Border town Przemyśl

February 27, 2024 by Peter Jan Haas in Ukraine

After 24 February 2022 it became inevitable that I had to travel to Ukraine. I had to wait two years for an opportunity. On 17 February 2024 Ukraine was still at war with Russia but I judged my personal risk for this journey to be very low. Besides, my father survived five years of war in Scheveningen and after 1942 in The Hague. I am not afraid of Russian missiles.

To save time I flew from Amsterdam to Kraków on a KLM Cityhopper Embraer and took the EC Porta Moravica, which runs between Graz and Przemyśl. I bought a first class ticket and was surprised my seat number was in the panorama coach of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). The three hour train journey was a luxury I hadn’t experienced in some time, even though the landscape of Małopolska is pretty boring.

I bought Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin specifically for this journey. A first class train is excellent for reading. I arrived in Przemyśl just before sunset.

Przemyśl is built on a hill looking over the river San. Its location is of strategic significance, both economically and military. In 1861, when Przemyśl was part of Austrian Galicia, the first railway line was built between Przemyśl and Lviv. In the years leading up to 1914 the city was turned into the third-largest fortress in Europe. Tensions mounted between the Russian Empire and the Austrian Empire and Austria rightly foresaw the strategic importance of Przemyśl. In the war bloody battles were fought between Austrian and Russia. Both sides lost up to 115,000 killed, wounded, and missing [ source ] in this little city.

After the war, in 1918, Przemyśl was disputed between the West Ukrainian People's Republic (1918–1919) and the Second Polish Republic (1918–1939). The Battle of Przemyśl resulted in a Polish victory in the same year. Przemyśl became part of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 until 1939 when the Second Polish Republic seized to exist.

In 2022 Przemyśl proved its function as border town again when the city helped Ukrainian refugees fleeing the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine for which the city received the honorary title of ‘Rescuer City’ presented by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Today there are roughly 60.000 people living in the city, about the same number as in 1910.

The Good Soldier Švejk (Przygody dobrego wojaka Szwejka in Polish) sitting on an ammunition box on the main square. This unfinished work is an anti-war novel, but also anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian. Considering the history of Przemyśl it seemed fitting to me to see Švejk enjoying his beer and his pipe. But not all wars are alike. I am deeply anti-war myself, but the Ukrainians do not need a Švejk in their ranks. They need to win the war. In peacetime we can muse about the absurdity of war. Not now.

The city center of Przemyśl is very clean and has clearly been newly renovated. The city’s history and surrounding landscape is attractive for tourism.

Restauracja Dominikańska

A colleague from work advised me to visit restaurant Dominikańska (address: ul. Pl. DOMINIKAŃSKI 3) and he was spot on. I started with the best potato-herring salad I ever tasted. It was that good. As soup I love Żurek, made from fermented rye flour. Similar soups can be found in other western Slavic cuisines.

**Śledź w sałatce z jajkiem, 15,00 zł.**

Żurek na tradycyjnym zakwasie żytnim z prawdziwkami, jajkiem i kiełbasą, *20,00 zł.*

Pierogi z kaszą gryczaną i borowików, *22,00 zł.*

My Booking.com apartment. Artwork like this just emphasises my solitude. They could have gone for a poster of a whale’s tail sticking out of the ocean.

In the years after the end of the Second World War the development of Przemyśl stalled. The city lost its strategic importance. During the years of the Republic of Poland (1947 - 1952) and the Polish People's Republic (1952 - 1989) economic development was not great either. There was no Marshall Plan for Poland. By 1981 the Polish state was insolvent.

When you walk through the entrance of the typical courtyards, the housing blocks look grim. It is only a matter of time these buildings have to be torn down.

Entering Ukraine

I took a 3:10 PM bus to Lviv. I was the only man on the bus. It is just women and children who shuttle back and forth between Ukraine and Poland. The border checks going into Ukraine are pretty straightforward. I had to hand in my passport and got it back after 10 minutes. No luggage check, no questions. This would be very different leaving Ukraine. That border check took three hours.

During my bus ride the sun was slowly setting. Even though the border is open I felt a little victorious when I entered Ukraine. I finally made it!

Lviv - birthplace of Ukrainian nationalism

February 26, 2024 by Peter Jan Haas in Ukraine

Vladimir Putin denies the very concept of a national Ukrainian identity. Benedict Anderson conceptualised the modern nation-state as an imagined community in his famous 1983 book Imagined Communities. During the time of the Habsburg Empire Ukrainians were influenced by the nationalism that spread after the French Revolution. The first seeds were sown. The Revolutions of 1848 in the Austrian Empire inspired the founding of the Supreme Ruthenian Council in the city we now call Lviv (Львів). One of the three political requests was that lectures in schools and publishing of government statements needed to be conducted in the Ukrainian language.

From the Supreme Ruthenian Council (1848 - 1851) to the breakup of the Sovjet Union, Ukrainian nationalism survived – between 1917 - 1918; 1918 - 1921 there was even a short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic. In 1991 an independent Ukraine was formed when the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was dissolved. Not based on ethnicity but as a modern Ukrainian state and pluralistic citizenship laws.

“Fight — and you’ll be victorious,
God is helping you!
On your side is justice, on your side is glory,
And holy liberty!”

— "The Caucasus", Taras Shevchenko, 1845

Lviv is a very modern bustling city with a population well over 700.000, almost as big as Kraków.

I arrived in Lviv after sunset. My hotel was right on Svobody Avenue. The entrance was inside a luxurious shopping mall. Signs with red arrows pointed at the shelter in the basement in case of an air raid. Since 2022 twelve civilians were killed and thirty-two wounded during dozens of attacks on Lviv Oblast.

I was pretty hungry so I entered the first beer pub I saw, the White Lion pub (Білий Лев, Lesi Ukrainky vul. 15). They served smoked pig’s ears as a beer snack and they lend me a paperclip to remove my physical sim card so I could be sure my data went through eSIM.

Soon I discovered Piana Vyshnia (“Drunk Cherry”), a tiny little place selling sweet but not too sweet cherry liqueur. Most of the action was on the street. I was mesmerised by the singing, and two pints of beer and two cherry liqueurs helped lift my mood. I filmed in vertical video format for Instagram.

I have been to regions of conflict before, Kosova in 1991 among others, Serbias had full and direct control of the province, tanks guarded the border, but never to a country which is under martial law. I have often wondered whether I would be able to fight, would I show valour or would I run to the hills? This question cannot easily be answered. In Lviv I was observing people of fighting age. For them the question is not hypothetical.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy sees the need to mobilise more citizens. The average age of the Ukrainian solider is 43 years at the moment of writing. His commanders have asked for up to 500,000 extra soldiers, but this is hard to finance. For each fighting soldier you need six extra people working to pay for that one soldier. Zelenskyy has to find 3 million extra jobs to even make this possible.

Still, every man, or even woman, in Ukraine knows there could be a moment he or she will be asked to serve, possibly on the front. A bill on mobilisation is now discussed in Ukraine's parliament. At the same time conscripts who have served since before the full-scale invasion began are now being discharged and won’t be called up for 12-months. Zelenskyy promised rotation in his speech when he removed general Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief in February.

When curfew was about to start the crowd started singing this song. I didn’t have time yet to ask somebody what song this is and what the lyrics mean.

Lemberg

When Lviv fell under the Habsburg monarchy the city was known as Lemberg and saw a large influx of Austrians and German-speaking Czech bureaucrats. The city became quite Austrian by the mid 19th century. You can still find the Viennese Coffee House in the city center (12 Svobody Avenue), which was established over a hundred years ago. I ordered the ‘business lunch’ menu which consisted of a beet salad, a very good borscht and a Wiener Schnitzel as flat as a sheet of paper: perfect.

Slavik’s Fashion

One moment the war is invisible, the next moment you are looking at portraits of men who very recently died in battle. President Zelenskyy announced in February 2024 that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action since 2022.

Memorial of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes

This memorial, built in 2019, is a reminder that upraising of the Ukrainian people against corruption, oligarchs and Russian influence started more than ten years ago, and consequentially the annexing of Crimea by Russia and the war in Donbas. The memorial is to commemorate the people who lost their lives during the Euromaidan protests in 2013 and 2014. Address: Pidvalna St, 6, Lviv.

The protest did not start in Kyiv, but in Lviv when in November 2013 mayor Sadovy called for students to go on a strike and protest. Shortly afterwards tens on thousands young Ukrainians travelled to Kyiv from West-Ukraine to the now famous Maidan Nezalezhnosti square. In January 2014 protesters occupied the regional government building in Lviv. This led to the storming of regional government buildings all over Ukraine. It still angers me when right (and left) wing idiots claim Euromaidan was a CIA sponsored coup. Lviv as cradle for Euromaidan is argued for by Dutch journalist Michiel Driebergen in this article dated 3 February 2014.

Children on a school trip visiting the memorial.

This statue below depicts merchant and translator Yuri-Franz Kulchytsky. He became a hero in the defence of Vienna from the Turks. As a rewards he received 300 sacks of coffee. When Austria ruled Galicia in late 18th century, coffee culture spread to Lviv and today Kulchytsky, a native of a region near Lviv (back then the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, today Ukraine), is seen as the man who brought coffee to Central Europe, which is most likely not true. But it makes a nice story and a cool statue. Today Lviv has many coffee houses in the style of a Wiener Kaffeehaus.

Lviv Railway Station

My final destination would be Kyiv, the capital and seat of government. My train to Kyiv left at 11:05 pm and would arrive the next morning at 06:19 am at Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi railway station. Many trains run at night. The sleeping carriages are still heated by coal. The night time atmosphere at the railway station is amazing, the smell of coal, the long trains, up to 17 carriages, the big Soviet era locomotives, it’s unforgettable.

I probably bought a first class ticket because my compartment had only two beds. I bought my ticket online before my journey. It was quite a comfortable night.

The situation of the war shortly before my visit. The front is roughly 500 kilometres distance from Kyiv.

The battle of Kyiv

February 25, 2024 by Peter Jan Haas in Ukraine

The battle of Kyiv was arguably the most important battle of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the capital would have fallen, there would have been little hope for recovery. The battle of Kyiv started with an attack on Hostomel Airport with Russian Ka-52 attack helicopters and Mil Mi-8 helikopters carrying paratroopers on 24 February 2022, early in the morning. Shortly before the attack Putin announced a ‘special military operation’ in a a televised speech.

The Russians succeeded taking over the airport but two Ukrainian Su-24 bombers of the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade managed to damage the runway. Airport staff drove trucks onto the runway, making the airport useless for Russian air support. Instead the Russians used the airport as a forward operating base for ground troops. Satellite images showed no Russian forces inside the airport by 28 March 2022.

Russian helicopters advancing on Hostomel Airport on 24 February 2022.

Despite being overwhelmed by the Russians, Ukraine managed to destroy quite a few advanced Ka-52 attack helicopters.

The next day

On 25 February a small Russian convoy drove through Bucha towards Kyiv, likely accidentally separated from other units, and was ambushed in Irpin and completely destroyed. But on 27 February Russian ground forces advanced into Bucha. After heavy fighting for two weeks, on 12 March 2022, the Bucha City Council announced that Russian forces had fully occupied the city.

Another phase in the battle of Kyiv was the advance of the Russian Kyiv convoy, a large column of Russian military vehicles, to take over the capital. This also didn’t go according to plan. Because of fuel and food shortages and Ukrainian resistance, the convoy was halted. The column was first spotted on satellite images on 28 February 2022. By 31 March the US Department of Defense (DoD) could not confirm the column was still there. It had simply dissolved.

By 31 March the Russians retreated from the Kyiv area, including Bucha. The Battle of Kyiv was over and won by Ukraine.

“We are all here, our troops are here, citizens are here, all of us are here protecting our independence of our country. And it will continue to be this way. Glory to our defenders, Glory to Ukraine, Glory to Heroes.”

— 25 February 2022, Volodymyr Zelenskyy outside the president's office in Kyiv

The road to Bucha

I travelled to Bucha via Irpin to get a sense of the battle and its geography. From Akademmistechko, the final stop of the Kyiv M1 metro line, I took a minibus to Irpin. From Irpin you can walk to Bucha in half an hour but I took a train instead. What struck me most is how ordinary a place like Irpin is. In peacetime nothing ever happens in Irpin.

Irpin railway station and the train to Bucha.

From Hostomel Airport to Irpin river is just 12 kilometers. The Irpin river was the last natural barrier before the outskirts of Kyiv. After the river there is a forested area of about 2 kilometres before you reach the residential part of Kyiv. Below is the route the Russians took until they were halted.

Bucha (Буча), Vokzalna Street

Vokzalna street became infamous because it visualised the attempt by the Russian army to take over Kyiv. After the Russian withdrawal from Bucha, press photos showed the full horror of the war: the street was coloured matt black because of the fighting. Ukrainian forces entered Bucha on 1 April 2022, soon the Bucha massacre became clear. In August 2022 the count of civilian deaths was published: 458, the vast majority of the bodies had signs of shooting, torture, or violent trauma.

Two years later the street has been cleaned up, some houses have been rebuild, some are still being rebuild. What struck me most is how mundane this street is. After walking up and down the street a couple of times I wanted to do something unremarkable. I went to the hairdresser and had a haircut.

Considering the current war this memorial commemorating the Afghanistan war from 1979 to 1989, in Bucha, is pretty crazy. It shows a Soviet BRDM-2 patrol vehicle. Back then Ukrainians and Russians were bothers in arms in the Soviet Army.

The extension of the main shopping street of Bucha has countless portraits of mostly men who died during the Battle of Bucha.

Vodoprovidna St, Bucha, Oblast Kiev

Irpin (Ірпі́нь)

Travelling back from Bucha to Kyiv I walked to Irpin. In Irpin I would take a minibus back to Kyiv.

In Irpin the war damage is still very visible. Bucha has gotten more international attention and therefor more funds for repairs. According to Irpin’s mayor Oleksandr Markushyn 115 buildings had been completely destroyed, 698 significantly damaged and another 187 need partial repairs.

If the Russians would have succeeded crossing Irpin river they would have ended up roughly in this part on the outskirts of Kyiv near Akademmistechko. From there it is another 12 kilometers to Maidan square.

The battle continues

Even though Kyiv is safe from Russian ground troops, it is not safe from attacks by air. Below the weapons Russia is still using against the capital: the air-launched ballistic missile Kh-47M2 Kinzhal, the ship-launched Kalibr missiles, guided Kh-101/Kh-102 missiles, S-400 missile systems, the 9K720 Iskander and Iranian Shahed drones.

“Attention, air raid alert. Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless, your overconfidence is your weakness.”

— Air Alert app, Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker of Star Wars

The air defence of Kyiv consists of several different systems. The American Avenger Air Defense System, German Flugabwehrkanonenpanzer Gepard, American MIM-23 Hawks, American-Norwegian NASAMS, Franco-Italian SAMP/T, European IRIS-T SLM and TRML-4D radars.

Even after the initial battle Kyiv was not safe. Kyiv after Russian shelling, 2022-10-10. Photo attribute kyiv.dsns.gov.ua.

Kyiv and the quest for independence

February 25, 2024 by Peter Jan Haas in Ukraine

The Orange Revolution of 2004 and 2005 was a revolution for independence. Not because Ukraine wasn’t an independent state, it was. But because the population was alarmed by reports of election interference during the election between the pro-Europe candidate Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. After a revote, on 10 January 2005, the Election Commission officially declared Yushchenko the winner of the presidential election. He would remain president of Ukraine for 10 years.

In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych won the election of that year in his second attempt to become president. The Orange Revolution was later overshadowed by ‘Maidan’ in 2013 and 2014 when the people took to the street again after President Viktor Yanukovych suddenly decided not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement.

I remember the 2016 Dutch referendum on the Association Agreement very well. I voted in favour of it. Only 32,28% of Dutch voters bothered to vote. 61% voted against the Agreement, partly due to Russian interference. Michiel van Hulten, former chairman of the PvdA, and publicist Joshua Livestro led the campaign in favour of the agreement: They would later state: “No one realized that we were on the front line of an information war.”

Further reading: Sandworm A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers, by Andy Greenberg,

I arrived in Kyiv very early in the morning. My hotel was practically on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, so I got off the metro at Khreshchatyk. The first thing I noticed was a giant sea of blue and yellow flags on Maidan. The square was still empty except for one girl sitting on a corner next to the flags, headphones on, and crying. With lack of sleep because of the night train, I was fighting to hold back my own tears.

Among the fallen soldiers are many from the volunteer unit International Legion. Jonathan Sheng-Guang Tseng left Taiwan to fight for Ukraine. His decision has to be seen in the context of the tensions between China and Taiwan. He must have recognised the similarities between Taiwan and Ukraine. He was only 25 when he was killed in action. Likewise the Georgian National Legion has been fighting on the side of Ukraine since in the war in Donbas.

It was too early to check into my hotel so I just dropped off my bag and started exploring Kyiv on foot. The old city is built on a hill, but nothing remains of the old medieval street plan. Roads are wide and long. When the capital of Ukraine was moved to Kyiv in 1934 the Soviet government carried out a ‘reconstruction’ of the historical center of the capital. St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, dating back to the 12th century, was demolished between 1935 and 1937. In 1941 Stalin’s Red Army mined the city center and detonated these when the Wehrmacht marched into the city. One square kilometre around Khreshchatyk street was completely destroyed. The city center was rebuild in Neoclassical Stalinist architectural style.

One building the Soviets didn’t demolish is the Saint Sophia Cathedral. The cathedral was most likely founded in 1011 by Vladimir the Great.

Mykhailivska Square

This square in central Kyiv is now a permanent destroyed Russian military equipment exhibition, but on Ukrainian Railway Day a shelled train carriage was put on display. On this cold February morning the square was mostly devoid of people.

Below the remains of an OTR-21 Tochka (NATO name: SS-21 Scarab) missile. Being a Soviet missile, both Russia and Ukraine have this missile in their arsenal.

Below the rebuilt St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. The cathedral reopened in 1999.

View from Mykhailivska Square before the St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery was demolished by the Soviets. The photo was made in the early 1900s.

What was started in 2004 with the Orange Revolution continues to this day. As long as Russia continues the war against Ukraine, true independence cannot be celebrated. Currently Kyiv is in a battle for survival, no matter how far away the war front is. Its wounds are mostly invisible. 80% of the population of Ukraine have a close relative who has been wounded or killed, and an estimated 12 million Ukrainians are suffering from war trauma. Invisible Wounds.

ORCS MUST DIE, a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Orcs were the primary soldiers of both Dark Lords' armies: Morgoth and Sauron. Dehumanization is a prerequisite for killing.

Kyiv has some very good lunchrooms. I had a glass of very good Ukrainian wine, and Kyiv borsch served with pampushka stuffed with meat (260 UAH) at Glek (Глек), 6 Velyka Zhytomyrska Street. The borsch is made with porcini mushrooms, smoked pear, red Carpathian beans.

Poster for Azov, the Azov Battalion was founded in 2014 as a volunteer unit in reaction to the Russian backed forces in Donbas. It was formally incorporated into the National Guard just half a year later and is now know as the Azov Regiment. The Azov Movement was created by the military unit and has drawn attention because of its ties with far-right movements. Putin has used Azov as a justification for his special operation to de-nazify Ukraine. The Azov Regiment is now considered to be largely depoliticised.

Entrance to a Kyiv army surplus store. You are meant to use this Russian military jacket as a doormat. I visited quite a lot of army surplus stores out of personal interest. The official uniform has a MM-14 camouflage pattern and is easy to recognise.

In the evening I had dinner in Pervak. I ended up ordering a few dishes, one dish was chicken Kyiv, around a big glass of beer. They served horseradish shots alongside the beer. The place was not busy.

New city marketing slogan: Kyiv is waiting for you after the victory! I was just thinking: “Why wait?”

When I arrived in Kyiv I bought a return ticket leaving at 6:19 in the morning. Soon I discovered that would be a problem considering curfew ended at 5 am in the morning. It could be enough time to reach Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi railway station in time from my hotel, but I had no idea how overwhelmed the taxi system would be just after curfew. I decided I couldn’t risk missing my train, and therefore my flight in Kraków, so prepared for leaving my hotelroom in the evening to spend the whole night at the railway station. This wasn’t ideal and I swooped up the last seat/bed in a train leaving at 02:57 am in the morning. This would cut my waiting time in a cold and dark railway station by 3,5 hours.

I spent my last day in Kyiv taking the metro to the metro end stations and walking the streets of central Kyiv.

Lisova terminus station of the Sviatoshynsko-Brovarska Line.

Donation box for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade next to a heavily damaged vehicle of the unit. They need a new car to keep fighting. In the background: Azovstal. Free Mariupol Defenders. The Azovstal Iron and Steel Works was the last holdout during the Siege of Mariupol in March 2022. About 1500 Azovstal defenders are still captured by the Russians.

The landscape between Kyiv and Lviv from my train window.

There are trains running between Lviv and Poland but I couldn’t buy a ticket using my app. So I booked another bus, this time directly to Kraków. The bus left at 00:40 am, so I had to be at the bus station before curfew. We drove all night and spent three hours at the Ukrainian-Polish border. This time customs was more strict and my bag was searched for military stuff. When the customs officer discovered my Putin toilet paper I bought as a souvenir, she smiled and the search was over.

“ПТН ПНХ”

— Putin khuylo (Putin dickhead)

Geopolitical chessboard Ukraine

May 11, 2022 by Peter Jan Haas in Ukraine

Just as the pandemic was almost over in The Netherlands, mainly due to our high vaccination rate & effectiveness, and natural immunity, the Russian president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin started a geopolitical game of chess which effectively ended the post-Cold War era of relative peace in Europe. It was Thursday morning 24 February 2022. I cursed when I woke up.

The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was just an escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014 which ended as a frozen conflict in 2015. Russia has waged a cyberwar against Ukraine at least since 2014. Read: Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers (2019) by Andy Greenberg.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has deep global geopolitical implications. A successful campaign in Ukraine might have emboldened Xi Jinping to take military action to control Taiwan.

The owners of the company I work for immediately thought of ways to help Ukraine. Donation of money for humanitarian aid was a no-brainer. Within a week we decided to donate the profits of the webshop of the month March to Giro555. We also crowdfunded money for a first transport to the Polish-Ukrainian border. We bought calorie dense food for fighters on the front and as many night vision goggles we could possibly buy. Just three days after the start of the war I agreed to be a back-up driver for the first transport, and maybe more to come, so I cancelled my plans for my springtime holiday.

Social Media

The Vietnam War was the first war broadcast on television while the Gulf War of 1991 was the first war being live broadcast. Who can forget the green blurry images of the night vision cameras as the first artillery hit Bagdad? The 2022 Russian war against Ukraine is the first true social media war. Not only does information spread instantly via Telegram, Twitter or WhatsApp, the Diia App (“Action”) made by the Ministry of Digital Transformation in 2020 helped the Ukrainian army target the enemy. The Diia app was quickly tailored towards the war and allows ordinary Ukrainians to submit location-tagged photos and videos of Russian military sightings.

“Der Krieg ist das Gebiet der Ungewißheit; drei Vierteile derjenigen Dinge, worauf das Handeln im Kriege gebaut wird, liegen im Nebel einer mehr oder weniger großen Ungewißheit. ”

— Carl von Clausewitz: Vom Kriege

SpaceX Starlink War

But the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 might be best remembered as the first SpaceX Starlink War. Just before the war started Russia knocked out tens of thousands of KA-SAT SATCOM terminals by a suspected cyber attack. Within days of the war Elon Musk activated the Starlink service and sent a number of receiver kits to Ukraine.

To generate more crowdfunding money we requested photo’s and video’s from Ukrainians receiving our equipment. And so they did. Below is an Ukrainian soldier with one of our night vision goggles.

Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes

The Russian army was not so mighty as seemed on paper. Tanks are just heavy chunks of metal without personal and strategy. This was not a first for Russia. In the first big war of the 20th century, the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian army also proved much less effective than thought. This war started with the Russian demand for the establishment of a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Japan in Korea north of the 39th parallel. The Imperial Japanese navy subsequently attacked. Nicholas II of Russia refused to submit to a humiliating peace with Japan, which was victorious in most battles. US President Theodore Roosevelt had to mediate a treaty between Russian and Japan, which resulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution, which set the stage for the 1917 Russian Revolutions.

Vladimir Putin seems to have made the mistake only an authoritarian leader can make, or American neocons just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He didn’t understand the enemy. It has become clear that he thought of the ‘special operation’ as a non-military operation. The imagined ‘regime’ in Kyiv would quickly fall and the Ukrainians would greet the Russian soldiers as liberators. This explains the poor military planning. Putin ignored the long quest for national identity among Ukrainians. He seems to have completely misinterpreted the Orange Revolution of 2004 - 2005 and the Maidan Revolution in 2014. The Ukrainians clearly rejected closer ties with Russia and were looking West towards the EU as a future path for the nation. Ukrainian values aligned with Europe and not with Russia.

Lies

An authotoritan leader has to lie to his people to stay in power. This greatly reduces battlefield effectiveness. Who wants to die for a lie? The propaganda was that the United States were going out nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Many Russian soldiers left their tanks and BTR’s (armoured personnel carrier) when they realised they have not been told the truth.

Read: The Dictator's Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes by Caitlin Talmadge, Cornell University Press (2015).

Russian prisoner of war being interviewed by an Ukrainian journalist.

Below a video made by an Ukrainian fighting group thanking us, and my employer by name, for the equipment we sent.

Putin governs Russia like a crime syndicate and money which should have been spent on the military was stolen and transferred out of Russia. This left the army with antiquated tanks, dangerous infantry fighting vehicles and a Black Sea flagship which was not modernised as planned in 2016. The Russian cruiser Moskva was sunk on 14 April. Even Hitler was smart enough to rename the German cruiser Deutschland to Lützow just before the war so when sunk, it wouldn’t function as a symbol.

Russia and Ukraine are both part of the Western Steppe. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was established in 1569 and the eastern border of the Commonwealth of Poland still marked the political landscape of Ukraine in 2010. In 2022 new lines are drawn.