Whatever our grumbles with the chow-line, sailors rarely have a concept of what life in the infantry is like. If there’s a conflict on and in the dirt, we assume one to be talking about a scrap between deck-division bruisers in the Bahrain or Dubai sandboxes. Reading about life on the front lines has been sobering. Whatever gripes one has about the New York Times’ or Wall Street Journal’s general reporting, their journalism in the oblasts has been remarkable.
For example, the Times spoke with a former history teacher, Shuler, who now as a Ukrainian soldier “wears a patch with a Star of David on his arm, a reminder of his great-grandparents who died in the Holocaust.” His grandfather changed the family name to sound less Jewish with the arrival of the Soviets.
Michael Shwirtz reports for the Times:
The fighting here [in the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine] is intensely personal. Most of the soldiers of the 110th Brigade come from areas now occupied by Russia. Shuler’s unit was forced to retreat in the early days of the war, which began in February 2022, and his parents remain in occupied Melitopol, roughly 80 miles from the bunker.
Over the past year, they have slowly turned the tide, halting the Russian advance and building a network of defensive positions that the Russian military, for all its superiority in weaponry and numbers, has been unable to crack.
“We really know this location — every bush,” said Col. Oleksandr Ihnatiev, a veteran of Ukraine’s special operations forces who took command of the brigade in April last year. “From the beginning of the war, we in our strip have not lost one position or post.”
You can read the rest here. David Guttenfelder’s photography for the story is well worth a minute’s — nay, an hour’s — consideration.
Then there are James Marson’s interviews with Wagner Group (Russian paramilitary organization) members. The piece closely follows the account of “ex-cop and convicted killer” Yevgeny Nuzhin, who signed on with Wagner’s commissar (correction: CEO) Yevgeny Prigozhin when recruited from the prison yard. Prigozhin’s pitch: “I’m taking you out of here alive. . . . But I won’t return all of you alive.”
Marson writes:
On Aug. 25 last year, Mr. Nuzhin and other recruits boarded vans and left their prison in Skopin, Russia, about 150 miles southeast of Moscow. They arrived at a nearby airport and flew by plane to southwestern Russia. From there, they traveled by helicopter to a Russian-occupied part of eastern Ukraine.
The men trained for a week at a former prison using rifles without bullets—a sign, Mr. Nuzhin later said, that they weren’t trusted. They were told to advance on command, he said, and warned that “if someone remained in the trench, they would just shoot them dead.”
On Sept. 2, the men were driven to a house on the front lines near Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine that Wagner had been assaulting for months—and still is. That night, Mr. Nuzhin joined a group of 17 men who were loaded into pickup trucks and taken to woodlands to retrieve the bodies of comrades killed in a battle.
When considering the drama of the war for Ukraine, it is good to have these accounts preserved. There is nothing so anathema to the human condition as death — indeed, this observation is foundational to the natural-rights argument — and the journalists of the Times and Journal provide an 1890-by-1260-pixel conduit into the souls of these men already dead, or soon-to-be, that should be dwelt upon.
I cannot offer a solution to the conflict, or provide a thesis on what we ought to do. Sometimes it is sufficient to simply acknowledge the suffering of the men in the trenches — men who will eventually be tallies on the propaganda sheets. If it weren’t for the DJI drones overhead (interestingly these share a top speed with the WWI-era Blériot XI reconnaissance monoplane), each image in these pieces could be prised from the pages of a history book from which Shuler used to instruct.