The Long War #48
Malevych and Ukraine, Soviet then Russian gas, capturing and being captured
KYIV—Hi everyone and a belated Happy New Year! We'll kick off 2025 with a fairly short and unstructured issue, looking at three very different stories I picked up these past two weeks.
I’ll start with an unremarkable piece of news that nevertheless caught my eye, bringing me back to some reporting I did several years ago: on January 2, a commission from Ukraine’s Culture Ministry announced it had added 11 museum items to the state register of national cultural heritage. Among those 11 artworks is ‘Suprematism 65’, a painting claimed to be by Kazimir Malevych.
It happens that, five years ago now, I traveled deep into the Kharkiv region and visited the small museum where that painting is exhibited. I then wrote what remains one of my favorite stories I’ve ever worked on while in Ukraine—the story of a museum claiming to own an incredible collection of world-renowned, priceless masterpieces, from Malevych to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Kandinsky, and the story of how those doubtful attributions came to be. It’s a story that combines national myth-making, Soviet cultural politics of the 60s, and the towering figure of one ambitious and charismatic history teacher. Readers of this newsletter would enjoy it, I think.
While we’re looking at the past—in the course of doing some research for a story about the end of the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine, I came across this bit of news from the New York Times, circa 1968. It is a report about the very first gas deal between the Soviet Union and a Western country—Austria. Interestingly, that gas didn’t come from faraway Siberia at the time, but from the gas fields of Western Ukraine. The first to consume Soviet and later Russian gas, Austria won’t be the last: in November, Gazprom stopped supplying the country.
But back to the present. Rather, no, let’s stay in the past, albeit the recent past. Ukraina Moderna, a website publishing texts by Ukrainian academics, published a fascinating anthropological dive into a fairly incredible situation dating from the very first days of the Russian invasion: a group of Ukrainian soldiers who captured the Russian crew of a T-90 tank, before being themselves taken prisoner by Russian forces a few days later.
The capture of the Russian tank crew on February 26 happens with disarming casualness, with one of the Ukrainian soldiers (most of them volunteers who had taken up arms just two days before) saying they didn’t even think to tie their prisoners’ hands:
Left without fuel, the tank became easy prey. Andrey Frolkov's volunteer detachment managed to capture the crew of the T90 tank, which had lost communication with its convoy and had been left to its fate. According to Valeriy Poznyak, “their radio was working, they waited for their own for a long time, then they were freezing, hungry, something had to be done and they decided to abandon the tank and go wherever.”
MG: They didn't resist?
VP: No, no, they didn't resist.
MG: So they raised their hands when you approached?
VP Yes, yes. They raised their hands, that's it, we disarmed them, took off their bulletproof vests, took off their clothes.
Things happen very differently when, a day later, the group of Ukrainian soldiers find themselves captured:
VP: Two tanks immediately drove up to us, standing in the center of the road, […] [Russian] soldiers started running and shooting at us above our heads. Then they ordered us to lie down. We got out of the cars, laid down, and they immediately handcuffed us. And since Serhiy and I were the first, they jumped us, that is, they beat us both. […] They broke two of my ribs, hit me on the head with a boot. […] Well, I turned my head to look, and he hit me on the head with his foot […] I can say that I was definitely saying goodbye to life at least three times. There were several times when I thought “that’s it!”.
But even then, the relationship between the Ukrainian prisoners and the Russian guards quickly evolves, as the Russian troops start engaging in conversation with their prisoners. There’s a big emphasis from the Ukrainian soldiers about the moment when the Russian troops guarding them switched from the informal “ty” to the formal and more respectful “vy” to address them.
The soldiers of the military police unit of the Russian Armed Forces did not hide their desire to communicate with the Ukrainian prisoners. They listened to the Ukrainian side with interest, without aggression, and on their part, showing confusion and stress.
VP: This [Russian] guy, who has been to Syria three times, he knows what's what. He says: “My rights have been violated. I was not warned, I did not sign anything that I would take part in the fighting.” And practically everyone who communicated with us was not in the mood to fight at all. That is, he was so, well, I understand, they did not understand why they were here and what they were doing here. And what is the goal of this war in general.
There’s also this unexpected scene, given the reputation that Chechen troops would earn later in the war:
IM: The Chechens—all those guys who were Muslims—they treated us better than anyone else, and there was an uncle who… well, an uncle. He was in his forties… He brought us tea in a thermos, and he brought us some cookies, he gave his sweater to those who were freezing, that is, he treated us very… that is, he treated us very humanly. So the Muslims treated us better than anyone else.
AF: Then in the morning an Uzbek sergeant came, and I asked him: “What are you? Who are you?” He says: “I am Uzbek” And he brought a thermos of hot tea. He pours it for me, says: “Drink it”. And they didn’t even give us water, because they didn’t have any water themselves. And he says to me: “Drink it”. I say: “Come on, our guys are wounded, let’s eat first”. And he gave both Sergey and Valery Semenovich a drink. He says: “I’ll make some more tea now”. He left, they lit a fire.
One of the soldiers guarding came from the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (DNR), the Russia-backed Donbas statelet that Moscow annexed in 2022—meaning that man was, or had been, Ukrainian:
AF: And then there was one who was a DNR citizen from Makiivka, he spoke Ukrainian better than me. He came up to me and said [in Ukrainian]: “Well, what’s that, strawberries – some kind of berry”. (…) I look at him, and he says: “Why are you looking at me like that!? My mother is a Ukrainian language teacher in Makiivka”. – “So why are you fighting then?” – “I’ve been fighting since 2015” – “Why are you fighting?” – “So what, I don’t have anything else to do, and I really want to go to Odessa to relax, to sunbathe. (…) We don’t have work, they grab us on the street, we have nothing to do”.
This isn't even an isolated event—I remember meeting a man in the town of Izium in September 2022 (it had just been liberated by Ukrainian forces) who also said he talked with several Russian soldiers from the DNR who spoke fluent Ukrainian.
What makes this account so striking to me is how remote it now feels. At a time when reports of Ukrainian soldiers being captured and immediately executed by Russian troops surface weekly, it is almost disorienting to read about Russian soldiers confused by the decision to invade, going about their work with little enthusiasm and little hate, simply expecting this unpleasant business to be over soon. The fact that the war has lasted almost three years, the sheer brutality of the fighting, the losses both sides have endured all make an interaction like this hard to imagine today. The way the war is now fought—deadly, small-scale infantry assaults under a sky saturated with drones—makes it pretty much impossible.
ICYMI
Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days
Zeit / And yet he remained a human—an interview with Maksym Butkevych
The Washington Post / As another Trump presidency nears, Ukraine’s army is on the defensive
The New York Times / How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine
The New York Times / A Gas Cutoff Sends Shivers Through a Russian-Backed Breakaway Region
NPR / Ukrainian soldiers and shopkeepers hold on as Russia's siege of Pokrovsk tightens