Sweeping up discarded Russian supplies, broken glass, and battered furniture was a daunting task.
In the four and a half months that Russian forces had occupied Velyka Komyshuvakha, a town in eastern Ukraine, the troops had used the local bar as a small outpost, destroying it in the process.
The physical destruction of the bar was only part of what the Russians left behind.
In the back room was a twisted sketch of the minds of some of the soldiers who make up the backbone of the Russian Army.
They had turned every wall into a handwritten message board of phrases, rhymes, and big words.
“It doesn’t count as a war crime if you had fun.”, read one sentence, with a smiley face drawn below. And in a rhyme on the same wall: “With a happy smile I will burn foreign villages”.
Many of the barely legible scribbles focused on dehumanizing Ukrainians and reinforced that the Kremlin wants to eradicate Ukraine and its culture. “The house behind us burns —well, let it burn—one more, one less,” said a phrase.
“It was scary,” said Svitlana Mazurenko, one of about 70 current residents of Velyka Komyshuvakha, which once had around 500 residents before many fled.
He had read the texts in September, days after the Russians had retreated, and faced them again last month while helping to clean up the bar..
The soldiers who turned the back room into some kind of cruel message board were from the 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division, announced by their own hand by spray-painting the unit’s nickname, the Taman Division, repeatedly all over the bar.
The Second Guards Division is a famed unit of the Russian Army and was repulsed around the capital Kiev by Ukrainian troops shortly after the invasion began in February 2022. They suffered another defeat around Velyka Komyshuvakha and the Kharkiv metropolitan region as the Ukrainian formations spread in September.
Now, they are in the eastern region, near Kreminna, military analysts said, preparing for a potential advance as part of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Writings inside the bar suggested that these troops they were not demoralized Russian soldiers under the impression that they were there to “liberate” their people, a term commonly used in the early days of the war. These troops seemed to be there to conquer.
“We need the world, preferably everything”, said a text on a wall. “Victory or death!” declared another.
Based on the writings, the company or platoon of Russian soldiers called themselves “Wind 12”. They also made fun of each other, missed “snow and vodka” and seemed to hate or simply tolerate their helpings of bacon.
The soldiers were also desperate to return home. “Winter is near, but retreat is not,” a soldier had scribbled.
Another called for his colleagues to stop robbing civilians, a common practice on all fronts of the war. “Stop stealing everything in your way,” he wrote with one high-sounding word.
Mazurenko said that the Russians had lived in most of the nearby houses, robbed and vandalized them. But they couldn’t rob her: her house was destroyed by artillery before the Russians entered the village.
The type of language written in the bar is frequently seen in propaganda and on social media. But seldom is it on display so clearly as a battlefield artifact.
“For all questions about Ukraine there are two answers: 1) It did not happen. 2) They deserved it. Both are correct”, said a phrase on the wall.
THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6771026, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-21 20:50:07
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