Analysis of the Ukraine conflict.
Litterae ex Sepulchris
“Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
— Vom Kriege, Book One
February – May 2022
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
Consider the act of making coffee. The kettle, the water, the flame. The jar of instant Nescafé—not the good Turkish coffee, that was for weekends—and the chipped ceramic mug with the faded sunflower pattern. These objects arrange themselves in sequence. Water boils. Granules dissolve. Steam rises. The hands that perform these operations have performed them ten thousand times. There is no thought required, only repetition.
This is what Oksana Koval was doing at 4:47 in the morning on February 24, 2022, in her apartment on the seventh floor of a nine-story building in Mariupol’s Tsentralnyi district, when the first explosions began.
She had risen early because sleep had become difficult. For weeks the news had carried warnings—American intelligence, British intelligence, all of them saying the same thing. Her husband Taras dismissed it as hysteria. “They’ve been saying this for eight years,” he said. “Since 2014. The Russians make noise, then nothing happens. It’s theatre.” But Oksana taught history at School Number 23, and she knew that theatre sometimes becomes reality, that the rehearsal and the performance share the same gestures, differing only in consequence.
The kettle had just begun to whistle when the sound came.
It was not the sound she expected. She had imagined, in the abstract way one imagines catastrophe, that war would announce itself with clarity—sirens, perhaps, or the crack of gunfire. Instead there was a deep concussive thump, felt as much as heard, followed by a rumbling that seemed to travel through the building’s bones. The kettle continued its whistle. The water continued to boil. For three seconds, perhaps four, nothing in the kitchen changed except the quality of the air, which seemed suddenly to have weight.
Then the second explosion, closer. The windows rattled in their frames. A car alarm began to wail in the street below.
Oksana turned off the flame beneath the kettle. This was the first decision of the war, and it was made without thought: the gas should not be left burning. Later she would recognise this as the beginning of a new logic, a calculus that would govern every action in the days to come. Conserve. Protect. Prepare for the worst while hoping it will not arrive.
She walked to the window. The predawn darkness revealed little—the amber glow of streetlights, the silhouettes of apartment blocks identical to her own, the distant bulk of the Azovstal steel plant’s smokestacks against the grey horizon. She saw no fire, no destruction. The explosions might have been thunder, might have been industrial accident, might have been anything except what they were.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her sister in Zaporizhzhia: Are you okay? They’re saying Kyiv is being bombed.
Then another, from a colleague: Turn on the television.
Then another, from the school’s group chat: Classes cancelled. Stay home. Updates to follow.
Oksana did not turn on the television. She went instead to her daughter’s room.
Yulia was seventeen, in her final year of secondary school, and she slept the way teenagers sleep—deeply, thoroughly, immune to interruption. The explosions had not woken her. She lay curled beneath a blanket decorated with cartoon cats, a relic of childhood she refused to replace, her dark hair spread across the pillow. In the faint light from the hallway, she looked younger than her years. She looked like the child Oksana remembered bathing, feeding, walking to her first day of school.
This is the nature of friction in its most essential form: the resistance between what is and what must be done. Oksana knew she should wake her daughter. She knew that every moment of ignorance was a moment of vulnerability. But she stood in the doorway for thirty seconds, perhaps a minute, watching Yulia breathe, watching the slight movement of the blanket with each exhalation, and she could not bring herself to speak the words that would end that peace.
Taras made the decision for her. He appeared behind Oksana, his face creased with sleep and something else—not fear, not yet, but the beginning of it, the first chemical trace of adrenaline.
“The airport,” he said. “They’re bombing the airport.”
Mariupol’s airport was twelve kilometers from their apartment. The explosions had seemed closer. This meant either that the reports were wrong or that other targets were being struck. Both possibilities carried their own terrors.
“Yulia,” Oksana said, and the word was enough.
The next three hours demonstrated what military theorists call the fog of war, though no theorist can convey its texture, its density, the way it permeates every thought and action. Information arrived in fragments, each fragment contradicting the last. The Russian military had crossed the border at multiple points—or had not yet crossed—or had been repelled—or was advancing rapidly toward Kyiv. Mariupol was being attacked—or was being bypassed—or was under siege. The president had fled—or was broadcasting from the capital—or had been killed.
Oksana’s phone became useless, then essential, then useless again. Networks overloaded. Messages failed to send. When calls connected, the voices on the other end spoke in the same bewildered tones, asking the same questions, possessing the same absence of answers.
Taras wanted to leave immediately. “The car is ready,” he said. “We can be in Zaporizhzhia in four hours, maybe five.”
But the roads, according to some reports, were already blocked. Russian forces had entered from Crimea—from the south, meaning they would have to drive toward them to escape. Or the roads were open but filling with refugees, kilometers-long queues of vehicles burning fuel while going nowhere. Or the roads were being bombed, cars burning by the roadside, bodies in the ditches.
“We should wait,” Oksana said. “Until we know more.”
“We’ll never know more. That’s the point. We have to decide now.”
This was the paradox that would define the war’s opening days. To act without information was to risk catastrophe. To wait for information was to risk being trapped when the information finally arrived. Every choice was a gamble made in darkness.
Yulia, awakened and dressed, sat on the sofa with her phone pressed to her ear, speaking rapidly to friends. “Masha’s family is leaving. They’re going to Poland. Andriy says his father has a contact in the army who says the Russians will be stopped at Berdyansk. Lena’s parents won’t let her leave the apartment.”
“What do you think we should do?” Oksana asked her.
The question surprised them both. Oksana had not planned to ask it, and Yulia had not expected to be consulted. But in that moment, in that apartment filled with the sound of distant explosions and the glow of conflicting news reports, the usual hierarchies of family seemed inadequate to the situation.
“I don’t know,” Yulia said. “I don’t want to leave. But I don’t want to stay if—”
She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
By eight o’clock, the fog had thickened rather than lifted. The television showed footage of missiles striking Kyiv, of tanks crossing fields, of civilians with suitcases standing in train stations. The president—alive, in Kyiv, wearing military green instead of his usual suit—spoke of resistance, of unity, of the need to defend the nation. His words were clear, but clarity of rhetoric did not translate to clarity of circumstance.
Oksana made coffee. This was the third attempt; the first two had been interrupted, the water left to cool in the kettle while she attended to other things. Now she stood at the counter with the chipped mug in her hands, watching the granules dissolve, and she understood that this simple act—this act she had performed ten thousand times—had become the most difficult thing in the world.
The difficulty was not physical. Her hands still worked, the water still boiled, the Nescafé still dissolved. The difficulty was in the meaning of the act, in its assumption of continuity, in its premise that there would be a tomorrow in which coffee might be drunk again. To make coffee was to declare that life would go on. To drink it was to believe that declaration.
She drank it standing at the window, watching the smoke rise from somewhere in the eastern part of the city, and she tried to calculate the odds. Eight years of conflict in the Donbas had taught Mariupol something about war. The city had been captured briefly in 2014, then liberated, then shelled intermittently for years. Its people understood, in a way that Kyiv and Lviv and the western cities did not, that war was not a distant abstraction but a local reality. But this was different. This was not skirmishes on the outskirts or artillery duels at night. This was the full weight of a nation’s military directed at them, and no amount of experience could prepare for that.
Taras joined her at the window. He had been on the phone with his brother, who lived in a village outside the city, who had seen military vehicles on the road heading south.
“Russian?” Oksana asked.
“Ukrainian. Our forces are moving to defend.”
“That’s good.”
“Maybe. It means they expect fighting here.”
The steel plant’s smokestacks stood against the morning sky, their familiar silhouettes now carrying new meaning. Azovstal was one of Europe’s largest metallurgical complexes, a maze of industrial buildings and underground tunnels that stretched for kilometers along the coast. Oksana had passed it countless times, had taught lessons about its history—the Soviet construction, the Stakhanovite workers, the economic importance of Ukrainian steel. Now she looked at it and saw what a military planner might see: terrain, cover, defensive positions.
“If we’re going to leave,” Taras said, “we should do it now. In an hour the roads will be impossible.”
“And if we leave and the roads are already impossible?”
“Then we’ll turn back. But at least we’ll have tried.”
This was the core of their disagreement, Oksana understood. Taras believed in action, in movement, in doing something even if that something might be wrong. She believed in patience, in observation, in waiting for the shape of events to clarify before committing to a course. Neither approach was inherently superior. In some circumstances, action saved lives; in others, it destroyed them. The same was true of waiting.
She thought of her students. Twenty-three children in her history class, most of them Yulia’s age, most of them probably in their own apartments right now, having the same conversations with their own families. What would she tell them, if she were standing in front of them in the classroom? What lesson from history applied to this moment?
Nothing, she realised. History taught patterns, tendencies, the shape of what had been. It did not teach what to do when the future arrives disguised as the present, when every pattern breaks simultaneously, when the rules that governed yesterday no longer apply.
“One more hour,” she said. “Let’s wait one more hour and see what happens.”
Taras exhaled slowly. He wanted to argue—she could see the argument forming in his jaw, in the tension of his shoulders—but he did not. He walked to the television and turned up the volume, as if the news might offer an answer that their own deliberation could not.
Yulia came out of her room carrying a backpack.
“I packed some things,” she said. “Just in case.”
Oksana looked at her daughter—this young woman who had been a baby sixteen years ago, who had learned to walk in this apartment, who had grown up speaking two languages and navigating two cultures and thinking of herself as Ukrainian without apology or hesitation. The backpack was purple, a colour Yulia had chosen herself, and it bulged with whatever she had deemed essential: clothes, probably, and the phone charger, and perhaps some small tokens of her life—a photograph, a piece of jewelry, something that could not be replaced.
“That’s smart,” Oksana said. “I should do the same.”
She went to the bedroom and opened her closet. The suitcase they used for vacations was on the top shelf, covered with dust. She pulled it down and placed it on the bed, and then she stood looking at it, and she understood that she had no idea what to pack.
What do you take when you might never return? What objects carry meaning when the context that gave them meaning has been destroyed? She looked at the framed photographs on the dresser: her wedding, Yulia’s birth, her parents who had died years ago. She looked at the books on the shelf: Shevchenko’s poetry, dog-eared from teaching, and the collected works of Chekhov in Russian, a gift from her mother, and a dozen other volumes that represented a lifetime of reading. She looked at the closet full of clothes, most of which she had worn a hundred times, none of which seemed relevant to whatever was coming.
In the end, she packed practical things: warm layers, sturdy shoes, underwear, her passport and documents, a small amount of cash. She added one photograph—Yulia as a baby, held in Taras’s arms—and the silver necklace her mother had given her on her wedding day. Everything else she left behind.
The suitcase was not full. It felt lighter than it should, as if her entire life weighed almost nothing when reduced to what could be carried.
She returned to the living room. Taras and Yulia were watching the television, where a reporter stood in front of a damaged building, describing what he called “the first hours of Europe’s largest military conflict since World War II.” The phrase seemed too large for the reality—for the apartment with its faded wallpaper, for the chipped mug still sitting on the counter, for the morning light filtering through windows that had not yet been broken.
Another explosion, distant but audible. The reporter paused mid-sentence, then continued.
“One more hour,” Oksana said to no one in particular. “Then we decide.”
The hour passed. Then another. Then a third.
Each hour brought new information, each piece of information contradicting the last. The roads out of the city were passable—then blocked—then passable again. Russian forces were approaching—then had bypassed the city—then were attacking from multiple directions. The Ukrainian army was holding—then retreating—then counterattacking.
By noon, Oksana understood that they had waited too long. The window for escape, if it had ever been open, had closed while they debated. The roads were now genuinely impassable, clogged with vehicles and under sporadic fire. The city was encircled or soon would be. To leave now would be to drive into danger rather than away from it.
Taras said nothing. He sat on the sofa with his hands clasped between his knees, staring at the floor, and his silence was worse than any accusation.
Yulia was crying quietly, not from fear but from frustration, from the helplessness of being trapped by circumstances beyond her control. Oksana sat beside her and put an arm around her shoulders, and she said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Outside, the sound of artillery had grown closer. Smoke rose from several points across the city. The Azovstal plant’s smokestacks stood unmoved, industrial monuments to a world that had existed yesterday and might not exist tomorrow.
This is what the theorists mean when they speak of friction, Oksana thought. Not the grand strategic friction of supply lines and communication failures and fog of war, but the small friction of human indecision, of information that arrives too late or too corrupted to be useful, of families arguing in kitchens while history decides their fate. The simplest thing—the decision to stay or go—had become impossibly difficult, not because the choice itself was complex but because the conditions in which it had to be made stripped away all certainty.
She went to the kitchen and made another cup of coffee. The kettle still worked. The gas still flowed. The Nescafé was still in its jar. These small continuities were all she had left.
When she returned to the living room, Taras had turned off the television. The silence was sudden and complete, broken only by the distant rumble of artillery and the occasional wail of car alarms.
“We’ll need to prepare,” he said. “Fill containers with water. Gather food. Find the candles.”
He was speaking now in the voice of practicality, of survival. The window for escape had closed, and a new logic had replaced the old one. They were no longer a family deciding whether to flee. They were inhabitants of a besieged city, and their survival would depend on entirely different calculations.
Oksana nodded. She drank her coffee—her fourth of the day, though it was barely past noon—and she looked at the window, at the smoke, at the city that had been her home for twenty-three years, and she tried to imagine what the next days would bring.
She could not imagine it. No one could. That was the nature of war: it exceeded imagination, it overwhelmed preparation, it turned the simple into the impossible and demanded that you navigate the impossible anyway.
Yulia wiped her eyes and stood up. “I’ll help,” she said. “Tell me what to do.”
They began to fill containers with water, not knowing that in three days the water would stop flowing, that in five days the electricity would fail, that in two weeks they would be sheltering in basements while the city burned around them, that the school where Oksana taught would be destroyed by artillery, that the apartment where they now stood would be hit by a missile that would not explode but would lodge itself in the wall of Yulia’s bedroom like a terrible message.
They did not know any of this. They knew only that the simple act of filling a container with water had become essential, that each bottle and pot and basin might be the difference between life and death, that the routines of peacetime had been replaced by the rituals of siege.
The kettle sat on the counter, cooling. The chipped mug with the sunflower pattern had been rinsed and placed in the cabinet. These objects remained what they had been, but their meaning had changed, and Oksana understood—not intellectually but in her body, in her bones—that nothing would be simple again.
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
The remarkable thing about war is not that it kills so many men, but that it finds so many willing to be killed.
Consider the mathematics of attrition. An army advances. It encounters resistance. To overcome that resistance, it must expend resources—ammunition, fuel, equipment, time. But above all, it must expend men. The men die or are wounded or are captured, and they must be replaced, and the replacements must be trained, and the training takes time that the advance does not have, and so the army reaches into ever-deeper reserves, drawing from populations that have progressively less to lose and progressively less to gain.
This is where Viktor Semyonov enters the story.
He was thirty-four years old in July of 2022, serving the fourth year of a seven-year sentence at IK-6, a penal colony in the Saratov region, six hundred kilometers southeast of Moscow. His crime was armed robbery—a convenience store, a knife, forty-three thousand rubles and a bottle of vodka. He had been drunk when he committed it and barely remembered the act itself, only the aftermath: the police, the trial, the journey in a prison transport van, the gates of the colony closing behind him.
Four years. In four years he had learned to sleep on a thin mattress, to eat food that tasted of nothing, to avoid the men who needed to be avoided and cultivate the men who needed to be cultivated. He had learned to measure time not in days but in counts—morning count, evening count, the count before meals and the count before sleep. He had learned that freedom was not a place but a feeling, and that feelings could be suppressed until they no longer troubled him.
He had not learned to read well, though he could manage simple texts. He had not learned a trade, though he had worked in the colony’s furniture workshop, sanding boards until his hands cracked and bled. He had not learned to imagine a future, because imagination required hope, and hope was a luxury the colony did not provide.
Then Prigozhin came.
The visit was announced three days in advance, which was unusual. Normally the administration told the inmates nothing until the moment arrived. But this was different—this was, as the guards said with something like awe in their voices, an important man, a man connected to the highest levels of power, a man who had come to offer them something unprecedented.
Viktor did not know who Prigozhin was. He learned later—the catering business, the troll farms, the private military company that officially did not exist but somehow operated across three continents. At the time, he knew only that the man who walked into the assembly hall on a Tuesday afternoon in July carried himself like someone who had never been told no.
He was shorter than Viktor expected. Bald, heavy-set, with small eyes that moved constantly across the assembled inmates. He wore civilian clothes—a dark jacket, no tie—and he walked with the confidence of a man surrounded by invisible protection. Behind him came several others, younger, fitter, with the bearing of soldiers.
“Gentlemen,” Prigozhin said, and the word was strange, because no one had called them gentlemen in years, perhaps ever. “I am here to offer you a choice.”
The hall was silent. Three hundred men, murderers and thieves and rapists and fraudsters, sitting on wooden benches, watching this stranger who spoke to them as if they mattered.
“You know what is happening in Ukraine. The special military operation. The defense of Russian interests against NATO aggression.” Prigozhin’s voice was calm, almost conversational, as if he were discussing business over dinner. “The Ministry of Defense has its methods. We have ours. Our methods require men. Men who are not afraid to fight. Men who have nothing to lose.”
He paused. His eyes swept the room.
“I am offering you a contract. Six months. You will be trained, equipped, sent to the front. If you survive six months, you will be pardoned. Your record will be erased. You will walk out of here as free men.”
A murmur rippled through the hall. Viktor felt it pass through him—not hope, exactly, but something adjacent to hope, something that had been dormant so long he had forgotten its name.
“I will not lie to you,” Prigozhin continued. “Many of you will die. Perhaps most of you. The fighting is brutal. The Ukrainians are skilled and determined. You will face artillery, drones, snipers. You will live in trenches and bunkers. You will see things that will stay with you forever, assuming you live long enough to remember them.”
He smiled. It was not a reassuring smile.
“But you will die as soldiers. You will die for Russia. And if you survive—” He spread his hands. “Freedom. A clean slate. A chance to start again.”
The man beside Viktor, a Georgian named Giorgi who had killed his brother-in-law over a land dispute, whispered: “He’s lying. They’ll use us and throw us away.”
“Maybe,” Viktor whispered back. “But three more years in here, or six months out there. Which would you choose?”
Giorgi did not answer. He did not need to.
The recruitment process was perfunctory. Viktor signed papers he did not fully understand, received a cursory medical examination, and was told to gather his belongings—not that he had any worth gathering. Within a week, he was on a bus with forty other men, heading south toward a training camp that appeared on no official maps.
The camp was in the steppe, flat and featureless, surrounded by nothing. Tents and prefabricated buildings clustered around a parade ground of packed dirt. Men in mismatched uniforms moved between the structures, some carrying weapons, others carrying the dazed expressions of the recently arrived.
Training lasted three weeks. This was, Viktor would later understand, inadequate. A proper soldier required months of preparation—physical conditioning, weapons handling, tactics, communication, the thousand small skills that separated survival from death. But Wagner did not have months. Wagner had bodies to fill, positions to hold, advances to make. The training taught them the minimum: how to load and fire a Kalashnikov, how to dig a trench, how to follow orders without questioning.
“You are not soldiers,” their instructor told them on the first day. He was a lean man with a scar across his throat and eyes that had seen things Viktor did not want to imagine. “Soldiers take years to make. You are assault troops. Your job is simple. You advance. You engage the enemy. You create opportunities for those behind you.”
“What if we’re killed?” someone asked.
“Then you have served your purpose.”
The arithmetic was not hidden from them. They were the first wave, the expendable wave, the men whose deaths would reveal enemy positions and expend enemy ammunition. If they survived the first assault, they might survive the second. If they survived enough assaults, they might complete their six months. The odds were not discussed, but Viktor could calculate them from the faces of the trainers, from the way they looked at the recruits like livestock being prepared for slaughter.
He learned to shoot. He was not skilled, but he was adequate—able to hit a man-sized target at a hundred meters, able to reload without looking, able to clear a jam in the time it took to draw three breaths. He learned to crawl through mud, to dig a foxhole, to move at night without a light. He learned the shape of a grenade, the weight of a magazine, the sound of incoming artillery.
He did not learn to think of the Ukrainians as enemies. He did not learn patriotism or hatred or any of the emotions that were supposed to sustain a soldier in combat. He learned only that survival required obedience, and obedience required the suppression of everything else—doubt, fear, morality, self.
At the end of the three weeks, they were issued uniforms without insignia, weapons without serial numbers, and orders without explanations. They boarded trucks in the dark and drove east, toward the sound of guns.
The front announced itself gradually, then all at once.
First came the sound—a low rumble that might have been thunder, except that it did not stop. Then came the smell—smoke and cordite and something sweeter, something that Viktor would later learn to identify as decomposition. Then came the sight: a landscape that had been villages and fields and forests, now reduced to craters and rubble and the skeletal remains of trees stripped by shelling.
They dismounted from the trucks in a town that had no name anymore, only a grid reference. The buildings that remained were hollow shells, walls punctured by impacts, roofs collapsed into the streets below. The men who met them were gaunt and filthy, their eyes carrying the thousand-yard stare that Viktor would come to know well.
“Fresh meat,” one of them said, not unkindly. “How long was your training?”
“Three weeks.”
The man laughed. It was not a pleasant sound.
“We’ll give you the orientation,” he said. “The real one. The one they don’t teach at the camp.”
The orientation was simple. They were near Bakhmut—or Artyomovsk, as the Russians called it—a city that had become the focus of Wagner’s operations. The Ukrainians held the city and the land to the west. Wagner held the land to the east and was advancing, meter by meter, through the surrounding villages and suburbs.
“The tactic is this,” the veteran explained. “Small groups, eight to twelve men. You advance until you make contact. When you make contact, you fix the enemy’s position and call for fire support. Then the next group advances past you. Then the next. Eventually, someone breaks through.”
“What about the groups that don’t break through?”
“What about them?”
Viktor understood. The groups that did not break through were dead or wounded, and the wounded were often left behind, and being left behind in this landscape was its own form of death. The acceptable casualty rate was not discussed because there was no acceptable casualty rate—there was only the advance, measured in meters per day, paid for in lives.
“How long have you been here?” Viktor asked.
“Two months. I was in the first wave. There were forty of us. Now there are seven.”
The mathematics confirmed what Viktor had suspected. Survival was not expected; it was an aberration, a statistical anomaly that occurred despite the system’s design. The system required death. It was optimized for death. The recruits were not soldiers but fuel, consumed to power an advance that moved at the pace of a glacier and cost more lives per kilometer than any battle since Stalingrad.
That night, Viktor lay in a basement with twenty other men, listening to the artillery. The shells fell without pattern or rhythm, each one a lottery ticket that might land on their position or might land somewhere else. Sleep was impossible, then necessary, then impossible again. He closed his eyes and saw the face of the convenience store clerk, the one he had threatened with a knife four years ago, and he wondered if this was punishment or penance or simply the universe’s indifferent arithmetic catching up with him.
He decided it did not matter. He was here now, in this basement, in this war, and the only question that mattered was whether he would be here tomorrow.
In the morning, they advanced.
The first assault was confusion.
Viktor moved forward with his squad—eight men, most of whose names he had not learned—through a shattered treeline toward a village that appeared on no map. The Ukrainians were somewhere ahead, in positions that their reconnaissance had failed to locate precisely. The plan, such as it was, was to advance until contact, then hold and call for support.
Contact came sooner than expected.
The first man died before Viktor heard the shot. He simply fell, mid-stride, and lay still. The second man dove for cover and was hit as he dove, the round catching him in the shoulder and spinning him into the dirt. The rest of them scattered, crawling behind whatever cover they could find—a fallen tree, a crater, the remains of a stone wall.
Viktor pressed himself into the earth. Bullets cracked overhead, each one a small sonic boom that announced how close death had passed. He could not see the enemy. He could not see his squadmates. He could see only dirt and grass and the grey sky above.
“Contact front!” someone was shouting. “Contact front, two hundred meters!”
Viktor raised his weapon and fired in the direction of the shout. He did not aim; there was nothing to aim at. He simply fired, as he had been trained to fire, creating noise and suppression while others maneuvered. His magazine emptied in seconds. He reloaded, hands trembling, and fired again.
The engagement lasted perhaps ten minutes. It felt like hours. When it ended—when the Ukrainians withdrew or were suppressed or simply stopped shooting—Viktor found himself alone behind his crater, breathing in shallow gasps, his weapon hot in his hands.
Three of his squad were dead. Two were wounded, one badly enough that he would not survive the evacuation. The remaining three, including Viktor, crawled back to their starting position and reported the contact.
“Good work,” the commander said. “We’ve fixed their position. The next wave will advance through you.”
Viktor wanted to say something—to scream, perhaps, or to ask what had been accomplished, what purpose had been served by the deaths of three men for a hundred meters of churned earth. But he said nothing. He sat in the trench and cleaned his weapon and waited for the next order.
That night, he dreamed of coffee. Not the instant powder of the prison canteen, but real coffee, the kind his mother had made when he was a child, dark and bitter and sweet with sugar. He woke to the sound of artillery and did not remember where he was for three seconds, four, five—long enough to believe he might be somewhere else, someone else, before reality returned and settled over him like a shroud.
The weeks that followed established a rhythm, though rhythm implies regularity, and there was nothing regular about the fighting. Some days they advanced. Some days they held. Some days they retreated, trading ground they had paid for in blood to avoid paying more blood for ground they could not hold.
Viktor learned to identify the sounds of different weapons—the crack of a Kalashnikov, the deeper boom of a machine gun, the whistle and crump of mortar fire. He learned to read terrain, to see cover where a civilian would see only grass and trees. He learned to sleep in fragments, stealing minutes of unconsciousness between barrages, waking at the slightest change in the pattern of sound.
He learned, above all, that survival was arbitrary. The man beside him could die while Viktor lived; the position that seemed safe could become a death trap in an instant. Skill mattered, but luck mattered more, and luck was distributed without logic or justice.
The men around him changed constantly. New recruits arrived, were assigned to squads, advanced, died or survived. Viktor could not remember most of their faces. He learned not to learn their names, because names created connections, and connections created grief, and grief was a weight he could not carry while also carrying his weapon and his ammunition and his fear.
But some faces he remembered. Giorgi, the Georgian who had whispered beside him in the assembly hall, died in the third week, caught by a Ukrainian drone while crossing an open field. Andrei, a former bank robber from Yekaterinburg, survived two months before a sniper found him during a cigarette break. Dmitri, who had been a teacher before he was a murderer, lasted until October, when a shell landed directly in his foxhole, leaving nothing to bury.
Viktor survived. He did not know why. He was not faster or smarter or braver than the men who died. He simply did not die, day after day, assault after assault, until the days accumulated into weeks and the weeks into months.
Three months in, he was no longer a new recruit. He was a veteran, one of the men who met the fresh arrivals with knowing eyes and bitter laughter. He gave the orientations now. He explained the tactics. He watched the new faces and calculated their odds without telling them what he calculated.
“Why do they keep coming?” one of them asked—a boy, really, barely twenty, convicted of car theft.
“Because the alternative is prison.”
“But they must know. They must see what happens.”
“They see. But they don’t believe. No one believes until they’re here.”
The boy died in his first assault, three days later. Viktor did not remember his name.
By November, the battle for Bakhmut had become the center of the war. The city itself was a ruin, contested block by block, building by building, sometimes room by room. Wagner’s tactics had not changed—wave after wave, assault after assault, the calculus of attrition applied with mechanical consistency. But the Ukrainians had adapted, fortifying positions, pre-registering artillery, using drones to observe and strike with precision that made every advance costlier.
Viktor had survived five months. One month remained on his contract. The odds had shifted; he was no longer the fresh meat, the expendable first wave. He was experienced enough to be valuable, skilled enough to lead a squad, lucky enough to have avoided the thousand ways that men died in this landscape.
But survival was not guaranteed. Survival was never guaranteed. Each day he woke in whatever basement or bunker or trench he had slept in, and each day he calculated the odds again, and each day the odds were not good enough to offer comfort.
He thought sometimes about what he would do if he survived. Freedom was an abstraction—he had not been free since his arrest, and before that, he had been free only in the sense that prison is freedom from responsibility, from choice, from the weight of determining one’s own path. What would he do with a clean slate? What skills did he possess? What desires? The questions had no answers, and so he stopped asking them. He focused on the immediate: the next assault, the next meal, the next hour.
The irony, which he understood but did not dwell upon, was that war had given him something prison never had. Purpose, perhaps. Or clarity. In prison, time was something to be endured; here, time was something to be survived, and survival demanded engagement, attention, presence. He had never been more alive than in the moments when death was closest. This was not a comfortable realization, but comfort had never been part of his experience.
One month remained. Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Forty-three thousand minutes, each one a lottery, each one a chance to live or die.
He cleaned his weapon. He checked his ammunition. He waited for the order to advance.
The remarkable thing about war is not that it kills so many men, but that it finds so many willing to be killed.
War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of those things upon which action in war must be calculated are hidden in the fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.
Consider what is lost when a city dies. First the electricity—the invisible current that powers light and refrigeration and communication and the thousand small conveniences that separate civilisation from its absence. Then the water, which flows through pipes until the pipes are broken or the pumping stations are destroyed or the workers who maintain them have fled or been killed. Then the gas, which heats homes and cooks food and represents, in its controlled combustion, humanity’s mastery over fire. Then the telephone networks, the internet, the ability to know what is happening beyond the range of one’s own senses.
What remains, when all of this is stripped away, is the basement.
Oksana descended into the basement of her apartment building on March 2, 2022, six days after the war began. She brought with her Taras and Yulia, two suitcases, four containers of water, whatever food they had managed to gather, and the conviction—already weakening—that this would be temporary, that the siege would lift, that normality would return.
The basement was not designed for habitation. It was a storage space, low-ceilinged and damp, cluttered with the detritus of decades—old furniture, broken appliances, boxes of photographs and documents that residents had deposited and forgotten. The floor was concrete, the walls were concrete, the ceiling was concrete reinforced with steel beams that might or might not withstand a direct hit. There was no natural light. There was no ventilation beyond what seeped through cracks in the foundation. There was no plumbing.
Forty-three people lived in this space. Oksana counted them on the first day: twenty-seven adults, sixteen children, the youngest an infant of four months, the oldest a woman of eighty-six who had survived the German occupation and spoke of this siege as if it were a familiar acquaintance. They arranged themselves by family, claiming territories of a few square meters each, marking boundaries with suitcases and blankets and the unspoken agreements that emerge when strangers must share space without killing each other.
The Kovals established themselves in a corner near the stairs, which offered both the advantage of quicker escape and the disadvantage of exposure to whatever might come down from above. Taras hung a sheet from the pipes to create a semblance of privacy. Yulia arranged their supplies with the methodical precision she had inherited from her mother. Oksana sat on an overturned crate and tried to calculate how long they could survive.
The arithmetic was not encouraging. They had perhaps forty liters of water, enough for drinking and minimal hygiene for a week, maybe two if they were careful. They had food for perhaps the same duration—canned goods, dried pasta, a bag of rice, some vegetables that would spoil within days. After that, they would need to venture out, to find supplies in a city that was being systematically destroyed.
“We’ll manage,” Taras said, reading her expression. “We’ve managed before.”
But they had not managed before, not like this. The 2014 conflict had touched Mariupol but not consumed it. There had been fighting, yes, and shelling, and the fear that came with proximity to war. But the infrastructure had held. The city had functioned. This was different. This was annihilation.
The days acquired a rhythm dictated by artillery.
The shelling began each morning around six, peaked in intensity through the afternoon, and continued sporadically through the night. The basement residents learned to distinguish between the sounds—the whistle of incoming rounds, the crump of impacts, the particular resonance of different calibers. They learned which sounds required immediate reaction (a whistle growing louder) and which could be endured without movement (distant explosions, already landed). They learned to sleep in fragments, as soldiers do, stealing rest between barrages.
Oksana found herself teaching again, though not in any classroom. The children needed occupation, and she was a teacher, and teaching was what she knew. She organised lessons in the dim light of candles and phone flashlights—mathematics, history, Ukrainian literature. The lessons were abbreviated, interrupted by explosions, conducted in whispers to avoid attracting attention from whatever might be listening above. But they provided structure, and structure was survival.
“Why are they bombing us?” asked Dima, a boy of eight whose parents had been killed in the first week. He lived now with a neighbour, a woman named Iryna who had taken him in without being asked.
Oksana considered the question. She could have offered the geopolitical explanation—NATO expansion, Russian security concerns, the contested status of Crimea and the Donbas. She could have offered the historical explanation—centuries of Russian-Ukrainian entanglement, the Holodomor, the Soviet legacy, the 2014 revolution that had set this conflict in motion. But Dima was eight, and his parents were dead, and he did not need a lecture. He needed something he could hold.
“Because they want what we have,” she said finally. “And we won’t give it to them.”
“What do we have?”
“Our home. Our language. Our right to decide for ourselves.”
Dima thought about this. “Will we win?”
Oksana looked at the concrete walls, at the candles flickering in the dark, at the forty-three people crowded into a space meant for storage, and she did not know what winning meant anymore.
“We will survive,” she said. “And survival is a kind of victory.”
On March 9, the building was hit.
Oksana did not hear the shell that struck their home. She heard only the aftermath—the roar of collapsing masonry, the screaming of metal and concrete, the shower of dust that fell from the ceiling of the basement like grey snow. The lights they had rigged—a car battery connected to a single bulb—flickered and died. In the darkness, people screamed. Children cried. Someone was praying in Russian, the words tumbling out in a desperate rhythm.
“Is everyone here?” Taras was shouting. “Count off! Is everyone here?”
They counted. Forty-three had descended; forty-three remained. The basement had held. But above them, the building had not.
When they finally ventured up the stairs, hours later, after the shelling had paused, they found that their apartment no longer existed. The seventh floor had taken a direct hit. The eighth and ninth floors had collapsed onto it. A crater of rubble occupied the space where Oksana had made coffee six days ago, where Yulia had slept beneath her cartoon-cat blanket, where twenty-three years of accumulated life had arranged itself in rooms and closets and drawers.
Yulia stood at the edge of the destruction, staring. She did not cry. She had not cried since the first day, and Oksana had begun to worry about what that absence meant, what was being stored rather than released.
“My books,” Yulia said. “All my books.”
It was a small loss, in the calculus of war. Books could be replaced. Lives could not. But Oksana understood that the loss was not about paper and ink. It was about the self that had been constructed in that apartment, the identity that had been anchored in those possessions. Yulia had lost not just objects but the evidence of who she had been.
“We’ll get new books,” Oksana said. “When this is over.”
“When will it be over?”
Oksana did not answer. She did not know.
The siege continued.
Days blurred into each other, distinguished only by the rhythm of violence and the dwindling of supplies. Water became the primary concern. The containers they had brought were emptying, and no new water was available. The taps had stopped flowing on March 3. The building’s reserves, stored in rooftop tanks, had been contaminated by the debris. What remained had to be rationed—a cup per person per day for drinking, nothing for washing, nothing for the toilets that no longer functioned anyway.
Taras organised expeditions to find water. Small groups, moving quickly, darting between buildings during lulls in the shelling. They found water in unlikely places—melted snow collected in buckets, the tanks of abandoned cars, a swimming pool at a sports complex that had somehow survived. Each expedition was a lottery. Some groups returned with water. Some groups did not return.
On March 12, Taras went out and did not come back.
Oksana waited in the basement, watching the stairs, counting the minutes. An hour passed. Two hours. Three. The shelling intensified, then eased, then intensified again. When darkness fell and Taras had not returned, she understood that she would have to choose: wait longer, or accept that waiting would not bring him back.
She chose to wait. She waited through the night, sitting on her overturned crate, watching the stairs with an intensity that burned her eyes. She did not sleep. She did not speak. Yulia sat beside her, silent, their hands intertwined in the darkness.
At dawn, Taras appeared.
He came down the stairs slowly, limping, his face covered in dust and blood. Behind him came two others from the expedition—of the five who had left, only three had survived. A shell had caught them in an open square. Two had died instantly. Taras had been thrown against a wall, had lain unconscious for hours, had woken in darkness and made his way back by memory and instinct.
“I found water,” he said, and collapsed.
His leg was broken. There was no doctor in the basement, no medicine beyond aspirin and bandages. Oksana set the bone as best she could, using techniques she had learned from a first-aid course years ago, techniques meant for hiking accidents, not war wounds. Taras screamed when she manipulated the fracture, then went silent, his face grey with pain.
“He needs a hospital,” Iryna said.
“There are no hospitals,” Oksana replied. “Not anymore.”
This was true. The hospitals had been bombed—some deliberately, if the reports were accurate; others as collateral damage in the general destruction. Medical care in Mariupol had ceased to exist in any organised form. What remained were individuals with fragments of knowledge, doing what they could with what they had.
Taras survived, but he did not walk again for weeks. He lay on a makeshift bed of blankets and cardboard, his leg splinted with pieces of a broken chair, and he directed the water expeditions from his position of immobility. Leadership, Oksana observed, did not require movement. It required only the willingness to decide.
On March 16, the theatre was bombed.
Oksana heard about it from others who had ventured out, who had seen the aftermath, who had spoken to survivors. The Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre, in the heart of the city, had been sheltering hundreds of civilians—families with children, elderly, the displaced and desperate. Someone had painted the word “CHILDREN” in large white letters on the ground outside, visible from the air, a plea in the international language of mercy.
The Russians had bombed it anyway.
The reports were fragmentary, contradictory, filtered through trauma and fog. Some said hundreds had died. Some said fewer. Some said there were survivors trapped in the rubble, calling for help that could not reach them. The truth, as always in war, was hidden beneath layers of confusion and propaganda and the simple inability of witnesses to comprehend what they had seen.
Oksana thought of the theatre. She had been there many times—to see plays, to attend concerts, to participate in the cultural life that Mariupol had built over years of peace. She remembered the ornate facade, the red velvet seats, the way the lights dimmed before a performance and the audience fell silent with anticipation. She remembered taking Yulia to see a production of Chekhov when she was twelve, and Yulia complaining that nothing happened, and Oksana explaining that Chekhov’s genius was in showing that everything happened, invisibly, in the spaces between words.
Now the theatre was rubble. The children it sheltered were dead or dying. And the word painted on the ground—CHILDREN—had meant nothing to whoever gave the order to release the bomb.
“Why?” Yulia asked, when she heard. “Why would they do that?”
Oksana did not have an answer. She had taught history for two decades, had explained atrocities and genocides and the systematic cruelty that humans inflicted on each other. She had presented these events with the scholarly distance that education demanded, had discussed causes and consequences and lessons learned. But sitting in a basement, hearing about children crushed under the rubble of a theatre, she found that her professional vocabulary was useless. There was no explanation that sufficed. There was only the fact, brutal and incomprehensible.
“Because they can,” she said finally. “Because no one is stopping them.”
By late March, the decision they had postponed could no longer be avoided.
The siege was not lifting. The city was dying—systematically, deliberately, building by building and block by block. Russian forces had encircled Mariupol completely. No supplies were entering. No civilians were leaving, except through Russian-controlled corridors that led to filtration camps, to interrogation, to an uncertain fate.
But remaining was also death, slower but no less certain. The food was gone. The water was nearly gone. Disease had begun to spread through the basement—dysentery, respiratory infections, the ailments that flourish when sanitation collapses and immune systems weaken. The elderly woman of eighty-six, the one who had survived the German occupation, had died quietly in her sleep, and they had buried her in the courtyard, in a grave dug between shellings.
“We have to leave,” Oksana said to Taras. His leg had healed enough to bear weight, though he walked with a pronounced limp. “We have to try the corridors.”
“The corridors lead to filtration. They’ll interrogate us. They’ll take our phones, our documents. They’ll ask about our loyalties.”
“And if we stay?”
Taras did not answer. He did not need to.
The evacuation corridors were a gamble. Some who entered them reached safety—Zaporizhzhia, Ukrainian-controlled territory, the chance to escape. Others were detained, sometimes for days, sometimes longer. Others disappeared entirely, their fates unknown. The Russians controlled the process, and the Russians’ criteria for passage were opaque, arbitrary, subject to the whims of individual soldiers and commanders.
But the alternative was the basement, and the basement was death by attrition.
“When?” Taras asked.
“Tomorrow. If there’s a corridor.”
They spent the evening preparing. What little they had left—a change of clothes, documents, the photograph of Yulia as a baby that Oksana had carried in her suitcase—they packed into bags small enough to carry while running. They charged their phones from the car battery, knowing that power might not be available again for days. They said goodbye to the others in the basement, the forty-one who remained after the deaths, knowing that they might never see them again.
Yulia was silent through these preparations. She moved mechanically, packing and repacking, her face empty of expression. When Oksana tried to speak with her—to explain, to reassure, to connect—Yulia responded in monosyllables, her eyes focused on some middle distance that admitted no intrusion.
“We’ll be okay,” Oksana said. “We’ve survived this far.”
“Surviving isn’t the same as being okay,” Yulia replied. It was the most she had said in days.
They left on March 28, joining a column of civilians that stretched for kilometers along a road that had once connected Mariupol to the rest of Ukraine. The convoy moved slowly, stopping at checkpoints, waiting for permission to proceed, watched by soldiers whose uniforms bore no insignia and whose faces revealed nothing.
The filtration point was a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Russian soldiers separated the men from the women, the young from the old. They took phones and searched them for evidence—photographs, messages, anything that might indicate affiliation with the Ukrainian military or government. They asked questions: Where do you work? Who do you know? What do you think of the special military operation?
Oksana answered carefully, constructing a version of herself that might be allowed to pass. She was a teacher—yes, but only of mathematics, not history, not anything that might be considered ideological. She knew no one in the military. She had no opinions on the operation; she only wanted to leave.
The soldier who interviewed her was young, perhaps twenty-five, with the bored expression of someone performing a routine task. He glanced at her documents, at her phone, at her face. He asked about the photographs on her phone—family pictures, nothing incriminating—and about her husband’s injury, and about her daughter’s education.
“You may go,” he said finally, stamping a paper that would serve as her passage.
Taras was detained longer. His military service, decades ago, had left a trace in some database. The questions were sharper, the tone more suspicious. Oksana waited outside the warehouse, holding Yulia’s hand, watching the door, counting the minutes as she had counted them when Taras failed to return from the water expedition.
He emerged after three hours, his face grey but intact. He said nothing about what had happened inside. He took Oksana’s hand on one side and Yulia’s on the other, and they walked toward the buses that would carry them away from Mariupol.
Oksana looked back once, at the city that had been her home for twenty-three years. The skyline was unrecognisable—buildings that had stood for decades were now ruins, smoke rising from fires that no one was fighting, the Azovstal plant’s smokestacks still standing but surrounded by devastation. In the basement they had left, people were still hiding, still surviving, still waiting for a rescue that might never come.
She turned away and boarded the bus. There was nothing else to do.
The journey to Zaporizhzhia took two days. They traveled through Russian-controlled territory, past checkpoints and destroyed villages, through landscapes that had been farmland a month ago and were now moonscapes of craters and wreckage. They slept on the bus, in their seats, their bodies pressed together for warmth and comfort. They ate what little food the humanitarian workers provided at stops along the route. They did not speak much.
When they finally reached Zaporizhzhia—Ukrainian-controlled, functioning, impossibly normal compared to what they had left—Oksana stood on a street corner and wept. It was the first time she had cried since the war began. The tears came without warning and without end, a release of everything that had been stored during thirty-two days of siege.
Yulia stood beside her, dry-eyed, watching.
“We survived,” Oksana said, when she could speak again.
“Yes,” Yulia said. “We survived.”
But her voice carried no triumph, no relief. It carried only the flat acknowledgment of a fact, stripped of meaning, stripped of hope. They had survived, yes. But survival, as Yulia had said, was not the same as being okay.
Nothing would be okay again. This, too, was a fact, and Oksana accepted it as she had accepted the others—the death of the city, the loss of the apartment, the thirty-two days in the basement that had stripped away everything except the essential.
They were alive. That would have to be enough.
War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of those things upon which action in war must be calculated are hidden in the fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.
Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice whenever the former tries to become a substitute for the latter.
Consider the evolution of weapons. Each new instrument of war promises to transform the battlefield, to render obsolete the tactics of the previous generation. The crossbow was supposed to end the dominance of the armoured knight; the machine gun was supposed to make infantry charges suicidal; the tank was supposed to restore mobility to the trenches. Each promise contained truth, but also limitation. The crossbow did not eliminate cavalry; the machine gun did not prevent the slaughter of millions in frontal assaults; the tank became another variable in the endless equation of attack and defense.
The drone was different.
Serhiy Bondarenko understood this in his bones, though he could not have articulated it in theoretical terms. He was twenty-eight years old, a former software developer from Kharkiv, and he had spent the first months of the war learning to kill with a device that cost less than a good laptop. The FPV drone—first-person view, controlled through goggles that transmitted live video from the aircraft’s camera—had transformed him from a civilian with programming skills into something the military did not have a name for yet. Part soldier, part technician, part video-game player. The taxonomy of war had not caught up with the reality.
He had volunteered in March, when the Russians reached the outskirts of Kharkiv and began shelling his neighbourhood. His apartment building had not been hit—not then—but the building across the street had taken a direct impact, and he had watched from his window as smoke rose from the wreckage and people ran screaming into the streets. The abstraction of war had become concrete in that moment, and the question of what to do had answered itself.
His programming background made him valuable. The Ukrainian military was desperate for people who understood technology, who could adapt civilian equipment for military purposes, who could think in terms of systems and algorithms rather than rifles and artillery. Within weeks, he was assigned to a drone unit operating near Kharkiv, learning to fly quadcopters that had been designed for aerial photography but were now being retrofitted to carry grenades.
The learning curve was steep and lethal. His first attempts to hit targets were failures—the drone’s movements were jerky, the video feed was disorienting, the grenades dropped wide or failed to detonate. He crashed three drones in his first week, expensive losses that the unit could not easily replace. But he learned. Each failure taught him something about wind patterns, about camera angles, about the precise moment to release the payload. By April, he was hitting targets consistently. By May, he was training others.
The FPV drones were a different matter. These were racing quadcopters, built for speed and manoeuvrability, modified to carry small explosive charges and flown directly into their targets. They were suicide weapons, each one a guided missile that cost a few hundred dollars and could destroy a tank worth millions. Flying them required a particular kind of skill—not the patient precision of the reconnaissance drones, but the reflexive aggression of a video game, the willingness to see through the camera’s eye as the ground rushed up and the target grew larger and then darkness.
Serhiy discovered he was good at this. Better than good—exceptional. His reaction times were fast, his spatial awareness acute, his ability to track multiple variables simultaneously honed by years of coding and gaming. He could fly an FPV drone through a window, could thread it between trees at eighty kilometers per hour, could adjust for the sudden appearance of obstacles that would have crashed a less skilled operator. Each kill felt like completing a level, achieving an objective, except that the objectives were real and the consequences were measured in bodies.
This troubled him, sometimes, in the quiet hours between missions. He had killed men—dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, he had stopped counting—and he had done it from a distance, through a screen, with the emotional remove of a technician performing a task. The men he killed were not abstractions to him; he had seen their faces, sometimes, in the final moments before impact. But the distance created a buffer that direct combat could not provide. He did not smell the blood. He did not hear the screams. He saw only the flash of the explosion and then static as the drone’s camera ceased to function.
Was this easier or harder than killing face to face? He did not know. He suspected it was easier in the moment and harder in the accumulation, that the dissociation allowed him to function but would exact a price later, when the war ended and the buffer of purpose dissolved. But such calculations were for peacetime. For now, there was only the mission, and the mission was to kill Russians before they killed Ukrainians, and the drones made that possible in ways that no other weapon could match.
The Kharkiv counteroffensive began in September 2022, and Serhiy was part of it.
The planning had been meticulous, the execution audacious. Ukrainian forces had feinted toward Kherson in the south, drawing Russian attention and reserves, while assembling a strike force in the northeast that the Russians had failed to detect. When the attack came, it was faster and more devastating than anyone—including many Ukrainians—had expected.
Serhiy’s unit was positioned near Balakliya, a town that the Russians had held since the war’s opening weeks. Their job was reconnaissance and interdiction: to identify enemy positions, to track movements, to strike targets of opportunity. The drones were the unit’s eyes and its fists, providing intelligence that no satellite could match and delivering precision violence that artillery could not replicate.
The first day of the offensive was chaos in the best possible way. Ukrainian armour punched through Russian lines that had been weakened by months of attrition. Infantry followed, sweeping through villages that the Russians abandoned in haste. Serhiy flew mission after mission, his goggles fogged with sweat, his hands cramping on the controller. He found a Russian column retreating along a road and called in artillery that turned the vehicles into burning wrecks. He spotted a command post and guided a strike that killed officers whose orders would never be given. He flew an FPV drone into an ammunition truck and watched the secondary explosions ripple outward like a flower blooming in fire.
By the end of the first day, Balakliya was liberated. By the end of the first week, the Ukrainians had recaptured an area larger than some European countries. The Russians were in full retreat, abandoning equipment, leaving behind soldiers who had not received orders to withdraw. The fog of war worked in Ukraine’s favour now, blinding the enemy while Ukrainian drones pierced the darkness with perfect clarity.
Serhiy felt something during those days that he had not felt since the war began: hope. Not the desperate hope of survival, but the strategic hope of victory. The counteroffensive proved that the Russians could be beaten, that their army was not invincible, that the war might end in something other than occupation or destruction. Each liberated town was evidence that the future was not fixed, that outcomes could be changed by will and skill and courage.
But hope was a dangerous emotion, and he had learned to hold it loosely.
The liberation of Izyum showed him why.
Izyum had been under Russian occupation for months, a logistics hub for their operations in the Donbas. When Ukrainian forces entered the city on September 10, they found something that the drones had not revealed: a mass grave in a forest on the outskirts, containing more than four hundred bodies.
Serhiy was not present for the exhumation. He heard about it from others, from journalists who had followed the advance, from soldiers who had been assigned to secure the site. The details emerged gradually, each one worse than the last. Many of the bodies showed signs of torture—broken bones, bound hands, gunshot wounds to the head. Some were soldiers, prisoners of war executed in violation of every convention. Others were civilians, killed for reasons that might never be known.
He thought of his drones, of the precision strikes, of the faces he had seen in the final moments before impact. He had killed Russians—soldiers, combatants, men who had chosen to participate in an invasion. He had felt justified in this, as justified as anyone could feel in war. But the Russians had killed civilians, had tortured prisoners, had dug mass graves and filled them with bodies. The moral calculus was not equivalent. The war was not a game between equal players. One side was defending its existence; the other was committing atrocities.
This knowledge did not make the killing easier. It made it necessary, which was a different thing entirely.
October brought new challenges. The front lines stabilised, the Russians regrouped, and the war settled into the grinding attrition that both sides had hoped to avoid. The drone tactics that had worked in September became less effective as the Russians adapted—deploying electronic warfare systems that jammed signals, shooting down drones with increasing accuracy, building defensive networks designed to counter the new threat.
Serhiy adapted in turn. He learned to fly in ways that avoided the jamming, to use terrain for cover, to coordinate with other operators for saturation attacks that overwhelmed the defenses. The chess game continued, each move prompting a countermove, each innovation inspiring a counter-innovation. The drones were no longer a surprise; they were a known quantity, incorporated into the enemy’s planning. But they remained effective, because the underlying advantage—cheap, precise, and numerous—could not be negated by any single countermeasure.
He trained new operators during this period, passing on the skills he had developed through trial and error. The recruits were diverse: former gamers, engineers, students, a retired accountant who had never touched a video game in his life but possessed steady hands and a methodical mind. Each brought different strengths, different limitations. Serhiy learned to identify which recruits would excel at reconnaissance and which at strike operations, which could handle the psychological weight of killing and which would need to be rotated out before they broke.
“How do you do it?” asked one of the recruits, a young woman named Katya who had been a graphic designer before the war. “How do you keep going?”
Serhiy considered the question. He had asked it of himself, many times, in the quiet hours when the drones were charging and the front was quiet.
“I think of it as debugging,” he said finally. “The Russians are a bug in the system. The system is Ukraine—our country, our people, our future. My job is to find the bugs and remove them. Each drone strike is a fix, a patch, a step toward a system that works properly.”
Katya looked skeptical. “That’s very... technical.”
“Yes. It helps to think of it technically. The alternative is to think of it humanly, and that’s harder.”
“Doesn’t that bother you? The dehumanisation?”
“Everything bothers me. But I can be bothered later, when the war is over. Right now, I need to function.”
This was the adaptation that the drones demanded: not just technical skill, but psychological reconfiguration. The operators who thrived were those who could compartmentalise, who could separate the act of killing from the meaning of killing, who could perform their function without being consumed by it. Those who could not—who felt each death as a personal weight, who saw each target as a human being with a family and a history—burned out quickly, their effectiveness degrading as their conscience expanded.
Serhiy was not sure which category he belonged to. He functioned, yes, but the functioning required effort, required the deliberate construction of mental barriers that he was not sure would hold indefinitely. He was debugging his own psychology as much as he was debugging the battlefield, patching the errors in his emotional processing, suppressing the exceptions that threatened to crash the system.
By December, the war had entered a new phase.
The counteroffensives had stalled. The front lines had frozen, literally and figuratively, as winter descended and both sides dug into defensive positions. The drone operations continued—reconnaissance, harassment, precision strikes—but the strategic momentum had dissipated. The war had become what military theorists called a conflict of attrition, a competition to see which side could sustain losses longer, which side would break first.
Serhiy found this phase harder than the offensive. Movement had provided purpose; stasis bred doubt. Each mission felt like a repetition of the last, the targets interchangeable, the outcomes indistinguishable. He killed Russians on Monday, and on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, and each kill felt less meaningful than the one before. The accumulation that he had feared began to manifest, not as guilt exactly, but as a kind of numbness, a progressive anaesthesia that dulled both the satisfaction of success and the horror of what success required.
His unit was rotated off the line in late December, given two weeks of rest in a rear area where the sounds of war were distant enough to ignore. Serhiy spent the time sleeping, mostly, catching up on the deficit that months of adrenaline had created. When he was awake, he tried to read, to watch films, to engage in the normal activities of peacetime. But normalcy felt foreign now, a language he had once spoken fluently but had forgotten during his time at the front.
He called his mother, who had evacuated to Poland in March. She was living in Kraków, sharing an apartment with two other refugee families, working in a restaurant that had hired Ukrainians when no one else would. She asked about his health, his safety, his plans. She did not ask about his work, and he did not volunteer details.
“When will you come visit?” she asked.
“When the war is over.”
“When will that be?”
He did not have an answer. No one did. The war had begun with predictions of days or weeks; now it was measured in months, with no end in sight. The Russians had failed to conquer Ukraine, but Ukraine had not expelled the Russians. The result was a stalemate that could persist indefinitely, a frozen conflict like the one in the Donbas that had preceded the full invasion.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll come when I can.”
He returned to the front in January, rested but not restored. The drones were waiting, their batteries charged, their payloads attached. The targets were waiting too—Russian positions that had been mapped and remapped, defensive lines that needed to be probed and tested. The chess game continued, move and countermove, adaptation and counter-adaptation.
Serhiy put on his goggles and lifted the first drone of the new year into the grey winter sky.
The war was not over. The killing was not over. The adaptation was not over.
He flew toward the enemy, and the screen filled with the familiar landscape of destruction, and he searched for the next bug to fix.
Talent and genius operate outside the rules, and theory conflicts with practice whenever the former tries to become a substitute for the latter.
The moral forces are amongst the most important subjects in war. They form the spirit which permeates the whole being of war.
Consider what it means to count days. In peacetime, days accumulate without notice, each one indistinguishable from the last, measured only by the routines that give them shape—the alarm clock, the commute, the evening meal. But in war, days become precious, finite, each one a gift that might be withdrawn without warning. The soldier counts them obsessively, marking progress toward an end that may or may not arrive, calculating odds that shift with every artillery barrage, every assault, every random event that determines who lives and who dies.
Viktor Semyonov had thirty days remaining when December began.
Thirty days. Seven hundred and twenty hours. Forty-three thousand two hundred minutes. He had survived five months of Bakhmut—five months of assaults and retreats, of trenches and basements, of watching men die in ways that would not leave his memory. He had earned his position among the veterans, the men who understood the rhythms of this particular hell and had learned to navigate them. But thirty days was still thirty days, and any one of them could be his last.
The contract was simple: six months of combat in exchange for a pardon. Prigozhin had promised it, and Wagner had a reputation for keeping its promises—to those who survived. The men who completed their contracts walked out as free citizens, their records erased, their debts to society paid in blood. The men who did not complete their contracts were buried in mass graves or left where they fell, their names added to lists that no one outside Wagner would ever see.
Viktor had watched the calendar with increasing intensity as the months passed. In July, six months had seemed like infinity, a horizon too distant to contemplate. In August and September, it had been a destination, something to work toward. In October and November, it had become an obsession, each day crossed off with a mixture of relief and renewed anxiety. Now, in December, with the end in sight, the counting had acquired an almost religious quality, each morning a small miracle, each evening a prayer answered.
But the war did not care about his calendar. The war continued according to its own logic, and that logic demanded bodies, and Viktor’s body was as useful to it as any other.
The assault on December 4 was supposed to be routine.
“Routine” was a word that meant different things in different contexts. In Bakhmut, it meant an attack that was not expected to achieve significant gains, that was designed to probe defenses rather than break through them, that would cost lives but not as many lives as a major operation. The veterans understood this distinction. The new recruits, the fresh meat who arrived each week with their three weeks of training and their naive hope, did not.
Viktor’s squad—six men, including himself—was assigned to advance through a stretch of destroyed apartments on the eastern edge of the city. Intelligence suggested that the Ukrainian positions ahead had been weakened by artillery; the task was to confirm this and, if possible, to establish a new forward position. If the positions were not weakened, the squad was to withdraw and report for further bombardment.
The intelligence was wrong.
They encountered fire almost immediately, heavy machine guns that had been repositioned during the night, their fields of fire covering the approaches that Viktor’s squad had been told were clear. The first man died in the initial burst, cut nearly in half by rounds that struck him across the torso. The second man made it to cover but was hit by a grenade that landed in his crater, killing him instantly.
Viktor and the remaining three pressed themselves against the rubble of a collapsed building, returning fire without targets, simply making noise to suppress whatever was shooting at them. The plan had already failed; there would be no advance, no new position, no confirmation of weakened defenses. There would only be survival or its absence.
“Fall back!” Viktor shouted. “Covering fire and fall back!”
They began the retreat, the deadly choreography that Wagner had drilled into them: one man moves while the others fire, then the next, then the next, leapfrogging backward toward safety while the Ukrainians tried to kill them. It was a dance Viktor had performed dozens of times, and he performed it now with the mechanical precision of long practice.
The third man died during the retreat, hit by a sniper whose position Viktor never identified. The fourth made it to the secondary line but was wounded in the leg, a wound that would take him out of combat but not out of life. Viktor and the fifth man—a former car thief named Kolya who had been with the unit for three months—reached safety together, their ammunition nearly expended, their breath coming in ragged gasps.
“Report,” the commander said when they returned.
“Positions not weakened. Heavy resistance. Four casualties—three dead, one wounded.”
The commander nodded. This was expected. This was routine. The information would be passed up the chain, the artillery would adjust, another assault would be planned, another squad would advance into the same killing ground. The machine continued.
Viktor sat in the trench and tried to stop his hands from shaking. Twenty-seven days remained.
The middle of December brought a strange calm.
Not peace—there was no peace in Bakhmut, only variations in the intensity of violence—but a relative pause in major operations as both sides consolidated their positions against the winter. The shelling continued, the patrols continued, the small-scale firefights continued. But the large assaults decreased, and the daily casualty counts, while still horrific, were lower than they had been in November.
Viktor used this time to observe, to think, to consider what might come after. He had not allowed himself to think about the future for months; the future was an abstraction, a destination that might never be reached. But with seventeen days remaining, the future began to seem possible, and he found his mind wandering to questions he had suppressed.
What would he do with freedom?
He had no skills except violence. His education was minimal, his work history spotty, his criminal record—while theoretically erased—would shadow him in any background check. He had no family waiting for him; his parents were dead, his brother had cut contact years ago, and the woman he had once loved had moved on while he was in prison. Freedom would be an empty room, a blank page, a question without an obvious answer.
And yet he wanted it. He wanted it with an intensity that surprised him, a desperate hunger for something beyond the trenches and the basements and the daily calculus of survival. He wanted to walk down a street without scanning for snipers. He wanted to sleep through the night without waking to artillery. He wanted to eat a meal that was not military rations, to drink water that was not rationed, to feel sunlight on his face without calculating the risk of exposure.
He wanted, in short, to be human again. The war had stripped away everything except the animal essentials—fight, flee, survive—and he wanted to recover what had been lost. Whether that was possible, whether the man he had been could be reassembled from the fragments that remained, he did not know. But he wanted to try.
Seventeen days. Four hundred and eight hours. Twenty-four thousand four hundred and eighty minutes.
On December 20, Viktor was assigned to a patrol that would change everything.
The patrol was reconnaissance, not assault—a three-man team tasked with observing a suspected Ukrainian supply route and reporting any activity. It was the kind of mission that veterans preferred: dangerous, yes, but with a clear objective and a defined duration, without the suicidal momentum of the assault waves. Viktor, Kolya, and a new recruit named Yevgeni set out at dusk, moving through the ruined landscape toward an observation point that overlooked a road the Ukrainians were believed to use.
They reached the position without incident, settling into the rubble of what had once been a school. The irony was not lost on Viktor—a school, a place of learning, reduced to a sniper’s nest in a war that none of them fully understood. He set up his optics and began to watch the road, while Kolya covered the rear and Yevgeni, still new enough to be nervous, checked and rechecked his weapon.
The hours passed in silence. No vehicles moved on the road. No Ukrainian patrols appeared. The war, for this brief moment, seemed to have paused, leaving them alone in the darkness with their thoughts and their weapons.
Then Viktor saw movement.
Not on the road, but closer—a figure moving through the rubble perhaps fifty meters away, visible only as a shadow against the slightly lighter darkness of the sky. He raised his weapon, finger on the trigger, calculating the shot. The figure was moving erratically, stumbling, clearly not a trained soldier on patrol. A civilian, perhaps, lost in the ruins. Or a wounded combatant, seeking shelter. Or a trap.
“Contact,” he whispered to Kolya. “Fifty meters, moving south.”
Kolya shifted his position, bringing his weapon to bear. “Take the shot?”
Viktor hesitated. The rules of engagement were clear: unknown contacts in a combat zone were legitimate targets. The figure could be enemy reconnaissance, could be a spotter calling in artillery, could be any of a hundred threats that justified lethal force. But something made him pause—the stumbling gait, the small size, the way the figure moved like someone who was lost rather than someone who was hunting.
“Hold,” he said. “I’m going to check.”
This was against protocol. You did not approach unknown contacts; you eliminated them or you reported them or you withdrew. But Viktor had twenty days remaining, and perhaps that number had made him reckless, or perhaps it had made him human again, just enough to wonder if the shadow in the darkness was something other than a target.
He moved forward, weapon ready, closing the distance in careful increments. As he drew nearer, the shadow resolved into a shape, and the shape resolved into a child.
A boy. Perhaps ten years old. Thin, filthy, shivering in the cold. He stood among the rubble, looking at Viktor with eyes that held no fear, only exhaustion—the exhaustion of someone who had seen too much and could no longer summon the energy to be afraid.
“Who are you?” Viktor asked in Russian.
The boy answered in Ukrainian, a language Viktor understood but did not speak well. Something about his family, his home, the soldiers. The words blurred together, too fast and too desperate for Viktor to follow completely.
“Are you alone?”
The boy nodded. Or shook his head. Viktor could not tell.
He should have left the child. He should have returned to his position, completed the mission, reported the contact to his superiors. That was the protocol. That was what the war demanded. But he looked at the boy—this small figure in the ruins, this survivor of a siege that had consumed thousands—and he could not make himself walk away.
“Come with me,” he said. “We’ll find someone to help you.”
The boy did not move. He stared at Viktor’s uniform, at his weapon, at the insignia that marked him as enemy, and his exhaustion gave way to something else—fear, finally, the fear that had been too tired to manifest before.
“I won’t hurt you,” Viktor said. “I promise.”
He did not know if the promise meant anything. He did not know if he could keep it. But he said the words anyway, and something in his voice—some remnant of the man he had been before the prison, before the war, before the mathematics of survival had consumed everything else—must have reached the boy, because slowly, hesitantly, the child stepped forward.
Getting the boy to safety was complicated.
Viktor could not bring a Ukrainian child to Wagner’s positions; the commanders would assume the boy was a spy, would interrogate him, might kill him. He could not leave the boy in the ruins; winter was coming, and a child alone would not survive. He could not abandon his mission; the patrol had to be completed, the report had to be filed, the machine had to be fed.
He made a decision that violated everything he had learned.
“Kolya,” he said when he returned to the position with the boy. “I need you to take him to the humanitarian corridor. The one the Ukrainians control.”
Kolya stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“That’s desertion. They’ll shoot both of us.”
“They won’t know. The patrol continues. Yevgeni and I finish the observation. You take the boy, drop him at the corridor, and return before dawn. No one will know.”
“If I’m caught—”
“You won’t be caught. You’re the best at moving through the ruins. That’s why I’m asking you.”
Kolya looked at the boy, at Viktor, at the darkness that surrounded them. He had been with Wagner for three months, had survived the assaults, had watched men die. He had no reason to help a Ukrainian child, no reason to risk his freedom for a stranger. But something in him—the same something that had made Viktor pause before taking the shot—responded to the request.
“Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” Kolya said. “If I’m not back by dawn, you never saw me.”
He took the boy’s hand and disappeared into the ruins, two shadows moving through the darkness toward a border that had been drawn in blood.
Viktor and Yevgeni completed the patrol. They observed the road, noted the lack of activity, compiled the report that would be filed and forgotten. When Kolya returned, just before dawn, they made their way back to Wagner’s positions together, three men who had seen nothing unusual, done nothing remarkable, violated no protocols.
The boy was never mentioned in any report. His fate remained unknown. Viktor told himself that the humanitarian corridor would have delivered the child to safety, to the Ukrainian side, to people who could care for him. He told himself this because the alternative—that the boy had been caught, interrogated, killed—was not something he could carry.
Fifteen days remained on his contract.
The final days were the longest.
Viktor counted them obsessively, each morning a small victory, each evening a step closer to the end. He performed his duties—the patrols, the observations, the occasional assaults—with the mechanical precision of long practice, taking no unnecessary risks, volunteering for nothing, keeping his head down while the war continued around him.
On December 28, with three days remaining, his luck nearly ran out.
An artillery barrage caught his squad in the open, rounds falling with the random cruelty that defined modern war. Viktor dove for cover, pressing himself into a crater that had been carved by previous bombardments, and he felt the earth shake as shells landed meters away, felt the pressure waves that compressed his chest and left his ears ringing.
When the barrage ended, two of his squadmates were dead. Viktor was uninjured, protected by the crater’s depth and the random geometry of the explosions. He lay in the dirt, breathing the acrid smoke, and he counted: seventy-two hours. Four thousand three hundred and twenty minutes. The finish line was visible, almost touchable, but the war was not finished with him yet.
He made it through the 29th. The 30th. The 31st, New Year’s Eve, a holiday that no one in Bakhmut celebrated because celebration required hope, and hope had been exhausted long ago.
On January 1, 2023, Viktor Semyonov’s contract expired.
He was called to the commander’s position, a basement that served as headquarters for the sector. The paperwork was processed—forms he had signed six months ago, documents that confirmed his service, certificates that would serve as his pardon. The commander, a man Viktor had never liked but had learned to respect, shook his hand without warmth.
“You survived,” the commander said. “Not many do.”
“I know.”
“What will you do now?”
Viktor did not have an answer. The question had haunted him for weeks, and he was no closer to resolving it than he had been at the beginning.
“Live,” he said finally. “I’ll figure out the rest.”
He walked out of the basement, past the trenches, past the positions he had defended and attacked, past the landscape of destruction that had been his home for six months. He walked until he reached the rear area where transport was arranged, where men who had completed their contracts were processed out of the system and returned to the world.
A bus was waiting. Other survivors—four of them, from different units, all with the same hollow expression—were already aboard. Viktor climbed on, took a seat, and stared out the window as the bus pulled away from Bakhmut.
He was free. The word felt strange in his mind, abstract and unfamiliar. He had been a prisoner, then a soldier, then a survivor. Now he was free, and freedom was terrifying in ways that prison and war had not been, because freedom required choices, and he had spent six months surviving by not choosing, by simply reacting to whatever the war presented.
The bus drove north, away from the front, toward Russia, toward a future that Viktor could not imagine but was determined to reach.
Behind him, the war continued. The shells still fell. The assaults still launched. The mathematics of attrition still calculated its terrible sums. Men were dying at this moment, in the trenches and basements and craters he had just left, paying with their lives for meters of rubble that would be lost and retaken and lost again.
Viktor watched the landscape pass—the ruined villages, the cratered fields, the long grey road that led away from hell—and he thought of the boy in the ruins, the child he had saved or not saved, whose fate he would never know.
Perhaps that was enough. Perhaps one act of mercy, hidden in the darkness of a war that demanded only brutality, was enough to balance some small portion of what he had done. Or perhaps it changed nothing, meant nothing, would be forgotten as thoroughly as the names of the men who had died beside him.
He did not know. He would never know.
The bus drove on, and Viktor Semyonov—former prisoner, former soldier, survivor of the Bakhmut meat grinder—began the journey toward whatever came next.
The moral forces are amongst the most important subjects in war. They form the spirit which permeates the whole being of war.
2023
In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. It is the clash of two hostile wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.
Consider what it means to command. The popular imagination envisions generals as chess players, moving pieces across a board, implementing plans with geometric precision. But chess is a game of perfect information; war is a game of fog and friction and the unpredictable reactions of an enemy who is also calculating, also adapting, also trying to impose his will. The commander does not move pieces; he issues orders that are interpreted, modified, delayed, and sometimes ignored by subordinates who face circumstances he cannot see. He operates in darkness, reaching for outcomes that recede as he approaches them.
Colonel Oleksandr Kovalenko had been a soldier for thirty-one years and a commander for fifteen. He had fought in the Donbas since 2014, had seen the lines stabilize and destabilize and stabilize again, had buried friends and promoted strangers and learned that war was neither the glory of the patriotic songs nor the horror of the pacifist’s nightmares but something more mundane and more terrible: a job that required decisions, day after day, knowing that each decision would cost lives and that not deciding would cost more.
In April 2023, he commanded the 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade, one of the units designated for Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive. The brigade was newly equipped with Western armour—Bradley fighting vehicles from the United States, Leopard 2 tanks from Germany, mine-clearing equipment that represented the state of the art. His soldiers had trained in Germany and Poland, had learned combined arms tactics that NATO had refined over decades, had returned to Ukraine with skills and equipment that should have given them a decisive advantage.
Should have. The gap between “should have” and “did” was where men died.
Kovalenko knew what the plan required. He had seen the briefings, had participated in the planning sessions, had studied the maps with their optimistic arrows showing Ukrainian forces piercing Russian defenses and racing toward the Sea of Azov. The objective was to cut the land bridge to Crimea, to sever the logistical connection between Russian-occupied territory and the peninsula that Russia had seized in 2014. If successful, the counteroffensive would change the strategic equation of the war, would demonstrate that Ukraine could not merely defend but could attack and win.
But Kovalenko had also seen the intelligence reports. The Russians had spent nine months building defenses—not the hasty trenches of the war’s opening phase, but engineered fortifications extending for hundreds of kilometers. Minefields layered so densely that a path cleared today would be re-seeded by tomorrow. Anti-tank ditches deep enough to swallow a Bradley. Concrete bunkers with interlocking fields of fire. Dragon’s teeth and hedgehogs and every obstacle that military engineering could devise.
And behind the fortifications, reserves. Fresh units rotated in from Russia, equipment that had been pulled from storage and refurbished, artillery batteries that could devastate any breakthrough before it could be exploited. The Russians had learned from their failures in the war’s first year. They would not be surprised again.
“The Americans think we can do it,” his deputy said during one of their planning sessions. “They’ve given us the equipment. They’ve trained our men. They believe in the plan.”
“The Americans have not fought a peer adversary since 1945,” Kovalenko replied. “They believe in plans because their plans have always worked. Ours might not.”
“Then why are we proceeding?”
It was a fair question, and Kovalenko considered it carefully before answering. “Because we have to try. Because the alternative is stalemate, and stalemate means we bleed while they rebuild. Because the West is watching, and if we do not show progress, their support may weaken. Because war is not only about winning battles; it is about maintaining the will to fight, and will requires hope, and hope requires action.”
He did not add: And because I have been given orders, and orders must be followed, even when I doubt them.
This was the commander’s burden, the weight that did not appear in the training manuals or the strategic assessments. The subordinate could blame the superior; the superior could blame the situation; but someone had to decide, and the one who decided carried the responsibility for everything that followed. Kovalenko had carried that weight for fifteen years. He would carry it through the summer that was coming.
The counteroffensive began on June 4, 2023.
Kovalenko’s brigade was not in the initial assault wave; that honour—if honour was the word—fell to units that had been designated as the spearhead. His role was to exploit any breakthrough, to push through gaps in the Russian lines and race toward the objectives that the planners had marked in confident red ink.
The first reports were not encouraging.
The initial attacks encountered the minefields exactly as intelligence had predicted, but predicting and overcoming were different things. Mine-clearing vehicles were destroyed by artillery before they could complete their work. Infantry advancing behind them were caught in the open when the path they followed turned out to be incompletely cleared. Tanks that should have provided fire support were immobilized by mines that had been missed, their crews either dying inside the burning hulls or escaping only to face the small-arms fire that the Russians directed at anyone who emerged.
“The breakthrough at Robotyne has stalled,” his intelligence officer reported on the second day. “They’ve advanced two kilometers and taken heavy casualties. The minefields are deeper than expected.”
“How deep?”
“Unknown. They keep finding more.”
Kovalenko studied the map, calculating. Two kilometers in two days. At that rate, reaching the Sea of Azov would take months, not the weeks that the optimistic plans had projected. And the casualties—each kilometer cost men and vehicles that could not be easily replaced. The Western equipment was superior, but it was not magic. A Bradley destroyed by a mine was just as dead as a Soviet-era BMP.
“What about our sector?”
“No orders yet. Command is reassessing.”
Reassessing. The word meant that the plan was failing, that the confident arrows on the maps were being erased and redrawn, that someone higher up the chain was grappling with the same calculations Kovalenko had made weeks ago and was coming to the same conclusions.
He waited. Waiting was also part of command—the patience to let events develop, to resist the urge to act before the picture clarified. His men trained, maintained their equipment, watched the horizon for the order that would send them forward. Some were eager, still believing in the plan. Others were skeptical, having heard the rumours that filtered back from the front. All of them looked to Kovalenko for guidance, and he gave them what he could: calm, confidence, the appearance of certainty even when certainty did not exist.
On June 8, the order came: the 47th Brigade would advance toward Robotyne, reinforcing the units that had stalled.
Kovalenko assembled his officers and laid out the situation with the honesty that he believed command required. The minefields were extensive. The artillery threat was severe. The path forward would be measured in meters, not kilometers. But the objective remained: break through, reach the highway that connected Melitopol to Tokmak, cut the Russian supply lines.
“Questions?”
His battalion commanders asked about fire support, about air cover, about the coordination with adjacent units. Kovalenko answered what he could and admitted what he could not. The fog of war was not a metaphor; it was a physical reality, an absence of information that no amount of reconnaissance could fully dispel.
“One more thing,” he said before dismissing them. “The men you command are not numbers. They are not arrows on a map. They are sons and fathers and brothers, and they have entrusted their lives to you. Remember that when you make decisions. Remember that every order has a cost, and the cost is paid by them.”
The officers nodded. They understood. They had all paid costs of their own.
The advance began the next morning.
The reality of modern combat bore little resemblance to the heroic narratives of history.
There were no dramatic charges, no bayonet assaults, no moments where courage alone could turn the tide. There was instead a grinding, methodical process: engineers clearing paths through minefields while artillery fell around them; infantry crawling forward under drone observation, every movement tracked and targeted; vehicles advancing in short bounds, never more than a few hundred meters before stopping to assess the threat ahead.
Kovalenko commanded from a position several kilometers behind the line, receiving reports, issuing adjustments, trying to maintain coherence in a situation that constantly fragmented. His map showed the positions of his units, updated every few minutes by radio reports and drone feeds, but the map was always wrong—always showing where men had been, not where they were, a picture that aged into inaccuracy the moment it was drawn.
“First Battalion has reached the treeline,” his operations officer reported. “They’re taking fire from a strongpoint at grid reference 47.”
“Artillery?”
“Already called. Six minutes to impact.”
Six minutes. In six minutes, men would die on both sides—his soldiers from the fire they were receiving, the Russians from the shells that were inbound. The arithmetic of war, the exchange ratios that strategists calculated and commanders implemented. Kovalenko did the math automatically: if the strongpoint was suppressed, First Battalion could advance another three hundred meters before the next obstacle. Three hundred meters closer to an objective that was still kilometers away.
“What about Second Battalion?”
“Pinned down. Minefields are denser than expected in their sector. They’ve lost two Bradleys.”
“Can they bypass?”
“Checking. The terrain analysis shows a possible route to the east, but it’s under observation from Russian positions on the ridge.”
Everything was under observation. The drones—Ukrainian and Russian both—had made the battlefield transparent in ways that previous wars had not experienced. You could not mass forces for a breakthrough because massing forces created targets. You could not move without being seen, and being seen meant being fired upon. The advantage had shifted decisively to the defense, to the forces that could dig in and wait while the attackers bled themselves against fortifications.
Kovalenko had known this intellectually. Now he was learning it in the blood of his soldiers.
“Tell Second Battalion to hold position. We’ll find another way.”
The weeks that followed established a pattern that Kovalenko came to recognise as the new rhythm of war.
Advance a few hundred meters. Take casualties. Consolidate. Wait for the minefields to be cleared. Advance again. Take more casualties. Consolidate again. The Western equipment performed as advertised—the Bradleys were faster and better protected than the Soviet-era vehicles, the Leopards were devastating when they could engage—but equipment could not overcome geometry. The Russians had prepared for exactly this kind of attack, and their preparations were effective.
By mid-July, Robotyne had been reached but not taken. The town itself was a ruin, contested building by building in fighting that reminded Kovalenko of the urban battles he had studied from Stalingrad and Grozny. His brigade had advanced perhaps ten kilometers in six weeks, at a cost of dozens of vehicles and hundreds of men. The objective—the highway, the land bridge, the strategic prize—remained beyond reach.
“We’re not going to break through,” his deputy said one evening, voicing what they both knew but had not spoken.
“No,” Kovalenko agreed. “Not this summer. Perhaps not at all.”
“What do we do?”
“We continue. We press them. We force them to defend, to expend their own resources. We demonstrate that they cannot hold what they have taken without paying a price.”
“That’s not victory.”
“No. It’s attrition. It’s the hope that they will exhaust before we do.”
The deputy was silent for a moment. “Will they?”
Kovalenko considered the question honestly, as he tried to consider all questions. The Russians had more men. They had more artillery. They had more tolerance for casualties, or at least their leadership did. They had nine time zones of depth and an economy that, while damaged by sanctions, was still functioning. Ukraine had Western support and Ukrainian courage, but courage could not be manufactured and support was not guaranteed.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “But we have to act as if they will. The alternative is surrender, and surrender is not an option.”
The counteroffensive officially ended in October, though the fighting continued in diminished form.
The strategic objectives had not been achieved. The land bridge to Crimea remained intact. The Russian defenses had bent but not broken. The Western equipment, so celebrated when it arrived, had been consumed by minefields and artillery, its technological superiority nullified by the terrain and the tactics the Russians had employed.
Kovalenko wrote his after-action reports with the precision that thirty-one years of military service had instilled in him. He documented what had worked and what had not, analysed the failures without assigning blame, recommended adjustments for future operations that he suspected would face the same obstacles. The reports were honest, which made them uncomfortable for some readers, but honesty was what he owed to the soldiers who had died and the soldiers who would follow.
In November, he was promoted to Brigadier General and given command of a larger formation. The promotion was recognition of his performance, acknowledgment that he had done as well as anyone could with the situation he had been given. He accepted it without celebration, knowing that higher rank meant more responsibility and more weight.
His new command included units that had fought in other sectors, men who had experienced different aspects of the same failed offensive. Kovalenko met with their commanders, listened to their accounts, integrated their experiences into his understanding. The picture that emerged was consistent: Ukrainian forces were skilled and courageous, Western equipment was capable, but the fundamental challenge—attacking prepared defenses with insufficient mass and inadequate air support—remained unsolved.
“What would you change?” one of his new subordinates asked.
Kovalenko thought carefully before answering. “Air superiority. Without it, we cannot concentrate forces without them being destroyed by artillery. We cannot suppress the defenses without being suppressed ourselves. The F-16s will help, when they come, but they may come too late and in too few numbers. The war is being fought with the weapons of the 2020s and the tactics of 1943. Until that changes, we will continue to pay in blood for every meter we gain.”
“And the Russians?”
“They pay too. But they have more to spend.”
It was not a hopeful assessment, but Kovalenko had learned that hope was a poor foundation for military planning. Better to see clearly and act accordingly than to believe in fantasies that the battlefield would disprove.
The year ended with the lines essentially where they had been at the beginning, adjusted by a few kilometers here and there, purchased at a cost of tens of thousands of lives on both sides. The war had become what military theorists called a “war of attrition,” a competition in endurance rather than maneuver. Such wars were won not by brilliance but by persistence, not by breakthrough but by exhaustion.
Kovalenko prepared his command for 2024, knowing that the year ahead would bring more of the same: more attacks and counterattacks, more casualties and replacements, more calculations made in the currency of lives. The clash of wills continued, neither side able to impose itself on the other, both sides paying the price of that failure.
He thought sometimes of the men who had died under his command, their names recorded in reports that would be filed and eventually forgotten. Each one had been a decision—an order given, a position held, an attack pressed forward. Each one was a weight that he would carry for the rest of his life, however long that might be.
This was the cost of command. This was what it meant to be a calculator in a war without clear solutions.
He continued to calculate, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping was not an option.
In war the will is directed at an animate object that reacts. It is the clash of two hostile wills, each trying to impose itself on the other.
The first and most important judgement that a statesman and commander must make is to determine the nature of the war on which they are embarking.
Consider what happens when the nature of a war is misunderstood by those who wage it. The commanders who send men into battle without grasping what kind of battle it will be; the politicians who promise quick victories without understanding the enemy’s capacity to resist; the soldiers who fight for causes they cannot articulate, against opponents they do not comprehend. Such misunderstandings are the engine of catastrophe, turning small conflicts into great ones, transforming expected triumphs into unexpected disasters.
On June 23, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin demonstrated that he, too, had misunderstood the nature of the war he was fighting—or perhaps had understood it all too well, and decided that the war within Russia mattered more than the war in Ukraine.
Viktor Semyonov learned of the rebellion the way most Russians did: through his phone, in fragments of information that accumulated over hours into a picture he could barely comprehend.
He was living in Rostov-on-Don, in a rented room in an apartment that belonged to a widow who asked no questions about his past. Six months had passed since his contract with Wagner had ended, six months of trying to reconstruct a life from the ruins that prison and war had made of him. He worked construction, carrying bricks and mixing cement, jobs that required no skills he did not have and no references he could not provide. He drank less than he had before prison, though more than a doctor would advise. He slept poorly, waking to sounds that were not there, reaching for a weapon he no longer carried.
The room was small—a bed, a chair, a window that looked out onto a courtyard where children sometimes played. It was more than he had expected to have. Freedom, which had seemed so abstract when he left Bakhmut, had proven to be exactly what he had feared: a series of empty hours that he had to fill with something other than survival. In the trenches, the only question was whether he would live through the day. Here, the questions multiplied: What should he do? Who should he be? What did the future hold for a man whose past was written in blood and erased by bureaucratic fiat?
He had not found answers. He had found only routines—wake, work, eat, sleep—that kept the questions at bay.
Then, on the morning of June 23, his phone began to buzz with messages.
The first message was from Kolya, the man who had helped him save the boy in Bakhmut. Kolya had also completed his contract, had returned to his hometown of Voronezh, had found work in a warehouse and a woman who did not ask about his scars.
Have you seen the news?
Viktor had not seen the news. He opened his browser and found chaos.
Prigozhin had released a video—ranting, furious, accusing the Russian Ministry of Defense of bombing Wagner positions in Ukraine. Lies, he claimed. Treachery. The generals were sacrificing Wagner soldiers to cover their own incompetence. He demanded justice. He demanded accountability. He demanded, though he did not use the word, war against the men who had sent his soldiers to die.
Viktor watched the video twice, trying to parse the performance from the reality. He had seen Prigozhin in the prison assembly hall, had heard the promises of pardons and clean slates, had survived the tactics that Prigozhin’s lieutenants had implemented. He knew the man was a performer, a manipulator, someone who told each audience what it wanted to hear. But this did not seem like performance. This seemed like rage—genuine, uncontrolled, the rage of a man who had been pushed past the point of calculation.
What does it mean? Viktor typed back to Kolya.
I don’t know. But Wagner is moving. Columns on the road.
Moving where? Viktor checked the news again. Reports were fragmentary, contradictory, the fog of war descending on Russia itself. Wagner forces had crossed from Ukraine into Russian territory. They were heading north. They had seized military facilities without resistance. They were—
His phone buzzed again.
They’re in Rostov.
Viktor went outside.
The city was quiet in the morning light, the usual traffic moving through the streets, people walking to work or to shops, unaware or pretending to be unaware of what was happening. But when he reached the main avenue, he saw them: military vehicles, armored personnel carriers, men in Wagner uniforms establishing positions around the Southern Military District headquarters.
He stood on the sidewalk and watched. Other civilians gathered nearby, some filming with their phones, others simply staring. The Wagner soldiers did not seem aggressive; they controlled intersections, checked vehicles, but they did not fire. The city was being occupied, but quietly, almost politely, as if the occupiers were guests who had arrived unexpectedly and were waiting for their hosts to acknowledge them.
Viktor approached one of the positions, drawn by a compulsion he did not fully understand. He had spent six months with these men, had fought beside them, had watched them die. He knew their faces, their gestures, the way they held their weapons. These were not strangers. These were—
“Comrade.”
The soldier who addressed him was young, perhaps twenty-two, with the bearing of a professional rather than a conscript. He looked at Viktor’s face, at his hands, at something that marked him as different from the other civilians.
“You served,” the soldier said. It was not a question.
“Bakhmut. Six months.”
The soldier nodded. “Then you understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Why we’re here. The generals sent us to die while they sat in their dachas. Prigozhin is setting things right.”
Viktor said nothing. He did not understand—not because the words were unclear, but because understanding required accepting that the war he had fought had been not just brutal but pointless, that the deaths he had witnessed had been caused not by military necessity but by bureaucratic incompetence, that the machine he had survived was being challenged by the man who had built it.
“What happens now?” he asked.
The soldier shrugged. “We march to Moscow. We demand accountability. Then—” He shrugged again. “Then we’ll see.”
The march to Moscow.
Viktor spent the next eighteen hours watching the rebellion unfold, refreshing his phone for updates, listening to the rumours that spread through the city. Wagner columns were advancing north, meeting no resistance. The Russian military, the same military that had mobilized hundreds of thousands for the war in Ukraine, was not opposing them. Bridges that should have been destroyed were left intact. Checkpoints that should have been manned were abandoned. The road to Moscow lay open.
Putin spoke on television. He called the rebellion a betrayal, a stab in the back, an act of treason. He promised that the organizers would be punished, that justice would be swift and severe. But his face, Viktor noticed, was pale, his voice less certain than usual. The confidence that had characterized his rule for two decades seemed, for the first time, uncertain.
By nightfall, Wagner forces had advanced hundreds of kilometers. They had shot down Russian helicopters that attempted to intercept them—Russian killing Russian, the internal contradiction made manifest. They had reached Voronezh, where Kolya lived, and continued north. Moscow was less than a day away.
Viktor tried to sleep and could not. He lay in his small room, listening to the sounds of the city—quieter than usual, the residents uncertain whether to flee or stay—and he tried to make sense of what was happening.
He had fought for Wagner. He had killed for Wagner. He had survived because Wagner’s tactics, however brutal, had proven effective enough to keep him alive through six months of Bakhmut. He had no loyalty to the organization—loyalty was a luxury that prison and war had stripped away—but he had a connection to it, a bond of shared experience that could not be easily severed.
And now Wagner was marching on Moscow, and Viktor did not know whether to hope they succeeded or pray they failed.
The rebellion ended as suddenly as it had begun.
On the evening of June 24, Prigozhin announced that he had reached an agreement. The march was halted. The forces would return to their bases. No charges would be filed. Prigozhin himself would relocate to Belarus, and Wagner would continue to operate, though under different arrangements that were not specified.
The explanation was vague, the details murky. Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader, had apparently mediated. Putin had agreed to—something. Prigozhin had accepted—something else. The crisis that had threatened to tear Russia apart dissolved overnight, leaving behind only questions and the lingering sense that nothing had been resolved.
Viktor watched the announcement on his phone, sitting in his room, trying to understand.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Wagner had been marching on Moscow. Their leader had accused the Ministry of Defense of treason. Russian aircraft had been shot down by Russian mercenaries. The power vertical that Putin had constructed over two decades had cracked, revealing the weakness beneath the facade.
And now it was over. No consequences. No accountability. No explanation that satisfied.
Kolya called him that night.
“What do you think?” Kolya asked.
“I think nothing has changed,” Viktor said. “And everything has changed.”
“What does that mean?”
Viktor considered the question. He thought about the assembly hall, about Prigozhin’s promises, about the men who had died believing those promises. He thought about the boy in the ruins, the one he had saved or not saved. He thought about freedom, and what it meant, and whether it meant anything at all in a country where a mercenary army could march on the capital and be forgiven by sunset.
“It means the war will continue,” he said finally. “It means we were used, and we’ll continue to be used. It means nothing we did mattered, because the people at the top can do whatever they want and face no consequences.”
“Then why did we fight?”
“Because we had no choice. Because the alternative was prison. Because—” Viktor stopped. The reasons sounded hollow, even to him. “I don’t know, Kolya. I don’t know why we fought.”
The silence stretched between them, two survivors of a war that had not ended, citizens of a country that had just revealed its fractures.
“What will you do now?” Kolya asked.
“What I’ve been doing. Work. Sleep. Try not to think about it.”
“And if they call us back? If there’s another mobilization?”
Viktor had considered this. The contract had granted him a pardon, but pardons could be revoked. The promises that seemed binding could be broken. He had learned in Bakhmut that the only guarantee was survival, and survival was temporary.
“Then I’ll decide when it happens,” he said. “I’m done planning for the future. The future doesn’t exist.”
The summer passed.
Prigozhin relocated to Belarus, then to Africa, then—on August 23, exactly two months after the rebellion—to a plane that fell from the sky and killed everyone aboard. The official explanation was mechanical failure. No one believed it. No one was supposed to believe it. The message was clear: rebellion, even rebellion that was forgiven, carried a price that would eventually be collected.
Viktor heard about the death while working on a construction site, hauling materials for an apartment building that would house families who knew nothing about Bakhmut or Wagner or the men who had died in trenches for meters of rubble. He set down his load, checked his phone, read the news, and felt—nothing. Or something so close to nothing that the difference did not matter.
Prigozhin had been his commander, in the abstract sense that all of Wagner’s soldiers had served under his banner. But Viktor had never met him, had only seen him once in that assembly hall, had formed no attachment that death could sever. What he felt, if he felt anything, was a kind of confirmation: the world worked the way he had learned it worked, the powerful disposing of the powerless and then of each other, the machine consuming everyone eventually.
He returned to his work. The bricks needed to be moved. The cement needed to be mixed. The apartment building needed to be finished. These were tangible tasks, real in a way that politics and rebellions and assassinations were not. He could measure his progress in walls completed, in wages earned, in days survived.
The war continued in Ukraine. The counteroffensive that the Ukrainians had launched was grinding through minefields and fortifications, making slow progress at enormous cost. Bakhmut, which Wagner had finally captured in May after months of fighting, remained in Russian hands, though the city that had been fought over no longer existed in any meaningful sense. The meat grinder had stopped only because there was nothing left to grind.
Viktor did not follow the news closely. He had learned what he needed to learn in those six months: that war was not about victory or defeat but about survival, about getting through each day without being killed, about suppressing everything that might interfere with that basic imperative. The strategic calculations that generals made, the political considerations that leaders weighed—these were abstractions that had nothing to do with the reality of combat. The reality was simpler and more terrible: you lived or you died, and the reasons why were irrelevant to the outcome.
He thought sometimes about the boy in the ruins. He had never learned what happened to the child—whether Kolya had delivered him safely to the humanitarian corridor, whether the Ukrainians had taken him in, whether he had survived to grow up in a country that was still at war. Viktor told himself that the boy had made it, that his one act of mercy had accomplished something, that not everything he had done in those six months was destruction.
He did not know if this was true. He would never know. But he chose to believe it, because belief was all he had, and without it the weight of everything else would crush him.
By autumn, Viktor had established something resembling a life.
The construction job paid enough for rent and food with a little left over. He had made acquaintances, if not friends—other workers who asked no questions about his past, who shared cigarettes during breaks, who complained about the weather and the economy and the war in the same breath. He had found a bar where the bartender knew his drink and the other patrons left him alone. He had learned the routines of civilian life, the small rituals that structured days that no longer revolved around survival.
But the war was still inside him. It emerged in dreams that woke him sweating, in flinches at sudden sounds, in the way he scanned every room for exits and threats. It emerged in his inability to plan more than a few days ahead, in his suspicion of promises and guarantees, in the distance he maintained from everyone he met. He was alive, and he was free, but he was not whole, and he did not know if wholeness was something that could be recovered or if Bakhmut had taken it permanently.
He received a letter in October, forwarded through Wagner’s administrative channels, informing him that his service had been officially recognized and that he was entitled to certain veterans’ benefits. The letter was bureaucratic, impersonal, the language of a system that processed men like materials. He read it once, then threw it away. He did not want benefits. He did not want recognition. He wanted only to be left alone, to build his small life brick by brick, to forget what could be forgotten and endure what could not.
The war would continue. Men would die. The machine would consume whoever was fed into it. But Viktor Semyonov was no longer part of that machine, and he intended to stay that way for as long as he could.
He went to work. He laid bricks. He came home. He slept.
The future did not exist. There was only the present, and the present was enough.
The first and most important judgement that a statesman and commander must make is to determine the nature of the war on which they are embarking.
War is not an act of blind passion, but is dominated by the political object. The value of that object determines the measure of the sacrifices by which it is to be purchased.
Consider what it means to be a refugee in your own country. The word itself carries connotations of foreignness, of crossing borders, of seeking asylum in lands that speak different languages and follow different customs. But internal displacement is a different kind of exile—you remain within your nation’s boundaries, you still hold your passport, you still hear your language spoken on the streets, yet you are not home. You are from somewhere else, somewhere that may no longer exist, and you carry that somewhere with you like a weight that cannot be set down.
Oksana Koval had been displaced for eighteen months when the autumn of 2023 arrived.
She lived in Kyiv now, in a two-room apartment on the city’s left bank, in a building that had been constructed during the Soviet era and showed its age in the water-stained ceilings and the elevator that worked only intermittently. The apartment belonged to a cousin who had fled to Germany in the war’s first weeks and who had offered it to Oksana’s family for as long as they needed it. Need, it turned out, had no foreseeable end.
Taras had found work at a logistics company, loading and unloading trucks, his limp a constant reminder of the broken leg that had healed imperfectly. Oksana had returned to teaching—not at a school, there were no positions available for displaced teachers from Mariupol, but privately, tutoring children whose families could afford such services. She taught history and Ukrainian literature, subjects that seemed both essential and absurd in a country that was living history in real time.
Yulia had enrolled at a university in Kyiv, studying psychology. The choice of major, Oksana understood, was not accidental. Her daughter was trying to understand what had happened to her, to map the territory of trauma with academic tools, to find in textbooks and lectures the answers that experience had not provided. Whether this was healthy or merely another form of avoidance, Oksana did not know. She was grateful only that Yulia was functioning, that she attended classes, that she occasionally smiled, that the complete shutdown of the siege’s immediate aftermath had gradually—very gradually—given way to something that resembled life.
But resemblance was not identity. The Yulia who walked the streets of Kyiv, who sat in lecture halls, who sometimes joined her parents for dinner, was not the Yulia who had existed before Mariupol. That girl had been confident, argumentative, full of opinions about politics and music and the future she intended to build. This young woman was quieter, more guarded, slower to laugh and quicker to withdraw. She had stopped reading for pleasure; the books that had once been her companions now sat unopened on a shelf. She had stopped talking about the future; when Oksana asked about her plans after graduation, Yulia would shrug and change the subject.
“She’s processing,” the therapist said—a young woman named Dr. Lysenko, whom Yulia saw once a week at the insistence of her parents. “Trauma takes time. There’s no schedule for recovery.”
Oksana wanted to ask: How much time? Months? Years? A lifetime? But she knew the question had no answer, and asking it would only reveal her own desperation to have her daughter back, the daughter who had been lost somewhere in a basement in Mariupol while shells fell and the city died around them.
The war continued, but in Kyiv, the war had become background noise.
This was not true everywhere. The eastern and southern fronts remained active, the daily casualty reports a grim accounting of lives expended for meters of territory. Drone attacks struck the city periodically, air raid sirens sending residents to shelters with a frequency that had become routine. The blackouts that had plagued the previous winter—the result of systematic Russian strikes on infrastructure—had been partly repaired, but the threat of their return hung over every discussion of the coming cold months.
But Kyiv functioned. Restaurants served customers. Shops sold goods. Traffic jammed the streets during rush hour. Young people gathered in cafes and bars, their conversations touching on the war but not consumed by it. The capital had developed a resilience that was part denial, part necessity, part the simple human need to continue living even when living was precarious.
Oksana found this normalcy both comforting and disturbing. Comforting because it demonstrated that life could persist, that the war had not destroyed everything, that some version of the future remained possible. Disturbing because it felt like a betrayal—of Mariupol, of the people who had died, of the forty-one who had remained in the basement when her family left, whose fates she had never learned.
She thought about them often. The elderly woman who had survived the German occupation and had not survived this one. Dima, the eight-year-old orphan, and Iryna, the neighbor who had taken him in. The families who had crowded into that concrete space, sharing water and fear and the thin hope that the siege would end. Had they escaped? Had they died? Had they been deported to Russia, filtered through the same checkpoints that Oksana’s family had navigated?
There was no way to know. The information networks that had connected Mariupol to the outside world had been severed, and the city itself was now part of occupied territory, accessible only through Russian channels that reported nothing of the civilians who had lived there. Oksana searched online databases of the displaced and the dead, looking for names she recognized. Sometimes she found them—a notice that someone had reached Zaporizhzhia, a report that someone else had been confirmed killed. More often, she found nothing, the absence of information its own kind of grief.
“You can’t save everyone,” Taras said when he found her searching one evening, the glow of the laptop illuminating her face in the darkened room.
“I’m not trying to save them. I just want to know.”
“What difference would it make?”
Oksana did not answer. She did not know what difference it would make, only that not knowing was unbearable, that the uncertainty gnawed at her in ways that certainty—even terrible certainty—would not.
In October, she received a message that changed everything.
It came through a social media platform, from a name she did not recognize: Maria Petrenko. The message was brief:
I was in your basement. Building 47, Tsentralnyi district. I remember you—the teacher who gave lessons to the children. I made it out. I’m in Dnipro now. My mother and I. We were the last to leave, in April, after you. I wanted you to know.
Oksana stared at the message for a long time before responding. The words blurred through tears she had not expected—tears not of grief but of relief, the sudden lifting of a weight she had not realized she was carrying.
Maria. I remember you. You were with your mother in the corner near the water heater. I’m so glad you’re alive. Can we talk?
They arranged a video call. Maria Petrenko was a woman in her forties, thin and worn, with grey streaks in her hair that Oksana did not remember from the basement. Her mother, visible in the background, was in a wheelchair now, weakened by the ordeal in ways that medical care could not fully reverse.
“We left on April 15,” Maria said. “The humanitarian corridor finally opened, and we made it through. But it was—” She paused, her face tightening. “Difficult.”
“I know. We left in late March.”
“You were smart to leave early. It got worse after that. Much worse.”
They talked for an hour, exchanging stories, comparing memories, filling in the gaps that eighteen months had created. Maria knew what had happened to some of the others: Dima, the orphan, had been evacuated with Iryna and was now living in western Ukraine, attending school again. The infant who had been four months old during the siege was alive, growing, learning to walk in a refugee center. Two families had been killed when a shell struck the building after Oksana’s family left, destroying the upper floors that the first impact had spared.
“And the others?” Oksana asked. “The ones who were still there when you left?”
Maria’s face clouded. “I don’t know. By the time we left, there were only twelve of us remaining. The rest had gone—evacuation corridors, some of them, but others...” She shook her head. “Some went to Russian territory. Some tried to get to Azovstal, where the soldiers were holding out. I don’t know what happened to them.”
The forty-one had become twelve. Some of that reduction was evacuation, escape, survival. Some of it, clearly, was not.
“Thank you for telling me,” Oksana said. “I’ve been wondering for so long.”
“I’ve been looking for people, too. Everyone who was in that basement—we’re connected now, aren’t we? For the rest of our lives, we’ll be connected by those weeks underground.”
Oksana thought about this after the call ended. Connected. The word implied community, relationship, something positive. But what connected them was not friendship or shared values; it was shared trauma, the common experience of having survived something that should not have happened. They would carry that connection like a scar, visible to each other even when hidden from the world.
She told Yulia about the call that evening. Yulia listened without expression, nodding occasionally, asking no questions.
“Does it help?” Yulia asked finally. “Knowing what happened to them?”
“I think so. It’s better than not knowing.”
“Is it?” Yulia’s voice carried an edge that Oksana had learned to recognize—the edge that appeared when Yulia approached something she did not want to feel. “Knowing that some of them died, knowing that some of them were taken to Russia—does that actually make anything better?”
“It makes it real. It makes it something I can grieve, instead of something I can only wonder about.”
Yulia considered this. “I don’t want to make things real. I want them to stay vague, distant. When they’re vague, I can pretend they might not have happened.”
“You know that’s not healthy.”
“I know.” Yulia’s voice was flat, uninflected. “Dr. Lysenko tells me every week. Face the trauma. Process the emotions. Move through it rather than around it. All the right words, all the right techniques. But sometimes—” She stopped, her jaw tightening in a way that reminded Oksana of Taras. “Sometimes I just want to not feel anything. Is that so wrong?”
Oksana did not have an answer. She wanted to say that feeling was essential, that suppression only delayed the inevitable, that Yulia needed to confront what had happened in order to move beyond it. But she also understood, in ways that the therapist’s textbooks might not capture, that sometimes survival required not feeling, that the human psyche had defenses for good reasons, that forcing someone through trauma before they were ready could cause more damage than letting them find their own path.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I don’t know what’s right. I just want you to be okay.”
“I am okay,” Yulia said. “I’m functioning. I’m attending classes. I’m not hurting myself or anyone else. Isn’t that enough?”
The question hung in the air between them, unanswerable.
November brought the first anniversary of the blackouts, and Kyiv prepared for another winter of uncertainty.
The government had spent the year rebuilding infrastructure, hardening the power grid, stockpiling generators and fuel. But everyone knew that the Russians were preparing too, building their stockpiles of missiles and drones, waiting for the cold to amplify the impact of any strike. The question was not whether the attacks would come but when, and how severe they would be.
Oksana bought candles and batteries and bottled water, repeating the preparations she had made in Mariupol, the preparations that had proven both essential and inadequate. The motions felt familiar now—the calculus of survival, the weighing of what could be stored against what might be needed. She had become an expert in this calculus, had learned lessons that no one should have to learn, and she applied them with the methodical precision that had once characterized her lesson planning.
Taras watched her preparations without comment. He understood, as she did, that preparation was a form of control, a way of asserting agency in a situation where agency was limited. You could not stop the missiles from being launched, but you could ensure that your family had water when the pipes froze, light when the power failed, warmth when the heating died. These small acts of resistance were what remained when the larger forms of resistance—fighting, protesting, fleeing—were no longer available.
“Do you ever think about leaving?” Taras asked one evening, as they sat in the kitchen with the preparations spread around them.
“Leaving Kyiv?”
“Leaving Ukraine. Going west, like your cousin. Germany, Poland, somewhere safe.”
Oksana had thought about it. In the war’s first months, when the outcome seemed uncertain and the Russians were threatening Kyiv itself, the idea of escape had been appealing, even urgent. But as the months passed, as the front lines stabilized, as life in the capital resumed something approaching normalcy, the urgency had faded. Now leaving felt less like escape than like abandonment—abandonment of the country, of the people still fighting, of the idea that Ukraine could survive and rebuild.
“Where would we go?” she asked. “Your cousin in Germany—she’s living in a single room, dependent on charity, unable to work in her profession. Is that better than this?”
“She’s not at risk of being killed by a missile.”
“Neither are we, probably. The odds are low. You know that.”
“The odds in Mariupol were low, too. Until they weren’t.”
This was the argument they had been having, in various forms, for eighteen months. Taras wanted safety, certainty, the assurance that what had happened once would not happen again. Oksana wanted—what? Home. Belonging. The sense that she was still part of something larger than herself, still connected to the nation that had given her identity and meaning. Leaving would mean severing those connections, becoming a stranger in a strange land, defining herself forever by what she had fled rather than what she had stayed to defend.
“Yulia’s in university,” Oksana said finally. “She’s building something here, however fragile. Uprooting her again—I don’t think that’s the right choice.”
“And if the choice is taken from us? If the Russians break through, or the bombing intensifies, or—”
“Then we’ll decide then. But not before.”
Taras nodded slowly. He did not agree, she knew, but he accepted her position, as she had accepted his during the siege, when he had wanted to leave and she had wanted to wait. Their marriage had always been a negotiation, a balancing of different perspectives, and the war had not changed that fundamental dynamic. It had only raised the stakes.
The winter arrived, and with it the attacks.
They were not as severe as the previous year—the air defenses had improved, and many missiles and drones were intercepted before they reached their targets—but they were enough to remind everyone that the war was not over, that the normalcy of Kyiv was provisional, that safety was a condition that could be revoked at any moment.
Oksana went to the shelter when the sirens sounded, joining her neighbors in the basement of their building, a space that reminded her uncomfortably of another basement, another siege. Yulia came sometimes and sometimes did not, choosing to stay in the apartment with her textbooks and her laptop, claiming that the statistical risk did not justify the disruption. Oksana did not argue; Yulia was an adult now, making her own calculations, and the calculations were probably correct. Probably.
On December 29, 2023, the Russians launched a massive strike—their largest in weeks, aimed at multiple cities simultaneously. Oksana was at the market when the sirens began, buying vegetables for New Year’s Eve dinner, and she spent three hours in a subway station with hundreds of other Kyivans, waiting for the all-clear that came only after the last missiles had been intercepted or had struck their targets.
When she emerged, the city was intact but shaken. Reports came in of damage across Ukraine—Kharkiv hit badly, Odesa suffering casualties, infrastructure targets struck in multiple regions. The new year would begin, as the previous year had, with destruction and defiance, with the reminder that the war continued no matter what calendar page was turned.
She walked home through streets that looked normal but felt different, the familiar buildings now carrying the potential for violence, the clear sky now a vector for threats that could arrive at any moment. This was what the war had done: it had transformed the ordinary into the dangerous, had made every moment provisional, had taught her that nothing could be assumed and nothing was safe.
Yulia was in the apartment when she arrived, sitting by the window with her psychology textbook open but unread.
“Are you okay?” Oksana asked.
“I’m fine. The building wasn’t hit.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Yulia looked up, and for a moment her careful blankness wavered, revealing something beneath—fear, perhaps, or exhaustion, or the same grinding uncertainty that Oksana herself felt.
“I’m tired,” Yulia said. “I’m tired of sirens and shelters and wondering if today is the day. I’m tired of pretending everything is normal when nothing is normal. I’m tired of studying psychology to understand my own brain when my brain keeps telling me that none of this should be happening, that this isn’t how life is supposed to work.”
It was more than Yulia had said about her feelings in months. Oksana sat down beside her, not touching, not speaking, just being present.
“I know,” she said finally. “I’m tired too.”
“How do you keep going?”
The question was not rhetorical. Yulia was genuinely asking, seeking guidance from a mother who had somehow maintained herself through siege and displacement and the endless uncertainty of war.
Oksana thought carefully before answering. “I keep going because stopping is worse. I keep going because there are still things I care about—you, your father, the possibility of a future that isn’t like this. I keep going because that’s what people do when the alternative is giving up, and I’m not ready to give up yet.”
“What if I am? Ready to give up?”
“Then I’ll carry you until you’re not. That’s what family is for.”
Yulia was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, she reached out and took her mother’s hand—the first voluntary touch in weeks, perhaps months.
“Thank you,” she said.
They sat together in the fading light, mother and daughter, refugees in their own country, survivors of a siege that had not ended, waiting for a future that might or might not arrive.
Outside, the city continued. Sirens silent now. Life resuming. The war grinding on.
War is not an act of blind passion, but is dominated by the political object. The value of that object determines the measure of the sacrifices by which it is to be purchased.
The defensive form of war is intrinsically stronger than the offensive. This is the point we have been trying to establish.
Consider what happens when both sides can see everything. The fog of war—that fundamental element that has shaped combat since the first armies clashed—does not disappear, but it transforms. It becomes selective, asymmetric, a fog that clears in some places while thickening in others. The commander who once wondered where the enemy was now wonders what the enemy is planning to do with the forces that are clearly visible on every drone feed, every satellite image, every thermal scan. The question is no longer “where” but “when” and “how”—and those questions prove no easier to answer than the original.
Serhiy Bondarenko had been fighting on the transparent battlefield for two years, and he had watched the transformation accelerate until it became something no one had predicted.
Spring 2024 found him in the Zaporizhzhia sector, part of the same static front that had consumed the previous summer’s counteroffensive. The lines had barely moved since September. Both sides dug in, fortified, adapted to the reality that movement was death and survival required stillness. The war had become what some analysts called “positional”—a polite word for the grinding stalemate that neither side could break.
But within that stalemate, the technological arms race continued.
The drones had evolved. When Serhiy had begun flying in 2022, the standard FPV was a modified racing quadcopter, cheap and effective but vulnerable to electronic warfare. Now the arsenal included fiber-optic drones—guided not by radio signals that could be jammed but by a thin filament that unspooled from the airframe, carrying video and commands immune to interference. The ranges had increased from hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers. The payloads had grown from grenades to anti-tank munitions. The platforms had diversified into ground-based robots, marine drones, loitering munitions that could hover for hours before striking.
And the Russians had adapted in turn. Their electronic warfare systems now blanketed the front, creating dead zones where conventional drones simply fell from the sky. Their counter-drone teams had learned to shoot down FPVs with shotguns and machine guns, to deploy nets and jamming devices, to create defensive screens that turned drone operations from routine into gamble. The advantage that Ukraine had enjoyed in 2022 and 2023 had narrowed, and the narrowing continued with each month.
Serhiy understood this dynamic intimately. He had spent two years watching innovations become obsolete, watching countermeasures prompt counter-countermeasures, watching the technological chess game proceed move by move toward a complexity that exceeded any individual’s comprehension. The boy who had started as a software developer learning to fly quadcopters had become a specialist in a domain that was reinventing itself monthly.
“The fiber-optics are the future,” his commander said during a briefing in March. “Unjammable, undetectable, precise. We need operators who can adapt to the new platforms.”
Serhiy adapted. He always adapted. It was his defining characteristic, the quality that had kept him effective and alive when others had burned out or been killed. But adaptation had costs, and he had begun to notice them accumulating.
The fiber-optic drones changed everything and nothing.
They changed the tactics: longer ranges, deeper penetration, targets that had been safe now vulnerable. They changed the psychology: knowing that the enemy could reach you from kilometers away, with platforms you could not detect and could not stop. They changed the mathematics: cost-per-kill ratios that made tanks and armored vehicles increasingly obsolete, infantry increasingly exposed.
But they did not change the fundamental equation of the war. The front lines remained static. The attacks and counterattacks continued to trade meters for lives. The strategic stalemate that had defined 2023 persisted into 2024, and all the technological innovation in the world could not break it.
Serhiy flew his first fiber-optic mission in April. The target was a Russian command post fifteen kilometers behind the line, identified by signal intelligence and confirmed by satellite. The drone was larger than the FPVs he was accustomed to, slower and steadier, with a payload that could penetrate armored structures. The fiber unspooled from a drum as he flew, a gossamer thread connecting him to the aircraft, carrying his vision and commands through the electromagnetic soup that would have killed any radio-controlled platform.
The flight took twelve minutes. He navigated by the camera feed, following terrain features he had memorized from maps, avoiding the obvious approach routes that the Russians would be watching. The landscape scrolling beneath him was scarred by two years of war—craters and trenches and the ruins of villages that had once held families, schools, churches. He did not let himself think about what those ruins represented. He focused on the mission.
The command post appeared on his screen: a cluster of vehicles around a reinforced structure, camouflage netting draped over equipment that the netting could not hide from thermal imaging. He identified the primary target—the communication antenna that would cripple the post’s ability to coordinate—and he began his attack run.
The impact was precise. The antenna collapsed. Secondary explosions suggested that ammunition or fuel had been struck. The screen went to static as the drone completed its terminal dive, the fiber severing in the impact, the connection ending as abruptly as the lives of whoever had been in the target zone.
Serhiy removed his goggles and sat in the silence that followed every mission. The silence was its own kind of weight—the absence of the drone’s perspective, the return to the limited vision of human eyes, the awareness that somewhere fifteen kilometers away, people were dead or dying because of what he had done.
“Good hit,” his spotter said. “Confirmed destruction of primary target. BDA shows significant secondary effects.”
Battle damage assessment. The clinical language of military operations, designed to convert violence into information, casualties into data points. Serhiy had learned this language fluently, had used it to maintain the professional distance that the work required. But lately the language felt inadequate, a thin veneer over reality that was wearing through.
“Prep for the next mission,” he said. “We have two more targets for today.”
May brought an intensification that no one had expected.
The Russians launched a new offensive in the Kharkiv region, probing Ukrainian defenses, seeking weaknesses that two years of fortification might have created. The attack was not a breakthrough attempt—the forces committed were insufficient for that—but a pressure campaign, designed to stretch Ukrainian resources and force difficult choices about where to concentrate defense.
Serhiy’s unit was redeployed north, into the sector that was suddenly hot after months of relative quiet. The transition was jarring: from the static lines of Zaporizhzhia, where the front had barely moved in a year, to the fluid situation around Kharkiv, where positions changed daily and the map required constant updating.
The drone operations intensified correspondingly. Where Serhiy had been flying two or three missions a day, he now flew eight, ten, sometimes more. The targets multiplied: armored columns advancing toward Ukrainian positions, artillery batteries that needed to be suppressed, supply convoys that could be interdicted. Each mission blurred into the next, a continuous stream of takeoffs and engagements and static screens that marked successful strikes.
He began to make mistakes.
The first was minor: a miscalculation of wind that caused a drone to miss its target by several meters, the explosion damaging but not destroying the vehicle he had been aiming for. The second was more serious: a navigation error that brought him over friendly positions, triggering anti-drone fire from his own side that nearly shot down his platform. The third was—
He did not want to think about the third.
The target had been designated as a military vehicle, a truck that intelligence assessed was carrying ammunition. But when Serhiy reviewed the footage after the strike, he saw details that the initial assessment had missed: the shape of the cargo bed, the absence of military markings, the figure that had emerged from the cab in the seconds before impact and had raised hands in a gesture that might have been surrender or might have been confusion or might have been anything except what he had assumed.
He reported the discrepancy. The investigation concluded that the target was legitimate—the absence of markings was consistent with Russian attempts to disguise military vehicles, the figure’s gesture was inconclusive. The kill was confirmed, the mission was successful, and Serhiy was cleared to continue operations.
But he remembered the raised hands. He would always remember them.
The accumulated weight that he had feared in 2022 began to manifest in ways he could not ignore.
Sleep became difficult. When he did sleep, the dreams were vivid and disturbing—not nightmares exactly, but repetitions of the day’s missions, the screens playing behind his eyes, the targets growing larger as he approached, the static that ended each engagement. He woke exhausted, his mind still running the algorithms of targeting and navigation, his hands twitching toward controllers that were not there.
His appetite diminished. Food tasted like nothing, a necessary fuel that he consumed without pleasure. He lost weight—enough that others noticed, enough that Katya, the trainee he had mentored the previous year, asked him directly if he was okay.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired.”
“You look more than tired. You look—” She hesitated, searching for a word that would not sound like an accusation. “Depleted.”
“It’s the tempo. We’re all depleted.”
This was true, as far as it went. The unit was operating at maximum capacity, flying more missions than their equipment could sustain, burning through drones and operators at rates that the supply chain struggled to match. Serhiy was not the only one showing signs of strain. But he was among the most experienced, and his strain was noticed where others’ might not be.
His commander called him in for a conversation that was half assessment, half intervention.
“You’ve flown over two hundred missions since the offensive began,” the commander said. “That’s more than anyone else in the unit. It’s time for a rotation.”
“We can’t spare the operators. You know that.”
“I can’t spare operators who are too burned out to function effectively. A mistake in this environment doesn’t just cost a drone—it costs lives. Ukrainian lives.”
The argument was logical, unanswerable. Serhiy had used the same reasoning with trainees who showed signs of breaking, had rotated them off the line before their errors became catastrophic. But applying the reasoning to himself felt like failure, like an admission that the adaptation he had prided himself on had reached its limits.
“Two weeks,” the commander said. “Mandatory rest. Non-negotiable.”
Serhiy accepted because he had no choice. He turned in his equipment, briefed his replacement on the ongoing operations, and boarded a transport heading west, away from the front, toward a rest facility that had been established for exactly this purpose.
The facility was in a town that had not been touched by direct combat, though the signs of war were everywhere—checkpoints on the roads, sandbags around municipal buildings, the occasional distant sound of air defense engaging incoming threats. Serhiy was given a room in a converted hotel, meals in a communal dining area, access to counselors who had been trained to help soldiers process what they had experienced.
He did not see the counselors. He lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to remember what it felt like to not be flying, to not be hunting, to not be killing. The debugging metaphor that had sustained him for two years no longer worked. Bugs were errors in code, impersonal, fixable. What he had been doing was not debugging. It was something else, something that the technical language could not contain.
He thought about the raised hands. He would always think about them.
On the fourth day of his rotation, he received news that changed his understanding of the war.
The Ukrainians had launched an incursion into Russia itself. Not the drone strikes and cross-border raids that had become routine, but an actual ground operation—armored columns crossing into the Kursk region, seizing territory, establishing positions on Russian soil.
The news was everywhere: on the television in the common room, on the phones of every soldier in the facility, in the conversations that sprang up wherever two or more people gathered. The strategic implications were debated endlessly—was this a diversion? A pressure tactic? A genuine attempt to change the dynamics of the war?
Serhiy watched the coverage with the analytical distance that two years of drone operations had trained into him. He saw the footage of Ukrainian forces advancing through Russian villages, the bewildered civilians, the hastily evacuated checkpoints. He recognized the tactics—the same combined arms approach that he had supported in countless operations, now applied to an objective that no one had expected.
And he felt—what? Not triumph, though the strategic value was clear. Not satisfaction, though the symbolic importance of Ukrainian boots on Russian soil was undeniable. What he felt was exhaustion, a profound weariness that went beyond physical fatigue to something deeper.
The war would continue. The front in Kursk would stabilize or collapse, but either way the larger conflict would persist. The drones would fly, the targets would be struck, the static screens would accumulate. Nothing he did would end it. Nothing anyone did seemed capable of ending it. The war had become a machine that fed on itself, consuming men and material and hope, producing only more war.
He returned to his room and lay down. The ceiling was the same ceiling he had stared at for four days—white plaster, a crack running from corner to corner, a water stain that vaguely resembled a map of Ukraine. He traced the borders of that stain with his eyes and thought about what it would mean to stop. Not to stop fighting, exactly, but to stop adapting, to acknowledge that the adaptation had costs that were no longer sustainable.
He had killed hundreds of people. Perhaps more—the numbers blurred together, the successful strikes merging into a single continuous mission that had lasted two years and showed no sign of ending. He had been effective, valuable, one of the best operators in his unit. But the best operators were not immune to the weight of what they did. They simply carried it longer, until the weight became impossible.
The two weeks ended. Serhiy returned to his unit. He picked up his goggles, his controllers, the equipment that had become extensions of his own body. He flew his first mission back—a reconnaissance operation, no weapons engaged—and he felt the familiar calm of the flight, the focus that excluded everything except the screen and the target.
But the calm was thinner now. The focus was harder to maintain. The raised hands hovered at the edge of his vision, a ghost image that would not resolve.
He adapted. He always adapted. But he was beginning to understand that adaptation was not infinite, that even the most flexible system eventually reached its breaking point.
The war continued. The drones continued. Serhiy continued.
For now.
The defensive form of war is intrinsically stronger than the offensive. This is the point we have been trying to establish.
Late 2024 – Early 2025
Every offensive action in war has a culminating point at which its force is exhausted, its advantages expended, and further advance becomes impossible or counterproductive. The art of strategy lies in recognizing this point before it arrives.
Consider what happens when a war approaches its culmination. The lines that have been drawn in blood begin to harden into permanence. The advances that seemed possible in the first months become impossible in the third year. The forces on both sides—men, equipment, will—approach the limits of what can be sustained. And the question that no one wants to ask becomes unavoidable: Is this how it ends? Not with victory or defeat, but with exhaustion so complete that neither side can continue?
Brigadier General Oleksandr Kovalenko received the news of the American election on the morning of November 6, 2024, in a command bunker somewhere in the Zaporizhzhia region. The results had been announced hours earlier, but the implications were still being processed, debated, denied by those who could not accept what they meant.
Trump had won. The man who had promised to end the war “in twenty-four hours,” who had criticized Western support for Ukraine, who had expressed admiration for Putin’s “strength”—this man would return to the White House in January, with all the power that the American presidency commanded.
Kovalenko read the reports with the analytical detachment that thirty-two years of military service had trained into him. He did not indulge in panic or denial. He assessed the situation as he would assess any other operational development: What does this mean for the forces under my command? What adjustments are required? What can be controlled, and what must be accepted?
The immediate implications were unclear. Trump had made many promises during the campaign, and presidents rarely fulfilled all their promises. American military aid might continue, or it might be reduced, or it might be cut entirely—the possibilities ranged from manageable to catastrophic. The pressure for negotiations would certainly increase; whether that pressure would produce results depended on factors that Kovalenko could not predict and could not control.
What he could control was the preparation of his forces for whatever came next.
“The strategic situation has not changed overnight,” he told his staff at the morning briefing. “The Russians are still in their positions. Our positions are still defensible. The Kursk operation continues. What has changed is the political context, and political contexts are not our domain. Our domain is the operational reality in front of us.”
His officers nodded, but he could see the uncertainty in their faces. They had fought for over two years with the assumption—sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit—that the West would support them for as long as necessary. That assumption was now in question. Not invalidated, perhaps, but questioned in ways that affected everything from supply planning to morale.
“We will continue our operations as planned,” Kovalenko said. “We will maintain our readiness. We will prepare for multiple scenarios, including scenarios where our resources are constrained. This is what professional soldiers do: we prepare for the world as it might be, not as we wish it were.”
The briefing continued. Reports from the Kursk sector, where Ukrainian forces still held territory inside Russia. Reports from the Donbas, where the grinding attrition continued unchanged. Reports from the air defense networks, which had successfully intercepted another wave of Russian missiles the previous night. The war went on, indifferent to elections and political transitions, demanding attention and resources regardless of what happened in Washington.
But Kovalenko knew, as his officers knew, that the war’s continuation could not be taken for granted. The culminating point was approaching—perhaps had already arrived—and the question of what came next would be answered not by generals but by politicians, not by soldiers but by diplomats, not by those who fought but by those who decided whether fighting should continue.
The weeks following the election brought a strange atmosphere to the front.
The fighting continued—it had to continue; positions had to be held, attacks had to be repelled, the daily work of war had to proceed. But the conversations had changed. In the command bunkers and the trenches, in the logistics depots and the field hospitals, people talked about what Trump’s victory might mean, about whether the aid would stop, about whether they would be forced to accept a peace that none of them wanted.
Kovalenko listened to these conversations without participating in them. Speculation was not his role. His role was to prepare his forces for whatever came, and preparation required clarity of thought that speculation undermined.
He ordered a comprehensive assessment of his formation’s sustainability. How long could they fight at current intensity if ammunition deliveries were reduced by twenty percent? By fifty percent? By one hundred percent? The answers were not encouraging—modern warfare consumed resources at rates that no nation could sustain indefinitely without external support—but they were necessary. Better to know the limits than to discover them in crisis.
He also ordered an assessment of negotiating positions. This was unusual for a military commander, but Kovalenko understood that the line between military and political was blurring. If negotiations came, the military situation would shape their outcome. What could Ukraine credibly defend? What would be lost if fighting stopped tomorrow? What would be the strategic implications of various territorial settlements?
The assessments painted a picture of a war at a decision point.
Ukraine held approximately 80% of its pre-2014 territory—less if you counted Crimea, which had been lost a decade ago. The 20% that Russia controlled included the industrial heartland of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea, and the strategic positions along the Sea of Azov. Retaking this territory through military force alone appeared impossible with current resources; the failed counteroffensive of 2023 had demonstrated the limits of what could be achieved against prepared defenses.
Russia, for its part, had failed to achieve its original objectives—the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, the annexation of the entire country, the expansion of Russian influence to the borders of NATO. But it had also demonstrated the ability to sustain a prolonged conflict, to absorb casualties and sanctions and isolation without collapsing. The Russian economy was strained but functional. The Russian military was damaged but still capable. The Russian government showed no signs of moderating its demands.
The result was a stalemate that neither side could break and neither side would accept. Ukraine demanded the restoration of its 1991 borders; Russia demanded recognition of its annexations and Ukrainian neutrality. The gap between these positions was unbridgeable through negotiation alone, yet bridging it through military force seemed equally impossible.
“We are at the culminating point,” Kovalenko wrote in a private assessment that he shared with no one. “The war cannot continue indefinitely at current intensity, but it cannot end on terms that either side will accept. Something must break—either the military deadlock or the political deadlock. If the political deadlock breaks first, we may be forced to accept an outcome that military action alone could not have prevented. If the military deadlock breaks, the result will depend on which side breaks it and in which direction.”
He did not know which deadlock would break, or when. He knew only that his forces must be ready for both possibilities.
December brought the first hints of what the new political reality would mean.
The transition team in Washington began to signal its intentions—not through official channels, which remained supportive of Ukraine, but through leaks and interviews and the public statements of advisors who would soon hold power. The message was clear: the new administration wanted negotiations, wanted an end to the conflict, wanted to redirect American attention and resources to other priorities.
The pressure on Ukraine to negotiate intensified accordingly. European allies, uncertain of American commitment, began to calculate their own positions. The unity that had characterized the Western response to the invasion showed its first serious cracks as different nations pursued different approaches to the question of what peace might look like.
Kovalenko observed these developments with the detachment of a soldier who understood that politics was beyond his control. He focused on what was within his control: the readiness of his forces, the maintenance of his defensive positions, the planning for contingencies that might or might not arise.
The Kursk operation provided a model for what was possible. Ukrainian forces had demonstrated the ability to conduct offensive operations on Russian territory, to hold ground against counterattacks, to inflict costs that Russia had not expected. The operation had not changed the strategic balance, but it had changed the psychology—had shown that Ukraine was not merely defending but could also attack, that the war’s geography was not fixed, that risks could be taken and rewards could be reaped.
Whether such operations could continue depended on resources that might or might not be available. The fiber-optic drones, the precision munitions, the intelligence and reconnaissance systems that enabled effective targeting—all of these required Western support that could not be replaced from domestic sources. If that support diminished, the operations would diminish accordingly.
“We must be prepared for negotiations that may come sooner than we expect,” Kovalenko told his senior staff in mid-December. “This does not mean we stop fighting. It means we fight with the awareness that our military position will translate into our negotiating position. Every meter we hold, every position we defend, every capability we demonstrate—these become assets in a negotiation that may determine the future of our country.”
“And if the negotiations fail?” his operations officer asked. “If no agreement is reached?”
“Then we continue fighting. But the resources available for that fighting may be different than they are today. We must plan for sustainability, not just effectiveness. A force that is highly effective for six months but exhausted thereafter is less valuable than a force that is moderately effective but can sustain that effectiveness indefinitely.”
The planning continued. Maps were revised. Supply chains were assessed. Personnel policies were adjusted to account for the possibility of a longer war with fewer resources. Kovalenko worked eighteen-hour days, driving himself toward a readiness that might never be tested, preparing for scenarios that might never arrive.
But preparation was all he had. In the absence of certainty, preparation was the only rational response.
On December 20, 2024, Kovalenko received orders that changed everything.
He was to report to Kyiv for a briefing with the General Staff. The subject was not specified, but the urgency was clear: immediate departure, no delegation, personal attendance required.
He traveled through the night, past checkpoints and through cities that had learned to live with war, past air defense positions that scanned the sky for threats that came without warning. The country had changed in three years—had hardened, adapted, become something that no one had anticipated in February 2022. The people who filled the streets and the shops and the restaurants were not the same people who had watched the invasion begin; they had been transformed by what they had survived, had developed a resilience that was part defiance, part exhaustion, part the simple human need to continue living regardless of circumstances.
Kyiv itself was both familiar and strange. The capital had been bombed repeatedly but had not been conquered. The buildings showed scars, but the traffic flowed and the businesses operated and the government continued to function. This was perhaps the war’s most remarkable achievement: not a military victory, which remained elusive, but a demonstration that Ukraine could absorb punishment and continue to exist, could be invaded but not destroyed.
The briefing was held in a secure facility that Kovalenko had visited several times before. The attendees were senior officers from across the military, gathered for what the Chief of the General Staff introduced as “a strategic assessment of the current situation and the options available to us.”
The assessment was comprehensive and unflinching.
The military situation was stable but not favorable. Ukrainian forces had successfully defended most of the country but could not recapture the occupied territories without resources that were not available. The Kursk operation had demonstrated offensive capability but had not changed the strategic balance. The coming year would require continued defense with potentially reduced support.
The political situation was uncertain but trending toward negotiation. The new American administration was expected to push for talks, and European allies were likely to follow. The shape of any potential agreement remained unclear, but the pressure to reach one was increasing.
The options were limited. Ukraine could continue fighting indefinitely at reduced intensity, preserving its forces while waiting for political conditions to change. It could seek a negotiated settlement that would end the immediate conflict but might not address long-term security concerns. It could attempt a new offensive operation designed to change facts on the ground before negotiations concluded.
Each option carried risks. Continued fighting risked exhaustion without resolution. Negotiation risked accepting terms that left Ukraine vulnerable to future aggression. Offensive action risked catastrophic losses for uncertain gains.
“We are not asking you to make this decision,” the Chief of Staff concluded. “That decision will be made by the political leadership, as it should be. We are asking you to provide your assessment of what is militarily feasible and what is not, so that the decision-makers have accurate information on which to base their choices.”
Kovalenko listened, considered, and spoke.
“The military situation is consistent with a negotiated settlement, if that is what the political leadership determines is necessary. Our forces can defend current positions indefinitely if provided with adequate resources. They cannot recapture the occupied territories without offensive capabilities that we do not currently possess and are unlikely to receive. The choice between continued fighting and negotiation is not a military choice; it is a political choice that must weigh factors beyond our expertise.”
He paused, choosing his next words carefully.
“However, I would caution against any assumption that a negotiated settlement will end the conflict permanently. Russia’s strategic objectives have not changed. Any pause in fighting should be used to build the capabilities that we lack, to strengthen our defenses, to prepare for a possible resumption of hostilities. A peace that leaves us weaker is not a peace; it is a preparation for defeat.”
The briefing continued for several more hours. When it concluded, Kovalenko returned to his command, knowing that the decisions made in the coming months would shape the future of his country in ways that military action alone could never accomplish.
The culminating point had arrived. What came next would depend on choices that were not his to make.
Every offensive action in war has a culminating point at which its force is exhausted, its advantages expended, and further advance becomes impossible or counterproductive. The art of strategy lies in recognizing this point before it arrives.
War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.
Consider what happens to those who escape the war only to find that the war has not escaped them. The veteran who returns to civilian life carries the conflict in memory and muscle, in the flinch at unexpected sounds and the dreams that replay what waking hours suppress. But beyond these internal battles, the external war continues, and the state that sent him once may send him again. Freedom, for the soldier of an endless war, is provisional—a pause rather than a conclusion, a respite that can be revoked.
Viktor Semyonov had been free for nearly two years when the letter arrived.
It came in November 2024, delivered to the apartment building in Rostov-on-Don where he had lived since leaving Bakhmut. The envelope bore no return address, only the official stamps of the military commissariat. He knew what it contained before he opened it: the summons that he had feared since the day his Wagner contract ended, the recall that would send him back to the war he had barely survived.
He stood in the hallway of the building, holding the envelope, unable to open it. The widow who owned his room passed him on the stairs, nodded politely, continued upward. She did not ask about the letter. In Russia, certain letters required no explanation.
Viktor returned to his room, sat on the bed that had been his refuge for twenty-two months, and opened the envelope.
The language was bureaucratic, impersonal: he was ordered to report to the military commissariat within seven days for “verification of registration status and potential service obligations.” The letter did not say he would be mobilized. It said only that he must appear, must submit to whatever process the state had designed for men like him—men who had served, who had survived, who had been released but not forgotten.
He read the letter three times, searching for ambiguities that might offer escape. There were none. The summons was clear, the deadline absolute, the consequences of non-compliance implicit in the official language that wrapped threats in procedure.
Seven days. One hundred sixty-eight hours. Ten thousand eighty minutes.
He had counted time this way before, in Bakhmut, when the end of his contract had seemed both imminent and impossibly distant. Now he counted again, measuring the interval between freedom and whatever came next.
The days passed in a blur of routine and dread.
Viktor continued to work—the construction site did not care about military summons, cared only about bricks laid and cement mixed—but his mind was elsewhere. He calculated scenarios: What if he fled? Where would he go? The borders were watched, the routes to Georgia and Kazakhstan and Finland monitored by security services that had grown more vigilant as the war demanded more bodies. He had no money for bribes, no connections to smugglers, no plan beyond the vague hope that something would intervene.
He thought about hiding within Russia itself, disappearing into the vastness of a country where millions lived off the grid, beyond the reach of commissariats and mobilization orders. But he knew that such disappearance was harder than it seemed, that the digital systems tracked movements and transactions, that eventually the state would find him and the consequences would be worse than compliance.
He thought about Kolya, his comrade from Bakhmut, who had helped him save the boy in the ruins. He called the number he had saved, heard it ring without answer, tried again the next day and the day after. On the fourth day, a woman answered—Kolya’s woman, the one who did not ask about scars.
“He received a letter too,” she said. “He reported two days ago. I haven’t heard from him since.”
The information settled into Viktor’s stomach like a stone. Kolya, who had survived six months of Bakhmut, who had built a life in Voronezh, who had found work and love and something resembling normalcy—Kolya had been summoned and had not returned.
“What did they tell you?” Viktor asked.
“Nothing. They tell us nothing. He went in and he didn’t come out, and when I called they said he was being processed and I should wait for further information.”
Being processed. The language of bureaucracy applied to human beings, as if men were materials to be sorted and allocated, inputs for a machine that consumed them without explanation.
Viktor thanked her, ended the call, and sat in his room as the light faded outside his window. Five days remained. One hundred twenty hours. Seven thousand two hundred minutes.
On the sixth day, he made a decision.
He would not flee. He would not hide. He would report to the commissariat as ordered, would submit to whatever process awaited him, would accept whatever fate the state determined. This was not courage—Viktor had no illusions about that. It was exhaustion, the recognition that resistance required resources he did not possess, that flight would only postpone an outcome he could not avoid.
And beneath the exhaustion, something else: a kind of resignation that might have been peace. He had survived Bakhmut by not thinking beyond the immediate moment, by reducing existence to the simple question of whether he would live through the next hour. He would apply the same technique now. He would not think about what came after the commissariat. He would think only about getting through the door, answering the questions, following the instructions. Everything else was beyond his control.
He spent his last free day in ordinary activities. He went to work, laid bricks, collected his wages—less than he was owed, but the foreman knew about the summons and knew that Viktor would not be back to complain. He returned to his room, packed a small bag with the few possessions he valued, left the rest for the widow to dispose of. He ate a meal at the bar where the bartender knew his drink, said nothing about leaving, paid his tab and walked out into the cold November night.
The city continued around him, indifferent to his fate. Cars moved through streets. People walked to destinations that had nothing to do with war. Lights glowed in windows where families ate dinner and children did homework and life proceeded as if the war were something happening elsewhere, to other people, in a place that did not touch this ordinary evening in Rostov-on-Don.
Viktor walked for hours, memorizing the city he might never see again. He passed the building where he had watched the Wagner rebellion unfold, the square where armored vehicles had established positions while Putin’s voice trembled on television. He passed churches and shops and the river that flowed to the sea, the same sea where the war was being fought by men in boats and submarines and naval bases. The war was everywhere, he realized. It had always been everywhere. The civilian life he had tried to build was an illusion, a temporary arrangement that the state could dissolve whenever it chose.
He returned to his room as dawn approached. He slept for a few hours, dreamless for once, and woke to the day of his summons.
The commissariat was a grey building in a grey district, indistinguishable from the administrative structures that dotted every Russian city. Viktor arrived early, before the doors opened, and found a line already forming—men of various ages, some clearly veterans, others looking like they had never held a weapon. All of them carried the same expression: resignation, fear, the blank acceptance of those who had surrendered agency to the state.
The processing was efficient, mechanical. Documents were checked. Questions were asked. Medical assessments were conducted—cursory examinations that declared everyone fit for service unless they were visibly dying. Viktor moved through the stations like a piece on an assembly line, answering when spoken to, presenting papers when required, offering no resistance and no opinion.
The interview room was small, windowless, dominated by a desk behind which sat a major whose face showed the fatigue of processing thousands of men through the same system. He looked at Viktor’s file, at the Wagner service record, at the pardon that had granted freedom two years ago.
“Semyonov, Viktor Ivanovich. Wagner Group, July 2022 to January 2023. Bakhmut sector. Contract completed, pardon issued.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You are aware that pardoned veterans may be recalled for service under certain conditions?”
“I was not aware of specific conditions, sir.”
The major made a note. “The conditions are determined by military necessity. The current situation requires experienced personnel. Your service record indicates competence in urban combat and survival under difficult conditions. These skills are needed.”
Viktor said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“You will be assigned to a regular army unit for further training and deployment. Your previous experience will be considered in determining your role. Do you have any questions?”
A hundred questions crowded Viktor’s mind, but he knew that none of them would receive useful answers. Where would he be sent? How long would he serve? Would he survive? These were not questions that majors in commissariat offices could answer, even if they were inclined to.
“No, sir.”
“Report to the assembly area. Transportation will be provided to your training location. You have one hour to notify any family members of your status.”
Viktor had no family members to notify. His parents were dead. His brother had cut contact years ago. The woman he had once loved was a memory from a previous life. He would notify no one, because there was no one who needed to know.
He stood, saluted—the gesture automatic, drilled into him by months of Wagner training—and walked out of the interview room, out of the commissariat, into a courtyard where buses waited to transport the processed men to wherever the war needed them next.
The courtyard was full of men like him: veterans and conscripts, the willing and the unwilling, all of them now property of the state, resources to be allocated according to military necessity. Viktor found a place on one of the buses, took a seat by the window, and watched as the city of Rostov-on-Don receded into the distance.
He thought of the boy in the ruins, the child he had saved or not saved in Bakhmut. He thought of Kolya, who had helped him and who was now somewhere in the same system, being processed toward the same war. He thought of the freedom he had held for twenty-two months, the routine of work and sleep and the slow reconstruction of something that might have become a life.
All of it was gone now. The war had reclaimed him, as he had always known it would. The summons was not a surprise; it was a confirmation. In Russia, there was no escape from the war. There was only the question of when it would call you back.
The bus drove north, toward training camps and front lines and a future that Viktor could not imagine and did not try to. He had learned in Bakhmut that imagination was a luxury. Survival required only the present moment, only the next breath, only the simple question of whether he would live through whatever came next.
He would find out soon enough.
The training camp was somewhere in the Voronezh region—Viktor recognized the landscape from his months of service, the same flat terrain and sparse forests that bordered the Ukrainian frontier. The facilities were newer than he expected, built hastily to accommodate the expanded forces that the war demanded, barracks and training grounds and administrative buildings arranged with the geometric precision of military planning.
The processing continued. Assignments were made. Viktor was placed in a unit composed primarily of recalled veterans—men who, like him, had served and returned and been summoned back. Some he recognized from Bakhmut, faces that triggered memories of trenches and assaults and the meat grinder that had consumed so many. Others were strangers, veterans of different sectors, different units, different nightmares that they carried with the same silence he carried his.
The training was abbreviated—a few weeks of refresher courses on weapons and tactics, updates on the equipment and procedures that had evolved during his absence. The fiber-optic drones that Serhiy had mastered were now common on both sides. The electronic warfare had intensified. The trenches had grown deeper, the fortifications more elaborate, the war more entrenched in every sense.
“You’ll be deployed to the Zaporizhzhia sector,” the training officer said during the final briefing. “The front is static but active. Your experience in urban combat will be valuable for holding positions and conducting local operations. Questions?”
Viktor had one question, the only one that mattered: “What is the duration of this deployment?”
The officer’s expression flickered—something between sympathy and contempt. “Duration is determined by military necessity. You serve until you are released or until you are no longer capable of serving.”
Until death, in other words. Or until the war ended. Or until some bureaucratic decision released him back into a civilian world that might or might not still exist.
Viktor nodded. He had expected nothing different.
The deployment came in late December. Buses and trains carried the unit south, toward the front, toward the positions that Ukrainian forces were defending and Russian forces were probing. Viktor watched the landscape change, the peaceful farms giving way to the scarred terrain of the war zone, the distant sounds of artillery growing closer with each kilometer.
He was back. The war he had escaped had reclaimed him, and this time there was no contract, no six-month limit, no pardon waiting at the end. There was only the war, endless and hungry, and his small life within it.
He checked his weapon, adjusted his gear, and prepared to enter the trenches again.
The cycle continued.
War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.
The machine consumes its operators no less than its victims. The soldier who believes himself to be directing violence will find, in time, that violence has directed him.
Consider what happens when the mind can no longer sustain the work that war requires. The soldier who functions, who adapts, who performs his duties day after day—this soldier is not immune to the weight of what he does. He carries it invisibly, storing it in places he cannot access, until the storage capacity is exceeded and the weight begins to overflow. The breakdown, when it comes, is not a single event but an accumulation, not a crack but a crumbling, the slow collapse of structures that had seemed permanent.
Serhiy Bondarenko broke on January 15, 2025.
The mission was routine. A reconnaissance flight over Russian positions near Orikhiv, collecting intelligence on troop movements and equipment placements. No weapons payload. No strike authorization. Just the camera and the flight path and the feed that showed the landscape scrolling beneath the drone’s eye.
He had flown thousands of such missions. His hands knew the controls without thought, his eyes reading the terrain automatically, his mind processing the visual data with the efficiency of long practice. The mission proceeded normally for the first twenty minutes, the drone crossing the front lines and penetrating Russian territory, the fiber-optic cable unspooling silently behind it.
Then he saw the children.
They were in a village that the map marked as abandoned, playing in the street outside a house that still showed signs of habitation. Three of them—two boys and a girl, their ages difficult to judge from the drone’s altitude, their movements carrying the careless energy of childhood. They ran and chased and threw something back and forth, oblivious to the aircraft that observed them from hundreds of meters above.
Serhiy’s hands froze on the controls.
He was not supposed to see children. The villages in this sector had been evacuated, the civilians moved to safer areas or deeper into Russian territory. Intelligence had confirmed this. The mission brief had noted no civilian presence. But the children were there, unmistakably, their small figures moving across his screen with the reality that no intelligence assessment could override.
“Control, I have civilian presence in target area,” he reported. “Three children, possibly more. Requesting guidance.”
The response came after a pause. “Continue reconnaissance. Document civilian presence. Maintain altitude and observation.”
He continued. He documented. He watched the children play while his drone circled above them, recording their movements for analysis by officers who would decide what the information meant. The mission proceeded according to procedure, the reconnaissance completed, the drone recalled to base.
But something had broken.
The breakdown did not announce itself immediately. It crept in over the following days, manifesting first as small disruptions in the routine that had sustained him.
He could not sleep. This was not new—sleep had been difficult for months—but now it became impossible. He lay in his bunk and stared at the darkness and saw the children on his screen, their movements replaying in an endless loop that no amount of exhaustion could interrupt. When he did sleep, he dreamed of them—dreams in which the reconnaissance became a strike mission, in which his drone carried weapons instead of cameras, in which the children looked up at the last moment and their faces were clear enough to see.
He could not eat. Food tasted like static, like the visual noise that filled his screen when a drone was destroyed. He forced himself to swallow what was necessary, but the nourishment did not reach whatever part of him required it. His weight dropped. His strength diminished. The hands that had been so steady on the controls began to tremble in ways he could not hide.
He could not fly. This was the most serious symptom, the one that made the breakdown visible to others. On January 18, three days after the mission that had broken him, he was assigned a strike operation against a Russian ammunition depot. He put on his goggles, took the controls, lifted the drone into the grey winter sky—and found that he could not proceed.
The screen showed the landscape. The controls responded to his inputs. The drone flew toward its target with the mechanical precision that the technology demanded. But Serhiy could not direct it. His hands would not complete the motions that would guide the aircraft to its destination. His eyes would not focus on the imagery that would identify the target. His mind would not perform the calculations that would result in destruction.
He sat in the operator’s seat, frozen, while the drone flew on autopilot toward a target it would never reach.
“Bondarenko. Serhiy. What’s happening?”
The voice was his commander’s, coming through the headset, concerned but not yet alarmed. Serhiy heard it as if from a great distance, through layers of static that muffled the meaning of the words.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Can’t what? What’s the problem?”
“I can’t fly. I can’t—” He did not have words for what he could not do. The language that had served him for three years—the technical vocabulary of targeting and engagement, the clinical terms that converted killing into procedure—had abandoned him. There was only the static, filling his vision and his hearing and his mind.
“Abort the mission. Return the drone to base. Bondarenko, acknowledge.”
He acknowledged. He returned the drone. He removed his goggles and sat in the operator’s seat and did not move when the commander entered the room and stood before him and asked questions that Serhiy could not hear.
The breakdown was complete.
They sent him to a medical facility in the rear, a place where soldiers went when their bodies or minds were too damaged for continued service. The diagnosis was PTSD, complicated by operational exhaustion—a clinical description of what Serhiy experienced as the collapse of everything that had allowed him to function.
The treatment was rest and medication and counseling, the standard protocols for psychological casualties. He attended the sessions, answered the questions, swallowed the pills that were supposed to restore the chemical balance that combat had disrupted. The doctors were kind and competent, the facility clean and quiet, the regimen designed to repair what war had broken.
But Serhiy knew that what was broken could not be repaired by protocols. The structure he had built—the debugging metaphor, the compartmentalization, the technical distance that had allowed him to kill without being consumed by killing—had not merely cracked but shattered. The pieces could not be reassembled into their previous configuration. He would never again be the operator he had been.
The children haunted him. Not just the children in the village, though they were the immediate cause of his collapse, but all of them—every civilian presence he had observed over three years of operations, every figure on his screen who had not been a valid target, every reminder that the war was not a game and the enemies were not bugs to be fixed. He had seen them without seeing them, had noted their presence in his reports without allowing their presence to penetrate the barriers he had constructed. Now the barriers were gone, and they flooded in—a tide of faces and movements and lives that his actions had touched in ways he could never fully know.
He thought about the raised hands. The figure who had emerged from the truck in the seconds before his strike, whose gesture had been ambiguous but whose death had been certain. He had been cleared—the investigation had found no fault—but clearance did not mean innocence. It meant only that the system had processed his action and deemed it acceptable. The system’s judgment did not affect the weight that the action carried.
Three years. Hundreds of missions. Thousands of impacts on his screen, each one representing a life ended or a structure destroyed or a position eliminated. He had been effective, valuable, one of the best operators in his unit. He had adapted to every evolution of the technology and the tactics. He had survived where others had broken, had continued where others had stopped.
And now he was here, in a medical facility, unable to fly, unable to kill, unable to perform the function that had defined him for three years.
“What will happen to me?” he asked the counselor during one of their sessions.
“You’ll be evaluated for fitness for continued service. If the evaluation determines that you can return to duty, you’ll be reassigned to a role appropriate to your condition. If not—” The counselor paused, choosing words carefully. “If not, you’ll be discharged and provided with resources for reintegration into civilian life.”
Civilian life. The phrase was almost incomprehensible. Serhiy had been a civilian once, a software developer in Kharkiv, a man whose greatest challenge had been debugging code that misbehaved. That man seemed like a stranger now, a character from a story he had read long ago. He could not imagine returning to that existence, could not imagine sitting in an office and writing programs while the war continued without him.
“And the war?” he asked. “Does it end?”
The counselor did not answer. The question was beyond her expertise, beyond anyone’s expertise. The war continued according to its own logic, indifferent to the casualties it created, consuming operators and victims alike without discrimination or mercy.
The evaluation came in February.
Serhiy was declared unfit for combat operations, his psychological condition too severe for the demands of drone warfare. The diagnosis would follow him—PTSD, operational exhaustion, unfitness for front-line duty—a permanent record of his breakdown that would shape whatever future remained.
He was offered options. He could accept a rear-echelon position, training new operators in the skills he could no longer perform. He could accept medical discharge, leaving the military entirely with benefits that would support him through the transition. He could request extended treatment, remaining in the medical system while his condition was monitored and managed.
He chose discharge.
The decision surprised even him. He had joined the war voluntarily, had found purpose in the fighting, had believed until very recently that he would continue until victory or death. But the breakdown had revealed something that purpose had hidden: he was exhausted, not just physically but existentially, depleted in ways that no amount of rest could restore. The war would continue without him, and he would have to find a way to continue without the war.
The discharge was processed with bureaucratic efficiency. Papers were signed, benefits were arranged, transportation was provided to Kyiv, where Serhiy’s mother had been living since her evacuation from Kharkiv in 2022. He would stay with her while he figured out what came next—a temporary arrangement that might become permanent, a return to family after three years of distance.
The journey west felt like traveling backward in time. The landscape changed from the scarred terrain of the war zone to the relatively undamaged regions that the front lines had never reached. Life proceeded in these places with something approaching normalcy—shops open, schools functioning, people going about their business as if the war were happening in another country, to other people.
Serhiy watched from the window of the train and tried to imagine himself as one of those people, living an ordinary life in an ordinary world. The imagination failed. He was marked, changed, transformed by what he had done and what had been done to him. The civilian world was a foreign country whose language he had forgotten.
But he would have to learn it again. The war had released him, not through victory or defeat but through the collapse of his capacity to continue. He would have to build a new life from the ruins of the old, would have to find purpose in something other than killing, would have to carry the weight of three years without the structure that had made the weight bearable.
The train arrived in Kyiv. His mother met him at the station, older than he remembered, worn by the years of displacement and uncertainty. She embraced him without words, held him for a long moment, then led him toward the apartment where she lived, toward the family that remained, toward whatever future awaited a man who had broken in service to his country.
The static in his mind did not cease. But it grew quieter, gradually, as the distance from the front increased.
Perhaps, in time, it would fade entirely.
Perhaps not.
He would have to wait and see.
The machine consumes its operators no less than its victims. The soldier who believes himself to be directing violence will find, in time, that violence has directed him.
History is made by those who survive to tell it. The dead leave only traces; the living give those traces meaning.
Consider what it means to bear witness. The witness sees what others do not see, remembers what others forget, speaks when others are silent. But witnessing is not passive observation—it is an act of construction, a shaping of raw experience into narrative that can be transmitted and preserved. The witness does not merely record; the witness creates, selecting from infinite detail the elements that will form the story, imposing order on chaos, meaning on randomness. In this creation lies both the witness’s power and the witness’s burden.
Oksana Koval received the invitation in March 2025.
It came from the International Criminal Court, a formal request that she provide testimony regarding her experiences during the siege of Mariupol. Her name had been collected through the documentation projects that had been gathering evidence since the war’s beginning—interviews with survivors, photographs of destruction, records of the dead and displaced. She was one of thousands who had been identified as potential witnesses, her story one thread in the vast tapestry of suffering that the war had woven.
She read the invitation in the kitchen of the apartment where she had lived for nearly three years, the borrowed space in Kyiv that had become, by default, her home. Taras was at work. Yulia was at the university, attending the psychology lectures that had become her anchor in the uncertain sea of displacement. Oksana was alone with the document, its formal language describing procedures and protocols that seemed impossibly distant from what she had experienced.
...request your cooperation in providing testimony regarding events witnessed during the period of February-March 2022 in the city of Mariupol...
Events witnessed. The phrase was clinical, detached, reducing thirty-two days in a basement to a category that could be filed and processed. But Oksana understood the necessity of such language. The law required precision; emotion clouded the record. What she had felt during those days was irrelevant to the legal proceeding. What mattered was what she had seen, what she could verify, what she could contribute to the edifice of evidence that might, someday, result in accountability.
She set the invitation on the table and considered what it would mean to testify.
The decision was not simple.
To testify meant to revisit what she had spent three years trying to integrate—not to forget, exactly, but to place at a distance where it could be examined without overwhelming. The therapy that Yulia had undertaken, that Oksana herself had tried in various forms, was built on the premise of processing trauma, of moving through rather than around. Testimony would require moving back through, reopening wounds that had begun to scar.
But testimony also meant purpose. Oksana had felt purposeless since the siege, her role as teacher reduced to tutoring, her identity as Mariupolka erased by the city’s destruction. She had searched for survivors from her basement, had reconnected with Maria Petrenko and learned the fates of those she could identify, but these efforts had felt incomplete—fragments of connection that did not add up to meaningful action. Testimony offered something different: the chance to contribute to a larger project, to participate in the documentation of what had happened, to ensure that the suffering was not forgotten.
She discussed it with Taras that evening.
“They want you to testify?” His voice carried the wariness that characterized all his reactions now, the learned caution of a man who had been hurt and expected to be hurt again.
“At the ICC. In The Hague. About Mariupol.”
“What would you say?”
“What I saw. What happened. The basement, the shelling, the theatre.” She paused. “The people who died.”
Taras was silent for a long moment. “Will it change anything?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. But someone has to say it. Someone has to make sure it’s recorded.”
“You’ve already been recorded. The interviews, the databases—”
“Those are archives. This is a court. There’s a difference.”
The difference was weight. Archives could be ignored, filed away, left to scholars and historians who might or might not access them. Court testimony became part of a legal proceeding, entered into the record, cited in judgments that might—years or decades later—hold someone accountable. The difference was the difference between speaking into the void and speaking to power.
“Will it bring them back?” Taras asked. “The people in the basement? The people in the theatre?”
“No. Nothing will bring them back.”
“Then what’s the point?”
Oksana thought about the question, recognizing in it the exhaustion that Taras carried, the same exhaustion that she felt but had learned to set aside. He had broken his leg in the siege, had limped through filtration, had rebuilt a diminished life in a city that was not his own. He did not have the energy for acts that could not change outcomes.
“The point is that it matters,” she said finally. “Maybe not to the dead. Maybe not even to us. But it matters that what happened is known, is recorded, is acknowledged. If no one testifies, then it’s as if it didn’t happen. And it did happen. We were there.”
Taras nodded slowly. He did not agree—she could see that in his face—but he understood her position, accepted it as he had accepted her decisions throughout their marriage. They had learned to disagree without rupture, to hold different views while maintaining the bond that held them together.
“When would you go?”
“June. The proceedings are scheduled for June.”
“Will you be safe?”
“It’s The Hague. It’s the Netherlands. There’s security, protection for witnesses.”
“There was security in Mariupol, too. Once.”
She did not respond to this. There was nothing to say. Security was always provisional, safety always temporary. She had learned this in the basement, had learned it again in every air raid siren that sent her to the shelter. The question was not whether safety could be guaranteed—it could not—but whether the risk was worth taking.
She decided that it was.
Yulia’s reaction surprised her.
“I want to go with you,” Yulia said when Oksana told her about the testimony. “To The Hague. I want to be there.”
“It’s not necessary. The testimony is mine—”
“I know whose testimony it is. I was there too. I saw the same things you saw. I lived in that basement for thirty-two days.”
Oksana studied her daughter, seeing the young woman who had emerged from three years of therapy and education, who had chosen to study the workings of the mind as a way of understanding what had happened to her own. Yulia was stronger now than she had been in the siege’s immediate aftermath, more present, more engaged. But she was also marked—would always be marked—by what she had experienced.
“The testimony will be difficult,” Oksana said. “I’ll have to describe things in detail. Things you might not want to hear again.”
“I’ve heard them before. I was there.”
“Hearing and remembering aren’t the same. Sometimes remembering is harder.”
Yulia considered this. “I need to see you do it. I need to see that it’s possible to say the words, to face what happened, and to survive the facing. My therapist talks about integration, about accepting the trauma as part of my story. But I’ve never seen anyone actually do it. I’ve only read about it in textbooks.”
There was something in her daughter’s voice that Oksana had not heard before—not the flat affect of the siege’s aftermath, not the guarded distance of the years since, but something that might have been called determination. Yulia was asking not for comfort but for example, not for protection but for witness.
“Then you’ll come,” Oksana said. “We’ll go together.”
The months between March and June were filled with preparation.
Lawyers contacted Oksana, explained the procedures, reviewed the evidence she would provide. She made formal statements, detailed accounts of what she had witnessed—the timeline of the siege, the conditions in the basement, the theatre bombing that she had heard about secondhand, the filtration process that had marked her exit. Each statement required precision, the careful separation of what she had seen from what she had been told, what she knew from what she inferred.
The preparation was exhausting in ways she had not anticipated. Not physically—the work was paperwork, interviews, nothing demanding of the body—but emotionally, psychologically. Each session required her to return to the basement, to relive the fear and the hunger and the uncertainty, to speak aloud the names of those who had not survived. The integration that therapy promised seemed to recede with each repetition; the trauma was not diminishing but renewing, gaining strength from the attention paid to it.
“This is normal,” her therapist assured her. “Testimony is a form of exposure therapy. The intensity will pass.”
But Oksana was not sure the intensity would pass. The basement had become more real to her in the months of preparation than it had been in the years since her escape. She dreamed of it again, dreams that had faded returning with fresh vividness—the concrete walls, the candlelight, the faces of her neighbors crowded into a space meant for storage. She woke exhausted, her mind already running through the details she would need to provide, the questions she would need to answer.
Yulia noticed the change. “You’re not sleeping,” she said one morning, finding Oksana in the kitchen before dawn.
“Neither are you.”
“I’m used to it. You’re not.”
They sat together in the early light, mother and daughter, neither speaking of what kept them awake. The silence was comfortable now, a shared understanding that words could not always capture. They had been through something together, had emerged damaged but alive, and the bond that the siege had forged remained stronger than the ordinary bonds of family.
“Are you afraid?” Yulia asked finally.
“Of testifying?”
“Of all of it. Of going back there, even in words.”
Oksana considered the question honestly. “Yes. I’m afraid. But I’m also—” She searched for the word. “Resolved. This is something I have to do. Not because anyone is forcing me, but because I would not be able to live with myself if I didn’t.”
“Because of the people who died?”
“Because of everyone. The people who died, the people who survived, the people who will never know what happened unless someone tells them. We have a responsibility, those of us who were there. The responsibility of witnesses.”
Yulia nodded slowly. “I think I understand.”
“You don’t have to understand. You just have to be there.”
“I will be.”
They flew to Amsterdam in early June, then traveled by train to The Hague—a journey that Oksana found surreal in its normalcy. The airports functioned, the trains ran on schedule, the landscapes outside the windows showed no scars of war. Europe continued, prosperous and peaceful, while three time zones to the east the conflict ground on. The contrast was jarring, disorienting, a reminder of how localized even the most brutal wars could be.
The ICC facilities were modern, efficient, designed with the gravity that international justice required. Oksana was briefed on procedures, shown the courtroom where she would testify, introduced to the support staff who would help her through the process. Everything was professional, courteous, aware that she was performing a difficult service for which she deserved consideration.
The testimony itself took place over two days.
She spoke of the first morning—February 24, 2022, the coffee she had been making when the missiles struck. She spoke of the decisions that followed, the debate about whether to flee, the closure of the escape routes that had made the decision for them. She spoke of the basement—the forty-three people who had descended, the rationing of water and food, the rhythm of shelling that had structured their days. She spoke of her husband’s injury, of the water expeditions, of the deaths that had reduced their number one by one.
She spoke of the theatre.
“I did not see the bombing,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor she felt inside. “I heard about it from others, from people who had seen the aftermath. But I knew that theatre. I had attended performances there. I had taken my daughter to see Chekhov when she was twelve.”
She paused, gathering herself.
“The word ‘CHILDREN’ was painted on the ground outside. Large letters, visible from the air. It was a signal, a plea for protection. They bombed it anyway.”
The courtroom was silent. The judges listened, their faces carefully neutral, their pens moving across notepads. The prosecutors nodded at appropriate moments, guiding her through the testimony with questions designed to elicit specific information. The defense—representing the Russian Federation in absentia—said nothing; the accused had not acknowledged the court’s jurisdiction and would not participate in their own trial.
Oksana continued. The filtration process. The questions about her loyalties, about her husband’s military service decades ago. The buses that had carried them through occupied territory, past checkpoints and destroyed villages, toward a safety that had seemed impossible until it arrived.
“How did you feel when you reached Ukrainian-controlled territory?” the prosecutor asked.
“I felt—” She stopped, the question demanding an emotional response that she had been trained to avoid. “I felt relief. And grief. Relief that we had survived, grief for those who had not. The two feelings were inseparable. They remain inseparable.”
The testimony concluded. Oksana stepped down from the witness stand, walked out of the courtroom, found Yulia waiting in the corridor where witnesses were permitted to wait. Her daughter rose and embraced her—the second embrace in as many years, the physical contact still new enough to feel significant.
“You did it,” Yulia said.
“Yes.”
“Was it what you expected?”
Oksana thought about the question. “I expected it to be harder. The saying of the words—that was easier than I thought. What’s hard is what comes after. Carrying it again. Having it fresh.”
“Will it fade?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
They left The Hague that evening, traveling back through Europe toward the war that awaited them. The testimony was complete, entered into the record, one voice among thousands contributing to an edifice of evidence that might, someday, result in justice. Or might not. The court’s processes were slow, the outcomes uncertain, the politics of international law as tangled as any other form of politics.
But Oksana had spoken. She had borne witness. She had fulfilled the responsibility that survival had placed upon her.
Whatever came next, that much was done.
History is made by those who survive to tell it. The dead leave only traces; the living give those traces meaning.
2025
To know war is to know repetition. The soldier who has fought once finds, upon returning, that the war has not changed in essence—only in detail. The trenches are in different places, the weapons are slightly evolved, the faces around him are new. But the fundamental experience remains: the waiting, the violence, the randomness of survival.
Viktor Semyonov had been back in the trenches for seven months when the summer of 2025 arrived.
The Zaporizhzhia sector was quiet by the standards of this war—no major offensives, no dramatic movements of the front, just the daily attrition of shelling and sniping and the small-scale raids that kept both sides bleeding. Viktor had learned the rhythms of this sector as he had learned the rhythms of Bakhmut, had mapped the danger zones and the relatively safe areas, had identified the positions where survival was more likely and the positions where death was almost certain.
The second time was different from the first.
In Bakhmut, he had been raw, untrained, thrown into the meat grinder with three weeks of preparation and the promise of a pardon that might or might not be honored. He had survived through luck and instinct, through the basic animal awareness that emerged when higher faculties shut down. He had not understood the war; he had merely endured it.
Now he understood. He understood the tactics and the strategies, the logistics and the politics, the forces that moved armies and the forces that consumed them. He understood why the front was here rather than there, why the attacks came at certain times and in certain ways, why the war continued despite the exhaustion of everyone involved. Understanding did not make survival easier—nothing made survival easier—but it gave the experience a different texture, a sense of participation rather than mere subjection.
He had been promoted, unofficially, to something like a squad leader—not by rank, which remained low, but by recognition of his experience. The younger soldiers looked to him for guidance, for the practical wisdom that only combat could teach. He showed them how to dig trenches that would survive shelling, how to move through no-man’s-land without being spotted, how to read the sounds of incoming fire and know which required reaction and which could be ignored.
“How do you know all this?” one of them asked—a boy of nineteen who had been mobilized six months ago, whose face still carried the uncertainty of someone who had not accepted his situation.
“I was here before,” Viktor said. “Bakhmut. Six months.”
“And you came back?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
The boy absorbed this, his expression shifting from curiosity to something darker—the recognition that the war could call you back, that freedom was provisional, that the future he imagined for himself might not exist.
“Does it get easier?” he asked.
Viktor considered the question honestly. “No. It doesn’t get easier. But you get better at it. Your body learns what your mind can’t accept. You stop thinking and start reacting. That’s how you survive.”
“And if you don’t survive?”
“Then you don’t have to worry about anything anymore.”
It was brutal advice, but brutal advice was what the situation required. The boy would either learn to function in this environment or he would die, and the learning required accepting truths that peacetime sensibilities rejected. Viktor had accepted those truths in Bakhmut, had carried them through his brief civilian interlude, had brought them back to the trenches where they remained valid.
The war had not changed him; it had revealed him. The man who emerged from combat was not a different person but the same person stripped of illusions, reduced to the essential. That man was still here, still functioning, still surviving.
For now.
The negotiations began in August.
Viktor heard about them the way soldiers heard about everything—through rumors and snippets of news, through the conversations of officers who knew more than they were supposed to share, through the atmosphere of uncertainty that pervaded the front when political developments threatened to render military positions meaningless.
The Americans were pushing for a settlement. The new administration had made good on its promise to engage, had pressured both sides to come to the table, had offered inducements and threatened consequences in equal measure. Russia and Ukraine had agreed to preliminary talks—not peace negotiations exactly, but discussions about the framework within which negotiations might occur. The process was slow, cautious, hedged with conditions that either side could use to withdraw. But it was happening.
“What do you think?” Kolya asked.
They had found each other again, Kolya and Viktor, both recalled veterans assigned to adjacent units in the Zaporizhzhia sector. The reunion had been wordless—a nod of recognition, a shared understanding that required no articulation. They had survived Bakhmut together, had helped each other save a child in the ruins, had built civilian lives that the war had dismantled. Now they were back, and the bond that combat created was renewed without ceremony.
“I think it won’t change anything,” Viktor said. “Not for us.”
“Why not? If there’s a ceasefire—”
“A ceasefire isn’t peace. It’s a pause. The politicians will argue about borders and security guarantees while we sit in these trenches waiting to see if the shooting starts again. Even if they sign something, even if they call it peace, the war will continue in some form. It always does.”
Kolya considered this. “You don’t believe it can end?”
“I believe it will end eventually. Everything ends. But not the way they’re talking about. Not with a treaty and a ceremony and everyone going home. It will end when one side is too exhausted to continue, or when both sides decide that continuing costs more than stopping. And even then, it won’t really be over. It will just be waiting for the next round.”
This was the wisdom that Bakhmut had taught him, the understanding that wars did not end neatly, that the cessation of fighting was not the same as the resolution of conflict. The causes that had driven Russia to invade would not disappear with a ceasefire. The grievances that had driven Ukraine to resist would not be satisfied by a partial settlement. Whatever agreement emerged would be a compromise that neither side fully accepted, a temporary arrangement that both sides would seek to overturn when circumstances permitted.
“So what do we do?” Kolya asked.
“We keep our heads down. We don’t take risks. We wait for whatever comes and deal with it when it arrives. That’s all we can do.”
The summer continued. The negotiations proceeded in fits and starts, progress announced and then denied, breakthroughs followed by setbacks. The front remained active—neither side was willing to stop fighting while talking, each seeking to improve its position before any agreement froze the lines. Viktor participated in raids and repelled attacks, killed enemies and watched friends die, continued the work of war while the politicians debated whether and how to end it.
He thought sometimes about the boy in the ruins, the child he had saved in Bakhmut. He had no way of knowing what had happened to that boy—whether he had survived, whether he had found a home, whether he remembered the Russian soldier who had not killed him when the rules of war said he should have. The boy was a ghost now, a figure from a previous version of the war, a reminder that humanity could persist even in the machinery of violence.
Viktor hoped the boy was alive. He hoped that one act of mercy had meant something, had created a future that would not have existed otherwise. He did not believe in redemption—the calculus of killing did not permit such neat accounting—but he believed in the possibility of meaning, of moments that mattered even when the larger pattern was chaos.
The summer faded into autumn. The negotiations continued. The war continued.
Viktor continued.
In October, the framework was announced.
The details were vague, as political announcements always were, but the outline was clear enough. A ceasefire would be declared, to be monitored by international observers. The front lines would become a line of control, recognized by all parties as the temporary boundary between Ukrainian and Russian-administered territory. The status of the occupied regions would be subject to future negotiations, with no predetermined outcome. Security guarantees for Ukraine would be discussed, with participation from NATO allies and potentially Russia itself.
The framework was not peace. It was a framework for the possibility of peace, a structure within which further negotiation might occur. But it was more than had seemed possible a year ago, when the war had appeared locked in an endless stalemate with no mechanism for resolution.
Viktor received the news in the trench, from an officer who gathered the soldiers for a briefing that was half information and half morale management.
“Nothing changes immediately,” the officer said. “The ceasefire, if it happens, will take time to implement. We maintain our positions. We remain ready for combat. The only difference is that the intensity may decrease, and the negotiations may change our long-term situation.”
“What does that mean for us?” someone asked. “Will we be released?”
The officer hesitated. “That depends on the terms of any agreement. Demobilization will be a complex process, tied to the security arrangements that are being negotiated. For now, assume that your service continues.”
Service continues. The phrase carried everything that the briefing did not say: that the soldiers in the trenches were bargaining chips, their presence a leverage point in negotiations that would determine their fates without their input. They had no agency in the process, no voice in the outcome. They could only wait, and fight when required, and hope that the politicians who controlled their lives would reach decisions that allowed those lives to continue.
Viktor had expected nothing different. The war had taught him that soldiers were instruments, tools to be deployed and discarded according to logics that had nothing to do with their individual experiences. The framework was not about them; it was about nations and territories and the abstractions that drove geopolitical competition. Their suffering was a cost to be weighed against other costs, their survival a factor in calculations that extended far beyond their comprehension.
But even instruments had preferences. Even tools hoped for outcomes that favored their continued existence. Viktor hoped—cautiously, provisionally—that the framework would lead somewhere, that the ceasefire would hold, that someday the war would release him as it had released him once before.
He did not believe it would happen. But he allowed himself to hope.
The ceasefire was announced for November 15, 2025.
The weeks leading up to it were tense, both sides seeking to gain advantages before the lines froze, the fighting intensifying even as the political process moved toward its conclusion. Viktor’s sector saw some of the heaviest action of the year—Russian probes seeking to improve their positions, Ukrainian counterattacks to deny those improvements, the daily violence accelerating rather than diminishing as the deadline approached.
Kolya was wounded on November 8, a week before the ceasefire.
It was a minor wound by the standards of this war—shrapnel in the leg, painful but not life-threatening—but it was enough to take him off the line, to send him to a field hospital where his injury would be treated and evaluated. Viktor visited him before the evacuation, standing by the stretcher in the aid station, looking at the face of the man who had helped him save a child, who had survived two tours of this war, who had nearly made it to whatever came after.
“I’ll be fine,” Kolya said. “The doctors say I’ll walk again. Eventually.”
“That’s good.”
“You need to be careful. These last days are the worst. Everyone wants to be the last one killed, but someone has to be. Don’t let it be you.”
Viktor nodded. He understood the warning. The final days of any conflict were the most dangerous, the violence concentrated into a shrinking window, the temptation to take risks amplified by the nearness of the end. He would be careful. He would survive. He would see what came after the ceasefire, would navigate whatever process followed, would find his way back to a life that the war kept interrupting.
“I’ll see you on the other side,” he said.
“On the other side,” Kolya agreed.
The stretcher was carried out, loaded into a vehicle, driven toward the rear where medical care was possible. Viktor returned to the trench, to the position he had held for seven months, to the waiting that defined the soldier’s existence.
November 15 approached. The firing continued, then began to diminish. The last attacks were launched, the last counterattacks mounted. The front line stabilized as both sides prepared for the transition from war to whatever came next.
Viktor watched the clock, counting the hours as he had counted them in Bakhmut, as he had counted them waiting for his summons, as he had counted all the intervals of his life that had been measured by violence and its aftermath.
The ceasefire took effect at midnight.
The guns fell silent.
The war—this phase of the war, at least—was over.
Viktor remained in the trench, staring at the darkness where enemies had been, listening to the silence that replaced the constant soundtrack of shelling and gunfire. The silence was strange, almost unbearable, a presence rather than an absence.
He did not know what would come next. He did not know if the ceasefire would hold, if the negotiations would succeed, if he would be released or retained, freed or forgotten. He knew only that the shooting had stopped, that for this moment he was alive, that the future—whatever it contained—had become slightly more possible.
It was not much. But it was something.
He would take what he could get.
To know war is to know repetition. The soldier who has fought once finds, upon returning, that the war has not changed in essence—only in detail.
December 2025
War is the province of friction. Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.
Consider what remains when the fighting stops. The silence is not peace; it is the absence of violence, which is not the same thing. The soldiers do not become civilians; they become former soldiers, carrying what they have seen and done into lives that cannot accommodate such weight. The destroyed cities do not rebuild themselves; they persist as ruins, monuments to what was lost, reminders of what can never be recovered. The dead do not return; they remain dead, their absence a permanent subtraction from the world.
War does not end. It transforms. The energy that drove the fighting disperses into other channels—grief, reconstruction, recrimination, the slow work of processing what occurred. The friction that made every action difficult does not disappear; it changes form, becoming the friction of memory, of trauma, of the impossible task of resuming life after life has been fundamentally altered.
December 2025. One month after the ceasefire. The war—if it had ended—had ended without resolution.
Kovalenko stood at the window of his office in Kyiv, watching the snow fall on a city that had survived.
He had been promoted again—Major General now, commanding a corps that existed more on paper than in the field. The ceasefire had frozen the front lines, had converted his soldiers from combatants into monitors, their positions maintained not for tactical purposes but as placeholders in a negotiation that might take years to complete. The fighting had stopped, but the war had not ended; it had entered a new phase, one that would be fought with words and lawyers and the slow accumulation of diplomatic pressure.
The framework that had been announced in October was taking shape. Ninety percent of the issues had been agreed, or so the diplomats claimed—ceasefire terms, monitoring mechanisms, humanitarian corridors, the exchange of prisoners and the repatriation of remains. The remaining ten percent was everything that mattered: the final status of the occupied territories, the security guarantees that Ukraine would receive, the question of whether Russia would face consequences for what it had done.
Kovalenko knew that the ten percent might never be resolved. Wars often ended this way, with incomplete agreements that deferred the hardest questions to future generations. The Korean War had ended in an armistice that remained in effect seventy years later, the underlying conflict unresolved, the peninsula still divided. This war might follow the same pattern—a ceasefire that became permanent through inertia, a de facto settlement that satisfied no one but that everyone accepted because the alternative was continued fighting.
Was that good enough? He did not know. He knew only that his soldiers were alive—most of them, the ones who had survived the final weeks of violence—and that their survival had value regardless of the political outcome. The war had cost Ukraine hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, had displaced millions, had destroyed cities and industries and the infrastructure of a modern state. The price of peace, whatever form it took, had already been paid. What remained was to ensure that the payment had purchased something worth having.
“The Americans are pressing for a final agreement before the new year,” his aide reported. “They want to declare victory.”
“Victory,” Kovalenko said. The word tasted strange in his mouth. “What would victory look like?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m not sure anyone knows.”
This was the truth that the politicians and diplomats would not acknowledge. Victory, in a war like this one, was not a definable condition. It was not the capture of a capital or the surrender of an enemy or the imposition of terms. It was something vaguer, more subjective—the sense that the sacrifices had been worthwhile, that the outcomes justified the costs, that the future was better than the past would have been without the fighting. Such a victory could not be declared; it could only be assessed, years or decades later, by those who lived with the consequences.
“We continue as planned,” Kovalenko said. “We maintain our positions. We prepare for both outcomes—continued ceasefire or resumed fighting. We do our duty, and we leave the political questions to those who are paid to answer them.”
He returned to his desk, to the paperwork that command required, to the calculations that had defined his career. The friction of war had been replaced by the friction of peace, and the work continued regardless.
Serhiy sat in a café in Kyiv, watching people pass on the street outside.
The café was ordinary—tables and chairs, coffee and pastries, the sounds of conversation and clinking cups. It was the kind of place he would have frequented before the war, when he was a software developer with ordinary concerns, when violence was something that happened to other people in other places. Now it felt foreign, a setting from a life that no longer belonged to him.
Ten months had passed since his breakdown. The static in his mind had faded, as the counselors had promised it would, replaced by a quieter hum that he had learned to live with. He was not healed—healing implied a return to a previous state, and there was no previous state to return to—but he was functional. He could eat and sleep and walk through the city without flinching at every sound. He could have conversations that did not end in silence. He could imagine a future, even if he could not yet inhabit it.
The discharge had been final. He would not return to military service; his diagnosis ensured that. But the war had not released him entirely. It remained present in his dreams, in his reactions, in the way he scanned every room for threats and exits. It remained present in the way he thought about the world—the understanding that violence was always possible, that the ordinary surfaces of civilian life concealed capacities for destruction that most people never glimpsed.
His mother had been patient, more patient than he deserved. She had welcomed him into her apartment, had given him space when he needed it and company when he could tolerate it, had asked no questions about what he had done or why he had stopped doing it. She knew, in the way that mothers knew, that some questions had no answers that could help.
He had begun to write code again—small projects, nothing demanding, exercises to rebuild the skills that three years of war had atrophied. The work felt strange at first, the abstractions of programming so removed from the concrete reality of combat that he could not bridge the gap. But gradually the gap had narrowed, and he had remembered what it felt like to solve problems without killing anyone, to create rather than destroy.
He was not the man he had been. He would never be that man again. But he was becoming someone else, someone who could function in the world that the ceasefire had created, someone who might someday find purpose beyond survival.
The coffee was good. The snow was falling. The people outside were living their lives.
Serhiy watched them and tried to remember how that was done.
Oksana received the news on a morning in mid-December: Mariupol was to be included in the territories subject to future negotiation.
The announcement was buried in the details of the framework, one clause among hundreds, its implications clear only to those who understood what it meant. The city where she had lived for twenty-three years, where she had raised her daughter and built her career, where she had survived thirty-two days in a basement while the world burned around her—that city would not be returned to Ukraine automatically. Its status would be negotiated, discussed, bargained over in rooms far from the ruins where thousands had died.
She read the news on her phone, sitting in the kitchen of the apartment that had become her home, and she felt—what? Not surprise; she had expected this. Not anger, exactly, though anger was present. What she felt was something closer to resignation, the recognition that the war’s outcomes would be determined by forces beyond her control, that her testimony at The Hague had been a gesture rather than an action, that the dead would remain dead and the displaced would remain displaced regardless of what any court or treaty decided.
Yulia found her there an hour later, still sitting, still staring at the screen.
“You’ve heard,” Yulia said.
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means we might never go home. Or it might mean nothing—the negotiations could fail, the war could resume, everything could change again.” Oksana set the phone down. “It means we have to keep living, whatever happens. That’s what it’s always meant.”
Yulia sat across from her, the daughter who had survived the siege, who had studied psychology to understand her own damaged mind, who had traveled to The Hague to watch her mother bear witness. She was twenty now, an adult by any measure, but she remained in Oksana’s care, in the orbit of a family that the war had reduced but not destroyed.
“Do you regret it?” Yulia asked. “Testifying?”
Oksana considered the question. The testimony had been painful, had reopened wounds that had begun to scar, had forced her to relive what she had spent years trying to integrate. But it had also been necessary—necessary for her, necessary for the record, necessary for the possibility that someday, somehow, justice might be served.
“No,” she said. “I don’t regret it. Whatever happens with the negotiations, whatever happens with Mariupol, the testimony is part of the record now. Someone will read it. Someone will know what happened. That matters, even if nothing else does.”
“Will we ever go home?”
“I don’t know.” Oksana reached across the table, took her daughter’s hand—a gesture that had become easier over the months, the physical contact that the siege had interrupted slowly resuming. “But home is not just a place. Home is the people you’re with, the life you build, the meaning you create. We’ve built something here, you and your father and I. It’s not what we had, but it’s ours.”
Yulia nodded slowly. She did not seem convinced, but she accepted the answer, as she had accepted so many answers that were incomplete but honest.
Outside, the snow continued to fall on a city that had survived.
Viktor walked through the streets of a Russian town whose name he did not know.
The demobilization had been sudden, unexpected—a release that came without explanation, as his recall had come without explanation, the bureaucracy of war operating according to logics that excluded the soldiers it processed. One day he was in the trenches, maintaining a position that the ceasefire had rendered meaningless. The next day he was on a bus, then a train, then walking through unfamiliar streets toward a future that remained undefined.
He had nowhere to go. Rostov-on-Don held nothing for him; the room he had rented was long gone, the widow who had housed him probably dead or displaced. His family was gone—parents dead, brother estranged, no one waiting for him anywhere. He was free, technically, but freedom without destination was not freedom; it was drift, the absence of constraint without the presence of purpose.
The town was small, provincial, the kind of place that the war had touched indirectly—young men sent to the front, economic disruption, the pervasive anxiety of a nation at war—but that had not been destroyed. Life proceeded here as it had before the invasion, changed but continuous, the rhythms of daily existence reasserting themselves despite everything.
Viktor found a boarding house, paid for a week with the discharge allowance he had been given, and sat in a room that reminded him of the room in Rostov, of the room in the prison, of all the small spaces he had inhabited between the larger spaces of war and freedom.
He thought about what came next.
The ceasefire was holding. The politicians were talking. The possibility of peace—real peace, not just the absence of fighting—seemed more real now than it had at any point in the previous three years. If peace came, if it lasted, he might be able to build something: a job, a home, relationships that did not begin and end in trenches. He might be able to become someone other than what the war had made him.
But he did not believe in peace. He had seen too much, had learned too thoroughly that violence was the underlying condition of human existence, that the intervals between wars were not peace but preparation. The ceasefire would hold until it did not. The negotiations would succeed or fail. Another war would come, sooner or later, and men like him would be called to fight it.
This was not cynicism. It was realism, the clear-eyed assessment of how the world worked that combat had taught him. He did not despair; despair implied expectations that could be disappointed. He simply saw things as they were, without the illusions that peacetime cultivated, without the hope that tomorrow would be different from yesterday.
And yet.
He thought of the boy in the ruins. The child he had saved, or not saved, whose fate he would never know. That act had meant something—not much, perhaps, in the calculus of a war that had killed hundreds of thousands, but something. It had demonstrated that the machinery of violence did not operate automatically, that individuals could choose differently, that mercy was possible even when mercy was not required.
If that was true—if individuals could choose, if mercy was possible—then perhaps the future was not fixed. Perhaps the cycles of war and peace were not inevitable. Perhaps the world could change, slowly, imperfectly, through the accumulated choices of people who refused to accept that violence was the only answer.
Viktor did not believe this. But he wanted to believe it, and wanting was a start.
He lay back on the bed, staring at a ceiling that looked like every other ceiling he had stared at over the years of war and imprisonment. Tomorrow he would begin again, would look for work, would try to construct something from the ruins of his life. He would carry what he had done and what had been done to him, the weight that could not be set down, the friction that would accompany him to his grave.
But he would carry it forward, into whatever came next.
That was all anyone could do.
War is the province of friction. Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war.
But friction, too, can be overcome. Not eliminated—never eliminated—but managed, endured, survived.
The simple thing remains difficult. But the simple thing remains possible.
This is the lesson of war, and of peace, and of the endless human effort to navigate between them.
The snow fell on Kyiv and Moscow, on the trenches and the ruins, on the living and the graves of the dead.
The ceasefire held.
The negotiations continued.
The future remained unwritten.
And somewhere, in all of this, four people who had been touched by the war—the witness, the expendable, the adapter, the calculator—continued their lives, carrying what could not be set down, moving toward what could not be predicted.
The friction coefficient remained high.
But they continued.
War is the continuation of politics by other means. But politics is also the continuation of war by other means. The two are never fully separable, never fully at peace. They exist in dynamic tension, each shaping the other, each constraining the other, each making the other possible.
In this tension, in this friction, human beings live their lives. They make choices that matter and choices that do not. They love and grieve and work and die. They tell stories that preserve what might otherwise be lost, that give meaning to what might otherwise be chaos.
This is one such story. It is not complete—no story is complete while the world continues—but it is sufficient. It contains what could be contained. It preserves what could be preserved.
The rest is silence.
The rest is snow.
The rest is the continuation of everything that wars interrupt but cannot end.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.