II can wash them however I want, my clothes smell like wood smoke and Lush’s Lord of Misrule. I smoke up to three packs a day, and I also train daily, pull-ups and push-ups. I’ve got a fat Japanese pickup truck with a rotating machine gun, and I’ve got a tablet on which I’m trying to finish my novel about the adventures of a Ukrainian during the American Civil War. My faithful companions are Spotify, headphones, a submachine gun, a walkie-talkie and a Finnish spade. I sleep on beach chairs, old mattresses, pine boughs and in the cab of my car. I report to eight people and have eight people above me in the command structure. I am a soldier of the Ukrainian army.
Although six months after the start of the all-out Russian invasion, I have not once had to fire my weapon against the enemy, I am taking part in this war. As a soldier, as a unit commander and as a man with war experience. For more than four months now, my battalion has been holding out on the northern border, in the quiet forests of the region, areas that the Russian army has held for a month. A few dozen villages, hundreds of roads and trails, and thousands of acres of forest – this is the terrain for which we are responsible. Close cooperation with other units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, endless establishment of defensive positions and always waiting, waiting, waiting. Is there an advance coming from Belarus? Will Europe’s last dictator give the order to attack Ukraine? Or will it again offer itself as a springboard for Russian troops, as it did at the end of February when the Russian Federation army almost made it to Kyiv and committed atrocities in the Kiev suburbs that are beyond imagination?
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