For Denis Semyrog-Orlyk, it is not a question of whether the Russians will invade Ukraine, but when. On a cold, drizzly evening last week, the affable 46-year-old architect was sitting with fellow members of the 130th battalion of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces in a hut on the outskirts of Kiev, taking lessons on how to stop the invaders in their tracks.
The Ukrainian capital, a bustling place of picturesque golden domed churches and horrendous traffic jams, does not feel like a city on the verge of war. There are no signs of panic buying; no mass exodus to the countryside. The estimated 100,000 Russian troops positioned menacingly on the country’s northern, eastern and southern borders feel far away.
Yet Semyrog-Orlyk and his comrades, all of them sergeants, are preparing for the worst: every Thursday evening they come to the hut to learn tactics, taught to them by veterans from the regular army and special forces. On Saturdays, they take to the woods or abandoned buildings around the city to practise patrols, defending positions and other military skills.
“Of course the Russians are coming,” said Semyrog-Orlok, as his colleagues — one a businessman, another a photographer and a third an expert in IT — nodded approval. “They need to rebuild their empire. And to rebuild their empire they need to conquer Ukraine. They have exhausted all the other methods of putting pressure on Ukraine and so they will cross the border. But they won’t get here because we will stop them.”
Serhii, 50, a veteran of Ukraine’s special forces whose day job these days is “in security”, is their instructor. “Putin’s a maniac,” he said. “Who knows what’s going on in his head and what he is going to do?”
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The dozen men — and one woman — who gathered for the lesson, each of whom will command 20-25 soldiers of their own, are among a quarter of a million territorials who will be deployed alongside the regular army and reserves, together making a fighting force approaching a million.
Their task, Serhii explains, is to make sure they know their area so well they can “defend it with their eyes shut” and resist the invaders at every point. “We tell them it is all about defending their own home, the other houses in the street, their district.”
Those from other units will engage in partisan warfare, even attempting to infiltrate Russian units and destroy them from within, in an echo of their forefathers in the west of the country who fought Soviet forces until the mid-1950s.
The Ukrainians would struggle to beat the Russians, whose conventional forces are ten times more powerful, said Oleksiy Melnyk, an expert on security issues at the Razumkov centre, a think tank in Kiev. “But Ukraine has quite strong potential, if not to resist for long, at least to deliver heavy losses on the Russian forces.”
Oleksiy Reznikov, the Ukrainian defence minister, put it more graphically in a television interview: “It will be a really bloody massacre and Russian guys will also come back in coffins.”
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Ukraine has effectively been at war with Russia since 2014, when Vladimir Putin sent special forces to seize the Crimean peninsula and foment an insurgency by pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east; in the years since, 14,000 people have died there, while large swathes of the Donbas, once Ukraine’s industrial heart, have been turned into a wasteland.
The apparent threat of a full-blown Russian invasion has grown in recent months, however, with US intelligence officials revealing that plans have been drawn up for a military offensive involving an estimated 175,000 troops that could begin early next year.
Putin has at the same time increasingly questioned Ukraine’s right to exist as a truly independent state. In a long essay published this summer, he claimed that the country’s “true sovereignty . . . is possible only in partnership with Russia”. He upped the pressure further last week by likening what he claimed was discrimination against Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east to “genocide”, while the Russian foreign ministry accused the West of pushing Kiev to take “aggressive steps”.
All this may be a colossal bluff by Putin, who has repeatedly denied he has any intention of invading and blamed growing tensions on Ukraine and its western backers, which have staged naval manoeuvres in the Black Sea and sent strategic bombers on “provocative flights” on Russia’s borders.
In a detailed analysis of Russia’s military options, Andriy Zagorodniuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister, said that a full-scale invasion was possible, but it would require 400,000 troops, cost tens of thousands of lives and massively damage the Russian economy. The resulting backlash at home could lead to “the end of the current Russian regime”, he wrote in the newspaper, Ukrainska Pravda. Other, more achievable goals included capturing more territory in the east or near Crimea.
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Putin’s aim appears instead to win concessions from the West without having to fire a shot — chief among them the rescinding by Nato of a promise made to Ukraine at the Bucharest summit in 2008 that it could one day become a member of the alliance.
President Joe Biden, who held a two-hour video meeting with Putin on Tuesday, has refused to oblige, and has repeated his assertion that it is up to the Ukrainians to decide if they want to join Nato — even though there appears no enthusiasm among the alliance’s members to admit the country any time soon.
It is a measure of the bankruptcy of the strong-arm policies pursued by Putin over the past few years that, rather than bring the Ukrainians to heel, he has turned a nation with centuries-old familial, cultural and linguistic ties with Russia into an implacable enemy. Some 30 per cent of men and women polled by the Razumkov centre have said they would be ready to take up arms to defend their country. Others polls put the figure much higher.
On social media, under the hashtag #UkrainiansWillResist, ordinary people have posed with their fists raised in defiance of the Russians in a campaign organised by Andrii Levus, a former member of parliament and co-founder of the Capitulation Resistance Movement. “There will not be any ‘peace’ on Russia’s conditions,” Levus tweeted recently launching the campaign. “Welcome to hell, Mr Putin.”
If Russian forces do invade, they will be up against a much more formidable opponent than the ragtag army they faced in 2014. Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of pounds of western weaponry has poured into Ukraine, much of it from America, which under President Donald Trump angered Russia by supplying sophisticated Javelin anti-tank missiles.
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The Kremlin was equally furious at Turkey’s decision to supply its fearsome Bayraktar TB2 combat drones, which Ukraine used for the first time in October to destroy the separatists’ artillery, though some of the more enterprising soldiers have made their own much smaller do-it-yourself versions by strapping grenade launchers to the kind of drones you can buy in a shop.
Looking uncomfortable in military helmet and flak jacket, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, marked the 30th anniversary of the formation of the former Soviet republic’s first army with a tour of the front line in the east during which he announced the delivery of more new tanks, armoured vehicles and ships.
Ukraine has also conducted joint military exercises with American, British and other Nato troops, most recently this autumn, while a number of western advisers are based in the country. The western alliance’s influence was evident at last Thursday’s class, devoted to communications, where a retired colonel taught them Nato protocols rather than those inherited from the Soviet years.
Such sophisticated weaponry has yet to make it to the territorials, though. One of the sergeants present, Vasiliy Hryhoruk, 28, an entrepreneur, said he had bought his own gun, a Ukrainian-made version of the AR15, a lightweight semi-automatic rifle notorious for its use in some of America’s worst mass shootings.
“It’s a great weapon,” Hryhoruk said of his purchase, which together with the night sight and other accessories had set him back more than £2,000. “Almost everyone has got their gun. Maybe an AK [47] or even a shotgun, which is not bad to defend yourself in a city.”
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Yet for all defence minister Reznikov’s bravura, Ukraine’s military chiefs have been pessimistic about their chances of seeing off an invasion without outside help.
“Unfortunately, Ukraine needs to be objective at this stage,” General Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, told The New York Times. “There are not sufficient military resources for repelling a full-scale attack by Russia . . . without the support of Western forces.”
Biden said he had warned Putin during their video meeting that a Russian invasion would be punished with “economic consequences like none he’s ever seen” — thought to include barring Russia from Swift, a global electronic-payment-messaging system, and a further delay to the opening of the Northstream-2 pipeline carrying Russian gas to Germany. The Kremlin leader, he said, had “got the message”.
But the American president admitted that sending US troops to Ukraine to deter an attack was “not on the table”. He also caused consternation in Kiev — and in neighbouring capitals — by apparently expressing a willingness to discuss with Putin a new “security architecture” for the region. Taken to extremes, it was feared, this could leave the country trapped permanently within Russia’s orbit, ending the prospect of membership of Nato — and also probably of the EU — for good.
Biden attempted to reassure his allies with a series of telephone calls on Thursday in which he vowed to Zelensky and the leaders of Nato’s nine eastern European members that he would not take joint decisions with Putin about their fate over their heads. The next day Biden’s spokeswoman was obliged to deny reports America would pressure Ukraine to grant autonomous status to the Russian-occupied Donbas region. Yet many in the region remain wary.
“We have to hope this was just a way for Biden to calm down Putin and to buy some time to let diplomacy work,” said Alyona Getmanchuk, director of the New Europe Centre, a think tank. “We should not forget that Russia is the aggressor and not treat it as if it is a victim of imaginary aggression from Nato in Ukraine.”
While words fly back and forth between Washington, Moscow and Kiev, those living in the east along the 265-mile “contact line” that divides areas controlled by the separatists from the rest of Ukraine have long since become inured to a war apparently without end.
In muddy trenches straight out of the First World War, soldiers from the opposing sides, sometimes drawn from the same communities or even families, can be positioned within a few dozen feet of each other.
“Keep your head down, they can see us,” said Mikhailo, a young Ukrainian soldier with a short beard and blue eyes, as he led a group of journalists through the trenches near Opytne, northwest of Donetsk, on a recent afternoon. Russian special forces snipers, who can hit targets almost a mile away, have become more active in recent weeks, Mikhailo said, but this was more down to the time of the year than a sign of escalation in attacks. As the winter draws in, the falling leaves leave the Ukrainian positions more exposed.
This area near Donetsk airport, which was almost destroyed in fighting in 2014-15, has been especially badly hit. Most people who could have long since moved away; many of those left behind are the elderly who have nowhere else to go, who live in often shocking conditions without power or running water.
Nevelske, a settlement 20 miles northwest of Donetsk, that lies half a mile from the Ukrainian military’s positions and just under three miles from the separatists’, has suffered more than most. Before 2014 and the outbreak of war, it was home to almost 400 people; now just a tenth of that number live there.
Among those remaining were Nelly and Nikolai Platitsin, but in the early hours of November 15 the house in which they had lived for the past four decades came under fire. By the time the shelling finished almost an hour later, only their bedroom was left intact.
Nelly, wearing just a nightgown, called her neighbours, who helped her escape through the window and gave her galoshes to protect her feet. “I cannot even convey the horror,” she said, standing amid the rubble of her home. “I didn’t know if we were going to survive or not. I prayed to God either for a quick death or to keep us alive.” @Peter_Conradi
Additional reporting: Kateryna Malofieieva, eastern Ukraine