I spent Christmas and New Year’s Eve with the soldiers I call my boys, between Lyman and Siversk, on the front line in Donetsk. We are volunteers in the 54th mechanised brigade of the Ukrainian army. The drone reconnaissance platoon which I command is known as the Hellish Hornets.
My brigade endured a Russian assault in mid-December, so it was a relief that things were quiet over the holidays – at least in our sector of the front line. But Russia launched 111 drones, including Iranian-made Shaheds, at Kyiv on New Year’s Day, killing two people. I called my mother Tamara and brother Bohdan to make sure they were okay. They had heard the explosions.
I barely slept during the week-long battle in December, which I followed on the drone feed. The Russians started with massive shelling of our positions. Then they sent armour against one of our battalions, and groups of 15-30 soldiers against other positions. Some Russians used motorbikes because they are fast and easier to ride in mud. They are also a lot cheaper than tanks or armoured personnel carriers. Our FPV (First Person View) kamikaze drones, which we rig with explosive devices, destroyed at least six Russian motorbikes.
In my opinion we won last month’s battle, because the Russians seized only one position which cost them about 100 lives. They left their wounded on the battlefield. We could see them hiding under trees and bushes and dying slowly.
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We sustained casualties too but far fewer. The Russians fired chloropicrin poison gas at our troops, which can be lethal. Its use by Russia in the war on Ukraine is one of many similarities with the first World War. The men in my brigade are equipped with gas masks.
Our company captured a half dozen Russians, who were interrogated and turned over to the Ukrainian intelligence agency SBU. Russia and Ukraine exchanged about 300 prisoners at the end of December. I am always happy when Ukrainian soldiers are released, because the Russians torture them and hold them in dreadful conditions. Worse still, Russia appears to have adopted a policy of summarily executing prisoners, particularly drone pilots, because our FPV drones claim the highest proportion of Russian casualties.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s commissioner for human rights, says Russia has executed 177 Ukrainian prisoners since the full-scale invasion. The majority – 109 – have been executed in the past year. But those are only confirmed executions; I believe the real number is much higher.
A video shot on October 1st near Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk which the Russians have been trying to take since July, showed the execution of 16 Ukrainian soldiers. Twelve days later, the Ukrainian battlefield analysis website DeepState published a video of the bodies of nine Ukrainian drone pilots who it reported were summarily executed in Kursk, the Russian region which Ukrainian forces invaded in a surprise assault in August.
I know the Russians kill prisoners, because I witnessed a summary execution on the drone feed last August, when Russian forces attacked my brigade all day every day for more than a week. They were using well-trained, well-equipped airborne troops.
On the image relayed by our drone to my computer screen, I watched Russian soldiers throw a hand grenade into the dugout. Six men climbed out with hands up. The Russians made them kneel in a line and shot them point blank. I felt desperate, but I was about 30km away and there was nothing I could do. It was one of the worst things I have seen, along with the explosion that killed my company commander in 2022, and our machine gunners mowing down Wagner mercenaries engaged in human wave attacks in 2023.
The summary execution of prisoners is a war crime. I hear it said that Vladimir Putin will demand impunity from war crimes trials for all Russians in any negotiated settlement. If he obtains that, I think I will abandon all hope for human civilisation.
My men and I talk a lot about the war and about what is going to happen. I would say we are realistic about the future, which means that we are more pessimistic than optimistic. We feel like we’re in that old Hollywood movie, Groundhog Day, repeating the same experiences over and over until we lose track of time. Next month, we’ll enter our fourth year of fighting.
Obviously, Trump’s inauguration is on everyone’s mind. I am afraid that he will force Ukraine to accept all of Putin’s demands, and we know what those demands are. As I mentioned, no prosecution for war crimes. No membership of Nato. The demilitarisation of Ukraine. The loss of all our territories which are all or partially occupied by Russia – Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The lifting of economic sanctions against Russia.
If Putin’s demands are met, the war won’t really end. Why would Russia respect the terms of any agreement, when it violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the Steinmeier Formula of the Minsk accords, which president Volodymyr Zelenskiy endorsed in 2019? Ukraine was neutral and demilitarised after the Budapest agreement. We gave our nuclear weapons to Russia and sold them our fighter bombers, which Putin now uses to attack us. Russia might stop firing missiles and Shahed drones at Ukraine, but I feel certain they would keep shelling us from the occupied territories. Putin wants all of Ukraine, and probably not Ukraine only. I think he wants to restore the Soviet Union.
Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, has said that the US should stop all support for Ukraine if we refuse to accept Trump’s proposals, but that he’ll give us “everything they need to kill [Russians] in the field” if Putin won’t play ball.
At least Trump knows how to talk to a thug like Putin. Obama and Biden were too soft and indecisive. They weren’t up to the challenge of dealing with Putin. It is just possible that Trump will turn out to be good for Ukraine.
Our combat groups are taking advantage of grey, wet and windy weather – which makes it difficult to attack us – to lay minefields to protect our lines from further Russian assaults. My platoon launches drones from dugouts less than 5km from Russian lines. I watch the drone feeds from an abandoned house in a village about 20km from the Russians, but I visit the dugouts as often as I can. On Christmas Day, I went to both my dugouts and ate cake and drank coffee with my men there.
Christmas and New Year’s were the same as any other day for me, except that I cooked better food on the gas camp stove and lit candles. I missed having an oven to fill the house with the scent of meat and apple and cinnamon pies. On my Facebook page, I appealed to followers to send us artificial Christmas trees and decorations that they didn’t need. We received so many that I gave half to our combat group. We don’t have electricity or running water, so I used batteries to power the fairy lights.
On December 21st, we received a visit from an army chaplain from western Ukraine, his daughter and a barber. The barber cut the boys’ hair and mine too. Our visitors played the guitar, and we sang traditional Ukrainian Christmas songs called kolyadka. I enjoyed it very much.
Army regulations forbid selling alcohol to soldiers, which I think is unfair, especially in the combat zone. For locals, reselling alcohol to the military at exorbitant prices is big business. Sometimes the police sell it. I don’t judge anyone trying to survive in this war.
We bought sushi in Kramatorsk for Christmas, and drank wine with our Christmas and New Year’s Eve dinners. In the text that I posted on Facebook and on my platoon’s WhatsApp loop, I thanked my men for protecting our families and our land. I told them that hard times breed strong people, that I am proud to serve with them. I asked God to protect our infantry, our tough warriors and to give us the strength to continue our fight for freedom.
When soldiers drink together, we always stand in silent homage to our fallen comrades. I mentioned Vlad, my best drone pilot, who was killed by a Russian glide bomb on January 1st, 2023, and Ivan, our driver who was killed last summer while taking soldiers to a rotation in a dugout. For the rest of my days, I will remember Vlad every New Year’s. The holiday will never be the same for me again.
Despite all, I still want to believe that there will be peace in 2025. Because Trump is determined. Because we are exhausted. But it cannot be on Putin’s terms. The Russian war machine must be stopped.
How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine by Lara Marlowe is published by the Head of Zeus imprint of Bloomsbury
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