The Long War #11
KYIV—Hi everyone. It’s been a while since I was last able to send this newsletter, between the Russian strikes across Ukraine, a reporting trip in Donbas and the liberation of Kherson, I simply couldn’t find the time to write here. It’s still not exactly easy right now, so I thought I would do something different and share with you a small part of an interview I recently did in southern Ukraine with a Ukrainian soldier, part of the country’s special forces, that I found particularly striking. The Washington Post just published a series of visualizations on the war in Ukraine, one of which provides the perfect context for what this soldier said:
— What do you think, can something like the liberation of Kherson happen again in other parts of the frontline?
— I don’t think so. Relatively speaking, the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions are unique in their landscape - rivers, ravines, fields... the way our command was able to establish fire control over the [Russian] logistical chains is what lead to what we did. Are there such opportunities in other areas of the frontline? No. These are all fields, steppes, while the enemy already understands what we are capable of. We took the Kharkiv region using coordinated, planned actions. We took the Kherson region using consistent work on the destruction of supply chains. After that, it seems to me that it will be a little more complicated. That is, it will be more difficult when we consider the price. Because Kharkiv and Kherson were taken at a relatively low price. But the Zaporizhzhia and Donbas areas consist of fields, it’s a positional war, there are no opportunities to play on the relief or on the water... Therefore, the price to pay will be huge. There will be consistent advances on our part, because we have the initiative, the provision, the support, but all this is a matter of price. In my view, we can take Donbas, we can take Crimea, but it is a matter of price. If we’re talking about Crimea and Donbas, there’ll be official condolence letters [похоронне повідомлення] sent to every [Ukrainian] house.
Something to read
(Foreign Policy published a story I wrote about the Kyiv metro and how it became such a crucial part of the city’s shelter system, you can check it out here. I’ve also had a piece published in Meduza about the situation in the village of Demydiv, which was flooded back in March when Ukrainian forces blew up a dam to slow down the Russian advance)
(Kharkiv Today / in Russian) Kharkiv mayor says he will keep speaking Russian (Something I keep thinking about is how this war will change not just Ukrainian identity, but Ukrainian politics as well. One thing that we seem to be seeing the first hints of is the emergence of a patriotic, Russian-language regionalism, based on the shared experience of Russian-speaking Ukrainian regions that bore the brunt of the Russian assault, and Russian violence. Very much too early to say whether such political projects will be created and whether such a project would gain any traction, but it’s certainly something to keep an eye on)
(Texty / in English & Ukrainian) Telegram Occupation: How Russia Wanted to Breed a Media Monster, but Ended up with a Paper Tiger (A fascinating piece about the way Moscow tried and failed to set up a comprehensive network of propaganda outlets in Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions using Telegram, the main source of information for millions of Ukrainians. It’s pretty hard to understate how big of a role Telegram plays in spreading information in this war, from channels set up by pro-Russian military bloggers raking up millions of views to thousands of smaller channels keeping people appraised of what’s going on in their city, to even more, even smaller private Telegram groups for people living in, say, one specific apartment building—that last one becoming even more important as Russian strikes on electrical infrastructure have led to an even stronger need for information and solidarity at the local level. Something else that I’ve found incredible in the Ukrainian Telegram space is the way several hugely popular political Telegram channels that, before the war, claimed to reveal “insider information” about Ukrainian politics, have since then of the Russian invasion revealed themselves as outright Russian projects)
(Conflict Armament Research) Dissecting Iranian drones employed by Russia in Ukraine (A very comprehensive breakdown of a couple of Iranian drones shot down over Ukraine)
(National Security Archive) Ukraine Cyber Project (An ambitious project attempting to keep track of the cyber war also unfolding in Ukraine, including a very useful chronology of cyber developments linked to Ukraine since 2010)