Confessions of a fighter. Revelations of a Volunteer

“Stay here and have a good think about it”, said someone.

In the morning we had breakfast, drill and roll-call. Then, in principle, free time, no obligations.

A Russian guy had come from Iraq with his whole body covered in scars. I don’t remember his callsign, but over the past twenty years he had been in practically all the armed conflicts on Earth.

“I’ll cover your ass, Bondo, you can rely on me”, he said. “Don’t worry, it’s only scary the first time, then you get to like it. When we’ve finished over there, we’ll go to Syria.”

That day, up to a hundred people had gathered there. Various people from all over Russia, and not just Russia. There were some from Israel, Italy, Spain and Canada. Some arrived in our camp and some left it.

In the evening some more young Ossetians arrived, and we sat down that night on the river bank to a small picnic. It was carefree and jolly, we were impatiently awaiting the morrow.

More Russian guys came from the Donbass. They worked with drones. I looked at them with envy: they’d already been there and were on their way home…

Next morning we were formed up, and about forty men were taken to the border in two minibuses. We chatted occasionally along the way, but we all felt apprehensive. Each of us was intensively thinking his own thoughts as we approached this war, speeding away from our peaceful life. When we approached the border, we saw self-propelled guns all along it with their barrels pointing towards Ukraine. We traveled for about two hours, on rural roads and bypasses, until we reached the Kuybyshevo border crossing.

We were all glad to get out onto the street. We began to look towards where the artillery was firing. Our cannon, on Ukrainian territory about five hundred meters from us, were blazing away. I heard the sound of guns for the first time in my life. Russian units had pushed the Ukrainian troops back from our borders. That was what the border guards told us.

Everything felt tight inside me. There was no fear, only new sensations which I noticed at once. You won’t experience such feelings anywhere else, only in war. Your organism is in shock, every cell is horrified by what is happening. But then some of you begin to like it, and will cherish dreams of another war.

No-one else was being let through this border post, only us and the military. The senior of our group, a man of about fifty, went up to the border guard and said:

“They should have called you. I’m Alexei.”

“Yes, go on through”, was the reply.

We crossed the border a few at a time. The roar of the guns rang in our ears. In fours and fives, we approached the barrier, where our passports were checked.

Twenty meters or so further on, they examined our things too.

“Any sharp objects? Weapons, ammunition?”

“No”, we replied.

“Where are you going?”

“To see a girl I know in Ukraine”, answered the guy from Suzdal.

“How about you?” He asked one of the Israelis.

“Me too, to visit people I know there.”

We had been warned in Rostov not to talk at the border crossing. So we were all quiet as mice, though both we and the border guards thought it was funny.

“Where are you all going?” asked the captain. You must have children at home, families, wives? What about them?”

This got home to me. I privately agreed with him. We’d left our own people and gone to strangers.

A big shot-up bus followed us from Donetsk. Only one or two window panes were intact, all the others were covered in cardboard. There was no doubt it had been in battles. A few days previously, a group of volunteers like this from Russia on the way to Donetsk had been ambushed and subjected to a hail of fire. Only a few survived.

While we were passing through this post, military vehicles – Ural-type trucks, other trucks, without license plates – were moving along a rural road to the left of us. People in uniform were sitting in them.

While I was traveling from Moscow to Rostov, I had seen these vehicles without license plates, moving through the territory of Rostov Province in big kilometer-long columns. I reckon everyone passing through that area in the summer of 2014 must have noticed them. Later, I often saw the like on Donbass territory.

But the three Ossetians and I were not allowed through, on account of restrictions on travel abroad imposed by officialdom. And they had only begun implementing them that very day. Before that, all had been let through. The officer in charge of the border crossing said:

“You’re out of luck, guys. New orders from today. You’ll go through with Alexei. He knows all about it, he’ll take you through.”

Alexei Mozgovoy, one of the eminent leaders of the armed units of the Lugansk People’s Republic, killed by persons unknown on 05.23.2015

We returned to Rostov, on the one hand with relief, the internal tension became less, but on the other hand with disappointment that we were not going with all the others. We spent the night in the camp, where a new lot had already arrived.

Next day, those of us who’d had problems crossing the border were divided into two groups. Fifteen of us went to Mozgovoy, the commander of the “Phantom” battalion6, and the others to the Cossacks.

The Ossetians came over to me.

“Bondo, are you really going with Mosgovoy?”

“Yes.”

“Watch out, they say he doesn’t care about people, he sends them off under fire.”

“No worries, bro, if anything like that happens I’ll retreat.”

Belenkoye village

We arrived in Donetsk in Rostov Province, which borders onto the territory of Ukraine, and spent about an hour there. People in passing cars stuck their heads out, looking at us with interest – we were almost all dressed in camouflage cloaks. The recruits arrived in a minibus painted a spotty green color. The senior man was called “Mechanic”. It was his job to take volunteers across the border, and also humanitarian goods, which were addressed to the Phantom battalion.

I was still wondering, “Where the hell am I going?” But my legs carried me of their own accord, not allowing the head to think…

We crossed the border in a field, went on for a hundred meters so that the minibus would not get stuck, and found ourselves in Belenkoye village, Krasnodon district of Lugansk Province, a thousand meters from the Russian border.

The recruits were housed in the local club. There were about thirty of us.

We unloaded, and the first thing we saw was a fight between two of the militiamen, heroes of the defense of Slavyansk. A week later, one of these two stole a Makarov pistol from a retired GRU captain7. The retired GRU group consisted of three men, and was going to Russia. They did not conceal who they were, although they did not draw attention to themselves. One of them was from Moscow, one from Nizhni Novgorod and I don’t recall where the third one was from. But I remember the senior of the group. It was obvious he was an officer. Five foot nine, well built, commanding voice and military bearing. He had fought in the First Chechen War and stormed Grozny. He knew how to handle guns and knives, and had basic medical knowledge, including about what kinds of wound there might be and what medicines to use. He was 100% prepared: a real professional. I didn’t meet many of those in the Donbass.

From a few snatches of conversation over ten days, I’d formed a picture of these officers, although they didn’t tell us everything. They had already been in Ukraine three months. They went in armed only with knives. Two attempts were unsuccessful because they encountered large numbers of the enemy. As one of them said: “You would never have known about us if we hadn’t lost contact with Russia, They thought we’d already been killed, so we didn’t get any help.” After a month wandering about, they came to the militia and attached themselves to the humanitarian column.

There had been four in the group at first, but their commander was shot by the militia. They were taking his body to be buried in Russia – or to be precise, the body was somewhere else and they were waiting at the border to escort it.

“Why did they kill your commander?” I asked.

“For no reason at all”, one of them replied. “They just shot him, that was it.”

It seemed out of place to inquire any further.

Two hours later, a column from Alcheyevsk8 joined us. They all looked really impressive. Some wore bulletproof vests, anti-shrapnel goggles and Kevlar helmets. Nikolayich, the deputy commander of the battalion, got out of his Land Cruiser with a pistol in his hand.

“Why haven’t the two fuel tankers gone where they should?” he shouted.

“We had no such orders, we were only told to wait here”, replied one of the drivers.

“I could have you shot on the spot! The tanks are stuck, they can’t move! Where’s the other driver?”

“I don’t know”, replied the bewildered man.

“Arrest both of them! Take them to battalion headquarters”, ordered Nikolayich.

One of the guys I had just arrived with came up to me.

“Something here sets my heart pounding, though I fought in Chechnya”, he said.

Another one came up and agreed.

“Yes, it’s no joke any more.”

I was also concerned. Up to now, I’d had no idea that you could simply be killed by your own side here. We had rapidly found ourselves in a different reality, and I started looking towards the Russian border.

It was already dark, and this column was supposed to take us to Alcheyevsk, where the Phantom battalion was deployed. Some of those we had arrived with were tank troops, and this was where they were formed into tank crews (engineer-drivers, gunners, gunlayers and tank commanders)

Fougasse, who had come with me from Rostov, suggested:

Stay behind, Bondo, we’ll teach you to be a gunner or gunlayer, you’ll be a tank man then!»

I was in an apprehensive mood, and I didn’t want to travel any farther, not that day anyway, so I decided to stay where I was. When the column had gone, we all sat at the table with the commander. They started interrogating us, asking who had served where, what specialty and so on. I hadn’t served anywhere, but my comrades said that I was a hunter and could shoot a squirrel in the eye from three hundred meters. The commander gave me the callsign “Hunter”. and promised: “When we get back from Rostov, you’ll be our sniper.” I had no objection, in fact that was the very position I had been hoping for.

After we’d been allocated to crews, we decided to have a bite to eat. Although we’d been offered food as soon as we arrived, somehow we felt it would have choked us. We took what we had from our bags, ate something, and I went out to the street. It was night time, quiet, there were bats about. The only light came from the open door. I was calm. “Fucking hell!” I thought.

About one in the morning, Fougasse called me.

“The column, Bondo! Look, our guys have arrived.”

About a hundred meters away, a column of military vehicles was moving along the road: Grads9, APCs10 and loaded tank transporters were proceeding from the Russian border towards Krasnodon11.

“Here they are at long last”, said one of the militiamen.

We would see this picture every night right up to our August advance.

We were staying in the club building, sleeping on the floor. We just threw the mattresses down and slept as we were, in our clothes. With the exception of the new arrivals, everyone had combat experience – they were almost all locals, from the Donbass. They were all about the same age, from forty to sixty-five. Their faces were coarse, not always pleasant, not like those we were used to seeing in peacetime.

The next day the militiamen under Batya’s command arrived. As I understood it, until a week ago he had been Mozgovoy’s deputy commander. He was a middle-aged man, about fifty-five. They arrived in expensive new Jeeps confiscated from civilians for the cause of “the struggle against fascism”. As he got out of the vehicle, Batya asked: “Who’ll join me? I’m creating a new battalion. If you come to us, there won’t be any tanks, Mozgovoy won’t give us anything like that. I’ll send all the tank crew lists to Russia.”

We new arrivals, of course, looked blank and didn’t understand anything. A few did go over to him though, five or six of our party.

The militiamen did not yet have weapons, they had all been disarmed back at Alchevsk, because they were supposed to be going to one of the tank training grounds in Rostov province for initial training and exercises, and to be given the equipment they’d need in combat operations.

One with the callsign Rost had already been there, and told us how the training went. “One to three weeks, from five in the morning till late evening, on the tank training ground. Then a test. Get fully clothed and shod, get weapons. They even give you brand new assault rifles, still with oil on them.” I had nothing against taking a ride to Rostov-on-Don and riding in tanks. I was in no hurry to get to the war.

We agreed to ring Mechanic at once if Batya and his comrades came back.

We did not have long to wait. The very next day, Batya got us fallen in and said:

“You realize, don’t you, that you’re like a flock of sheep, you can’t make your minds up to anything? Anyway, there’s an order from Phantom to shoot looters, because whatever town you go in, people are suffering from looting.”

Then Mechanic turned up with the reinforcements, We were between two armed groups. The situation had become tense. One of the drunken militiamen switched his gun’s safety catch off, which couldn’t go unnoticed.

“Hey, calm down, Don’t do anything stupid”, they told him as they disarmed him.

“I remember how as soon as I thought about going from Mozgovoy to Batya, I was cut by a knife, in his presence, in his office”, shouted one of those who had come with Batya, and showed us the scars of his ordeal. “And how many businessmen has Mosgovoy shot because they didn’t want to cooperate with him?”

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Примечания

1

A 7.62 mm Kalashnikov automatic rifle modified by Kalashnikov as the only standard automatic rifle for the USSR Armed Forces.

2

A Soviet/Russian reusable anti-tank missile launcher to fire cumulative ammunition, For use against tanks, self-propelled guns and other armor. Can be used to destroy enemy troops under cover and also against low-flying aerial targets.

3

A sniper’s silenced rifle for Special Forces.

4

Banderite: A member of, or one who subscribes to the ideas of, the political movement of Stepan Bandera; more generally, a nationalist Ukrainian.

5

AGS-17 Plamya: a large 30 mm. automatic grenade launcher. Intended to hit enemy personnel and artillery not under cover, in open dugouts (trenches) and behind natural folds in the landscape (in gullies and ravines, and on the reverse slopes of heights).

6

The “Phantom” battalion of the People’s Militia of Lugansk, was an armed unit. It took an active part in the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, in particular in the battles in the Debaltsevo region. The battalion commander was always Alexei Mozgovoy.

7

The GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate) is a special service for external intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation, the central control body for military intelligence on the Russian Federation Armed Forces.

8

Alchevsk: A town of provincial status in Lugansk Province of Ukraine, de facto from 2014, a city of republican status in the Lugansk People’s Republic.

9

9K51 “Grad”: The 9K51 is a Soviet multiple 122mm rocket launcher. It is intended to hit personnel in the open or under cover, non-armored equipment and APCs (see next note) deployed in concentrations, artillery and grenade launcher batteries, command posts and other targets, and for other tasks in a variety of combat situations.

10

APC: armored personnel carrier. An armored combat vehicle, a troop transporter, intended to transport personnel (riflemen), motorized units, infantry, motorised infantry, airborne and other units and materiel to required positions for combat missions and to evacuated wounded and injured from the combat zone.

11

Krasnodon: a provincial status city in Lugansk Province of Ukraine. Since April 7th 2014 it has been under the control of the Lugansk People’s Republic.