunteer, when the war broke out. “We were training to use machine guns and firing weapons but it’s a totally different situation we’re learning here,” he replied. “It’s a war not of machine guns but of artillery and IT technologies. But I don’t want my wife to be threatened with rape as it was in Bucha. It’s better for us to stop it here.”

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As young TDF fighters got to grips with their newly-donated SUV — I could hear the sound of, unexpectedly, Fischerspooner’s “Emerge” blasting out of the windows while they twiddled with the controls — I chatted to Andriy, huddling against the unseasonably cold wind. “I think that now, in three weeks, this is our eleventh car,” he said with satisfaction.

Andriy’s sense of accomplishment was visible. Before the war, many ordinary Ukrainians were profoundly dissatisfied with how the country was run: millions had moved to Western Europe, and to Russia, in search of better alternatives. The Maidan revolution had kept the country out of Russia’s orbit — at great cost — but not enough else had changed. But now, Andriy is using his profile as an ascendant writer to provide the equipment that may preserve the lives of his fellow Uzhhorod volunteers fighting at the front. He is doing his bit for the nation in its time of greatest trial and, as with many Ukrainians, doing so gives him a greater personal stake in the new Ukraine being forged by war.

“It is very deep changes that are now taking place in the consciousness of people,” he told me. “So, I think that maybe we even needed something like this earthquake as a big war, you know, because now we are ready to build a new, good country, and the only things we need now are victory, and peace.”

The platoon commander, “Pedro” — soldiers here all use noms de guerre, a tradition drawn from Ukraine’s long history of resistance to foreign occupation — turns to me, nodding at the treeline at the edge of the field. “That’s it,” he says. “This is the closest road I can take. The Russians are behind those trees.”

We park, reversing the SUV under an oak tree to keep it hidden from Russian drones, and hurry, crouching through the long grass, to the mortar section. The steppe landscape of the Donbas region is rippled with folds and gullies; the copses of tall oaks that have taken root in these shallow nooks provide perfect cover for guerrilla war, an archipelago in the endless sea of grass and ripening wheat. The mortar team have been concealed here for two days, in a tiny salient almost fully encircled by the Russian advance, observing enemy positions with their quadcopter and getting ready to strike.

Pedro points at a white house about a kilometre away at the edge of the Russian-held town of Svitlodarsk. It’s the Russian base. “Our Intelligence found a location with Russian mortar positions and an ammunition dump, so now the plan is to go, prepare the mortar, fire and leave immediately,” Pedro had told me as we were leaving. “With a quadcopter you can find a position to hit in 20 minutes — but once we fire, it will only take the Russians a couple of minutes to find our position and return fire.”

It is strangely tranquil, lying in the long  grass fragrant with wild herbs, listening to the cuckoos and the rustle of the oak leaves — until the radios crackle and the mortar squad shout out their orders. Now. In just a few minutes of furious activity, the 120mm mortar belches out a dozen rounds in bursts of flame, as the quadcopter operator sits cross-legged in the grass, ordering them to adjust their elevation, then grins at his tablet screen as the rounds land directly on the Russian position.

Then it’s time to go: we race to the SUV and drive off at high speed, bouncing over bumpy dirt tracks until we reach the village road, as the retaliatory Russian artillery rounds land harmlessly on the road behind us. Pedro lights a cigarette, watching the road anxiously until the mortar squad join us in their pick-up truck.

Today was a good day for Pedro. He’s brought all his men back unharmed from another mission, and the target was destroyed. The following day, Pedro, who has an ongoing social media feud with mercenaries from the far-Right Russian Wagner Group on the other side of the frontline, in which they threaten to kill each other, would show drone footage of the Russian soldiers in their trenches getting obliterated by his mortar fire on his phone, overlaid with a death metal soundtrack and cry-laughter emojis. Welcome to war in 2022.

I spent a week in rural Donbas with Pedro’s platoon, fighters from the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps or DUK, the militia of the nationalist Right Sector party, on their first mission since they were formally absorbed into the Ukrainian army as a special forces unit just a couple of weeks earlier. Formed during the Maidan revolution, in which they played a prominent role fighting the police and unseating Ukraine’s then pro-Russian government, Right Sector has since played a starring role in Russian propaganda as evidence of Ukraine’s takeover by Right-wing radicals.

It’s nonsense, Volodymyr Demchenko told me, back at their rear base in central Ukraine. Known as “Fransuz” or “Frenchman” (because his great-grandfather served in the French army after World War One), Demchenko is a 33-year-old documentary filmmaker from Kyiv with a hipster haircut and an engaging manner, who’s also become something of a Twitter celebrity since detaining the journalist John Sweeney for breaking curfew in Kyiv earlier in the war.

“Right Sector is a Christian, conservative organisation. Okay? Done,” he told me in his office cluttered with piles of books — Aristotle, Kafka, Umberto Eco — a postcard of Ernst Jünger propped on his bookcase next to the cafetiere and scent diffuser. “Like, I’m a liberal. I support LGBT, I have, like, all the time conversations about that here with the guys, and you know what, here I have freedom of speech to say that.”

Fransuz insisted that far-Right political movements were stronger in Western Europe than in Ukraine, citing the strong showing of those parties in the West compared to their marginality here. Yet Western journalists fixate on the far-Right symbols occasionally worn by Right Sector fighters, he told me with a weary sigh, “but I don’t think it’s a very interesting story, to be honest. They just want to be badass, it’s fucking cosplay, man. But if you’re talking person to person and try to find this ideology in him you wouldn’t. But here we don’t tell you what you can wear or what you can’t wear, because it’s bad for morale, every man can explain these things for himself.”

Formed as a coalition of Right-wing organisations during the Maidan Revolution, Right Sector suffered from an internal split when Andriy Biletskiy broke away to found the more radical Azov movement in spring 2014, which has since surpassed Right Sector in numbers and media attention — both good and bad. Part of the rift between them was Right Sector’s clampdown on far-Right symbolism, an aesthetic Azov leant heavily into until its recent rebranding.

Neither fascist nor National Socialist, despite the lurid reputation it has been given in Russian media, Right Sector instead draws a line of descent from both Ukraine’s early 20th century OUN nationalist movement for independence from the Soviet Union (whose red and black flag, for the rich Ukrainian soil and the blood shed for it, it has adopted) and from the anarchic, freewheeling Cossack war bands of Early Modern Ukraine. At times, the government has found the group a little too anarchic for comfort: in 2015, Ukraine’s previous president Petro Poroshenko futilely ordered them to disarm after a shootout with police in the western city of Mukachevo.

While foreign journalistic depictions of the group tend to flicker inconsistently between “Right-wing” and “far-Right,” Right Sector has always rejected the latter label, while Ukrainian academic specialists on Right-wing politics have stressed that the group’s electoral programme “does not contain any specifically ultra-Right or ultra-nationalistic ideas” and instead “seems to reflect a rather liberal worldview”. The group’s mission statement on its website asserts that its goal is “Ukraine’s liberation from both external — Kremlin’s — and internal occupation of clan-oligarchic groups, as well as struggle against the imposition of extreme-liberal, cultural-Marxist ideas upon the Ukrainian society.”

In a recent statement aimed at an English-language audience, the party’s leader Andriy Tarasenko insisted that Right Sector “is a nationalist formation; we unequivocally stand against all the fascist or Nazi things that Putin attributes to us. This is purely Russian propaganda, and we have nothing to do with such ideological positions.” Characteristically, the statement also notes that “We consider president Putin a liar and in general our people call him a ‘dickhead.’”

Three months and much fighting into his DUK career, Fransuz was a constant presence in the group’s rear base. One day I saw him staggering along beneath boxes of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet receivers, which have won great publicity for their use by Ukrainian forces. These must be useful at the front, I suggested. He looked at me like I was an idiot. “This? No way man, if we took them to the front, as soon as we turned them on the Russians would send a missile right on top of us, as soon as they see all this data going up into the sky.” He shook his head and carried on with his endless bustling around.

Fransuz joined DUK at the beginning of the war, taking part in the defence of Kyiv, and then the heavy fighting in Barvinkove, where they destroyed dozens of Russian tanks in close fighting, and lost their battalion commander and 13 men to Russian shelling. In Barvinkove alone, they destroyed 64 Russian armoured vehicles in their two-month deployment. “We had a position on the road and they kept sending tanks, and we kept destroying them, every day — it was like a cemetery for tanks”, laughed Hasid, the group’s officer in charge of reconnaissance (he comes from the town of Uman, a pilgrimage site for Hasidic Jews, hence the name). “We saw one column, 600 vehicles. We let them keep coming, then we hit them from the front and kept hitting them from all directions and then we escaped in this car, driving over fields,” he said, pointing at a battered Skoda Octavia.

“Soviet tactics are just to use mass, lots of tanks and lots of artillery, infantry aren’t important in their doctrine,” Hasid added. “We instructed our new volunteers to use small groups in cars that are very mobile and can ambush huge columns — this technique will be in the handbooks now, I’m sure.” Have the Russians learned from their earlier mistakes? “No, No, No,” he replied. “Fear and panic. Even if the soldiers learned, their commanders still give them the same orders — and if they disobey, they shoot them.”

But in the Donbas, the Russians do seem to have learned from their mistakes: massing their troops together behind a devastating wall of artillery fire, the invaders are creeping forward every day, taking ground and eroding the Ukrainian army’s ability to fight. With the Ukrainians suffering up to 200 soldiers killed and 500 wounded each day, according to President Zelenskiyy, the next few weeks in the Donbas may decide the outcome of an increasingly brutal war.

“I was on the frontline from 2014, but now the situation is really crazy, fuck, lots of planes, artillery, everything,” “Veloshka”, the commander of DUK’s medical unit and wife of Right Sector’s leader Andriy Tarasenko, told me. A big woman with bleached blond hair and sleeve tattoos, Veloshka smokes and swears incessantly. “When you’re killed,” she told me, “I’ll be really upset, fuck, it will be an international scandal. Fuck, maybe I should just give you a puppy and send you away home,” she added, nodding at the litter of sleeping puppies on a nearby bed.

DUK’s two ambulances, named Hope and Pikachu, veterans of the Maidan revolution, are now serving with their crews on the Donbas frontline, painted dark green and hidden under trees in a secret location near Bakhmut. Soon I would join them, to meet and live with the DUK fighters on the frontline. Scrolling through Twitter in the meantime, watching Russian drone videos of Ukrainian positions being obliterated by accurate artillery fire, was not a reassuring experience.

The DUK battalion has deployed a company-sized formation to the Bakhmut frontline, divided into an HQ element and a number of small sections living in deserted cottages among the local Russian-speaking population. I was sent to live with 1 Section, a squad of artisanal craftsmen, farmers, writers and eccentrics, most from the West-Central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, who had joined up together at the start of the war. On my arrival in the courtyard of their cottage, I was seated down at their table under the trees and given a bowl of meaty borsch, by Kuts, a lean, heavily tattooed 48-year-old with a Cossack chub haircut and long drooping moustaches.

Kuts — the name refers to a type of benign devil in Ukrainian folk belief — is a jeweller and traditional swordsmith from Kharkiv. He showed me a medieval longsword on his Facebook page he was in the process of completing when the war began: “I didn’t get to finish it because of the katsabs (butchers),” he told me. Pulling out his self-forged, oak-handled combat knife from his assault vest, Kuts told me that the oak is a tree of great significance in Ukrainian folk culture, and that he saw his service in DUK as following the traditions of his ancestors. “Right Sector is like a modern Cossack Sich,” he told me. “Different people have gathered together from all walks of life in a time of need. We don’t care about gender, preferences, age. We learn a lot about our traditions, our ancestors, our family values, in order to not lose our connection to our Ukrainian culture, because those traditions are what make us Ukrainians. And now we have to fight for them.”

What is their political orientation, then, I asked? “Cossack Sich,” replied Kuts. “It’s a movement that doesn’t tolerate any political oligarchies, it stands only for the interests of the nation,” added “Bayonet,” a shy, humorous middle-aged man with a long reddish beard. “We are the Cossacks who will give our lives for Ukraine, without question, or we’ll take the enemy’s life. The Russians have a 10 to 1 advantage in this offensive, but every one of us can take out 100 Russians.” And what if Russia wins the war? “Impossible! No, No, Never!” replied Kuts in English, “Our motto is Ukraine or death, so they would have to kill us all.”

“The Russians will never be able to win a war here without using mercenaries,” he added. “They want to eradicate us because they fear us. Ukraine was always the best nation at fighting, and now we have confirmed that we Ukrainians are warriors at heart, and not any of this other bullshit.” Will postwar Ukraine be different, I asked. “Yes!” said Kuts, “We must kill the internal enemies, the fucking separatists. We are not the ones that just talk, and sit at home, the ones that have a ‘practical solution.’ We always look our enemy straight in the eyes, even the dead ones.”

Like other nationalist battalions, Right Sector’s deployment in the long-running Donbas conflict has long been controversial: they were accused of human rights abuses against suspected separatists by Amnesty International in the war’s 2014 opening months, a period characterised by the kind of intimate brutalities typifying civil wars. It is difficult to gauge how they are viewed by locals in the Donbas. “When I heard Right Sector were going to liberate my village, I was like ‘Uh, we’re all going to die,” one former Donbas resident, Sasha, told me, laughing at the memory: now she fights as a member of the group.

But for now, the Ukrainian government has embraced Right Sector. Previously used as a deniable proxy to seize strategically important positions from the separatist forces during the long years of frozen conflict in the Donbas, it has been formally incorporated in the Ukrainian army as a special forces unit, tasked with harassing the advancing Russians. It’s a mixed relationship, DUK fighters told me, in which the disadvantage of increased bureaucracy is outweighed by the sudden flow of new weapons donated by Western countries. I sat at the table one day as the group prepared a shopping list of new equipment — sniper scopes, night vision goggles, thermal weapons sights — to obtain from the government following a request from Pedro.

“It’s OK now we’re in the army,” 22-year-old Anna, or “Athena” told me in flawless English, with a remarkably posh accent acquired from watching Dr Who and Torchwood. “It’s a way of getting our weapons and doing our job more effectively, so it’s worth the extra regulations. The regular infantry have in some ways a more difficult job. We go on special missions and the rest of the time are just chilling, but they spend all their time in foxholes under constant shelling. It’s a very difficult job.”

The group is recruiting heavily, with its rear base in Central Ukraine crammed with new recruits training for combat beneath the tall trees, and learning how to use the new heavy machine guns donated by the West. Most seem apolitical: when asked why he joined DUK, one recruit, the local sales manager for a large German company, told me it was simply because he didn’t want his wife to be raped and murdered by Russian soldiers, “like in Bucha”.

Most have joined DUK for the chance to see combat as soon as possible, without the petty regulations of regular army life. Unlike the regular army, DUK has an anarchic, democratic atmosphere in which soldiers discuss orders with their commanders and feel free to add their own suggestions. “No-one here asks if you’re a nationalist, or an anarchist,” Athena told me. Like Fransuz and most DUK fighters I spoke to, she’s not a member of the Right Sector party. “We’re all just here to do our job.”

Brought up in a Russian-speaking Catholic family in Vinnytsia, the daughter of a surgeon, Athena was a poet and English translator before the war, with a sideline writing essays for American college students. She first volunteered for frontline service at age 18, straight from university. With her black hair cut in a neat bob, she was a distinctive presence whenever she returned from special missions in her baggy, second-hand British uniform, shrugging off her heavy body armour and ammunition pouches, and leaning her heavily-customised assault rifle against the table as she lit up a cigarette.

“I’m not a feminist,” she told me. “I don’t like modern feminism, they march around but don’t have solutions for anything.” A child prodigy, she was a contestant on the Russian version of Britain’s Brainiest Kid aged 11, and recently published a letter to the host, a Putin supporter, condemning the Russian invasion. In a perfect illustration of the complexities of the Ukraine war, Athena’s Russian husband, a political dissident, is currently fighting as a member of the Ukrainian army, while her uncle was a senior officer in the Russian army.

“Me and my husband would quarrel with these sweet little grannies who’d call us butchers and fascists at Victory Day parades in Kyiv, when they’d be shouting ‘Donbas, we are with you!’” she told me. “And we were war veterans — I remember one little granny calling us butchers and baby killers,” she tutted, dragging on her cigarette.

But the current war in the Donbas is not going well for Ukraine. Concentrating its resources in one front, the Russian army is now driving through Ukrainian lines like a slow, unstoppable bulldozer. In his secret cottage headquarters elsewhere in the village, I met the company commander “Tuman” (“Fog”), a map of the ever-encircling frontline spread out across the coffee table in front of him. A 29-year-old veteran of the French Foreign Legion, who had fought in Mali, Tuman had flown back to Ukraine from his job selling cars in Provence just before the war broke out, leaving his eight-month pregnant wife at home.

“It’s like the first part of World War I here,” he told me, “when massive artillery started to appear but there were still no trenches. During my service abroad in the Legion I’ve never seen such intensity of fire. But taking into account the intensity of fighting we cannot just wait around. We are taking part here in active defence, we are doing counter-artillery and counter-sabotage work. All we can do is slow down the Russian advance.”

The disparity of materiel between the opposing forces was total, Tuman told me. “Russia uses almost all the resources they have, strategic aviation and submarines. It’s a force created for a war against Nato and now they use it all against us.” But he had no option but to fight, Tuman told me. A member of Right Sector since the very beginning, in the Maidan revolution, he told me: “I fight for freedom. My country is just a bit older than I am, but Ukraine is ready and I’m ready. Now we have the majesty of fighting, even though it sounds pathetic. We are not helpless. We can fight!”

Tuman’s deputy in holding back the Russian onslaught is his platoon commander Pedro, a giant of a man, covered in tattoos of ancient Ukrainian warriors and kings, the solar wheel of Slavic paganism on his chest, and a rosary around his neck — he’s a practicing Catholic from the Western city of Ivano-Frankivsk. Fighting alongside his younger brother “Bob”, Pedro plans and leads the missions into no-man’s land to take some of the pressure off the regular troops struggling to hold the line.

I joined Pedro’s mortar team on another mission, jostled in the back of his SUV as the fighters in the front nodded along to heavy metal on Ukraine army radio, swerving at top speed to avoid the pheasants scuttling along the country lanes, the driver scrolling through his mobile phone for the latest checkpoint password. The Russians had spotted the mortar position, I was told, and now was the last chance to hit them from the location before it was abandoned. Hidden in the undergrowth, the mortar squad had laid out a dozen heavy mortar rounds ready to be fired: “Admin”, a young Tatar Muslim from Russian-annexed Crimea, and a chef before the war, showed me where he had scrawled “Crimea is Ukraine” on them in marker pen.

As the sun began to dip over the steppe, the squad fired the heavy rounds at the Russians in quick succession, as other fighters pointed at the sound of munitions buzzing dully through the air around us. “Is that ours?” one asked, to a shrug. The layout was confusing: the Russians were more or less everywhere around. The Russian return fire landed harmlessly in the fields a few hundred metres away, a couple of mortar shells exploding in scattershot puffs of grey dust. My driver, “Kolos”, pointed at the thick plumes of black smoke now rising from the white building on the edge of Svitlodarsk where the Russian target was based. “Good work,” he said.

But for DUK’s fighters, their mission in the Donbas is frustrating. Their semi-guerrilla war of harassing Russian troops is necessary, but not what they came here for: they want to be assaulting the Russians head on. Unlike the infantry forces holding the trench positions on the first lines, they are based in a location where they can reach any sector of the Bakhmut front within a short drive, but which is itself strangely free of Russian artillery fire.

Driving around Bakhmut’s outskirts, you see the forested hillsides wreathed in smoke, and the flashes of cluster munitions as the Russians rain death on the Ukrainian defenders. But DUK have been deployed in what they see as a frustratingly boring island of rural peace at the heart of the largest war in Europe since 1945. The roar of outgoing Ukrainian artillery is constant, and the sound of incoming Russian artillery, the different rocket launcher types discernable from the pitter-patter tempo of their munitions, punctuates the day as it falls on nearby Ukrainian lines. But only once, when an incoming Russian missile made the windows quake, and sent me out for an unnerved 3am cigarette under the stars with the sentries, did Russian artillery feel like more than an offstage menace. “It’s no good just sitting on your ass,” Petrik complained to me, “I need to work.”

But apart from their combat missions, the squad lived lives of quiet rural domesticity, cooking, cleaning and smoking endless cigarettes, watching the Netflix show Euphoria on their phones, and enjoying the cool breeze in the trees. For Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the Donbas is strangely bucolic. Sitting under the cherry trees, the long days spent with them were like something from a Russian novel: one day we went to the village banya together, where a crop-headed boy shoved chopped wood into the furnace as we sweated ourselves clean in the steam (“Now you are one of us,” Athena told me afterwards). They bought jugs of raw milk from local farmers, and accepted big enamel bowls of cherries from the villagers, brought as gifts. “You know what they say,” Athena told me, “our soil is so fertile because of the dead bodies of our enemies.” One day, I went mushroom-picking in a nearby forest with the medical unit, as bursts of machine gun fire echoed dimly through the trees from somewhere nearby. “Thor,” a chubby, kindly paramedic pointed angrily at a pile of trash local picnickers had left under a tree: “Fucking human pigs,” he said.

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With a tattoo of a Carpathian mountain scene on one arm, and the portrait of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko on the other, Thor had joined up with his pink-haired wife “Iren” who he was serving alongside in the medical unit: “I would feel sad if we were apart,” he told me. For Thor, love of Ukraine was not just for the abstractions of flags and borders, but for its mountains and forests, lush meadows and broad flowing rivers. He told me that he had joined Right Sector at the beginning of the war because he liked its ideology, and because of its reputation from Maidan: “My mama likes Right Sector,” he smiled. What was its ideology, I asked? “Killing Russian bitches!” interrupted “Lektor,” a 19-year-old medical student from Lviv. Thor waved him away smiling. “It is following the example of our ancestors, our grandfathers who created this country, for the independence of our nation, for living by our own rules. We don’t need foreign things from anyone, and we won’t take what is not ours from anyone. This is our war of independence.”

If there’s one thing that bothers DUK’s fighters most of all, it’s Right Sector’s reputation in Russian media — and often in the West — as extreme Right-wing radicals. Tuman was furious the day I arrived because a French journalist who had visited them at their rear base for a day described them as neo-Nazis, an epithet based on the self-consciously edgy frontline aesthetic of a minority of their fighters rather than their words or deeds. “Just write what you see,” he replied, when I asked him how he would describe their ideology, “We want truth, just as it is. We can allow ourselves the truth.” Some of their  tattoos give off a fearsome appearance, though one belied by the gentleness and hospitality of the soldiers themselves The rare Nazi-adjacent markings were written off as legacies of youthful dalliances with more hardline groups; pressed on their beliefs, all the fighters disavowed any extreme sentiment:

“We’re not fascists, you might sometimes see people wearing these symbols but it’s not serious, we do it to troll the Russians because they call us Nazis,” Athena insisted. “We understand in reality that the Nazis were as bad for Ukraine as the Communists were. Me and my husband have got anarchist friends, fascist friends, nationalist friends, lesbian friends — that’s just how it is here in Ukraine. Before you go to war, you’re into Right-wing politics, political violence and stuff, and then when you come back having seen it, you just want to drink cocktails in Kyiv and spend time with your family, enjoying life.”

“A lot of notions about Right Sector come from liberal left propaganda, but in reality we are just ordinary Ukrainians defending our country, our sovereignty, and our Christian values,” Lis or “Fox,” the section commander, a taciturn blond-bearded 27-year-old solicitor from Vinnytsia told me. A fan of death metal, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and the Warhammer 40k gaming universe, Lis is the local head of Right Sector in Vinnytsia. “2014 was a hybrid war, and this is a Great War,” he told me. “But it doesn’t matter which war, the Russians will die either way. You have to believe in the [40k] God-Emperor,” he grinned.

Lis joined DUK along with Athena, Petrik and “Boroda” or “Beard,” a dark-complexioned hipster with a top knot hair style and long black beard. A beekeeper and mead brewer, Boroda missed his hives. “It’s very relaxing working with the bees. When I’m with them I forget about everything else. When I lived in an apartment in Vinnytsia, I kept them on my balcony,” he smiled shyly.

“We call him “Moldova” because perhaps he is a gypsy,” laughed Athena, “but he’s a good gypsy.” “I’m a quarter gypsy,” Boroda replied. “All gypsies are cockroaches,” replied Kuts, spitting on the floor, as they all laughed, Boroda included. Like all soldiers, especially in elite units, the squad roasted each other mercilessly. The highlight of each evening was Petrik’s phone calls to a drunkard wannabe recruit, entirely unfit for service, in which he pretended to be a strict colonel imparting life advice as they all clustered around the blue glow of his mobile phone stifling their laughter. They’d play fight constantly, fencing with metal pipes, each taking turns to cook and clean, and talking about the first drink they’d have when they got home: alcohol is strictly forbidden on the front line, its place filled by luridly colored energy drinks. Petrik, who had just bought a 32-acre farm, was angry at the Russians for — along with everything else — preventing him from sowing his first cabbage crop.

Athena, too, is resigned to the conflict between her desire to fight and her dream of an ordinary middle-class European life. “Ukraine has always been a country at war. It’s just geographical determinism, I guess,” she told me. “It was weird going back to Kyiv the first time after the frontline, but I guess that’s what we’re fighting for. I want people to drink iced lattes, smoke weed, make love. After the war I want to live my best life, because I had lots of friends who can’t do that any more.”

But instead of living their best lives at home, they are billeted in the far east of Ukraine in a war now turning in Russia’s favour, among a local Russian-speaking population with whom relations are at times strained, many of whom would prefer to live under Russian rule. While some local farmers smile and wave, and bring gifts of food, others are distinctly unfriendly. “Some are friendly, some not, some are enemy. You won’t know until they kill you,” cautioned “Paul”, a softly-spoken middle-aged tour guide from Kyiv turned paramedic.

Walking through the long grass and undergrowth of the semi-abandoned village to the local shops with the heavily armed soldiers, to buy energy drinks and ice creams from a pointedly unfriendly shopkeeper, Athena highlighted the eerie atmosphere of dereliction. “It’s weird out here, it’s almost as bad as Detroit,” she said with wonder — Athena had spent a year in a Michigan high school as an exchange student. All from elsewhere in Ukraine, they were fighting among a local population whose loyalty to the nation was not guaranteed, and found it a strange and frustrating experience.

“In the majority of countries, there’s one national language, but the problem here is that people refuse to use the national language,” Kuts said. Kuts had grown up in a Russian-speaking family in the border city of Kharkiv, he told me, but now he disavowed the language in search of his Cossack roots. He had been a Young Pioneer under Communism, he told me in broken English: “Shit. Fuck Communism, Fuck Lenin.” “Hora”, a young commercial filmmaker, added that because he was from Western Ukraine, he had never been bothered by the language question, but seeing people here refusing to speak Ukrainian distressed him.

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The truth about Ukraine's far-Right militias

By Aris Roussinos

“I want to make a big explosion in Moscow,” Bayonet, who had lived a few years working in Balham, suddenly announced in English. “Voronezh, Rostov and the Kuban [in southern Russia] are Ukrainian lands,” he continued. “We stand for historical justice, and we have to return these lands to the nation.” But Ukrainian forces are struggling simply to maintain their foothold in the Donbas. If and when the Right Sector fighters get their wish and tackle the Russians head on, many, perhaps most of them will die over the course of the summer. “We know that if the Russians capture us, as Right Sector, they will kill us straight away, on the spot,” Athena told me. “And for me, as a woman, well… you understand what would happen. That’s why we each carry a grenade with us.”

Returning to Dnipro, a haven of charming cafes and hipster cocktail bars a five-hour drive west from the front, the hotel bellboy who guided me through the blacked-out corridors to my room had a Right Sector screensaver on his phone; he beamed with pride when told we had just spent time with them. Catching up with a liberal Ukrainian friend, I told her I had just been at the front with Right Sector: “Yeeees!” she replied, “They are super cool!”

“Compared to other nationalist movements,” Lis told me, “Right Sector didn’t mess up like the others. Right Sector is the best nationalist movement in Ukraine.” But while vital in war, they know they are a marginal presence in peace. “The government will try to eradicate us after the war,” Petrik warned, “because they are afraid of us, because we stand for the truth. The politicians are afraid of revenge.” Tuman, too, sees the war as a watershed moment for Ukraine and for Right Sector, the greatest clarifying moment since independence in 1991. “This is like our postponed war for independence,” he told me. “Maybe we could have had war in 1991 and a peaceful 2022. But Ukraine didn’t introduce fierce wartime laws. The economy wasn’t transformed. After this war everything must change.”

“I guess the Russians will be here in a week,” 65-year-old Viktor tells me as he sits on a bench chewing sunflower seeds in the empty streets of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine. “I’ll stay of course — I have nowhere else to go. It’s fucking horrible. There’s no gas, and already my wife and I are preparing paraffin lamps for when the electricity goes. What else can we do?” Once a thriving industrial town centered on its vast salt mine, Bakhmut is now almost deserted as the bloody war in Ukraine’s Donbas region reaches deeper into Ukrainian government-held territory.

Entering Bakhmut, at the end of a long drive passed by military vehicles going towards the front, and ambulances and fuel trucks coming back, a line of black smoke clouds stands out against the blue sky as Ukrainian artillery pounded the Russian tanks approaching the city limits. Elite Russian forces, believed to include the 90th Guards Tank Division and the VDV paratroops who were so badly mauled in the failed encirclement of Kyiv at the beginning of the war, are now only around 5km to the east of Bakhmut, and 9km to the north. Images from social media indicate the Russian army has deployed its new, and rare BMPT “Terminator” vehicles, specifically designed for gruelling urban combat, on the approaches to the city, perhaps indicating preparation for an assault sooner than many observers expect.

Ukraine’s stunning and unexpected string of victories over the Russian invaders in the first phase of the war may have bred a sense of complacency in well-meaning outside observers. A narrative has evolved, particularly among Ukraine’s Western supporters, that the Russian army is a paper tiger, that its soldiers are a rabble of undermotivated conscripts and that its generals are inept. But here in the Donbas region, where the Russians have concentrated their forces behind a creeping, devastating wall of artillery firepower, Russia holds a clear advantage.

Lightly-equipped and poorly-trained Territorial Defence volunteers have been sent from Ukraine’s western regions to plug the gaps, as the grinding war of attrition by artillery takes its toll on the regular army. Outnumbered by seven to one in some areas, according to Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy, Ukrainian forces are outranged by Russian artillery and outmatched by newly-concentrated Russian armour. Russian language propaganda, rarely transcribed in Western narratives, is exultant: Ukrainians are bracing for the worst.

The Ukrainian government’s official messaging seems to be preparing the country for hard news, with Zelenskyy warning the nation that “the situation in Donbas is extremely difficult” as the Russians push towards Sloviansk and Severodonetsk. Last Thursday, Zelenskyy’s presidential advisor Oleksiy Arestovych warned that Russia is trying to create “a new Mariupol” in the Donbas, adding that “we are in a difficult situation, and it will get worse”, as “there may be encirclements, abandonment of positions, and heavy casualties” because “they have superiority in artillery and aviation… To put it mildly, we’re barely afloat.”

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The day before I arrived in the Donbas, Russian troops captured the town of Lyman 20km northeast of Sloviansk, well within artillery range, and are now focusing their fire on the small town of Rayhorodok, the last settlement between Sloviansk and the Russian army. From the north and from the southeast, outside Bakhmut — the Russian pincer already threatening to encircle thousands of the Ukrainian army’s most experienced and best equipped forces is now arching wider to slowly squeeze Sloviansk itself.

Even as Ukrainian forces fortify the Donets river that is now their most valuable asset, a Russian breakthrough from the town of Popasna to the east, for years one of Ukraine’s best-defended positions, is endangering what remains of Ukraine’s narrow toehold in the Donbas. The open steppe landscape of the Donbas is harder terrain for Ukrainian troops to defend than the the thick forests of the country’s north, and it is now the Ukrainians who face the challenge of moving men and materiel across overextended supply lines, nearly 1,000 miles from the western cities where NATO military aid is arriving in heavily-publicised but sporadic deliveries

Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the Donbas region is divided between two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, both ravaged by eight years of conflict with Russian-backed separatist fighters. Today the Russians control more than half of Donetsk region, and 95% of Luhansk. The government in Kyiv now faces the difficult choice of either abandoning Severodonetsk to preserve its forces intact, handing Russia another sizeable victory after Mariupol and Lyman, or defending the city in what will likely be bloody and destructive urban fighting, risking the annihilation of its garrison if they are cut off from resupply.

At an impromptu press conference in Bakhmut, Luhansk’s regional governor Serhei Hayday, now effectively in exile from his own province, stepped out of an armoured van in full tactical gear, emblazoned with his nom de guerre “Ronin”, to summarise the situation. Forced out of his own regional base, Severodonetsk, by Russia’s grinding advance, Hayday insisted that Ukraine would one day recapture its lost territories in Luhansk, while hinting that a tactical withdrawal might soon be necessary.

“Our main goal is to win the war, not to win a battle for one city, Severodonetsk,” he told me, ”It’s a great pain for me, because it’s the administrative centre of Luhansk oblast and this is my native city. I was born there, I have a lot of connections with it. But I understand we need to preserve our soldiers, to regroup… If the retreat is necessary, well, such is the fate of the city. But we will win in the end.” As he spoke, a Russian shell crashed somewhere into the city behind him, setting off the car alarms around us. As for Bakhmut and Sloviansk in Donetsk, the Russians have not crossed the Donets river, Hayday told me, “but during the next two months they might advance. But we will stop them. The main thing is to receive Western help as soon as possible.”

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For the Ukrainian army, long-range artillery that can match Russia’s concentrated and overwhelming resources is the only thing that can turn the tide. Earlier in Bakhmut, a soldier shopping for supplies at one of the last open mini-markets complained about the shelling he had undergone. “I’m just so tired, I need to sleep,” he sighed. At a medical facility in Bakhmut, before we were ordered away by a furious Ukrainian officer, army medics sat around smoking while lightly wounded soldiers limped away from treatment, and a soldier scrubbed a blood-soaked stretcher clean with a broom.  While a great deal of effort has been expended by OSINT analysts on totting up Russian casualties, there has been far less interest in recording Ukrainian casualty figures, about which the Ukrainian government is guarded. Zelenskyy has recently announced that between 50 and 100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed every day in Donbas.

So far, Bakhmut itself has only been lightly shelled compared to the defensive lines being pummelled outside the city, but civilians have been killed, and nerves are fraught. “There are bombs, shells, shooting but here we still are,” 75-year-old Vladimir shrugged as he waited for a trolley bus, “My house is on the outskirts of the city and my windows are all shattered. But I’ll stay, it’s fine, what else can I do?”

Outside the mini-market, as Ukrainian troop convoys and volunteer ambulances rumbled through its handsome neoclassical boulevards, a 36-year-old woman who preferred not to be named complained about the situation for the last civilians left living in Bakhmut. “The Russians are bombing civilian houses, and my house was shaking from the impacts,” she told me, “People nearby were killed in their beds. Humanitarian aid is distributed chaotically, some people take all the food and some are left with nothing. There’s no order here, no cash left in the ATMs, and we have no bread. I can’t leave, I have a beautiful house here, I had a wonderful life in this city, we just want them all to go away and leave us to live like we did before.”

Bakhmut’s civilian police have reportedly already withdrawn from the city, apart from the detachments manning checkpoints on the outskirts, and the distribution of aid is difficult as government infrastructure crumbles under the pressure. Outside a local government building, civilian volunteers unloaded a white van piled high with loaves of bread sent from a bakery in Dnipro, four and a half hours’ drive away, to be delivered in the city and in nearby villages wracked by fighting. At a playground nearby, a pair of middle-aged women sat on a bench watching their young children scramble over the slides, whooping with joy in the early summer sun. “We are from Soledar,” a frontline town 15 km north on the road to Severodonetsk, Olena, a pharmacy worker, told me. “Everything is destroyed there, by tanks, by Grad rockets, everything.”

“We don’t want the Russians to come here,” her friend Svetlana added, shaking her head, “We don’t know where to go, we have small kids, all the factories are closed and we have no money to live anywhere else.”

In the nearby city of Sloviansk, talked up by Ukraine’s well-wishers as an impregnable fortress, the head of the Civil Military Administration, Vadim Lyakh is urging civilians to leave as soon as they can, before it’s too late. His posts on Facebook advertise the times of the buses out of the city he has organised, and alert the remaining civilians to the few ATMs and bakeries working on any particular day. Talking to the civilians under his care, he urges them to leave before Sloviansk suffers the same fate as the other cities in the path of Russia’s assault. But speaking to me in his office, as an air raid siren wailed outside the window, he sounded considerably more upbeat.

“The situation has been complicated here for a long period of time,” he told me. ”We were nearly encircled but our army helped to prevent it. They attacked from the direction of Izyum but our army stopped them. Now they try to advance through Lyman, but they are still fighting in Lyman and there is a river. So, now the situation is complicated but under control. Our troops are there, and there is a water barrier. I don’t think they`ll succeed. It is very hard.”

When I asked him how long he expected it to take until Sloviansk was itself the frontline, he shrugged, saying “I’m not a military expert. Everything depends on the Lend-Lease, and how fast the [American] weapons will get here. That’s what the experts say. The artillery will help us to defend and to counterattack.” But Britain’s Ministry of Defence has warned that “in the coming days, Russian units in the area are likely to prioritise forcing a crossing of the river”, and the longed-for long-range artillery from the West is yet to be signed off, let alone arrive. Meanwhile, the Russian armour massing outside Bakhmut, south of the Donets river, suggests time is running worryingly short.

With no cooking gas, its cafes and restaurants all shut, and few shops open, life in Sloviansk is increasingly uncomfortable for the remaining civilian population, running out of money as work evaporates. The air raid sirens wail all night, and the sound of outgoing artillery rumbles like thunder throughout the day. In the morning, civilians queue for cash at the few functioning ATMs, and by late afternoon the city’s streets are deserted. Outside his pet shop in Sloviansk’s city centre, I asked Ihor, 33, if he expected the Russians to come. “I guess it’s 50/50 now,” he shrugged, “they’re only a few kilometers away, you see the situation,” he said, gesturing at the loud crump of Ukrainian artillery firing another barrage at the Russians advancing from the north, “but I’m stockpiling food and water, and I’ll stay whatever happens.”

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In the opening phase of the war, Ukraine’s regular and volunteer forces put up a valiant and stunningly effective defence against thinly-stretched Russian troops, who were seemingly unprepared for the level of resistance they would face. But if outside observers initially underestimated Ukraine’s willingness and capacity to fight back, now the danger is that they have underestimated Russia’s potential to inflict serious damage on Ukrainian forces and seize important territory. Massing their troops and artillery for slow, limited offensives, creeping behind a punishing wall of shellfire, the Russians are incrementally gaining ground while limiting their own casualties, and inflicting heavy damage to which Ukrainian forces are finding it difficult to respond.

Three months into a war that has so far seen a litany of stunning and unexpected Ukrainian victories, the momentum is now shifting towards Russian success in the Donbas. Over the medium and long-term, as Ukraine trains and equips new units with the heavy weapons arriving from the West, the pendulum may well swing back in the country’s favour. While many Ukrainians are certain of victory in the end, the sense of relief and optimism that marked the war’s springtime of victories is beginning to fade as Ukraine enters what will be a hard and bloody summer on the eastern front.

He is about a foot tall and half as wide, and is being carried by a man with a ponytail and scraggly black beard. Dressed in jeans and a tracksuit top, he cradles the icon in his arms. “Is this the way to Mariupol?” he asks the group of us standing by the road: me, Dima, the soldier taking me to the front, and my friend the journalist, Vladislav Davidzon. Mariupol — which has been almost destroyed by the Russian army — is almost 300km south. “Um, not really,” Dima replies. “Who are you?”

“I am a pilgrim,” he replies. “I’m going to get people out of the city.” He shows me what appears to be the business card of a UNHCR official — a psychologist it appears. I look at him. He has the glazed, trembling look of a pilgrim; of a smaller, scrawnier Rasputin (and, disconcertingly, Harry Kane). We talk for a few minutes before I watch him walk off into the distance, a lone madman clutching his Christ amidst the destruction. 

“Well,” says Dima as we get back into the car. “If he makes it to Mariupol, it really will be divine fucking intervention.”

***

Several hours earlier, in a cafe in the city of Dnipro, Dima shows me an image on his phone. Four bodies lie in the dirt. The image is grainy, but their ragged outlines are clear. Just 20 or so metres away, their comrades sit and eat. “It’s incredible,” says Dima. “​They’re eating lunch right by the decomposing bodies of their friends.” He continues: “I don’t understand the Russians. Sometimes they just drop the bodies of their mates into trenches. We found a grave of 15 bodies. They’d thrown a bit of dirt on them, but that was it. They don’t even respect their own people.”

Dima is an officer in the Drone intelligence section of the Dnipro 1 Volunteer Battalion fighting in the Donbas on the frontlines. It was here that I saw Russian troops trundle across the border back in April 2014. They had come to aid local “separatists” seize key cities in the region. Back then, the Kremlin didn’t want to conquer Ukraine, merely destabilise it to stop it drawing closer to the EU and Nato.

A few months ago, Moscow decided destabilisation was no longer enough; it was time, it said, to take Kyiv and “denazify” the country. It failed. Now its goals have shifted again. Now it hopes to “liberate” the Donbas by holding a bogus referendum. The eventual goal is to create a landbridge from the Russian border to Crimea, cutting off a large part of Ukraine’s access to the sea.

In their way stands Dima — and tens of thousands like him. Now 32, he was 24 when the war began in 2014 and he volunteered to serve in Dnipro 1. He fought for two years before leaving to work as an IT product manager. But when the war started earlier this year, he re-joined.

“We are fighting over [the town of] Rubizhne at the moment,” he tells me. “It’s one of the hottest spots right now. We’re desperately trying to hold it. But it’s close to Sievierodonetsk and [Russian-occupied] Luhansk so it’s tough. The Russians are throwing everything at us there. Missiles, artillery, tanks, men, drones: the works. A guy I know who was in Afghanistan twice said it was like a playground compared to eastern Ukraine.”

Yet the Ukranians remain confident, having already pushed the Russians back from Kyiv. More than this, they are angry. Mass graves discovered in towns such as Bucha mean no one I meet is interested in territorial compromise. “Even if they drop a nuclear bomb on Kyiv they will not win,” Dima tells me. He snorts at Russia’s plans to take southern Ukraine and link Russia up with Transnistria. “Sometimes you play poker with a bad hand, but Russia is playing without any cards at all. Their tactics are insane. Take Chernobaivka: it has a small military airport. Seventeen times they’ve tried to take it. Seventeen times we’ve smashed them. Still they come. Our soldiers ask: ‘Are they dumb?’ No, just incapable of independent thought. They just follow orders — no matter how crazy.”

Ukraine’s problem is resources: the army doesn’t have enough ammunition and artillery, but this is also something of a blessing: it forces them to be creative. “The Russians use Soviet military tactics that were out of date 30 years ago,” he says. “But we study the Afghanistan war and Israeli tactics. Russia just tries to press with mass.”

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What about the feared Chechen soldiers, I ask? “We call the Kadyrovites [named for Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov] TikTok soldiers. They’re always filming. We found one who was wounded and trying not to fight, but to take a selfie. I heard a story from the [battle for] Hostomyal airport. There were a load of conscripts refusing to fight. So the Kadyrovite commander asked them: ‘Who doesn’t want to fight?’ One guy raised his hand and the commander shot him. ‘Now, who else wants to go home?’ he asked. It’s Soviet tactics.”

From the beginning, Dima tells me, the Kadyrovites had a reputation for committing war crimes. The locals hate them and there are sometimes problems when the Ukrainian army captures one and the locals want revenge. But he says he’s never seen anyone mistreat a prisoner. “Our guys understand the Geneva convention, and also that prisoners are a resource. For every Russian we capture we can get one of ours back. I’m not a general, but at a guess I’d say maybe 1,000 of our guys are prisoners. Prisoner exchanges take place continuously and quietly.”

***

I convince Dima to take us to his base on the frontlines near Rubizhne. He’s reluctant: its location is classified as it’s so close to Russian firepower. Not even the BBC or CNN have been given access to a place like this. But in the end, he relents. “Ok, I’m in charge of your security now. You need to do what I say.”

We drive out of Dnipro and onto the highway; after a couple of hours we enter the Donbas. On the Donetsk Oblast (region) sign hangs a small flag showing a flower sprouting from a prostrate human. “Russian occupiers make the best fertiliser,” it reads.

​​Dima continues to talk as we drive. He’s from Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown. “I knew him a bit when I was younger,” he says. “I used to see him around the place in a cheap coat. I thought he was a great guy but not suited to running a country. Now I support him 1,000%. The most important thing that he did was stay. It was vital that the people saw that the head of the government didn’t flee.”

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Beyond Ukraine, Dima is especially positive about two things, or rather, two people. “Elon Musk’s Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favour,” he tells me. “Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol.”

“I know you British have a complicated relationship with your Prime Minister, but here Boris Johnson has become something of a national hero,” he continues. “The NLAWs you have given us are the best. Easy to use — lock, load and move. Without them we wouldn’t be taking out so many Russian tanks. We knew from the beginning that Britain was a very ancient and important nation. Now we know it’s a country that stands by its word.”

The closer we get to the front the more the world morphs into something profoundly alien. Almost all the vehicles on the road are military. We breeze through a succession of checkpoints manned by soldiers hardened by war. The Ukrainians have been fighting here for eight years. We pass through several villages. On each side of me I see small, perfectly kept houses with immaculate gardens. I’m told it’s a Ukrainian thing. Even war is no excuse to let standards slip.

As we draw closer to the front, we meander around potholed roads. Dima tells me there’s intense fighting at the moment. We get stuck behind two pheasants waddling in front of us. “They’re totally deaf,” he says. “Shelling has blown out their eardrums. We can hoot all day and they’ll never hear.”

He becomes reflective. “I won’t survive being a POW,” he says. “Dnipro I is considered a terror group by Russia. If caught, I expect to be tortured and summarily executed.” 

***

Out on the base, soldiers are everywhere — in their green and beige camouflage, as if they’ve sprouted from the earth itself: from the forests and fields that dot the Donbas. Daily life here is quietly relentless. In a small courtyard, crates of supplies are stacked on top of one another. Soldiers sit around and smoke and talk and clean their weapons. They tinker with armoured vehicles caked in mud and grime. 

Everything is geared toward staying hidden. We are asked not to gather in groups outside for fear of Russian drones flying overhead. Night falls. Inside, the lights must be switched off. Windows are always covered.

The base’s command centre sits in a compact bunker. Flat-screen TVs fixed to cement walls show live feeds of the battlefields. In a storage room, crates of ammo stand five feet high. A bust of Lenin, sitting in the corner, gazes over them.”Our commander is keen to give the old boy a good burial,” says Dima. “Come on,” he continues. “You’ll laugh your arse off when you see where our office is.”

We pile into a small room filled with an array of detritus: Kit Kats, vacuum-packed meals and old Soviet uniforms. I meet some of Dima’s drone team. ​​All of them are volunteers who work in IT. They could have paid bribes to leave the country, he tells me. But they chose to stay.

The drone reconnaissance unit has a vital job. They travel ahead of the artillery to a sector, usually just 1 or 2km from the front, and send up a drone to look for a target — anything from armour or troops (or sometimes to cover their infantry). Then they figure out the coordinates, telegraph the artillery guys and observe the subsequent strike. If it’s not accurate, they calibrate accordingly. Each evening, they return to base and watch a video of the day’s work.

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They are watching one as I walk in. The footage could be from a video game: I see artillery strike a building and a Russian soldier run out and start hopping around. “He’s having a panic attack,” says Dima’s friend, Pasha. In another, a Russian soldier writhes on the ground after a strike scythes him almost in half. “And here’s half a Russian,” says Dima. “Yup, 50% of a Russian,” his friend Pasha chips in.

The door opens and in walks the battalion commander, Yuriy Bereza. A former politician famous for attending parliament in his military uniform, he is one of Ukraine’s most famous fighters. Everything about Bereza is big. His head is big. His smile is big. His belly and arms are big. His hands are huge. He is something very rare: a man who is tough to his core.

He beams at me. “With your permission?” he asks before taking a bite of chocolate and sitting down. “First,” he says. “I want to tell you about one of my heroes, John McCain.” Bereza tells me he met McCain in Washington DC following an official invitation. Bereza had commanded Ukrainian forces at the battle of Iloviask in which many of his troops had died — a disaster Bereza blamed on then-President Petro Poroshenko. He was filled with rage. “I didn’t view Poroshenko as my president, but McCain told me: ‘You have a bright future, but understand if you wear the uniform you must accept him as your president. You can throw him out at the ballot box later.’ And then we got drunk together. Then McCain came here to visit us. We showed him videos of what the Russians were doing in Ukraine. He watched the whole thing and all he said at the end was ‘fucking Russians’.”

Bereza has his own — unvarnished — thoughts on war. “When I was in the Soviet army in the Nineties so many Russians told me: ‘You fucking Banderites, we’re going to conquer you.’ I knew we were going to have to fight these fucking paedophiles.” He continues: “By 2014 I knew with every fibre of my being that there would be war. For me, the IDF is the ideal army because like Israel, Ukraine is surrounded. Israeli citizens live normally despite their fucked-in-the head neighbours who continually fire rockets at them. I told Poroshenko back in 2014: this is just the beginning; we need to militarise society; everyone needs to go to the supermarket with a gun.”

I ask him why the Russians have fought so badly. “For the reason the guy who looks after their tanks shot himself,” he replies. “Me and Dima were buying equipment from those fucks for ten times less than it was worth. Thanks to their very effective corruption we very effectively killed their own guys.”

I ask if he minds if I take photos of him. “Take as many photos as you want,” he replies. “I spit on these bastards.” He’s into his stride now. “Look at General Zhukov, the ‘Great Marshal’ who was just a butcher. The Russians are fighting like Zhukov. They send wave after wave but our guys figured out they fight just like Soviets. The tank commander is always in the first tank, so we shoot it. Once you shoot the first and last tanks, they’re immobilised.”

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He leans forward and gives me his final thoughts. “Look, we are standing with our blood for Western values. The more you focus on us the more we will break the back of the TV, the press, the foggy mind — all of it: the collective Putin inside Russians.”

That night I bunk down with the soldiers. There must be 20 of us in the room, which is filled with cots and mats; sleeping bags and blankets are strewn across the floor. Everyone is constantly on alert, leaving to go on missions to the front throughout the night. Alongside rucksacks and helmets and uniforms, the room is filled with weapons. Everything from pistols to AK-47s and even a light machine gun is here. But that’s not the most striking thing about the room: that’s the smell. That mix of feet and sweat and fear and testosterone that I know so well. Next to me, Vlad leans over and whispers: “You know what that is,” he says with a chuckle. “That’s toxic masculinity.”

***

At breakfast the next day before anyone is allowed to eat, the chef makes them recite a line or two of Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko. It’s a poem about death. “When I die…” it begins. The soldiers laugh.

That afternoon we begin the long drive back to Dnipro. Dima, it turns out, is a big Queen fan. “Another one bites the dust — this is the song for war,” he laughs. Then he suddenly becomes serious. There is silence for long stretches of road. “I want it all!” sings Freddie Mercury. I think of the soldiers I’ve met. How many of them may not return. “You know,” says Dima as we turn off the motorway and enter Dnipro once again, “there should be no wars of nationalism between people who listen to the same music.”

It’s unsurprising. Dmitry lived through the entirety of the month-long Battle of Bucha. Russian forces entered the area in late February and captured the city on 12 March, occupying it until the Ukrainian army forced them to retreat almost three weeks later. Dmitry remembers the day the Russians rolled in. He had gone to a family apartment in the city that had been shelled. It now had a huge crater where the living room wall once stood, and looking down into the surrounding streets, he saw two Ukrainian men running from Russian soldiers who were shooting at them. Dmitry had served with the Kyiv territorial defence at Irpin just 5km away and guessed that the men were soldiers: they were in civilian clothes but running in the irregular patterns the military teaches people to avoid gunfire. It made no difference. The Russians shot them down.

They were the first people Dmitry saw killed in Bucha, but not the last. “They were,” he tells me, “the only people I ever saw the Russians kill who weren’t unquestionably civilians.”

Dmitry describes the invasion without a hint of emotion. One morning, he woke up to find a Russian armoured column of roughly 250 vehicles trundling through the city. Most of the territorial defence had retreated to Kyiv because they had nothing but hand grenades left — certainly not the javelins or British NLAWs needed to fight tanks. But he decided to stay in his hometown: he thought he could be of more use there.

And so began life under occupation. Using his phone, he was able to talk to the outside world, which was crucial given food supplies were perilously low. One woman who had fled the city told him to go to her chicken coops where he would find fresh eggs. Another called him to say where she had stored sugar, and so on.

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During these daily trips, Dmitry had to cross a number of Russian checkpoints. A garrulous and energetic man, he made sure to always chat to the Russian soldiers at each crossing (the officers, on the other hand, just looked at him like he was dirt). It was nothing major, just small talk. But it all helped to create a bond so he could move freely about the city. He also always took his dog with him to make sure he was recognisable even from a distance.

During these trips, Dmitry was able to get up close to the Russian army — and he was shocked by what he saw. “They were desperate,” he told me. “They’d been given enough food and cigarettes to last two weeks when they entered Ukraine and then been basically abandoned. They had to find everything themselves. They had nothing.”

Dmitry thinks the army may even have entered the city solely because they were so desperate for supplies. When they rolled in, he watched tanks break down garden fences and drive right up to houses and apartments. The soldiers would then just get out and go inside, emerging shortly after with what they needed. “They just went in and took whatever they wanted,” he told me.

The war crimes began almost immediately. One of the first things the Russians did was to find Ukrainian soldiers who had fought against separatist forces in the Donbas in 2014. There were eight of them. The Russians rounded them up and executed them by the glass factory in the suburb of Stekolka.

When it became clear that the Russians didn’t intend to bury their victims, Dimitry stepped in, digging graves in nearby fields as the Russians wouldn’t let them use the cemeteries. But alongside Ukrainians, Russians were also being killed — indeed, the more this happened the more brutal the soldiers became. “I offered to bury them as well,” he tells me. “‘We will bury them – they smell bad,’ I said. But they refused. They just put them in piles. They didn’t even take them when they left.”

Speaking to Dmitry, what shines through is the overwhelming sense of impunity. Norms of society and decency were not suspended or ignored — they were willingly trampled upon. In the first days of the occupation, Dmitry saw Russian soldiers approach apartments and toss grenades into them. They murdered civilians without any care, or for any reason. They shelled buildings and shot up cars for fun. They did all this every morning — these boy soldiers, many of whom were not more than 20. It was Lord of Flies, but with heavy artillery.

***

Arkadiy Koval, a 64-year journalism professor who spent five years at the Ukrainian Humanities Institute in Bucha, almost broke down when he saw the columns of Russians invade the city. From his 20th-floor apartment, he filmed the vehicles snaking through the city centre. He, too, saw the desperate state of the invaders: he saw them throwing grenades to destroy the casing around the electricity generators they needed.

The serious shortages of food, electricity and medicine swiftly became a problem as his 22-year-old daughter Darina was eight-months pregnant and recovering from an operation last year to remove a brain tumour. It was terrifying. The first week was simply a question of survival; they were under constant bombardment, and they hid in the basement of the building when they weren’t scavenging for supplies. Later on, though, a neighbour told them that the Russians had come in and killed one of the people hiding there, leaving the body there to rot. So they avoided it: choosing to cower in their apartment instead.

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“Every day my son-in-law and I would go looking for food,” he tells me. “We would drive onto the Warshavske highway and each day we saw cars that had been destroyed by shells — we saw several that had white flags on them. Every day there were more and more destroyed cars — many contained dead people.”

The Russians ordered civilians to wear a piece of white fabric on their shoulder — people would generally turn their Covid masks inside out — to signal they were residents. Failure to do so would mean being shot in the knee or the foot, though one day a few soldiers shot at Andriy, Arkadiy’s son-in-law, just for the hell of it. The family needed Lamictal for Danera and fed the request along to some volunteers but heard nothing. Later, they found out the volunteers had been killed.

***

Things were getting worse for Dmitry, too. Stekolka, especially the glass factory, had gained a reputation as a place where evil things happen. One day, he went with a friend to pick up some wooden pallets to turn into firewood — and ran straight into a bunch of Russian soldiers. With them stood 25 shiny, brand-new vehicles, clearly something they were not supposed to see. The soldiers grabbed the two of them and shut them in the cupboard that houses the factory fire extinguishers. They were held there for 16 hours, within earshot of the soldiers who were radioing their commanders to ask what should be done with their two prisoners. “Do whatever you want,” they were told.

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In the end, the soldiers let them out and told them to run, but not before a soldier asked Dmitry: “When are you Ukrainians going to overthrow your government? Ukraine started this war.”

“It’s amazing,” he told me. “They thought that if we can only overthrow our president the war will end.” He continued: “These soldiers looked about 20 years old. This means they were 12 when the war in Donbas started. They’ve grown up listening to Russian propaganda. They’re totally brainwashed.”

For now, though, the Russians have gone. Ukrainian soldiers walk through the streets of Bucha once more. The city is liberated, but the fear remains. “Don’t use my real name for the article,” Dmitry tells me as he says goodbye. “Just in case the Russians come back.”

But despite this bleak picture, one man has stood firm in his support for the invasion, both financially and with man-power: Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov is the governor of Chechnya, the small region in the North Caucasus that has repeatedly fought for its independence against Russian rule. Putin reintegrated the region in the early 2000s with the help of Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad. Following the assassination of Akhmad in 2004 by Chechen Islamists, Kadyrov developed a close relationship with Putin, frequently likened to that of father and son. He eventually took over as the head of Chechnya in 2007, receiving the Russian president’s full backing.

The personalist nature of this relationship is crucial: Kadyrov’s loyalty does not extend to the government or Russia, it is only to Putin himself. This has meant that Kadyrov has grown bolder throughout his rule, clashing with security services and even flouting federal policies. Suffice it to say, support for Kadyrov in the Kremlin does not reach much further than the president’s office. This history is important for evaluating the size of the gamble Kadyrov is taking in his support for the invasion, and what he has already gained.

In Chechnya itself, Kadyrov’s rule is characterised by brutal, indiscriminate violence. His campaign to purge the republic of its LGBTQ community, part of a policy of extrajudicial executions, is well-documented. At the start of this year, he embarked on his anti-dissident war with renewed vigour, conducting mass kidnappings of critics’ relatives. This included violently abducting Zarema Musaeva, the mother of a Chechen human rights lawyer, from Nizhny Novgorod in January; she is still held by police.

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This violence has been carried out by the Chechen security services, known as the kadyrovtsy, which operate as Kadyrov’s personal army. These units rarely leave Chechnya, and even then, only for training exercises. Kadyrov mobilised his top commanders and units at the beginning of February, sending them to the staging areas near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. Moving as one large group, the units known to be involved in the invasion are the “Sever” and “Yug” Battalions (“North” and “South,” respectively), the “Akhmat-Grozny” riot (OMON) police unit, and the “Akhmat” rapid-response (SOBR) police unit.

Allegedly deployed on March 22nd is the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment, the most notorious in Chechnya, and possibly in Russia. This is the unit largely responsible for the extrajudicial executions and the anti-LGBTQ purges. While Kadyrov claims they are now in Ukraine, he has faked their deployment before, and they just returned from a SWAT competition in the UAE.

The most important leader within these units is Magomed Tushaev, commander of “Sever” Battalion. While his counterpart in the “Yug” Battalion, Khusein Mezhidov, has appeared more prominently in propaganda clips, Tushaev played a more significant role in the psychological warfare during the military buildup and the initial days of the invasion, stemming from the brutal reputation developed by Tushaev’s unit during counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.

Tushaev was rumoured to have been killed on February 26th, the kadyrovtsy’s worst day of casualties. It soon transpired that he was, in fact, alive, yet many of Kadyrov’s opponents abroad keep repeating it, allowing Tushaev’s presence to continuously make them look foolish.

In addition to these units’ leaders, Kadyrov sent in his cousins: brothers Sharip Delimkhanov, commander of Rosgvardia in Chechnya, and Alibek Delimkhanov, deputy commander of Rosgvardia’s North Caucasus forces. Their final brother, Adam, is a Duma parliamentarian from Chechnya who is now overseeing the kadyrovtsy’s operations in Mariupol. These units were engaged near Kyiv but could not take sufficient ground to carry out their objective: assassinating President Zelenskyy. Accordingly, Kadyrov pulled them back to Chechnya, deploying new, unidentified units near Mariupol under the leadership of Adam Delimkhanov. These reinforcements also failed the crucial task of taking the Azovstal metallurgy plant, which instead had to be bombed.

Kadyrov’s financial backing for the invasion has come from the Akhmat Kadyrov Fund (AKF), his family’s private slush fund. It was primarily created by embezzling federal subsidies to the republic and racketeering businesses and state employees. As part of the war effort, the AKF has supplied food and equipment to his troops on the frontlines, as well as military vehicles to the authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He has also used his corrupt slush-fund to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Melitopol, which is under Russian occupation.

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The invasion may still be in its infancy, but a number of consequences of Kadyrov’s gamble are already visible. Most obviously, his information war has proved a success. He continuously makes his critics look foolish about the fact that Tushaev is alive, and he has been able to stage rallies in support of the invasion far beyond Chechnya. Kadyrov’s simultaneous campaign to court the Arabic-speaking world has also helped keep Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from siding against Russia in the pitched economic battle. For Putin, at least, this is enough to justify his decision to make Kadyrov Russia’s chief diplomatic emissary to the Muslim world — even if it does backfire when he prioritises Muslim issues over Kremlin policy, such as with his support for the Ronhingya.

In elite politics, Kadyrov is also coming out ahead. His strong support for Putin, when others were more hesitant, is a clear win. The domestic turmoil in both the FSB and Rosgvardia — exacerbated by American and Ukrainian intelligence disclosures pointing to leaks from the security services — plays to his advantage. Kadyrov’s long-running feud with federal security service leadership means that, the more endangered their futures become, the more secured his is.

Yet not everything is going to plan. For all his propaganda victories, Kadyrov’s biggest loss is that the kadyrovtsy’s reputational bubble has burst. Almost everyone, except the Chechen propaganda circus, has noted that his army has not engaged in fighting, but has still sustained significant casualties. This is likely to embolden his opponents among the Russian political elite, who may fear him a little less, making increased confrontation possible.

In Chechnya, too, his position will be weakened. There currently are and will be fewer kadyrovtsy, as many are engaged, while others have been killed, in Ukraine. It is also important to remember that not all of the kadyrovtsy are devout members of the Kadyrov cult of personality. Forced recruitment into their ranks has long been used as a tactic for containing societal discontent, but failure will only exacerbate it.

For the time being, however, Kadyrov is performing adequately. He is not doing as well as he would hope, but he is certainly not faring poorly, and is generally proving his value to Putin. The elite conflict among security elites could flip on him, but his propaganda victories should keep that at bay.

None of this is to say his safety is guaranteed. In the coming weeks, several trends should be closely watched to see how Kadyrov’s luck holds — the clearest of which is the continued invasion. For now, continued war means continued opportunities for propaganda, one of his favorite activities. This is representative of his regime, prioritising flash over substance. But while Tushaev may not have been killed, the abundance of Kadyrov’s trusted advisors in the field increases the odds of this happening to his allies. Were a number of them to perish, he could quickly find himself isolated.

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Then there are the worsening socioeconomic conditions in Chechnya. According to the region’s authorities, there is “no deficit of sugar”, one of the key economic benchmarks; according to reports, the AKF is now handing out sugar to some families. No doubt Kadyrov will keeping a close eye on this: socioeconomic concerns have proved to be the only mobilising grievance for the Chechen public in the current repressive atmosphere. This previous expression of dissent was led by women, who may also now have sons fighting and dying in Ukraine. Women have already led protests elsewhere in the North Caucasus, making this a distinct possibility in Chechnya.

Added to this is the fact that the entire North Caucasus region now faces mass economic disruptions from the new sanctions regime. While experts have noted the region’s potential resilience to the sanctions’ effects, their repercussions on the federal budget are not yet clear. The fate of the federal subsidies, upon which the North Caucasus relies, is still undecided.

The final threat to Kadyrov is the reshuffling of the elite hierarchy. While Kadyrov is currently edging out federal security officials, his advantage may not hold in the long run. Anticipating this, he is trying to earn federal recognition as the North Caucasus’s most important leader. Yet the Kremlin has worked to establish Sergei Melikov, head of neighbouring Dagestan, as a regional counterweight to Kadyrov — as most non-Putin officials in the Kremlin are wary of his influence in this corner of Russia. Whether he poses a significant threat to Kadyrov is still unclear: at a recent national security meeting, Kadyrov took the opportunity to, quite literally, shunt Melikov to the side. Elite jockeying is, after all, an art of longevity.

It was proof that, for now at least, Kadyrov remains in a strong position. But the consequences of Russia’s latest incursion into Ukraine are still coming into focus. The fate of the war has yet to be decided and the full effects of sanctions have not been felt. When the dust finally settles, Kadyrov may not be standing where he thought he was.

The original intel estimate of 127,000 troops was grossly inadequate, and when it was raised to 150,000 including forces already within the Russian-held parts of eastern Ukraine, it was still much too low for a coup de main that would start and end the war in one go — the only kind of war that Russia can fight without quickly incurring dangerous levels of economic damage.

Of course, reckless gamblers are undeterred by risks, but Putin’s record until a week ago was that of a very patient hunter, who waits until the target walks into his sights, only then pressing the trigger for a sure hit. That is how he gained Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008 after inter-ethnic fighting, and broken cease-fires since 1994. Both are small but significant territories — Abkhazia because it is the southernmost, most “Mediterranean” of all Russian-controlled territories, with oranges and lemons as well as a nominally independent government, and South Ossetia because it is an Orthodox enclave in the mostly Muslim Caucasus.

And that is also how Putin won his biggest prize so far, Crimea, detaching its several pieces from Ukraine in the turmoil following the Maidan uprising that sent President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing from Kyiv on 21 February 2014: a few thousand Russian operatives with some locals took over the territory of  Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the autonomous city of Sevastopol, and a coastal strip in the Kherson mainland and all without firing a shot: a quickly concocted Republic of Crimea then “voted” to join the Russian Federation along with the city of Sevastopol.

To do the same thing across the 1500 kilometre width of Ukraine, it would take not less than half a million well-trained soldiers. They would need to move quickly overland to seize the cities nearest to the border such as Kharkov less than twenty miles away, or by large-airlift to reach distant Lviv, or helicoptered to simultaneously seize the regional capitals, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the north-east, to Odessa in the south west, and Zaporizhia in the center-east, in addition to Kyiv, itself a metropolis of almost three million inhabitants. And yes, it all presumed only token resistance by such Ukrainian soldiers as would fight at all.

The once patient hunter turned reckless gambler persuaded himself of that, and of much more: that Ukraine’s Jewish ex-comedian turned President Zelensky would promptly flee, that his government would then collapse as ministers rushed off to escape arrest, that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Air Defence, long starved of funds in any case would dissolve, so that Russian forces would advance unopposed to quickly seize every city, with Kyiv’s population obediently awaiting Russian rule. Then former president Yanukovych could be brought back to form a new government for the TV cameras, whose task would be to vote immediately to re-join the Russian Federation, thus ending the fighting in glorious victory for Putin and his empire.

None of the above was wildly improbable — but it hardly takes much in the way of prudence to eschew war planning that consists of stringing together best-case scenarios, which is exactly what Putin chose to do, ignoring his own Intelligence chief and veteran Kremlin official Sergey Naryshkin. That much is proven by a truly extraordinary document: the video of Putin’s eve-of-war meeting with his ministers and advisors, ostensibly on the annexation of the self-proclaimed independent Donbas republics, but actually on the imminent invasion.

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We see a carefully staged display of imperial authority that has Putin sitting high up at his desk while the advisers sit in chairs below him, till each one in turn goes to stand in front of a microphone to endorse what Putin has just said. But the script fell apart when it was Naryshkin’s turn to speak. He clearly said that there should be “talks” to give the Western side a “chance”, pronouncing that French word in the French way, as Russians do. Visibly surprised, visibly angered, Putin demands an answer “yes or no” on the annexation itself, sidestepping Naryshkin’s real point: to rely on talks, not tanks in dealing with Ukraine.

The build-up to the war went well for Putin. He had the German government firmly in his camp — to the improbable extent that it went far out of its way to prevent Estonia from donating old Soviet 122mm howitzers to Ukraine, on the flimsy ground that they had briefly been in German possession when the West German army inherited East Germany’s military equipment. Nor would the German government agree to suspend the certification of the giant new Nordstream 2 gas pipeline that would have increased German dependence on Russian gas, uncaring of the vehement objections of the United States, Britain, the European Council and Poland.

Given that, Germany was bound to rule out effective sanctions in the lead-up to the fighting, with the most effective — the exclusion from the Swift payment system — not even considered, because it would block payments for Russian gas, stopping its supply. A request for weapons from the immense German surplus stocks yielded an offer of old helmets, on the grounds that German parliamentarians would prohibit the supply of lethal weapons. Providing cover for the Germans, the Italian government also ruled out a Swift cut off, and it was only Italy’s embattled Defence Minister Lorenzo Guerini’s personal determination that kept the door half-open for Italian military supplies.

Nor was the US Government much of an obstacle: instead of emulating the British airlift of anti-tank missiles on a much larger scale, the US focused on evacuating its diplomats in hysterical haste — as if to support Putin’s intimidation campaign — and then failed to airlift any of the tens of thousands of highly suitable “point and shoot” anti-tank rockets in Army depots that any civilian can use with one minute of training.

But war is the greatest contingency. As all veterans know — and that includes the present writer — until the fighting starts, no soldier knows how he will react to combat, and still less which of his comrades will fight bravely and which will keep his head down, waiting for the noise to end. And that goes for war leaders too: in 1939 the mediocre dictator Ioannis Metaxas replied to Mussolini’s verbose ultimatum with a monosyllabic ohi — “no” — inspiring victorious fighting by the hugely outgunned Greeks. And now in 2022 Zelensky’s comedic turn as a TV President, followed by a respectable showing as an actual President, set the stage for his current act as an indomitable war leader, totally uncaring of the risk to his own life as the number one target of Russian under-cover killer teams.

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After refusing Biden’s ill-judged offer to evacuate him (he asked for weapons instead) Zelensky declared that he would remain in Kyiv with his entire Cabinet to lead the fight for the city. That played its own undefinable role in inspiring Ukraine’s soldiers to resist no matter what: to hold the city of Kharkiv, close enough to the Russian border to have been within artillery range from the start, to defend Zmiinyi (snake) island in front of coastal Odessa, whose 13-man garrison came under overwhelming naval bombardment after impolitely refusing to surrender, to defend Mariupol the country’s eastern harbour, whose half a million inhabitants live less than 30 miles from the Russian border (but are holding out with the Russians still 15 miles away as of this writing), and on the Kyiv approaches through which the Russian army was supposed to swiftly advance on the city and finish the war in two days if not one.

The Ukrainian army did not run away, it did not surrender, it did not abandon its weapons to walk home, and neither was it quickly outmanoeuvred by the much better-funded Russian army, which has had the fuel, ammo, and replacement parts for much more intensive training than the badly underfunded Ukrainians. It turns out that motivation beats even training: Russian armoured columns that were supposed to advance at motor speed on the highways to Kharkov and Kyiv brushing aside token resistance to quickly seize both cities, were instead forced off the road by sustained Ukrainian anti-armour fire, and then blocked again by hard fighting when they gave up on highway momentum to advance cross-country at 3mph. Day after day, Kharkov and Kyiv not only held out but were not even attacked, except by a few missiles, more terrifying than destructive.

That is when Putin’s timetable and entire war plan fell apart.

The world could close its eyes for a day and a night to allow the Russians to finish the job, so as to continue business as usual for everyone: the trucks delivering French and Italian luxury goods to the Moscow bourgeoisie along with Audi and Mercedes cars, Dutch hydroponic vegetables and much more from Frankfurt an Oder via Warsaw and Minsk; the aircraft bringing Russian skiers to Courchevel and Megève, and shoppers to London and Paris.

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But when the Russian attempt failed, and the dramatic news was made by Ukraine’s heroic resistance rather than by the expected Putin victory, Western Europeans had to open their eyes, they had to look at the Russian aggression that had brought large-war to Europe for the first time since 1945.

After Italy’s Draghi spoke with Zelensky, Italy’s objection to the Swift ban suddenly gave way to approval, forcing the Germans to switch also to avoid opprobrium as the only hold-out. With that the silent opponents like Luxembourg also had to go along, and soon enough Japan also agreed to exclude the most regime-connected banks. With that the destruction of the Russian bourgeoisie’s way of life was underway in earnest: no skiing trips to France, or foreign trips anywhere outside the Russian sphere, no sending of children to expensive boarding schools in Britain or Switzerland, no new German cars, nor fresh tomatoes.

Concurrently, the spectacle of civilians, ladies of advanced years included, preparing Molotov cocktails out of beer bottles as a last resort to defend their streets, broke down the dam of Pacifist hypocrisy (“weapons only make war worse”) releasing an expanding torrent of weapons, with Germany, last seen stopping others from helping, itself offering 5,000 Stingers, aspirational anti-aircraft weapons against jets, but deadly against helicopters. Italy is sending badly needed anti-tank weapons, and others such as the British who did not wait for the fighting to begin in order to send anti-tank missiles, are sending more weapons as the US, Canada, Sweden and others are also doing, but adding a so far unique official encouragement of volunteers willing to fight for Ukraine.

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Suddenly the hitherto untouchable Putin is in trouble. He promised a quick, almost effortless victory, to instead plunge into a war increasingly costly of lives (hundreds of Russians are dead by all accounts), increasingly costly for the entire Russian economy, and disastrous for its bourgeoisie. And this for a war that Russia is not winning. That Putin has invited the Ukrainian President to send envoys to cease-fire talks is itself a tremendous defeat for him: he had insisted that he could not negotiate at all with the“drug addicts and Neo-Nazis” of Zelensky’s government, but now he must negotiate, to extricate himself from the war he deliberately started, whose costs have risen phenomenally.

If talks do start, the Ukrainians can have only one demand: an immediate and total withdrawal of Russian forces to their starting positions. And if the Russians accept that inevitable demand, it seems unlikely that Putin can remain in power, not after having overruled his Intelligence chief, to deliberately start a costly war, only to lose it.

If the Russians refuse, they must revert to a very hard fight, a slow-motion drive into Kyiv that will be marked by rising casualties, as Ukrainian resistance is strengthened by the influx of better weapons and rising military competence. Then the Russians must conquer the whole of Ukraine out to Lviv and the Carpathian mountains — where the population is mostly anti-Russian, promising ever more grinding combat.

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It is hard to imagine how Putin could emerge from this scenario victorious. Yes Zelensky might be reached and murdered at any time, but it seems entirely unlikely that the morale generated by the ferocious resistance he inspired would simply disappear — if anything it might well increase.

Another possibility is nuclear escalation, and Putin’s latest is indeed to talk up in his most ominous tones Russia’s forward-deployed nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately for Putin, the action is now in the hands of old ladies with Molotov cocktails, shoe salesmen with bazookas, and increasingly experienced street fighters. None of them are likely to pause this fight for fear of Russian nuclear escalation.

That leaves Putin with no way of redeeming his promise of a swiftly victorious war, no defence against the accusation of having grievously damaged Russia and humiliated its army. The spy chief Naryshkin in the Kremlin might be the one to remove Putin with the least disruption, but of course there are other Putin appointees also ready to save mother Russia.

Jenkin’s analysis was supported by an impressive line-up of Westminster figures, including the chairmen of both the defence and foreign affairs committees. David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, thundered that Putin sought to “re-establish Russia’s status and influence, including dominance over the sovereign countries in its near abroad.” He took issue with those echoing the Kremlin’s line that the West is provoking it into action by enlarging the European Union and Nato, leading his comrade Chris Bryant to express delight that Labour had “returned to common sense on these issues.” When the Corbynistas were in charge, the party’s stance on Russia was more ambivalent.

It was good to see such unity on this central issue of European security. Yet behind this debate — and much of the narrative about Russia — lies the pernicious idea that Putin is humiliating the West and its enfeebled democracies. This is, of course, the perspective of Russia’s well-oiled propaganda machine. Politicians, columnists and think tanks in the West also frequently praise his malign genius; I have done so myself in the past. Typical was a recent article by retired US general Keith Kellogg, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, who argued that Putin was on the brink of dealing “the final blow to diminish Nato” before adding: “history is on his side … it is a question of when — and not if — he stages his European checkmate.”

Admirers and appeasers of Putin — who can be found across the political spectrum — often repeat a well-worn cliché that he plays chess while his foes play chequers. He captured Crimea, crushed Chechen rebels, weakened Ukraine and grabbed effective control of Belarus, while detaching a chunk of Georgia and breakaway republics in the Donbas. He intervened in Syria to shore up his fellow dictator Bashar Assad. He supposedly interfered in the US election and has since made sinister moves in African states. “Putin has run rings around whoever was in the Oval Office, getting away with invasions, hacking, human rights abuses, assassinations, shooting down passenger airliners,” complained one US columnist last month.

But is Putin really such a grandmaster on the geo-political chessboard? Certainly he seems to have a clear strategy to restore Russian pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire — an event he has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Early in his presidency, he flirted with joining his now mortal enemy, Nato. Now his armed forces build up menacingly on the border of Ukraine. Yet one thing has been made abundantly clear to me after a fortnight back reporting in the country — and that is the failure of this supposed Machiavellian mastermind, whose goal of rebuilding Russia’s empire and shattering Nato lies in tatters, even as he terrorises his neighbour and keeps everyone guessing over the next move in his game plan.

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Ukraine is sliding away fast from Moscow’s sphere of influence, into the orbit of the West. The ageing president must know this, as he contemplates detonating another explosive conflict. Polls show a drastic change in attitudes: support for joining Nato, for instance, was backed by just one in five citizens in July 2009, but now 58% wish to sign up to the alliance, and even more want to join the European Union. “I know what life is like in Europe and I know also what life is in Russia,” said Marina Polyakova, a housewife in her fifties whose son was badly beaten in pro-democracy protests in Kharkiv. “I want Ukraine to be a just, democratic country.”

Putin’s brutal response to those nationwide protests in 2014 has heavily tilted the mood against him. The slaughter of 104 demonstrators in Kyiv led to the ousting of his ally Viktor Yanukovych from the presidency. A poll taken just before that massacre found 88% of Ukrainians held a positive view of Russia — these are, after all, two nations with deep cultural, commercial, historic and family ties. Then came the theft of Crimea, separatist revolts in two border provinces and the start of a war that drags on to this day, with 14,000 dead and two million displaced. By 2020, barely half of Ukrainians still held a positive view of their neighbour; this figure has fallen to less than 40% in the most recent survey, carried out as Moscow’s troops encircle their country.

So despite Putin’s efforts to blame the West for meddling in Ukraine, the reality is that his belligerence and toxic intervention hastened its move towards Europe. “Russia’s influence in Ukraine has failed spectacularly since the aggression began in 2014,” said Maria Avdeeva, a security and disinformation expert in Kharkiv.

“The Ukrainian population is much more united and anti-Russian. This anti-Russian sentiment is boosted by the hostile rhetoric of Kremlin officials and media along with their refusal to recognise Ukraine’s geopolitical choice. Ukrainians don’t see their future in union with Russia or any form of Russian control over our country.” 

In eastern Ukraine it was clear that a significant minority still look to Moscow. My first taxi driver in Kharkiv praised Putin for telling the truth unlike the politicians he railed against in Kyiv. Other people talked positively about their “brother” nation — although it is illegal to “glorify” dictatorial regimes, so people can be cautious about displaying open admiration to a journalist. Polls indicate about one in six voters would still back pro-Russian parties, although support has slipped in the past three months.

Still, it is simplistic to assume Russian-speakers — and even Russian natives — are not patriotic Ukrainians. I met one man born in Siberia who had already obtained an automatic weapon, ready to fight for Kyiv. A young Russian woman, forced to flee Donetsk after the separatist insurgency, told me she wanted desperately to see Putin dead.

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Pro-European sentiment is especially obvious in younger generations. One journalist in her mid-thirties told me that before 2014, friends wanting the best university education or work internships would go to Moscow — partly due to shared language, but also because “it was the cool place, the prestigious place, we all looked up to it.” Now they see Russia as an aggressor, she said, so are more likely to go to Poland or some other EU nation. Besides, there are no longer any direct flights between Kyiv and Moscow. Once, these best and brightest students would stay in Russia to work; now they are more likely to be found in Berlin, London or Warsaw.

The government is also fostering a cultural shift. In recent years, new laws have been passed to enforce wider use of Ukrainian language in schools and public spaces, so future generations will make increased use of their own language. Hollywood films used to be dubbed into Russian; now they are in Ukrainian. There are laws restricting foreign content on radio and in bookstores. Schools offer pupils patriotic activities after classes finish. Russian television channels have been banned. Bilateral trade has also collapsed; Ukraine is no longer economically dependent on Russia, as it turns towards Europe and China.

Putin’s real problem is not that Ukraine might join the defensive alliance but that the country is rejecting his repressive regime as it crystallises a sense of national identity, looks to Europe for its future and struggles towards democracy. Bear in mind the 2014 conflict was nothing to do with Nato; it was sparked by talk of a deal with the EU. Another democratic state is the last thing Putin wants next-door given his own dire leadership, development failures and grotesque theft of national resources.

Yet his hostile response backfired badly, by serving to reinforce Nato, deflecting the nagging post-Soviet questions over its relevance and funding tensions inflamed by Trump. 8,000 troops have been deployed to shore up fearful frontline states, with the US adding another 3,000 soldiers this week and keeping 8,500 more on standby. Non-members Finland and Sweden are so alarmed by Russia they have started whispering again about joining up while deepening their military ties, and driving up defence spending.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

Putin is pushing for roll-back of Nato’s enlargement in his negotiations over Ukraine — but he is achieving precisely the opposite. He is strengthening bonds — especially among newer members on its eastern flank who rushed to join Nato to protect them from the claws of the Russian bear after the Soviet empire crumbled. Anti-Russian views surged in places such as Poland after the 2014 invasion of Ukraine and have stayed high. And such is the concern on frontline states that Lithuania led Baltic moves to end reliance on the Kremlin’s gas by opening up major offshore storage facilities. “The Russian Federation was abusing its dominant position by charging higher prices and threatening to cut our supplies,” said former energy minister Romas Svedas. If only the rest of Europe had followed their lead.

Now consider Russia’s touted successes, which are supposedly leading to such decisive blows against Nato, dominance of Europe and restoration of the Muscovite empire. He blew apart Chechnya; glued the Crimea, with its two and a half million people back onto Russia; gained control of Donetsk and Luhansk; and detached the South Ossetia and Abkhazia enclaves from Georgia, which are together home to fewer residents than Coventry. Belarus is sliding into his arms. But even his most devoted disciple might struggle to argue that this motley cluster of places puts him on par with his hero Peter the Great’s opening up the nation’s window on the west in the Baltic.

Yet the cost to his own country has been immense. At the peak of the Second Chechen War it is believed more than 200 Russian soldiers were dying a month. It cost more than $1bn to rebuild the blitzed capital Grozny. Sanctions imposed after the capture of Crimea cost Russian firms almost $100bn, according to one study — 4.2% of the country’s gross domestic product — while Putin’s efforts to shield them almost doubled this impact on the economy. There is the drip-drip of depopulation from Donetsk to Minsk, with many of the brightest young people and middle classes leaving Putin’s depressed satellite statelets. The exodus highlights the lure of a less debased society, while persistent eruption of protests under Putin and his pals shows how seeds of democracy can sprout even in the most challenging terrain.

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Meanwhile these places need expensive military support and subsidies. Moscow is spending an estimated $5bn a year on Donbas, for instance, including $771m a year on electricity and gas for six million residents in the two self-declared republics. Once these areas, rich in coal and highly cosmopolitan, boasted the nation’s highest economic output. Since the war, they have seen exports crash, airports close, firms and seven universities move, factories shut, mines abandoned and unemployment soar. Five months ago, Ukrainian intelligence obtained documents revealing that Putin plans to spend another $12bn on development over the next three years. This is “not small money,” commented Oleksiy Reznik, former deputy prime minister, even “for the country that is basically the world’s gas station.”

These are Pyrrhic victories for Russia — but of course, Putin cares only about his own survival behind all his nationalist rhetoric. We should not dismiss the threat he poses. He invested huge sums building up and modernising his armed forces from the moment he took power — six of the first 11 decrees he passed after becoming president in 2000 concerned the military — and many of these troops are tested in battle. He has shown that he is a smart tactician and skilled spinner of lies, adroit at exploiting situations to his own advantage for short-term gain while dividing enemies.

But far from demolishing Nato and checkmating Europe, his grand strategy, pursued over more than two decades has been a dismal failure — and this is what makes him so dangerous now, capable of lashing out at Ukraine in callous disregard for the terrible damage his actions might cause.