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A journalist's account from the Bakhmut front [1]
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Date: 2023-05-23
A piece from the New Yorker that was written yesterday and included in Mark’s Ukraine Update today is gut-wrenching. Journalist Luke Mogelson tell the story of the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade that has been on the front line near Bakhmut since being moved from Kherson in November 2022.
We need to hear the feel good stories of reunions or Ukrainians love for animals… Those moments where humanity has not been crushed. But this reporting shows real life conditions and soldiers who have been facing the worst of it in or around Bakhmut.
I understand the need to keep the morale of the Ukrainian people up, of suppressing the civilian and military casualties. But as cities to the west are rebuilding and peoples lives further from the front are stabilizing, do the actual conditions become more abstract. I don’t doubt for a minute that Ukrainians understand the existential threat they are facing. Those who survived (or have loved ones who did not survive) Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv and so many other places will be indelibly marked. But I fear that some of us, reading daily updates in the safety of our homes looking at the military maps and cheering the ineptitude of the Russians don’t see that Ukrainian soldiers are facing the same conditions.
Food and trash were strewn everywhere. The mess had attracted mice. Adding to the unsanitary conditions, feces and soiled toilet paper littered the periphery of the position. Nobody wanted to die while burying his shit.
Even with the ingenuity that we are in awe of comes from the need to manage what they can scrounge up from old weapons that are so macgyvered it's amazing they still work (though sometimes they don’t).
A trench led from the entrance to a log parapet, underneath which the S.P.G.-9 was concealed from Russian drones. There wasn’t much to the weapon—a bazooka on a tripod—and it was in decrepit condition. The trigger mechanism was broken. To activate each warhead, Kaban had to pry open the rocket’s gunpowder-filled cartridge with a pocketknife, twist together two wires at its base, connect those wires to a household electrical cable, then hook the cable onto a loop of bare copper that was attached to the gun with masking tape. He and Cadet would lug the S.P.G.-9 out into the open, where Cadet would take aim and fire. Then they would hurry back to the dugout before Russian drones or artillery could find them.
In a blind overlooking the no man’s land stood an improbably antique contraption on iron wheels: a Maxim gun, the first fully automatic weapon ever made. Although this particular model dated from 1945, it was virtually identical to the original version, which was invented in 1884: a knobbed crank handle, wooden grips, a lidded compartment for adding cold water or snow when the barrel overheated. The gun’s operator, a rawboned soccer hooligan with brass knuckles tattooed on his hand, spoke of the Maxim like a car enthusiast lauding the performance of a vintage Mustang.
Now that Ukraine is being trained and supplied with the bigger, necessary items that it will take to win, I wonder if some of the basic personal and smaller equipment that was rushed to Ukraine in the early days through small donations and crowdsourcing has dropped off.
The battalion had begun the war with about seventy-five American night-vision devices, but many had been lost as soldiers were killed or injured in firefights. Kaban and Cadet had to use red lights on their headlamps to navigate in the dark.
And those Ukrainians who have fought on the front lines for so long, alongside some seasoned soldiers, are draftees with very little training (same as we hear of Russian draftee training). Leave consists of a few hours, every week or so, away from the front line to get showers, do laundry, get a hot meal and pick up mail. We recognize that after the war there will be a huge need for treating PSTD along with physical wounds… but:
Post-traumatic stress disorder did not seem to be an apposite diagnosis for anyone on the front, because the traumatic event was still happening. Taking leave, however, could trigger episodes of P.T.S.D. Oper, who had last returned home for his daughter’s baptism, told me, “It’s easier psychologically to stay here. It’s hard to come back after visiting civilization.” During the night that I spent with the S.P.G.-9 team, Kaban had recalled going to Odesa a few months earlier and experiencing a panic attack as soon as he exited the train station. The overwhelming stimuli—bustling crowds, speeding cars, jarring city noises—felt like an onslaught of potential threats. Strangers were rifling through their bags, making phone calls; Kaban instinctively reached for his Kalashnikov, only to realize that he was unarmed. When he spotted a group of soldiers patrolling the station, he ran to them, pale and shaking. “Don’t worry,” a soldier assured him. “You’re not the first. This happens a lot.”
And there is the age old problem of who fights these wars:
On February 24, 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, declared a general mobilization for male citizens between the ages of eighteen and sixty. Civilians of all stripes flocked to military-registration offices, eager to fight. Some waited in line for days, only to be told that no more men were required. Today, popular support for resisting rather than negotiating with Russia remains high, but, as in every war, the burden of sacrifice has fallen increasingly on the underprivileged. Nearly every draftee I met in the trenches had been a manual laborer—farmer, carpenter, dockworker, plumber—and stories abounded of Ukrainians with means dodging conscription through graft or nepotism. “You could find people from the higher classes in the infantry at the beginning of the war,” one veteran told me. “But, after a year, you don’t see an end to this—your chances of dying are higher, you’re fucking tired. Now most of the people are being drafted.”
It strikes me that at the beginning, when Mariupol was being destroyed we got to see the defenders as individuals, they became the faces of the war. We still see articles from embedded journalists that can bring that personal view, but do we take the time to read them in full, to take the time to let it sink in.
We get our daily dose of how inept, slovenly, stupid the Russians are. But do we really see that Ukrainian soldiers are running out of arms and ammo, living in filth in the trenches, being decimated by Wagner forces?
In December, while Pavlo’s battalion was being decimated by the Wagner Group, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told The Economist that it was “more important to focus on the accumulation of resources” for future battles. “May the soldiers in the trenches forgive me,”
I have used the pronoun “we” way too much and I know I’m speaking to the choir. I hope I haven’t abused “fair use” but I couldn’t figure out how to write it any other way.
Here at DKos we are taking the time to keep this in our daily conscious. I was just overcome by the horror that was described in such personal detail. I thought it was worth not overlooking.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/23/2171003/-A-journalist-s-account-from-the-Bakhmut-front
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