War in Ukraine: ‘US officers would not allow their soldiers to assault with the equipment we have’

Officers from the 67th mechanised brigade of the Ukrainian army have travelled hundreds of kilometres from the front line in Donbas to talk to The Irish Times at a predetermined location in the countryside east of Dnipro.

Lieut Oleksandr Sashko is deputy commander of the 67th brigade and remains chief of staff of Praviy Sektor (Right Sector), the paramilitary volunteer corps which was last year incorporated into the regular Ukrainian armed forces.

Praviy Sektor continues to exist as a sort of brotherhood outside the armed forces.

Sashko’s callname is Prut, after the river that forms the border between Ukraine and Romania. Like most of Praviy Sektor’s members, he is from western Ukraine, a region with a history of fierce opposition to Russia.

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Sashko (41) was a history teacher before he joined the nascent Praviy Sektor during the 2013-2014 Maidan revolution. He is rotund, with a scraggly black beard and laughing eyes.

He jokes that Chief Master Sgt Mykyta, callname Melnyk (the miller), looks like an Irishman, with his ginger hair and beard. Mykyta (29) wears a khaki T-shirt with the Praviy Sektor emblem, a sword flanked by two Kalashnikovs, resembling the trident, a symbol of Ukraine since the 10th century. Mykyta’s father and three brothers are also soldiers. He has never known any other life.

Like Sashko, Mykyta was at Maidan, at the beginning, when police loyal to Ukraine’s then Russian-backed president, Viktor Yanukovich, shot dozens of protesters dead. Nine years later they are still fighting, facing off Russian troops from a distance of 150m on the front line near Kreminna and Lyman.

“The artillery shelling is constant, 24/7,” says Sashko. “The battle has turned into positional skirmishes. Both we and the enemy are trying to advance. If you attack enemy trenches, it is almost like a fist fight... Some things I will never be able to tell. There are things that normal people should not know or see. War is much worse than you can imagine.”

A video that appeared on Ukrainian social media on the day of our interview shows a confused Russian soldier, identifiable by the Z on his flak jacket, zigzagging on the battlefield under fire and mistakenly jumping into a Ukrainian trench.

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Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive has been going on for nearly three months. There are reports that some units may have broken through the first Russian line of defence southeast of Zaporizhzhia, but in their part of Donbas it’s a stalemate, Sashko admits. I ask what would it take to break through..

“The 67th brigade has received US M190 and British L119 howitzers. Great guns,” Sashko says. “But it’s still not enough. We need artillery shells and aviation support.”

Unnamed US strategists recently criticised the Ukrainian offensive for distributing forces almost evenly between the east of the country, where Sashko and Mykyta are fighting, and the south, where Ukraine’s goal is to disrupt Russian supply lines.

“American planners have advised Ukraine to concentrate on the front driving [southward] toward Melitopol, Kyiv’s top priority, and on punching through Russian minefields and other defences, even if the Ukrainians lose more soldiers and equipment in the process,” the New York Times reported on August 22nd.

The phrase “even if the Ukrainians lose more soldiers” is shocking to units like Sashko’s, who are already suffering terrible losses.

Sashko takes the US advice in stride. “It’s their thing. We are doing our job,” he says. He values “tight and close connections, formal and informal” with “our military partners from the West” and does not want to offend them.

He adds: “If you don’t have enough artillery shells, aviation support and equipment, no army in the world would risk what we are doing. US officers would not allow their soldiers to assault fortifications with the equipment we have... In Vietnam and Iraq, the US had the choice of staying or leaving. We don’t have that luxury. We cannot go back.”

Ukrainian forces liberated Izium and Kherson last year.

“Those were good results. We were very glad about it. Are you asking why this is not happening a second time? There has been too much talk about the counter-offensive... You cannot compare the conditions in the Kharkiv offensive [last year] and the [present] offensive in the south. It is flat fields. There is nothing. It is impossible to hide from artillery and jets. The Russians had time to instal hundreds of thousands of mines,” Sashko says.

“They have created many lines of defence this time. And people imagine this is just a nice, even line of trenches because you have seen movies about the first World War and the second World War, and you think these are just straight lines and soldiers are shooting from trenches. But in fact, these trenches go many kilometres in depth. And behind every trench there are more trenches and minefields and trenches and concrete fortifications with artillery pieces massed and camouflaged. It is very close to [Russian-annexed] Crimea and Russian aviation can attack non-stop from the air.”

I ask if it is mission impossible.

“Our soldiers are nonetheless going on. But it’s tough.”

Sashko asked a close friend, an officer, how an American or British mechanised battalion would carry out such an attack. Again, he stresses that he does not wish to criticise Ukraine’s western allies.

The officer replied that before advancing, the battalion would attack with rockets, missiles, artillery, helicopters and jets, until the territory was scorched earth. Only then would they move in to look for survivors. Ukraine does not have that option.

A Ukrainian position is twice the size of the open-air hut where we are talking, Sashko says. “In one day, the Russians can hit this place 800 times with 152mm shells, big shells.”

“So you are getting pulverised?” I ask.

“That is a good word for it,” he replies.

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Praviy Sektor

The Praviy Sektor political party and paramilitary group was once suspected of right-wing extremism, but valour in battle and the group’s prescient warnings about Russian aggression have changed that perception.

There are several versions of how Praviy Sektor was named, including assertions that its militants occupied the right side of Maidan in the 2013-2014 protests.

But Mykyta says the word “right” was deliberately chosen for its political connotation, because the men who fought thugs loyal to Yanukovich, the former pro-Russian president, considered themselves to be right-wing.

“We are against the left because the Soviets claimed to represent the left,” Sashko says. “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics gave socialism a bad name. We knew before anyone else that Russia would invade us, because our grandparents who were born in Vorkuta, Kolyma and Solovky [towns in Siberia where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians were forcibly transferred to work in mines] told us. They couldn’t return home for 30 years.”

Praviy Sektor’s history stretches back to the 1930s, when Stepan Bandera, the son of a Greek Catholic priest from western Ukraine, hoped that Nazi Germany would drive the Soviets out of Ukraine. The Holodomor, a famine organised by Stalin, had just killed about four million Ukrainians.

The Wehrmacht conquered Lviv on June 29th, 1941. When Bandera declared independence the following day, his Germans allies put him in a concentration camp until 1944. While he was in prison, Bandera’s followers founded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). It participated in the massacre of tens of thousands of Poles in Volyn, which straddled present-day Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. A KGB agent would assassinate Bandera in Germany in 1959.

Members of Praviy Sektor honour Bandera for his fight against the Soviet Union and see him as a noble, tragic figure crushed between the two totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. The Russians portray him, and his self-proclaimed spiritual descendants in Praviy Sektor, as hateful Fascists and Nazis.

Putin blamed Praviy Sektor for Yanukovich’s overthrow, and for fighting so fiercely against Russia and Russian separatists in Donbas since 2014.

Ilia Mykhalchuk, a Praviy Sektor fighter, was wounded and captured by Wagner mercenaries near Bakhmut earlier this year, fighting under Sashko’s orders. Mykhalchuk, who is being fitted for protheses in the US, told the Washington Post that Wagner so loathed Praviy Sektor that he feared being killed immediately. Wagner militiamen interrogated the wounded soldier for hours, he says, then amputated both his arms at the shoulder, without anaesthesia and without suturing the wounds.

Sometimes the Russian obsession with Praviy Sektor is almost laughable. After a shoot-out in Slovyansk in 2014, a Russian news site claimed the business card of Dymytro Yarosh, one of the group’s leaders, was found at the scene, as if, like Zorro or Robin Hood, Yarosh left his mark. “They found Yarosh’s business card,” became a familiar meme, as in “They found Yarosh’s business card at JFK’s assassination” or “They found Yarosh’s business card at the World Trade Center.”

A Russian online article about Ulyana Kuzyk, the head of logistics for Praviy Sektor in Lviv, compares her to the Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, accuses her of “collecting money for the needs of the Nazis of Praviy Sektor” and employing chefs “to send food to the Nazis”. The Russians used photographs from Kuzyk’s Facebook page, and their article warned that “this cute little blonde girl will be caught by Russian peacekeepers and taken before a war tribunal”.

Russian propaganda has strengthened the appeal of Bandera and Praviy Sektor inside Ukraine. A poll last year by the Ukrainian polling agency Rating showed that Bandera’s popularity had risen from 22 per cent in 2012 to 74 per cent after the full-scale invasion.

At age 27, Dmytro Kotsiubailo was Praviy Sektor’s youngest battalion commander. He chose the callname Da Vinci because he had wanted to become a painter in his youth in Ivano-Frankivsk. Da Vinci met his partner, Alina Mykhailova, at the hospital in Kramatorsk where she was a volunteer in the medical service. She joined his battalion after the full-scale invasion. He was wounded by an artillery bombardment last March and died in Alina’s arms.

Ukraine held a national funeral for Da Vinci, attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as well as Ukraine’s prime minister, defence minister, chief of staff of the armed forces and the head of military intelligence. All knelt before the young fighter’s casket. Finland’s then prime minister, Sanna Marin, was also among the mourners. Da Vinci became the first member of Praviy Sektor to be awarded the Hero of Ukraine medal.

Sgt Mykyta looks at his hands. “I knew Da Vinci even before Maidan,” he says. “He was like a symbol for Ukraine.” When Russia invaded Donbas, Da Vinci was not allowed to go on frontline missions because at 17 he was underage.

In the summer of 2014, Praviy Sektor received a shipment of “really cool weapons. Long rifles”, Mykyta recalls. Da Vinci pleaded with Mykyta to ask their commander, whose code name was Chornyi (black) to give a weapon to Da Vinci. “Chornyi said, ‘Oh you mean that dude who has been nagging about not having a gun?’ We were about to go on a mission when I received a message from Dmytro saying, ‘Thank you, thank you!’ He was assembling and reassembling many times. This was his first weapon.”

Praviy Sektor members see queries about alleged neo-Nazi or Fascist leanings as a loaded question, akin to When did you stop beating your wife? The mere question contains a controversial assumption. “We don’t do the Hitler salute when you are around,” Mykyta says sarcastically when I raise the issue.

David Piguet is a former French army officer who joined Praviy Sektor soon after the full-scale invasion, and who goes by the callname Franzuz (Frenchman). “There is no extreme right element in Praviy Sektor,” Piguet says. “They were all expelled between 2015 and 2017. Praviy Sektor has nothing to do with fascism. Their goal is to join the EU and Nato and have a western lifestyle.”

Occasional racist or anti-Semitic incidents attributed to Praviy Sektor have been proven to be the work of Russian agents, Piguet says.

Volodymyr Palant, a prominent member of the Jewish community in Kyiv, says Ukrainian society is “very unified and origins are not an issue now.” Zelenskiy and Andrii Yermak, the head of the president’s office, are Jewish, he notes.

I ask Palant if there is any truth to accusations of anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism in Praviy Sektor. “It is illogical,” he says, “because there are many Jewish people in Praviy Sektor and I personally know at least two important, active Jewish members.”

As for the dispute regarding the role of Stepan Bandera and the UPA, Praviy Sektor’s historic predecessor, during the second World War, Palant says, “That wasn’t Ukraine. It was the Soviet Union. Germany committed war crimes, but Germany is helping us now. It is better not to mix historical periods.”

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Irish welcome

As my interview with Sashko draws to a close, I ask jokingly if there is anything he would like to say to the people of Ireland.

“I want to thank Ireland for hosting my sister, her husband and five children,” he says. Ukrainian men who have three or more children, including Sashko’s brother-in-law, are allowed to accompany their families abroad.

“We talk almost every day. She has been very well-received. They live in a house in a village. The eldest daughter has just returned to Ukraine to register at university in Ivano-Frankivsk, and the others are thinking about returning.”

What do they tell him about Ireland? I ask.

“The ocean is so cold that my nieces go swimming in wetsuits. The grass is really green and Irish people like rain. Also, the fact that they are welcomed. They were really welcomed by the community.”

Sashko picks up a phone and makes a video call to his sister Antonina (36) in Glenfarne, Co Leitrim, more than 3,500km away.

“Hi, how are you doing?” he says.

“Good. We are baking bread.”

“I am giving an interview to The Irish Times,”

“Cool. Really cool,” Antonina says while her youngest daughter, aged three, screams in the background. Sashko turns the telephone so that I can see his sister. “This is a beautiful place,” she says. “My husband is here with me. He has a job in a forest, planting trees. I take care of the girls. I want to find a job, but I am a German teacher, and no one wants to learn German. It’s not easy to find a job.”

Antonina knows that her brother occupies an important position in the Ukrainian armed forces. “Sometimes I don’t call because I know he is very busy,” she says. “We have Sunday Mass here in Glenfarne and on Sundays we pray all day for the military and for Ukraine.”

I ask to take a photograph of Antonina on the smartphone screen, with her brother holding the phone. But Sashko’s eyes fill with tears, as do his sister’s. He gestures no.

“This is a tragedy. So many women and children living abroad,” Sashko says when he regains his composure. “My kids are growing up without seeing me. It’s the same for Mykyta’s daughter.”

“She is called Anna Veronika,” the sergeant says with emotion. “She was born just before the full-scale invasion, and she is one year and nine months old now. I see her once every two or three months. She started walking and talking without me. ‘Tato, tato, tato, mama tato.’ She keeps saying ‘daddy’. Whenever the phone rings she thinks it is daddy.”

“It is a dangerous thing in war to have emotions,” Sashko says.

But that is what makes us human, I protest.

“That is the hardest thing,” he replies. “To remain human and to come back a human and to live in society.”