“This candy bar saved my life,” says Gennadiy, a 26-year-old soldier who has had several encounters with death over the past year since the Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022. He touches his head and finds the scar that commemorates the day when a piece of shrapnel miraculously left only a superficial wound. He had just bent down to pick up a kit-kat when a Russian bombing raid hit the base where he was stationed in Barvinkove, Kharkiv province, last April. He was in the building when the bomb hit. “No helmet,” he says with a grimace. A window blown out by the explosion flew over his head. Cadette, a fellow countryman, was smoking outside. The attack came as a complete surprise.
Like many others of his generation, born after gaining independence from the Soviet yoke in 1991, no one imposed Gennady’s mission on him. It’s clear from his words that he’s simply following a script that previously played out in Ukraine. First, during World War II eight decades ago, and more recently in the Donbass conflict of 2014. After quitting his job at a tech company on patriotic impulses, Gennadiy volunteered for the army with no previous military experience. He considers himself one of tens of thousands of self-taught warriors fighting in the most hostile of environments.
However, Gennady was also present at less tense moments that will shape Ukraine’s history, such as the day he was one of a handful of military personnel to receive President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on his first visit to the besieged city of Bakhmut on December 20th The abandoned factory where Zelenskiy was photographed with Gennadiy and his comrades fell weeks later to Russian Wagner Group mercenaries, who triumphantly published a photo taken at the same spot. Gennadiy downplays the existence of this photo, which he claims he has not seen. In any case, he was stationed in far worse places than on the Bakhmut front, where the bloodiest battle of the war to date has been raging for months.
Gennady signs the flag that Zelensky presented to Congress during his visit to the United States.
He volunteered with the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, which were nominally made up of reserve units. Their use has met with some criticism from their soldiers, Gennadiy said: “What infuriates me the most is that they are sending the Territorials to the front and not more experienced fighters,” he says, referring to the bloodshed in Bakhmut that Er describes it as “hell on earth”. In the devastated city, he says, “the most paradoxical and incomprehensible thing” is that there are still civilians there. He makes no attempt to hide the fact that the Ukrainian military knows that some of them are pro-Moscow and are waiting under the bombs for the Russians to “liberate” them.
But Bakhmut is not the place where Gennadiy’s worst war experiences were made. He did basic training nearby, on the Sloviansk, Dolyna and Bohorodych fronts, where he saw things were already looking bad. He took part in the liberation of Izium, but in Kreminna, where he fought for two months, he first questioned his courage. “Sometimes I thought I couldn’t take it,” he says. There, the Ukrainian defenders faced not untrained mercenaries from the Wagner Group—thousands of them ex-convicts whom Russia uses as cannon fodder—but regular army soldiers who, after all, he notes, “carried their dead from the battlefield.” During his conversation with EL PAÍS, Gennadiy reveals his feelings, his frustrations, his hopes. His entire story can be summed up in one venomous phrase, which he offers: “I wouldn’t wish the hell of that final year on my worst enemy.”
The war has instilled an animalistic survival instinct in Gennadiy, though he admits to occasionally throwing in the towel and puffing on a cigarette in a fox’s burrow waiting to die. “Fear is the most precious thing I lost in the war,” he says. He has also lost 25 kilograms from the 135 he weighed a year ago. Some of it was dropped during a mission late last year. He remembers December 31 as one of those days when he thought his time was up. The transport vehicle that took them to their position broke down. They were cut off and the Russian infantry advanced on their position under artillery barrage that killed or wounded many of his comrades.
Gennadiy tells about the engagement: “At midnight sharp, shells began to hit us and lit up the night. From the ditch we could not see what they were. Someone panicked, thinking it was phosphorus bombs. I figured if they were, we’d just burn. Even if I ran, there was a chance I would be shot by a sniper. So I sat and waited and smoked. I didn’t care. We later found out they weren’t phosphorus shells. It was a terrible situation. I couldn’t understand how the territorial defenses had been stationed at zero with the simplest weapons made 70 years ago. This situation dragged on for three days. Now January 3rd is my second birthday.”
Volodymyr Zelenskiy addresses Congress as Vice President Kamala Harris and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hold the signed flag. ALMOND NGAN (AFP)
Meeting with Zelenskyi in Bakhmut
When his commander informed Gennady’s unit on the morning of December 20 that they were going to Bakhmut, he did not expect to be one of the few who would receive Zelenskyy. It was the President’s first visit to that hornet’s nest in eastern Ukraine, where both armies have suffered appalling casualties. Gennady was among the soldiers who signed the Ukrainian flag, which Zelensky himself presented to the United States Congress a day later. The soldiers had not been warned of the President’s visit due to strict security protocols. Gennadiy even hugged Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, whom he mistook for a reporter. The young soldier was impressed by how Zelenskyy got “into the most dangerous hole in the world”. “He wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest. Nothing. He only had three men from his security detail with him. And all of us with our guns, with the ammunition, with the grenades…”
Then as now, Bakhmut was “an absolute horror, but at least we thought it could be saved, we could force them to withdraw. But now I just don’t see a way to keep it going with so many casualties. I don’t think it makes much sense,” he says. In recent weeks, the Russians have made gains, with many casualties on both sides. During a visit to the front lines last week, Zelenskyi made it clear that Kiev had no intention of yielding an inch to the Russians. “I’m not a great strategist,” Gennadiy admits, which is why he may not understand what’s behind the Defense Ministry’s decisions in Bakhmut, he adds. “They’re not fools,” he says. “Perhaps all of these sacrifices are necessary to deal the final blow to Russia.”
On the night of February 24, 2022, Gennady did not sleep. He was listening to music when the first rockets fell on Kharkiv. Then his mother got up. They started watching the news. He first wondered what to do, where to run… but within minutes he realized that he had to take an active part in defending Ukraine. That was his job. A little over a year has passed since then, an eternity in which he had to deal with strategy, weapons and first aid on the battlefield: “Sometimes I can’t even remember what my life was like before the war.”
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