The Long War #8
KHARKIV—I of course wasn’t there when the Ukrainian military smashed through Russian defensive lines in the Kharkiv region, rushed westward and forced panicking Russian units in the Izium area to abandon tanks, armored vehicles and huge amounts of ammunition to avoid encirclement.
When I arrived in the Kharkiv region early last week, I heard many locals express relief at having finally escaped Russian control. There was also shock, witnessing an outcome they did not expect would happen so quickly, or at all, after Moscow had vowed that Russia would be here “forever”. But, in Izium, I heard it as people waited in line under pouring rain to charge their phones and get some wifi at the only place that still had electricity (thanks to a generator and Starlink terminal provided by the military). One month of indiscriminate Russian shelling back in March followed by five months of occupation has devastated the city. “Come here in March, and you would have seen bodies all over the street” one man told me—he was waiting for his phone to charge so he could finally call his son who left to Ivano-Frankivsk just before the arrival of the Russian military.
In Kupyansk, expressions of relief were regularly interrupted by the sound of roaring artillery. The town, which sits on the Oskil river, is at the easternmost point of Ukraine’s 60 kilometers deep counter-offensive. While Ukrainian forces took full control of Kupyansk, Russian troops are forming new defensive lines not far from a town they now regularly shell. Here, people were desperate to evacuate, the constant shelling coming on top of the lack of any working infrastructure common in most other areas recently liberated by the Ukrainian military.
It’s hard not to focus on what looks like to be an impeding humanitarian catastrophe when you’re there, and to wonder how the reported 10,000 people still living in Izium will make it through the winter. But, taking a step back, it’s also obvious that this victory has already had a profound effect for Ukrainians. It seems to me that, until now, most Ukrainians believed in victory as a sort of quasi-religious article of faith. I’ve often heard people saying they believed in victory because they had “no other choice”, because they felt like the alternative was just too horrific to even be contemplated. Now however, the idea of victory has, maybe for the first time, become something tangible.
Some articles to read
(NV / in Ukrainian & Russian) Arestovych from A to Z. Who is “Mister two-three weeks” and what’s his role in Zelensky’s team (Oleksiy Arestovych is quite an interesting figure, or at least the way he’s become one of Ukraine’s most popular political figures is quite interesting. This long piece by Ukrainian outlet NV is jam-packed with fascinating details and the thesis that the president’s team basically created a monster they can’t control anymore is quite an intriguing one. NV can’t help but accuse Arestovych of spreading “pro-Russian narratives”, something I’m not exactly convinced by)
(MediaZona / in Russian) "Yabloko" - Military - Donbass. The convoluted path of a Moscow student, from political activism to death in Ukraine (Incredible story of a 22 years-old Russian student who started as a United Russia activist, later turned to opposition politics and calling for protests before being drafted into the army, ending his service, traveling to Donbass, being recruited into a local, Russia-backed militia before dying in combat)