The TA field phone was invented by the Soviets in 1950 and was used by their Army in railways and mining. In post-Soviet times, though, especially during the Russian-Chechen wars, it became more useful as a means of torture. If you want to understand Russia’s gradual regression into brutal atavism, examine the changing uses of its field telephone. The Reckoning Project, a team of Ukrainian and international journalists and researchers who record and verify witness testimonies of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has discovered it in almost every detention site they have visited during the Russian occupation of Ukraine.

While the TA wire is unrolled, Alseryuk is beaten. The 36-year-old construction worker from Balakliya in the Kharkiv Oblast endured this routine for three months. He had joined the army in 2014, after the Russians first invaded — mainly because it was a well-paid local job. And he had given up his commission long before the all-out invasion on February 24, 2022. The fact that he was a veteran was enough for the Russians. Alseryuk was taken from his home in the outskirts of Balakliya and imprisoned in a basement until the region was liberated in September by the Ukrainian troops.

According to the The Reckoning Project’s Kharkiv unit, there were at least 27 detention and torture sites in that region alone. The team interviewed more than a dozen former prisoners and discovered that men and women alike were treated in identical manner: taken from their houses without explanations, handcuffed, blindfolded, and then brought into tiny, cold, wet and overcrowded cells. There, men in balaclavas would interrogate them until they acknowledged their connections to the Ukrainian army.

Then they were tortured.

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Their captors were mainly Russian citizens — sometimes the National Guard or FSB would turn up. Generally, though, the guards were poorly equipped, mobilised men from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics. Sometimes there were no questions; sometimes the prisoners were just tortured. They would be beaten with batons or wooden sticks, shocked with electricity, and sometimes suffocated with gas masks. They would be kept for months without food or medical support. And no one knew where they were. Eventually some were freed — after it became clear even to their fastidiously sadistic captors that they had nothing to say. In truth, they probably realised this early on, but it was never about just information.

After the 2014 occupation of Crimea and the Donbas, Ukrainians knew that it was best for any activists, politicians, and independent journalists to leave the Russian controlled territories. But civilians could stay if they kept a low profile, which many did because they needed to take care of family, usually elderly parents.

This occupation is different. Russian soldiers have gone out of their way to seek out “disloyals”. Their definition is loose. Having a cousin in the army counts — though this doesn’t narrow victims down: according to official statistics around 40% of Ukrainians have a close relative serving in the army or law enforcement. Civil servants are also suspect — a common job in provincial towns — along with firefighters, schoolteachers, NGO workers, or even those who are physically fit and of fighting age. Local collaborators are helping the Russians: flying the Ukrainian flag before the war is enough to get you rounded up.

Things were particularly brutal in the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions. After the Russians invaded, in March 2022, residents would attend weekly peaceful rallies against the occupation. Olga, a 36-year-old photographer and SMM specialist was an enthusiastic participant. She lost her job and started helping local volunteers buy and deliver humanitarian aid to the residents of the city. She attended the rallies and kept Ukrainian symbols at home, as well as raising money on social networks. Shortly before her arrest, she took a photograph of the Antoniv bridge and the pontoon crossing but — crucially — did not supply the photo to the Ukrainian authorities.

On September 29, she was sorting food packages with two other volunteers when five men in military uniforms and balaclavas, carrying assault rifles, broke in and abducted all three of them. They were taken to the basement of building 15 on Pylyp Orlyk street. Olga was held there for 24 days, and subjected to five or so interrogations, during which time, she was shocked and physically abused.

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Her captors spoke Russian, but with Ukrainian accents, which led her to believe they were soldiers from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. During the first torture, two clamps were attached to her body through which an electric current was passed. The pain was so bad, she cannot say how long the torture lasted. The next day, they showed her postcards and bracelets with Ukrainian symbols on them that they’d found in her house. That day, they had decided simply to toy with her. Her interrogator told her that he wasn’t in the mood to torture her, but she could rely on him tomorrow. “You’re a cunt,” he spat at her as he left.

Over the course of lengthy and various interrogations, Olga was beaten across the head and ribs, smacked around the head, and electrocuted. They were asking the same questions over and over: “Did she ever go to Ukrainian-controlled territory? What did she buy there? Where did she get the money?” They also forced her to strip to the waist and were about to place clamps on her nipples and earlobes, until one of her captors decided it might kill her. She believes she was kept in detention — unlike other volunteers, who were released — because of her frank pro-Ukrainian position and the photos of the bridge and the pontoon in her camera. For the occupiers, this was a “crime” more serious than volunteering. Taken again to the basement for questioning, they put clamps on her fingers and the electrocution lasted longer than ever. She vomited from the pain.

The Russians weren’t fussy about who they tortured. They even brutalised priests. They took the Abbot of Kherson’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church one day after he was falsely accused of inciting hate speech. Six or so men arrived at his church and spirited him off. During the interrogation, he was asked about everything from church hierarchy to the contacts in his phone. Then, his interrogators beat him, put a cap over his face and wrapped it with tape, making it almost impossible to breathe; later his hands were taped so tightly that he lost all feeling in his fingers. The abbot was shoved across a table and beaten on his knees with a hammer, and then on his chest with a baton. He fell in and out of consciousness. At the end of the interrogation, he was told that Ukrainian media had already reported his death. Eventually, he was forced to write a statement agreeing to cooperate with the Russians, and freed.

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When I arrive in Kherson, the Russians have gone from the city, but are shelling it constantly and viciously from across the river. In an apartment, just off the city centre, I meet Oleksandr Diakov, a 48-year-old entrepreneur. He limps across the small living room to greet me — a problem with his leg was significantly worsened after his capture by the Russians. He is clearly traumatised and exhausted — though anger at his treatment seeps through as he recounts his ordeal.

He, along with five friends, had been passing information to the Ukrainian security services. And the Russians had got wind of it and were tracking them down. Two were captured first. And Oleksandr managed to evade them until he was eventually caught, along with another two, after the Russians bugged the apartment they were meeting in. “I was taken to pretrial detention centre, which is where the torture began,” he tells me, starting to silently weep. “The head of the centre had the nickname ‘Evil’ — he was totally sick. He would get drunk and torture people just for fun.” Evil used electricity. He would ask people if they knew the Russian national anthem,and if they didn’t, he would shock them. Every time he switched on the electric current, he made people shout “glory to Russia”, “glory to Putin”, “or glory to [Russian Defence Minister] Shoigu”. They would be electrocuted, denied food, cigarettes and sleep. Whatever took Evil’s fancy.

There were 21 cells in the centre. Most of them were designed only for three people but the Russians generally kept six or seven in each one. Diakov’s cell number was 19. He starts to cry again as he forces himself to relive the torture. “I counted 17 days there, sleeping on the floor without a mattress. It was so humid that many people have since developed lung problems. There was not enough air to breathe. One of the other prisoners was a policeman who was also tortured with electric shocks. He had two wounds from where they attached the cables that started to rot and develop abscesses.”

The FSB were especially brutal. They were angry at Oleksandr for giving information about not only military targets, but also where FSB were sleeping and living. Two men in balaclavas would interrogate him — one always sitting. They put a thick hat on his face so he couldn’t see them. That was taken off for the torture, when they would cover his face with a wet T-shirt and start on it with the electricity. And then they would beat him, taking care to pay particular attention to his bad leg. So bad was the beating, he started bleeding internally and by the end he couldn’t walk down the stairs.

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Toward the end he prayed it would end; that he would die and so not suffer anymore. “I never lost hope that Ukraine would come and release us,” he says. “We could hear the Ukrainian artillery. But they took longer than we expected.” Eventually his leg got so bad his captors took him to a hospital. There, he had surgery and spent a month recovering. The Russians gave him back his phone and told him to install Telegram and to be online constantly so they could track him. They also warned him that if he tried to escape, they would find him quickly. But he slipped out of the hospital and hid for several weeks until the Russians left the city.

Oleksandr’s story — like Olga’s and the priest’s — is not unique; it’s not even uncommon any more. With every territory that is liberated from Moscow, more of these types of stories emerge, variegated in their details, alike in their brutality. The truth is simply that this is life under Russian occupation. This is what the Russians do everywhere they go. This is what they do to their own people inside Russia.

It is just one reason why the Ukrainians refuse to surrender. They know what will come if they do. They’ve seen it too many times already. The war raging in Ukraine is over not only national sovereignty, but also the very essence of decency — for the right to live unmolested and unabused. They can never stop fighting.

Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM).

The latter induced President Emmanuel Macron to rush to Moscow and Kyiv to avert Ukraine’s imminent downfall by offering last-minute concessions to Putin. But the BND’s error had far graver consequences: told that it was impossible to stop Russia’s swift conquest, German chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to send weapons to Ukraine, refused to allow Estonia to send 122mm howitzers originally received from Germany, refused to rule out restricting its use of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and refused to allocate funds to rehabilitate Germany’s sadly diminished armed forces. Since Putin is especially attentive to German politics, this served as a strong green light for his war.

As for the CIA’s totally wrong assessment, it had still more serious consequences. Acting under the impression that the Russians would swiftly conquer Ukraine, the White House chose to evacuate the US Embassy in Kyiv instead of rushing in weapons that would only become Russia’s booty. The demoralising effect was amplified as other Western diplomats followed suit and fled.

The failure to dissuade Putin, then, was an intelligence failure — but this is something that only requires the resolve of 51 Senators and one President to fix. By contrast, Russia’s war-making capacity has failed at every level: in the quality of individual and unit tactical combat, in operational capacity, and, most egregiously, at the level of theatre strategy (the deployment of forces over the territory). The attempt to conquer Kyiv with an endless double column of armoured vehicles advancing on a single vector meant that every act of Ukrainian resistance generated cascading stop-and-go delays that emptied out fuel tanks.

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The most important tactical failure came right at the start. In the pre-dawn hours of the war on February 24, elite “air assault” infantry proved incapable of executing the key mission of the entire invasion. This was the Coup de Main that was to secure the Antonov airfield in Kyiv’s Hostomel exurb and open the way to the heart of the city, from where Zelenskyy was expected to flee in panic, leaving Ukraine’s forces leaderless and exposed. Arriving in a fleet of helicopters, the Russians duly seized the little-used airfield. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports were then expected to bring in many more troops to secure it, pending the arrival of mechanised units from nearby Belarus. But Zelenskyy and his ministers, who had gathered for war instead of fleeing, immediately ordered an all-out effort to counterattack the Russians with any and all forces that could reach the scene quickly.

In any normal scenario, to send odd lots of soldiers against cohesive elite units would be a sure recipe for disaster — but the ferociously determined Ukrainians overcame the Russians, who were disconcerted by having to fight hard just to survive, instead of advancing triumphantly to Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The IL-76 transports could not land amid the fighting, so the surviving airborne troopers had to be relieved by troops from Belarus. By that point, Ukraine’s forces were mobilised nationwide and the rapid capture of central Kyiv was out of the question.

Having blocked the Russians in Hostomel, the Ukrainians were unable to gather larger forces to crush them rapidly because they needed to send units across the country — from Kyiv and Kharkiv all the way round to Mikolaiv and Odessa. But by then the crucial fact had been established: the Russian airborne troopers in Hostomel were not tactically superior as professional elite troops should have been. The subsequent weeks of war have shown that the same was true of Russia’s tank crews, mechanised infantry and the artillery units that pounded towns and cities. Whether it was down to inattentive officers, perhaps distracted by business opportunities on the side, or because of inadequate supplies of fuel and ammunition, almost all Russia’s troops were badly undertrained, and therefore tactically inept.

Russian tactical incapacity also magnified the consequences of another surprise of this war: the emergence of super-empowered infantry that can destroy main battle tanks and knock helicopters out of the sky with shoulder-launched missiles, thereby regaining its long-lost role as the Queen of the battlefield. By 1943, the rocket-launcher M1A1 — nicknamed the “bazooka” — allowed heroic and very lucky infantrymen to occasionally destroy tanks; by 1955, the French produced wire-guided missiles that could destroy tanks if shielded from artillery, smokescreens or gunners on the hunt for them. But neither weapon could seriously impede armoured operations given normal artillery covering fires.

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Now it is different. With today’s missiles, soldiers can reliably destroy tanks and low-flying helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles that need only be pointed at the target once — while still retaining the infantry’s ancient advantages of economy, of abundance, and its ability to find cover far more easily than mechanised forces.

Russian army chiefs must have missed this tactical shift — not because they are still focused on re-fighting the last war, but because, just like their American counterparts, they were hypnotised by the trendy next war. This was meant to be fought with “post-modern information warfare”, or hybrid warfare, or “4^th Generation warfare ”— all so much more sophisticated, more advanced, and more high-tech than the old-fashioned “kinetic” warfare fought by blokes shooting at each other. It must have come as a big shock to Russia’s generals when Ukrainian soldiers could not be persuaded to surrender by sending menacing messages to their smartphones.

But now that the Ukrainians have gone on the offensive, they have lost their key advantage of remaining under cover while firing at exposed advancing enemies. They need armoured vehicles to avoid being held up by Russian fire, but so far they have received only a handful from the Czechs and Germans. What happens next in this war will very largely depend on the quantity and quality of the armoured vehicles friendly countries are willing to hand over to the Ukrainians. There is certainly no shortage of them in Europe, where shrunken armies have placed thousands of armoured vehicles in storage, ranging from thinly protected ten-ton M.113 troops carriers that are still better than nothing, to full-weight battle tanks with guns that can still be formidable if supplied with up-to-date rounds.

And this is just one more challenge in a war that will continue until Putin is willing to cut his losses and accept the one thing that Zelenskyy can give him: a promise that he will not apply for Nato membership. As to why the stalwart Zelenskyy has indicated he will do this, declaring that Ukraine’s model will instead be self-sufficient Israel, the answer is obvious: instead of strengthening its members, in recent times Nato has provided an alibi for their unilateral disarmament, which persisted even after Russia’s annexation of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea. Not only have armies shrunk, but their training is more ceremonial than functional, as became painfully evident when supposedly well-trained units were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In the years since Putin ended the post-1945 peace by seizing Crimea, only two European countries have acted to strengthen their armed forces: Finland in diverse ways, and Sweden whose government promptly reintroduced conscription to rebuild a strong army — neither of which are Nato members. Poland, which is a Nato member, contrives to have an army of 60,000 with its 37 million inhabitants, as opposed to Finland’s 280,000 on mobilisation with one sixth of the population.

As it happens, I was in Warsaw in November 2021, admittedly long ago, before the war. Upon asking the Presidential adviser whom I met for dinner why it was that Poland did not have a remotely commensurate army to defend itself given that it was next to Russia, he cited Nato’s security guarantee, which allowed Poland to spend its defence funds on what really mattered: a frigate in the Baltic (admittedly an excellent target for torpedoes or missiles), fancy helicopters for Polish units sent on peace-keeping missions, and the elaborate peaked hats of Polish officers. No wonder Zelenskyy gave up on Nato membership so easily.

The very great problem we all face — Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians and even Russians — is how to end this new European civil war. Now we are all stuck: Putin cannot leave the roulette table without the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as his prize, but Zelenskyy does not have the authority to give away Ukrainian territory even if he wanted to.

So here is my modest proposal: a referendum in each of the regions that requires a total ceasefire and which itself implies the renunciation of any further claims on Ukraine. Putin’s invasion failed within hours of being launched. Almost 50 days later, it is time for it to end.