A once pleasant suburban neighbourhood
The BBC has a long piece about life on the front lines in Kharkiv:
Russia invaded at 05:00 on 24 February. The night before, 22-year-old Vlad and his brother-in-arms Mark, also 22, were at a fellow private’s wedding. Columns of Russian tanks, howitzers, armoured vehicles and troop transports rolled across the border, just 40km (25 miles) away. Despite the long build up of Russian forces, the move was a shock – Ukrainian troops scrambled to defend the city.
When they learned of the attack, Vlad and Mark joined their battalion – the 22nd Motorised Infantry – and headed straight to the front lines. They have been there ever since. I have visited them there twice on the city’s northern edge – a once pleasant suburban neighbourhood, which has now become a muddy battlefield strewn with corpses and burned-out Russian tanks and vehicles.
It’s so easy, and disturbing, to picture – a suburb just outside the city, suddenly a war zone.
On that first day, one group of Russians made it into the centre, but were repelled after three days of hard, bloody fighting – with heavy casualties on both sides. The Russians were forced out beyond Kharkiv’s edge.
A month on, while Russian missiles still strike at the city centre and at least half the 1.4m population have fled, there are neighbourhoods that remain untouched.
But, the city’s eastern and northern residential neighbourhoods, which were largely intact when I arrived here three weeks ago, are unrecognisable. A tree has an unexploded Russian shell in its base; an apartment block has a 500kg bomb resting on its roof – if it had detonated, the whole building would have been brought down.
Mark and Vlad keep this grimness of war from family ears on the calls home they make most most days, just a couple of minutes each to mothers and girlfriends. So there is no mention of the dead bodies at the back door and in the next garden, no mention of the colleagues killed by Russian shelling, or of the tank commander who died the previous day. And nothing that could reveal operational details.
There were expectations that the invasion of Britain would be like that – village by village and town by town, with the local people resisting to the bitter end.
The Ukrainian soldiers might have it rough, but the Russians seem to have been particularly unprepared for anything other than the shortest possible campaign in Ukraine. The corpses I have encountered in the snow have been poorly dressed for a winter campaign, and Ukrainian soldiers say they found the most meagre of rations with them.
Now that is truly startling, given the fact that it was the Russian winter that foiled both Napoleon and Hitler. How ironic if Putin ends up being the Napoleon Q. Hitler of Ukraine.
A purported intercepted phone call, along with Western intelligence reports, may provide some of the answers. It is from a Russian commander in Mykolaiv, south of Lviv in western Ukraine, to his superiors on 11 March. It was released by Ukrainian officials and has not been independently verified. It paints a picture of Russian misery and incompetence in the Russian campaign that both the US Pentagon and the UK’s Ministry of Defence have, in part, detailed.
Troops lack basics such as tents and body armour – and are digging trenches in freezing ground to sleep. Two weeks ago, at another front line position in the city, I asked a young Ukrainian commander if his men slept in trenches. “Why would we sleep here when we can sleep in houses. The Russians sleep in trenches, but we sleep over there,” he said, pointing to a well-heated house filled with men. He explained that the dead Russians had Kevlar body armour but many lacked the armoured plates that make the vest effective.
…
A video of a captured Russian army cookhouse gives an unappetising glimpse of the meals served to troops. Servings piled high with onions and potatoes – all held together with congealed fat. Russian army rations – Meals, Ready-To-Eat (MRE) – with an expiry date of 2015.
An army marches on its stomach, remember?
When I met Mark and Vlad the first time, their commander gave me one of their sturdy green packs of Ukrainian daily rations – a leaving gift, he said.
There were 17 different things inside: wheat porridge with beef; rice and meat soup; beef stew; chicken with vegetables; pork and vegetables; crackers; biscuits; tea bags; coffee; blackcurrant drink; honey; sugar; black pepper; chewing gum; bar of dark chocolate; plastic spoons; moist wipes.
Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all this stuff.
Hats off for the Major Kong reference! Though for some reason I’ve been trying to forget Dr Strangelove…
I’ve spent my share of days living in freezing or wet conditions in a tent, but only by my own choice and always with adequate provisions and warm gear and the knowledge that I could leave and return to my home at any time, and even then that sort of day-to-day existence is miserable and soul-sucking. I cannot imagine what it must be like doing that in a war zone, with inadequate food and clothing, with no end in sight. Morale can only be plummeting–and the Russian soldiers aren’t even fighting for a cause that they can believe in, while the Ukrainians know that they are fighting for their lives and families and homes.
This sure removes any possible mystique of Putin as being a “savvy leader”, I have to say.
Hence ‘Dad’s Army’, of course.
When it is less painful and more appropriate, I’ll tell you the stories my dad told about the Home Guard (to be the British Resistance if the Germans came) in the little village where he lived.
Yep, and hence a gem of a little book called Henrietta’s War, an epistolary novel based on reality, a middle-class woman married to a doctor and living on the south coast, a mix of comedy and stark terror which is almost never actually spelled out. (I’ve never seen Dad’s Army, but I’ve read Henrietta’s War more than once.)
I’ve heard some analysts suggesting this failure and unpreparedness is the result of the inability or unwillingness of underlings to pass along bad news, or to say “no” to higher-ups, all the way to Putin. (Sound familiar?) Another consequence is that Russian generals are having to lead from the front, putting them much closer to combat than they would normally be:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/21/russia-generals-dead-ukraine/
Leaky, insecure communications has not been of help either. Apparently the Ukrainians have been taking advantage of this to send out teams to pick the the generals off.
Dad’s Army is peculiarly British, I think. It’s about the absurdity of old men being the final, surely futile resistance to the overpowering might of the German army, should it come to that. And it’s about the sort of characters who would inevitably end up in charge. But the humour and absurdity doesn’t take a thing away from the bravery these men would undoubtedly have shown if they’d had to. They would have fought to the end in the face of certain death, I’m sure. It’s the sort of humour the British are good at, I think, even now.
Near my dad’s village (also the village I grew up in), there was an RAF base and prisoner of war camp (both long gone in my time). The PoW camp was just… some huts. They didn’t keep the gates locked or anything, what would be the point? The prisoners mingled with the villages, babysat their children, worked on the farms… My dad wrote regularly to the grandchilden of some of the prisoners until he died a couple of years ago.
The stories he told about the Home Guard and about my grandad, who was a Special Constable charged with blowing up Smeaton bridge (a small bridge over a shallow beck) in case Hitler came were very Dad’s Army: pathos and slapstick at the same time.
latsot: Re POW camps.
There were a bunch of those in Canada, mostly quite far from major cities.
There was one here:
https://www.google.ca/maps/@51.0305245,-115.0387111,1225m/data=!3m1!1e3
The ‘Colonel’s cabin’ is the only(?) remnant of it.
As I heard it the POWs were allowed out to climb Mt Baldy quite often. (Zoom out on the map to see it just a couple of km south of the camp.) This allowed them to look out at the wilderness & wonder where they could possibly go if they started walking away from the camp. ;)
I have climbed that mountain & could *just* see the the tall buildings of downtown Calgary that were built decades later.
In 1939, the Russians invaded Finland expecting a walkover. And were caught unprepared for winter conditions. The Finnish army and national guard provided 4,000 calories of hot food per man, per day, as an absolute minimum. The Russians were trying to fight on black bread and tea.
Whole columns of the invading army, strung out along the northern roads, were cut off and exterminated. The actual count of Russian dead has never even been estimated. But the Finns still had to give up by March of 1940.