How to botch a war

This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Well, those ignoramuses in Moscow got it wrong from the outset. They didn’t understand — out of a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, and a fair bit of stupidity — that to win a revolution one needed to start from inside, not to enforce it from outside, before it had even begun! Craziness.

Dmitri and I could have done it blindfolded of course, along with the rest of us who still had half a brain in the so-called “new” army of the Russian Federation. New my arse! But sadly, professionalism and competence were no longer required for mid-ranking officers like him and me, for whom the only way to secure advancement up the greasy pole was by taking a cut from reselling the gasoline quota for our BMP-2s. It made lots of folk gasoline millionaires.

Life was hard enough in Donbas without this nonsense. There was never enough of anything — including trained crews — so I focused on keeping four or five of my best crews and vehicles in operational order. When we hit the road, I rarely had any more than one crewman per vehicle.

Commander, gunner or driver didn’t matter: all had to drive, otherwise we’d just be a hunk of metal. You could always spot the shortage of manpower when we were attacked. The turret never moved, because the BMPs weren’t being crewed. The vehicle would stop and the commander scrambled up from the driver’s seat to his own commander’s seat just to swivel the turret and look out the range finder.

To fire the cannon he then needed to drop back down into the gunner’s seat to line up the target. If those fascist cowboys in Donbas had had the British NLAWs in 2014, we’d have all been dead meat long ago. And we were a front line unit!

It’s pretty clear now that the operation was a cluster-bumble of the greatest magnitude

And then the war escalated, suddenly. No one was expecting it. From the inside of my rust-bucket I didn’t really know what was going on, but it’s pretty clear to all of us now that the operation was a clusterbumble of the greatest magnitude. The moment we knew that we were going to war was when the crew compasses all started swinging to 270 degrees and we were told to keep our feet on the accelerators. We didn’t have time to be given maps, of course, but the drunk Trifonov pooh-poohed maps anyway and just told us to keep the command vehicles in sight and follow on.

But from the offski, Dmitri and I knew we had serious problems. We had no inkling of the attack — no warning at all, just a brief instruction to say that we’d be heading out for summer exercises with the rest of the brigade.

The large amount of 30mm ammo that turned up (mainly HE) was a surprise of course (they clearly thought we wouldn’t be fighting tanks, or they’d have given us AP-T), but I just thought that some depot needed to get rid of old stocks. It was only when we were all heading west in one gigantic convoy that the truth dawned; we were off to smash those damned Khokhols for good.

For a brief moment Dmitri and I thought that we would be part of a well-planned and well-thought-through expression of Russian military brilliance. We should have known better. He’s now lying dead in a pool of blood at my feet, but I can tell you we could have planned and executed the invasion far better, quicker and with less bloodshed than the fools who were put in charge of Putin’s Special Military Operation.

Of course, an armed invasion was needed to subdue Ukraine, but fifth columnists and spetsnaz should have done most of the heavy lifting at least two or three days before the tanks even began to warm up their engines. The entire operation was botched precisely because it was misconceived. They got it all arse-about-face.

We could have told them that. But years of blockheadedness meant that we had long forgotten the cunningness of Uncle Joe Stalin. What half-wits we were! He had stitched up the whole of eastern Europe from 1943 by realising that you had to plant the seed corn of your revolution early, and deeply.

He created teams of political and organisational activists in the centre of the enemy heartland long before the tanks began to roll. He made it look easy. The military occupation of half of Europe became a fait accompli not because it was preordained, but because it was organised to happen that way.

First, capture the political activists. They didn’t need AK47s. Prepare them well in advance. Use cunning. We used to call it maskirovka, but now we appear to have forgotten the potency of simply lying your way to a position of strength.

Then get those VDV off their fat arses to infiltrate the enemy country a day before — make them look like tourists — to take out the radio and TV stations and the multiple microwave transmitters that carried the patchy Ukrainian cell phone traffic, and sow confusion in the great silence that follows. Play our own propaganda stations, radio and TV. Win the battle for the airwaves first.

In any case, tanks are useful only for showing the people who is in charge, after the key events had taken place, NOT TO FIGHT THE BATTLE. This is where we went wrong from the start. For that was what we were trying to do: create a revolution in Ukraine that would hand the heartland, the soul of the ancient Rus, to us on a plate.

But whilst we were starting out on our own ill-fated adventure in our long columns of T72s and BMP-2s, the planners in Moscow pressed the big green button on an attempt to win the war on Day One. These are always tricky things to do, and on this occasion a good plan was undone by one fatal flaw. The Khokhols fought back!

Blyat! They weren’t supposed to do that. Moscow’s grand idea was to send in large numbers of special troops directly into Kyiv to seize control of the heart of Ukraine before it had the chance of collecting its wits and responding. We knew the Ukrainians didn’t have much left in the tank and were struggling to sustain what they had. Morale was low. I saw that repeatedly over the years I served in Donbas. Their POWs were miserable specimens. If, before the SMO, I’d been told that the Khokhols would fight back, I would have refused to believe it.

The truth is, as Dmitri confessed to me, our plan was good, but the way the Khokhols responded unstitched it from the beginning. What’s more, their defence of the airport at Hostomel — because this is where we lost the war — was far ballsier than ours. Our boys at the airport fought half-heartedly because, I suppose, they were surprised at the scale, speed and sheer violence of the Ukrainian response.

How did it all come apart so quickly? Easy. Our column of armour in the 21st Motor Rifle Brigade wasn’t even supposed to fight the enemy. We went into Ukraine to occupy it. Fat chance! Every farmer and his wife came out to take pot shots at us. And then the NLAWs arrived overhead. All because Hostomel failed.

The plan was that the VDV boys — spetsnaz — would launch a coup de main attack on this big airfield to the northwest of Kyiv. In theory it was a brilliant idea, as we could have grabbed the throat of that blyat Zelensky before he had an inkling of what was going on. The spetsnaz would fly in helicopters from Belarus in the north — say, a couple of hundred kilometres — and capture the runway at Hostomel. This would allow a large number of troop-carrying IL-76 transports to fly in and deposit their crack troops in the heart of the badlands. Surprise! That’s what we Russians were supposed to be good at.

Sadly, the operation had been designed by politicians, not soldiers. These boys — several hundred paratroopers, the best guys we had, striped shirts and all — would then drive hard on Kyiv, which is only 30 kilometres away from the airfield. The whole SMO would have been over in a morning. Brilliant plan, eh? Yes, but a messed-up operation! How could so much go wrong?

Easy. Dmitri and I agreed that the first flaw was overconfidence. Moscow assumed that there wouldn’t be any significant enemy counteraction. But the first thing you have to think about before even tying your bootlaces is what the enemy might do. And we didn’t.

For some stupid reason Moscow thought they’d knock down the front door with some heavy explosives, rather than creeping silently through the back door. A couple of heavy cruise missiles landed at the airport but did damn all, apart from alert the local Khokhols that something was up. I think, too, that the Ukrainians had always been nervous about their open left flank and the threat over their shoulder from Belarus. They appeared to be watching this area carefully.

Anyway, when those spetsnaz junkies came flying in low in their Hips and Hinds — about 34 aircraft in all — the locals started blasting them out of the sky! Every farmer within a couple of miles of their low-level route south down the wide Dnieper took a pot-shot at them, and two helicopters went down and everybody on board became instant ash.

So long as they held the runway, those Ilyushins couldn’t land and the operation was doomed

Then, when the surviving helicopters got to Hostomel, they tried to smash their way in. Not an ounce of subtlety or guile. The Ukrainian conscripts on the ground fought back, with rifles, machine guns, hand-held anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles. Their weapons were old, but that didn’t matter. There are a couple of hundred Khokhols on the ground all firing back, and pretty accurately. That’s what matters. So long as they held the runway, those Ilyushins couldn’t land and the operation was doomed from the start.

As it turned out there was so much hot metal flying around that none of the helicopters could land either, and the Hinds just kept on blasting pieces of woodland without any real idea of where the Red Indians were. Much better to have dropped some spetsnaz into the area the night before to do a close reconnaissance of the target, then hit them hard with the Mi-24s at the start of the attack. The strutting buffoons of the VDV in Moscow certainly got their arses handed to them at Hostomel. Pizdec!

It was only when the defenders started running out of ammunition that more Russian troops managed to land on the north of the airfield. Their fancy uniforms don’t help them either, because after landing they just sat still! Battles are always won by those who attack first, and fastest. There was a time in history when all Soviet soldiers knew this. These brave paratroopers decided to wait for reinforcements and only advanced when the Khokhols ran out of ammunition and disappeared into the forest.

By now, however, with 18 Ilyushins in the air, more Ukrainians — in armoured vehicles and with artillery — turned up, quickly followed by their own parachute troops in helicopters, all spoiling for a fight. No one told us the game would be played this way: we just assumed we’d walk in and conquer.

By now everything was going to ratshit. The Ukrainians bombed the runway with Su-24s, meaning that our Ilyushins had to divert to Belarus. How humiliating. Why on earth didn’t they jump? Someone decided that landing on the airfield was faster, and had clearly assumed that there’d be no opposition. The Ukrainians then advanced through the airfield, and the VDV heroes ran off into the woods! Who would have thought? Pizdec!

Funnily, our side won back the airfield the next day, but by then this simply didn’t matter. We couldn’t land any troops on it, so it was worthless to us. Why did we continue to fight for it when it had become strategically irrelevant? Nobody knows, but once soldiers have the bit between their teeth, they often don’t want to let go.

Anyway, Russian troops milling around a now worthless Hostomel simply became targets for Ukrainian artillery. There was no way out. Slaughter. The fight for the possession of Hostomel became a joke. Our side hung on until the general withdrawal started in April, but by then we had become hostages deep inside enemy territory. Pizdec!

I look forlornly at my bloodied friend, Dmitri, lying at my feet with half his head taken off by a large-calibre round, perhaps a fragment of a 30mm shell. Bloody Khokhols: they weren’t even supposed to be able to shoot straight. I’m sitting in the midst of my own smoking BMPs, the metal still warm from the recent fire. NLAWs! They attacked from above without any warning. Cunning. Dmitri said that they came from Britain. I’m not sure how he knew, but I ask you, Britain! What did they have to do with this war? It was nothing to them. They must be fascists too. Pizdec!

*As told to Robert Lyman