On the front line with a Ukrainian militia
Aris Roussinos spent a week embedded in a platoon of the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, the militia of the nationalist Right Sector party – which has been recently absorbed into the Ukrainian army – as it battled to drive Russian forces out of the Donbas
The sun is beginning to set over the Donbas front line, and I’m hurtling down hedgerow-lined roads eerily reminiscent of English country lanes at 100km an hour, bouncing around in the back of a civilian SUV as the burly fighters in the front neck cans of Monster and buckle on helmets. We’ve entered the grey zone, the no-man’s land of abandoned villages and contested territory in the steppe landscape of eastern Ukraine; as we approach a stretch of road where the hedgerows thin out, making us visible to the Russian positions on the nearby hillside, the driver accelerates until we’re safely back in the cover of the trees.
The platoon commander, “Pedro” – soldiers here all use noms de
guerre, a tradition drawn from Ukraine’s long history of resistance to foreign occupation – turns to me, nodding at the treeline at the edge of the field. “That’s it,” he says. “This is the closest road I can take. The Russians are behind those trees.”
We park, reversing the SUV under an oak to keep it hidden from drones, and hurry through the long grass to the mortar section. The mortar team have been hidden here for two days, in a tiny salient that’s almost fully encircled. Pedro points at a white house about a kilometre away at the edge of the Russian-held town of Svitlodarsk.
It’s the Russian base. “Our intelligence found a location with Russian mortar positions and an ammunition dump, so now the plan is to go, prepare the mortar, fire and leave immediately,” Pedro had told me. “With a quadcopter you can find a position to hit in 20 minutes – but once we fire, it will only take the Russians a couple of minutes to find our position and return fire.”
It is strangely tranquil, lying in the long grass fragrant with wild herbs, listening to the cuckoos and the rustle of the oak leaves – until the radios crackle and the mortar squad shout out their orders. Now. In a few minutes of furious activity, the 120mm mortar belches out a dozen rounds, as the quadcopter operator sits cross-legged in the grass, ordering them to adjust their elevation, then grins at his tablet screen as the rounds land directly on the Russian position. After that it’s time to go: we race to the SUV and drive off at high speed, bumping over dusty dirt tracks until we reach the village road, as the retaliatory Russian artillery rounds land harmlessly on the road behind us. Pedro lights a cigarette, watching the road anxiously until the mortar squad join us in their pick-up truck.
Today was a good day for Pedro. He’s brought all his men back unharmed, and the target was destroyed. The following day, Pedro, who has an ongoing social media feud with mercenaries from the far-right Russian Wagner Group on the other side of the front line, in which they threaten to kill each other, would show drone footage of the soldiers in their trenches getting obliterated by his mortar fire on his phone, overlaid with a death metal soundtrack and cry-laughter emojis. Welcome to war in 2022.
I spent a week in Donbas with Pedro’s platoon, fighters from the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps or DUK, the militia of the nationalist Right Sector party, on their first mission since they were formally absorbed into the Ukrainian army. Formed during the Maidan Revolution, in which they played a prominent role in the unseating of Ukraine’s then pro-Russian government, Right Sector has since played a starring role in Russian propaganda as evidence of Ukraine’s takeover by right-wing radicals. It’s nonsense, Volodymyr Demchenko told me, back at their base in central Ukraine. Known as “Fransuz”, he is a 33-year-old documentary filmmaker from Kyiv with a hipster haircut and an engaging manner, who’s also become something of a Twitter celebrity since detaining the journalist John Sweeney for breaking curfew in Kyiv earlier in the war.
“It is strangely tranquil, lying in the long grass fragrant with wild herbs, until the radios crackle and the mortar squad shout their orders”
“Right Sector is a Christian, conservative organisation. OK? Done,” he told me in his office, which was cluttered with books (Aristotle, Kafka, Umberto Eco), a postcard of Ernst Jünger and scent diffuser. “Like, I’m a liberal. I support LGBT, I have, like, all the time conversations about that here with the guys, and you know what, here I have freedom of speech to say that.” Fransuz insisted that far-right political movements were stronger in western Europe than in Ukraine, citing the strong showing of those parties in the West compared to their marginality here. Western journalists fixate on the far-right symbols occasionally worn by Right Sector fighters, he told me with a sigh, “but I don’t think it’s a very interesting story, to be honest. They just want to be badass, it’s f**king cosplay, man. But if you’re talking person to person and try to find this ideology in him you wouldn’t.”
Three months and much fighting into his DUK career, Fransuz was a constant presence in the group’s rear base while I was there. He joined DUK at the beginning of the war, taking part in the defence of Kyiv, and then the heavy fighting in Barvinkove, where
they destroyed dozens of Russian tanks. In Barvinkove alone, they destroyed 64 Russian armoured vehicles in their two-month deployment. “We had a position on the road and they kept sending tanks, and we kept destroying them, every day – it was like a cemetery for tanks,” laughed Hasid, the group’s officer in charge of reconnaissance. Have the Russians learnt from their mistakes? “No, no, no,” he replied. “Fear and panic. Even if the soldiers learnt, their commanders still give them the same orders – and if they disobey, they shoot them.”
But in the Donbas, the Russians do seem to have learnt from their mistakes.
Massing their troops together behind a devastating wall of artillery fire, the invaders are creeping forward every day. With the Ukrainians suffering up to 200 soldiers killed and 500 wounded each day, according to President Zelensky, the next few weeks in the Donbas may decide the outcome of an increasingly brutal war. “I was on the front line from 2014, but now the situation is really crazy, f**k, lots of planes, artillery, everything,” “Veloshka”, the commander of DUK’s medical unit and wife of Right Sector’s leader Andriy Tarasenko, told me. A big woman with bleached blond hair and sleeve tattoos, Veloshka smokes and swears incessantly. “When you’re killed,” she told me, “I’ll be really upset, f**k, it will be an international scandal. F**k, maybe I should just give you a puppy and send you away home,” she added, nodding at the litter of sleeping puppies on a nearby bed.
Like other nationalist battalions, Right Sector’s deployment in the Donbas conflict has long been controversial: they were accused of human rights abuses against suspected separatists by Amnesty International in 2014. It is hard to gauge how they are viewed by locals in the Donbas. “When I heard Right Sector were going to liberate my village, I was like, ‘Uh, we’re all going to die,’” one former Donbas resident, Sasha, told me, laughing: now she fights as a member of the group.
But for now, the Ukrainian government has embraced Right Sector. Previously used as a deniable proxy to seize positions from the separatist forces during the long years of frozen conflict in the Donbas, it has been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian army, tasked with harassing the advancing Russians. “It’s OK now we’re in the army,” 22-year-old Anna, or “Athena”, told me in flawless English, with a remarkably posh accent acquired from watching Doctor Who and Torchwood. “The regular infantry have in some ways a more difficult job. We go on special missions and the rest of the time are just chilling, but they spend all their time in foxholes under constant shelling. It’s a very difficult job.” The group is recruiting heavily, with its rear base in Central Ukraine crammed with new arrivals learning how to use the heavy machine guns donated by the West. Most seem apolitical: when asked why he joined DUK, one recruit, a sales manager for a big German company, told me it was because he didn’t want his wife to be raped and murdered by Russian soldiers, “like in Bucha”.
Unlike the regular army, DUK has an anarchic, democratic atmosphere in which soldiers discuss orders with their commanders. “No one here asks if you’re a nationalist, or an anarchist,” Athena told me. Like most DUK fighters I spoke to, she’s not a member of the Right Sector party. “We’re all just here to do our job.” Brought up in a Russian-speaking Catholic family in Vinnytsia, the daughter of a surgeon, Athena was a poet and English translator before the war, with a sideline writing essays for American college students. She first volunteered for front line service at the age of 18. With her black hair cut in a neat bob, she was a distinctive presence whenever she returned from special missions in her baggy, second-hand British uniform, leaning her assault rifle against the table as she lit a cigarette. “I’m not a feminist,” she told me. “I don’t like modern feminism, they march around but don’t have solutions for anything.” A child prodigy, she was a contestant on Russia’s version of Britain’s Brainiest Kid aged 11. In a perfect illustration of the complexities of the war, Athena’s Russian husband, a dissident from Siberia, is fighting in an elite Ukrainian unit, and her uncle is a senior officer in the Russian army.
Apart from their combat missions, the squad lived lives of quiet rural domesticity, cooking, cleaning and smoking endless cigarettes and watching the Netflix show Euphoria on their phones. For Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the Donbas is oddly bucolic. The long days spent with them were like something from a Russian novel: one day we went to the village banya together, where a crop-headed boy shoved chopped wood into the furnace as we sweated ourselves clean in the steam (“Now you are one of us,” Athena told me afterwards). They bought jugs of raw milk from local farmers, and accepted big enamel bowls of cherries from the villagers. “You know what they say,” Athena told me, “our soil is so fertile because of the dead bodies of our enemies.”
She has resigned herself to the conflict between her desire to fight and her dream of an ordinary European life. “Ukraine has always been a country at war. It’s just geographical determinism, I guess,” she told me. “It was weird going back to Kyiv the first time after the front line, but I guess that’s what we’re fighting for. I want people to drink iced lattes, smoke weed, make love. After the war I want to live my best life, because I had lots of friends who can’t do that any more.” Instead, she and her fellow fighters are billeted in a war now turning in Russia’s favour, among a local population with whom relations are at times strained. While some farmers smile and wave, others would prefer Russian rule and are unfriendly. “You won’t know until they kill you,” cautioned “Paul”, a tour guide from Kyiv turned paramedic.
Walking through the undergrowth of a semi-abandoned village to buy energy drinks and ice creams from a pointedly unfriendly shopkeeper, Athena highlighted the eerie atmosphere of dereliction. “It’s weird out here, it’s almost as bad as Detroit,” she said – Athena had spent a year in a Michigan high school as an exchange student. Ukrainian forces are struggling simply to maintain their foothold in the Donbas: if the Right Sector fighters get their wish and tackle the Russians head-on, many, perhaps most of them, will die over the course of the summer. All from elsewhere in Ukraine, they were fighting among a local population whose loyalty to the nation was not guaranteed, and found it a frustrating experience. “We know that if the Russians capture us, as Right Sector, they will kill us straight away, on the spot,” Athena said. “And for me, as a woman, well… you understand what would happen. That’s why we each carry a grenade with us.”
Returning to Dnipro, a haven of cafés and hipster cocktail bars a five-hour drive west from the front, the hotel bellboy who guided me to my room had a Right Sector screensaver on his phone. He beamed with pride when he learnt I had just spent time with them. Back on the front line, the platoon fights on. “This is like our postponed war for independence,” the company commander, “Tuman”, had told me. “After the war everything must change.”
A longer version of this article first appeared on UnHerd © UnHerd Limited 2022
“Athena was a poet and English translator before the war. When it’s over she wants people to ‘drink iced lattes, smoke weed, make love’”