Field Notes From The Donbas: Forgotten Stories From The Russo-Ukrainian War

If you want the truth, you have to go find it. I recently returned from assignment in eastern Ukraine, speaking with guys on the ground in order to get stories overlooked by mainstream sources. Three weeks of being serenaded by KAB glide bombs, S300 missiles, and MLRS artillery. 

Crammed into the back of a clapped-out, four-banger diesel SUV, kidneys pummeled by a suspension long-since past its prime, bottoming out on the bump stops on potholed roads that make Detroit seem like the Nurburgring. Sweating in 95-degree temperatures while wearing armor and helmet and grabbing a whore’s bath in abandoned workshops whenever we found a working faucet. 

As in most armed conflicts, hardship is contrasted with the surreal. Like smoking Cuban cigars at 2 a.m. after an arm-wrestling match with snipers who’d just rotated off the line, as HIMARS rockets launched from the adjacent field, providing one of the world’s most expensive fireworks displays. Or watching a drone expert who’d racked up more kills than your neighborhood cancer ward hand-feed a baby bird he’d found on the ground.

Strangely enough, my team never ran into reporters from the major networks, but then again, chances to run up the corporate Amex were few and far between. Mainstream media rarely leaves Kyiv, as that’s where they can guarantee a regular diet of press releases, spoon-fed fresh from the MOD. Plus, there’s lots of good restaurants and titty bars. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Our story began a few months ago, on trip number five. We got the chance to shoot Ukraine’s version of the AR-10 (and pretty decent it is, too), courtesy of Sasha, a sniper instructor and founder of a semi-independent sniper unit that sends guns-for-hire to units of the Ukrainian army wherever they’re most needed. 

Sasha previously owned a Mercedes repair shop and was a national champion biathlete, so the dude knew how to innovate and shoot under stress and volunteered to help repel the first Russian invasion in 2014. He’s been slinging rounds downrange ever since the battle of Donetsk Airport and has an interesting tale of “repurposing” ex-president Yanukovych’s official armored SUV, in which he wound up getting ambushed, taking rounds from at least three PKMs and one RPG. 

He was heading east to deliver supplies and check on his men, so he asked if I wanted to hop a ride. Rolling out toward the rising sun, you never quite know what’s on the agenda, or if you’ll make it there. Or back.

After spending some time with contacts in a special forces regiment in Kharkiv, it was time to hit the road to the Donbas region. Pokrovsk is one of those Soviet-era bastions of heavy industry that would make an ideal location for a post-apocalyptic zombie movie, littered with shuttered coal mines, slag heaps, and endemic industrial decay. 

Think New Jersey, but without the charm. Driving past soulless and decrepit apartment blocks built during Brezhnev’s reign, the summer evening air was redolent with dust kicked up by ancient Kamaz military trucks belching black diesel exhaust, with additional olfactory notes provided by a malfunctioning city sewage system. 

Earlier that day, 220mm Uragan rockets had slammed into a random residential area, killing a handful of civilians, an event so unremarkable here that it barely made it into conversation. The city’s location makes it strategically important, situated at the intersection of two major roads and a railway line — taking it would expose the southern flanks of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, two of the last remaining major cities in Donetsk. 

As a result, the Russians are pushing hard to take as much real estate as quickly as possible. So far, they’ve been met with limited success, grinding away at the Ukrainian defenders with a seemingly insane disregard for casualties.

While on the road to Pokrovsk, we got word that the guys Sasha was supposed to rendezvous with had been killed. Later, this was amended; one surviving team member hadn’t deployed to the position, so had escaped his teammates’ fate and was there to meet us when we pulled up to an anonymous, single-story brick house on the edge of town. Misha, the lone survivor, relayed the tale. 

“F*cking brigade commanders tasked my boys without telling me and sent them to a bad position. We had recce’d a good sniper location on the flanks, but they used them like regular infantry, sending them to a place the Russians had already identified.” 

The next couple of days were spent trying to find out what actually happened to his detachment, visiting command posts and reviewing hours of drone footage, gaining a bird’s-eye view as Russian infantry supported by FPV drones rolled up his guys from the rear. 

“Anyone above the rank of Captain isn’t worth a sh*t!” exclaimed Misha. “We have too many commanders who are still of the Soviet mindset, where the lives of troops aren’t worth anything, and they don’t know how to effectively use specialists.” 

While the tradition of soldiers griping about their officers is as old as time and spans continents and centuries, this wasn’t an isolated incident. We heard from members of the 47th mechanized brigade who had been in the thick of fighting since Bakhmut, putting in good work with their U.S.-donated Bradley IFVs. 

They recounted a case where some of their supporting M109 Paladin crews had been given shovels and pushed up to the zero line to prepare infantry fighting positions. After several well-trained and experienced howitzer teams had been wiped out, higher command finally realized that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. 

In hierarchical organizations such as the military, the fish rots from the head. When commanders discipline their subordinates for bringing them bad news, bad news, no matter how important, doesn’t get brought. 

The old Soviet command structure placed great emphasis on discipline and loyalty, leaving little room for initiative or acting off the books in support of the commander’s intent. Despite having been trained in Western doctrines of pushing responsibility down to the lowest level feasible, Ukrainian troops are still saddled with a military bureaucracy that’s sclerotic and rigid. This goes all the way to the highest levels. 

The biggest problem I saw in their operations was lack of weapons, such as Javelins and Stingers. A very close second stems from their leadership.

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