{"id":35089,"date":"2023-09-26T05:17:17","date_gmt":"2023-09-26T05:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/?p=35089"},"modified":"2023-09-26T05:17:20","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T05:17:20","slug":"the-soldiers-who-cant-leave-the-front-line-until-the-war-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/?p=35089","title":{"rendered":"The soldiers who can\u2019t leave the front line until the war is over"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

BBC News: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open-ended service, just 10 days leave a year and a high casualty rate – for Ukrainian soldiers in one unit, life on the front line is far from easy, as BBC Newsnight witnessed up close.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standing among some flattened buildings, “Jimmy”, a Ukrainian officer who’s been on active service for years, reflected on his survival: “I’m a lucky man\u2026 as I see it, war can either love people or not.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His soldiers think the fact Jimmy’s still with them, despite multiple wounds, means he lives a charmed life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His unit, the 24th Mechanised Brigade, has a long history, and is part of the old regular Ukrainian army, fighting the Russians from 2014. But since the invasion of February 2022, the army has more than trebled in size, the nation mobilised and Jimmy’s unit changed out of all recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We spent two weeks in August with the 24th, which now serves in the Donbas, that old centre of smokestack industries in the east, occupying a section of the front between Bakhmut and Horlivka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Map<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And we went to the home community in western Ukraine where the brigade was garrisoned before the war, and where many of its families still live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jimmy – the Ukrainian army asks that we use soldiers’ nicknames rather than their real ones – commands a company (usually about 120 troops), a post he stepped into last year. One officer told me that none of the 15 company commanders in post at the start of the war are still in place, all having been promoted or become casualties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the run-up to war, the 24th Brigade was just over 2,000 strong, rotating its three battalions to the front line in eastern Ukraine for occasional tours of duty. Although the Ukrainian army rarely discusses numbers, sources told me it has now swelled to more than 7,000, with a total of five infantry battalions, four of artillery, a tank battalion and numerous other supporting elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As that mobilisation happened, the old regular soldiers were joined by thousands of volunteers and conscripts. “Yurii,” a twenty-something venture capitalist from Kyiv, is one of the talented incomers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Yurii\"\/
Image caption, Although Yurii ranks as a simple private soldier, according to an officer he in effect runs the unit<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Initially given a rifle and sent to the infantry, a few months later, Yurii was transferred into a military “start-up”, the 24th Brigade’s strike drone company. Sitting at a table in a children’s playground near the front, he showed us new drones, and the packages of explosive they carry, allowing him and others to fly them into vehicles, buildings, or bunkers where the Russians are taking cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yurii explained how his mother was initially sceptical about him joining up, but once he started guiding drones into Russian trenches, “then she changed her mind”, and became proud of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the terms of their contracts, volunteers – in common with conscripts – can’t walk away and are obliged to serve until the war ends. In the meantime, they are entitled to only 10 days’ leave each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yurii is unusual among the 24th’s men in that the \u00a32,600 ($3,195) he earns monthly (80% of which is combat pay) is less than his earnings in civilian life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bearded, and with a banker’s flair for selling a business plan, Yurii told me how the company has to be more ingenious than the Russians because the enemy have so many more drones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the officers revealed that although Yurii ranks as a simple private soldier, he basically runs this unit. That rethinking of the usual hierarchy is one of the differences between the pre-2022 army set-up and the force that now fights the Russians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another is their willingness to overlook age and other factors that might have counted against volunteers before 2022. We met a sergeant nicknamed “Hryb” (it means mushroom) who had been put in charge of a self-propelled artillery gun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’s an older man, 52 to be exact, who did his army service more than 30 years ago. What could he know about modern warfare?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Hyrb\"\/
Image caption, Hryb’s family wept when he told them of his decision to volunteer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As it happens, the 24th Brigade’s 152mm Akatsiya (or Acacia) howitzers are so ancient that they’re the same kind as the one Hryb commanded while serving with the Soviet Army in East Germany in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shells we watched them firing were manufactured 40 years ago, and the crew have nicknamed the howitzer Babushka or Grandma. Who better to know her old quirks than Grandpa Hryb?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His decision to volunteer did not sit easily with his family. “They cried silently,” Hryb explained. “They said they would wait for me, that they loved me.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind the summit declarations, of “as long as it takes”, are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families struggling along, managing their hopes and fears as the war passed its 18-month point without any end apparently in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a rehabilitation centre in Lviv for soldiers with life-changing injuries, I discussed the difficult exchanges when some of the less badly wounded tell their wives they want to return to the front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Rehab\"\/
Image caption, One injured serviceman warns that Ukraine has not reckoned with the number of people damaged by war<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“Many boys, well those who remained alive but lost a limb, also lost their family,” Pavlo, one of the patients, told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That conversation has been taking place within his marriage too, he says ruefully: “She thinks I have already done my duty.” Another man, wounded in a minefield during the recent counter-offensive, tells me that Ukrainian society has not yet woken up to how many damaged people there are now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The record of death, maiming, and capture may well be affecting people’s willingness to serve. Recruitment is another topic on which Ukraine does not publish official figures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BBC News: Open-ended service, just 10 days leave a year and a high casualty rate – for Ukrainian soldiers in one unit, life on the front line is far from easy, as BBC Newsnight witnessed up close. Standing among some flattened buildings, “Jimmy”, a Ukrainian officer who’s been on active service for years, reflected on his survival: “I’m a lucky man\u2026 as I see it, war can either love people or not.” His soldiers think the fact Jimmy’s still with them, despite multiple wounds, means he lives a charmed life. His unit, the 24th Mechanised Brigade, has a long history,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35090,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-in-english"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35089"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35091,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35089\/revisions\/35091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gyalchisarshog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}