The Daily - The Deserter: Parts 1-3

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

In “The Deserter,” Sarah A. Topol reports the story of Ivan, a captain in the Russian Army who fought in Ukraine and then ultimately fled the war and his country with his wife, Anna. Topol spoke to 18 deserters while reporting in eight countries across four continents over the last year and a half; their experiences helped paint a vivid picture of the Russian war operation and its corruption, chaos and brutality.Narrated by Liev Schreiber.“The Deserter” is a five-part special series in collaboration with The New York Times Magazine.

This reporting was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation's Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. Hi, my name is Sarah Topol and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Two and a half years ago, in the middle of the night, Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine. Ukrainian military casualties are closely guarded secret, but at least 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since then, although that is definitely an undercount. And according to British intelligence, more than half a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded.

Just who are these soldiers fighting for President Vladimir Putin's ambition? How did they explain their involvement in this war? And for the story you'll be hearing, I set out to write about the Russian military and meet as many service members as I could. I talked to 18 soldiers and officers who fled the war at the risk of retribution by the Russian regime. And what I learned was that a lot of these

men had families and partners who followed them into exile, into these terrifying and dangerous lives. And so I found myself writing not just about Russia on the front lines, but about Russia at home. And there was one person I spoke with whose story I couldn't get out of my head. A man I'll call Ivan. Ivan grew up in a military family. He attended a military academy and became a captain in the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

It was a steady job with a decent paycheck. He ended up getting promoted and on the very night he celebrated his promotion he also met a woman I'll call Anna. Ivan and Anna fell deeply in love, got married, started a family. Ivan planned to finish his military service, retire, and start his new life as a civilian. But then he got sent to fight in Ukraine. When I first met Ivan, we sat together for eight hours a day, for a week, as he told me his whole story. About his life in Russia, what he did as a soldier, and everything he did to escape. Some days after we spoke, I'd walk around for hours,

just talking to myself and processing what Ivan told me. I kept thinking how easy it is for each of us when we're in any conflict to feel like we're on the morally correct side of things, that we're on some sort of higher ground than our adversary. But what Ivan's story tells you is just how much more complicated everything really is. How one deliberate action or one decision leads to another,

and then another, until before you know it, you're in a crater getting shelled by tanks in a war whose outcome you feel you have no stake in. Ivan's story is also, I think, a kind of universal love story. Not just about romantic love, but about the type of love that would cause you to do all kinds of things that you wouldn't normally do, just to survive. And so here now is Ivan's story, and it starts with a message. A call for help from his wife. life. The Deserter, Part 1. The Ballad of Ivan and Anna. September 22nd, 2022. Subject. I need help. Hello. My name is... My husband

is a member of the Russian Army. He several times refused to participate in the special operation. He should have been fired, but he has not been fired so far. We are against war. We hate this mode in our country. Please, help us save his life. He has a foreign passport, but he cannot take it. Please, I beg you, help. Today or tomorrow he must be sent to war. My number is plus seven...

Thank you. Forgive me for writing this letter so chaotically, but I am crying and feeling absolutely hopeless. An email to a German refugee organization on the day the German Interior Minister announced that the country was ready to accept asylum requests from deserters from the armed forces of the Russian Federation. asylum requests from deserters from the armed forces of the Russian Federation.

On the night Ivan met Anna, he was so drunk that he could barely remember her face the next morning. Only that she had the most beautiful eyes. Earlier that day, Ivan had been promoted to senior lieutenant. Over a dinner banquet, officers from his unit watched as Ivan washed down, a Soviet-era ritual that continues to this day. They filled a glass with four shots of vodka until it was almost overflowing and threw Ivan's newly acquired six epaulette stars in. Following custom, Ivan stood up and addressed the assembled. Comrade officers, warrant officers, sergeants, he began. He paused, downed the vodka and

flipped the cup onto the table, scattering the stars. I, Senior Lieutenant, present myself on the occasion of awarding me the regular military rank of Senior Lieutenant. Once the newly minted officer had said everything clearly, smoothly, without a hitch, the commander of Ivan's unit continued. Comrade officers, warrant officers, sergeants, do we accept? We accept, they called in unison. They put three stars on each of Ivan's shoulders, doused them with vodka, and

pounded on them hard, so that the pins on the bottom dug into his skin. If Ivan had messed up, he would have had to drink another four shots and try again. Afterward, they headed to a club. In the crowd under the dim, smoke-addled light, he saw Anna. She was hypnotic. Anna noticed him, too. Without exchanging words, they started dancing. The crowds parted, forming a circle around them. Ivan danced for hours like he had never danced before. Later, he would call her Andromeda, like the goddess and the galaxy.

A constellation in the evening sky that shone so brightly it eclipsed all the stars. At the end of the night, or more like early morning, Ivan gave her his phone and told her to put in her number. Anna obliged, but when she looked up, he was gone. She stood there holding his phone for what felt like an eternity. Another guy came up and started chatting to her. Buddy, you're too late, Ivan proclaimed from behind them. She peered over and saw him covered in sweat,

holding a huge bouquet of lilies. He had sprinted to a 24-hour flower shop nearby. Anna was in town from St. Petersburg as the maid of honor at a wedding. At the ceremony earlier that day, she caught the bouquet. By the end of the week, Anna would be returning to her university hundreds of miles away. Ivan would leave for a month-long assignment around the islands of the Pacific, a routine expedition to observe an eavesdrop on U.S. Allied training there.

Later, both would agree it had been fate. The Russian ship was a simple surveillance vessel with radio equipment that looked as if it was from before Ivan's grandfather was born. Ivan had just bought his first camera, and for a month he took photos of the clouds, low and heavy over the waves. He imagined all the things he would tell Anna when he next got the chance. How when you first go out on a ship, you have to participate in a ceremony befriending Neptune.

In which the new sailors, nearly naked, drink sea water out of a glass and get rubbed with ash. How they fished for squid, dove right off the ship into the warm waters. A few guys standing watch with machine guns in case of sharks. While the sun sets, streak the sky with cotton candy pink and crimson red. Ivan spent hours on the deck looking for a cell phone signal. When he found one, he ordered Anna flowers, sent her sushi rolls through friends, and plotted a trip to St. Petersburg to surprise her.

For her part, Anna sleepwalked through her classes, re-reading all his texts. She marveled at his descriptions of the Philippine Sea, the color of the water. She was sure she had never seen a shade as blue as what he described. One day, not far from port, Ivan's boat passed 50 meters from an American aircraft carrier that looked straight out of Hollywood. Most of the soldiers had never seen a ship so big. The carrier's hatches were open, interior compartments, visible with airplanes and all kinds of equipment inside.

The Russians in flip-flops and swim trunks or underwear ran out to sea. The Americans stood on the deck in blue uniforms with white helmets and gloves, their ship glistening in the sun. Everyone waved. Ivan grew up on the outskirts of nowhere, in an unremarkable mid-sized city near a military base. His family considered themselves patriotic. Though they didn't talk much about politics,

Ivan was taught that he lived in a righteous country. Nearly every Soviet family had lost a man to the front in World War II, in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War. And both Ivan and Anna grew up on stories of sacrifice. Ivan's father served as had his father before him. As a child of the perestroika experiment, Ivan watched Russia sink into a decade of banditry, political tussles, and get-rich-quick schemes. While he and his friends played with little green soldiers in the courtyard, their parents struggled with the basics—electricity, food, water, heat.

Ivan's mother and father didn't make much, but they could count on housing and a small government-backed paycheck, though after the Russian Federation was established in 1991, often even that didn't come. Every month the family drove two hours to a larger city with a wholesale market, walking through piles of plush toys, clothes, kitchen supplies, and everything in between. Ivan, like everyone else, stood on a piece of cardboard while the vendor held a curtain around him as he tried on clothes. Whether it was very cold or snowing or raining, Ivan would remove his pants and stand in his underwear, too poor to try on clothes in warm changing rooms at shops.

This phrase, dressed on cardboard, is still used to describe a generation of Russians who lived through the poverty of the 90s. Ivan was in secondary school when Vladimir Putin rose to power at the turn of the century and began to establish his system of control. Promoting from his inner circle while crushing oligarchs and cracking down on newly gained freedoms. Still, in this new Russia, money was everything.

Though Ivan's family had stability, they had nothing on his girlfriend's parents. When he opened their refrigerator, there was so much juice, J7, the kind with pulp that his parents never bought. Her father was a businessman, and though Ivan wasn't sure what exactly that entailed, he wanted to be one too. But the year before Ivan graduated from secondary school, he spent a week with a family friend's son who spun him a tale of adventure in the Special Forces, where young men went on training

missions for days with just their bare hands to sustain them, living in the wild with a compass and a set of instructions. In wartime, they would sneak behind enemy lines to help lead the rest of the troops to victory safely, protecting their own in defense of their homeland. Ivan had always been a sucker for romance, for a world where the villains and the heroes were clear. There were rules in the military games Ivan played as a child. Under no circumstances could anyone attack a hospital. And that's the kind of world Ivan liked. Where things were black and white, and every problem had a solution.

Ivan got into one of the most competitive Russian military academies. It wasn't that he dreamed of going to war, he just thought it wouldn't happen. Becoming an officer was a fine path for a kid from nowhere. A degree, free healthcare, a pension, and a guaranteed apartment upon retirement. Not that Ivan was thinking that far ahead. He was spellbound by the promise of adventure. At the academy, cadets lived in barracks with metal bunk beds in neat rows. In the corner, there were mats and a punching bag.

The shower was cold water from a hose connected to the tap. Ivan loved it immediately. Angles were perpendicular, beds were made and everything ended with one word, panyatna, understood? Beds were made and everything ended with one word, panyatna, understood? The young men skied in the back country, learned terrain navigation and hand-to-hand combat, figured out how much TNT would blow a railway and how much would blow a bridge. They studied languages and built up their physical endurance.

But upon graduation, Ivan faced the perennial problem of the Russian military, its bloated officer corps. Ivan was a lieutenant doing reconnaissance duty, a position far from his specialization, the elite unit he trained for. His shifts were 24 hours on, 24 hours off, drafting training and duty schedules that no one looked at, and heating up his food in the microwave. He tried to complain to his superiors.

The state had paid for his education and then assigned him here. There was no opportunity to do what he trained for. No chance to put what he learned to the test. Worse, no one cared. Ivan couldn't just leave the service. If he were to break his contract, he would have to pay back the state for his education, lose his benefits, and have a mark on his record. It's not as if he knew how to do anything else anyway.

When he looked at the civilian sector for job opportunities with his language skills, he saw ads that said, Military Cadet graduates need not apply. Ivan decided to write it out. But the lack of good billets made life boring and difficult. He tried to distract himself applying to different remote rotations. At least he could try to make life more interesting. After he started dating Anna, Ivan found that he began to think more critically. It wasn't just that she pressed him to be more thoughtful about their relationship. She challenged him to think about a lot of things he had taken for granted before.

The contrasts didn't hit him all at once, but more slowly, an accumulation of incongruities that built up over time. Ivan told her about another work trip when he had been sent to the 2,600 mile long border with China. On top of a reconnaissance station he could see both sides of the boundary clearly. On the Russian side he saw a dilapidated village, not even a town, just a village, with broken roads and half-trunk passers-by.

On the other side, Las Vegas. High-rise buildings, neon lights, wind turbines. It looks like the difference between heaven and earth, he thought. At the time, Ivan and his comrades had asked one another, why couldn't their country do anything like that? It's bad, the young men agreed. But like most Russians, they did nothing but remark on it, without the expectation that it would change. Apathy is a skill that requires practice over time.

Ivan had never considered himself a big talker. But Anna had a lot of things to say. She had been struck by the economic boom that followed the poverty of their childhood. The future and its possibilities had been dazzling. She had done everything she could to get out of her own childhood nowhere and to St. Petersburg, a city of white nights, deep winters, and big dreams. She cared about art, theater, music, literature, international relations, lofty college conversations in big city bars. Before she met Ivan, Anna received a scholarship to go to America on a study abroad program.

And she realized that the world was much larger than anything she had been told about in school. That a person is bigger than where she was born or what language she spoke. These limits, boundaries, they don't even exist, she told Ivan when they were falling in love. You make these frames yourself. Theirs was a big wedding. Both Anna and Ivan had wanted to keep it small and simple, to do something at

a cafe, nothing pompous. But one thing led to another, and all their relatives came. Anna carried a large bouquet accented with yellow tulips, her favorite flower. He wore his officer uniform. She wore a white trumpet dress that swayed at her ankles, her long veils studded with glittering gemstones. Ivan was solemn during their vows, his eyes beaming. Anna cried straight through the whole thing. After they married, Anna left St. Petersburg and joined Ivan at his base. She had never spent much time thinking about the military before she met him. Soldiers were just people who wore green uniforms and

stood at attention on parade grounds a few times a day. Ivan left in the morning, came home for lunch, left again, and was home for a late dinner. It looked like a regular civilian job, except everyone cursed all the time. Like most Russians, Anna and Ivan saw politics as something dirty, something better avoided. It was best to focus on things you could actually control. And so neither of them had paid much attention to Putin's political maneuvering or his engineering a return to power for a third term, despite sweeping protests in 2012.

They lived in a tiny studio apartment that they renovated themselves. They had few luxuries, but they were happy. They wrote each other poetry, danced together, sang together, and even wrote a book just for the two of them so they wouldn't forget. They started planning for a baby. When she was young, Anna kept a diary. On page after page she begged the world to give her true love. She loved Ivan with a kind of mystical force, and she wanted to have a family.

She worried that his talents were wasted in the army. He was smart, greedy for life at his core. But the man she had fallen for had chosen this road, so she took it too. Ivan's disappointment with the realities of service were bearable until he got a new commander. His subordinates nicknamed him Pig for his jowls and ruddy cheeks. Pig started pocketing the rations earmarked for field training, which the guys were able to sell if they brought their own food from home. Ivan was owed three days worth after a weekend in the field, so

he went to demand them. If they didn't put an end to this now, who knows what would happen? First it's rations, Ivan said, then it's our wages. His colleagues told him not to bother. Everyone knew Pig had plenty of schemes. The confrontation went nowhere, and instead the commander started singling Ivan out, writing him up for minor infractions that everyone committed, like carrying a cell phone around the base to get him demoted.

When Ivan went to the military prosecutor's office to fight his demotion, he was told he would win a case against Pig in court, but he lost. Of course, Pig had a cretia, a roof. How is this happening, Ivan would ask. Everywhere I'm told I'm right, so why am I being punished? Did I steal the rations? No.

Those are my rations. He stole them from me, and I'm wrong. Graft was endemic in the Russian military, permeating every level from the top brass to the grunts. The scale is astounding, said Sergei Fridinsky, one of Russia's chief military prosecutors. Sometimes it seems that people have simply lost their sense of moderation and conscience. Theft was hard to root out, even if someone wanted to. It was less about criminality and more a mentality. The thinking was simple.

It's one thing to serve the motherland, but you can't forget about yourself. Pig was among the many commanders who stole state-subsidized fuel from the military and sold it on the side at the civilian market price. There were a number of methods for doing this. Blatantly filling a commercial truck at a military gas station. Filling a military transport, siphoning fuel from its tank to other carriers, and then adding fake kilometers to trucks to explain the difference on the accounting end. Pig was also ordering his subordinates to saw wood from the base's firing range so he could sell it.

Everyone did it. Russia's turn of the century prosperity had tapered off with the 2008 financial crisis and falling oil revenue. Though the government's official statistics suggest that poverty hovers around 10%, an investigation by the Russian outlet The Insider shows that the reality is much worse. Roughly half of Russian families in many regions live below the poverty line. Outside the major cities, more than 10 million people do not have gas in their houses. They collect wood for heating. Many families still do not have indoor toilets. They defecate and hold in their houses. They collect wood for heating. Many families still do not

have indoor toilets. They defecate and hold in the ground. There had been plenty of idiocy that Ivan overlooked in his service. Literally hours of watching troops paint the grass green. Ripping dandelions with his bare hands, plowing and re-plowing snow banks for no discernible reason, standing at attention for hours in the freezing cold on the parade grounds. Then there were larger frustrations, like the fact that they were promised weekends and overtime but never got them. Every repair at the base, painting the barracks, fixing broken stairs, was made using money the officers and the soldiers had to throw together,

though they were making next to nothing themselves. According to the Rand Corporation in 2008, around 30% of officers holding the rank of major and below were earning wages at or under the poverty line. Units were asked to donate for repairs, but everyone knew there was no answer outside of, yes, comrade. As a result, men like Ivan sold military fuel or bartered parts to make base repairs. Few civilians realized that each commander in the Russian military was actually a fiscal hostage. When an officer assumed his position, he signed off on responsibility for all his unit's

equipment, much of which had been sold or bartered by the previous commander, and so was never actually there. This made it impossible to abdicate his job, because it would look as though he stole the equipment, and he would have to use his own money to replace it. The equipment that was there was outdated and broke frequently. Not because someone did something wrong, but because the parts were old and unserviceable, or because the repair unit didn't feel like coming out. Still, the officer would be blamed for not monitoring the equipment well and penalized. So instead of reporting the break, the officer would sell some of the military's fuel to

repair the machinery. Was that really stealing, or was that simply the job? After his demotion, Ivan stalked around the base trying to foment a rebellion. He wanted to file a collective complaint against Pig to the military prosecutor, but none of the other soldiers would go on the record with him. The main thing is that when they discuss something in the back rooms, everyone is like, yes, yes, let's do it. But when I come up and say, let's take action, everybody says, oh, come on, why? He would rage to Anna.

Because everybody realizes that the same thing that happened to me is just going to happen to them. They're just going to be removed from their position on some flimsy excuse. Everybody's got debt, everybody's got families, and no one needs it. Anna didn't understand why it was this fight over stolen rations and his litany of complaints that broke him. He could be so categorical, so rigid.

She supported his decisions, but she didn't understand why he needed this. She told him to be careful. He was in the system and he had two choices. You either play by the rules or get out, she told him to be careful. He was in the system and he had two choices. You either play by the rules or get out, she told him. If you go against your superiors, you risk everything. Was that really something he wanted to do? At night in their tiny apartment, they sat at the kitchen table as he tried to explain it to her. The Russian military had promised him better.

A better billet, a better life, and some kind of purpose. And now after he watched them steal so much they were ruining his reputation. How much more could one man take? What kind of military was this? The roots of the dysfunction could be traced back to the army of Ivan's forefathers. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union built one of the largest standing armies in the world, twice the size of the U.S. military. More than four million troops were organized to repel a large land invasion. A blundering force with a huge officer corps that relied on young men serving two years of mandatory

conscription service for the bulk of its manpower. For the Soviets, national service was both political and practical. Homeland defense strategy for decades hinged on overwhelming the enemy with vast reserves of bodies on the cheap. The Russian Army's development from the disarray of the Soviet Union was as impressive as it was disastrous. Fifteen countries emerged from its wreckage. The Russian Federation inherited most of the Red Army's personnel and equipment, but also its baggage.

The rusted storehouses, low professionalism, and an over-reliance on conscripts and officers, with no professional non-commissioned officer corps in the middle to manage things. The new country was faced with a fundamental question. Should Moscow retain a vast army organized around fighting existential battles with the West, or should it instead create a smaller, more mobile force of professional enlisted soldiers? In the first decade of post-Soviet existence, with oil and gas prices falling to historic lows, that debate was largely theoretical. There was no money to feed or house the Russian troops, much less to professionalize them. Left to their own devices, units turned fields into farms

and foraged for mushrooms in the forests. Soldiers in Siberia were fed animal feed. Criminality abounded. Theft was rampant. Commanders, officers, and soldiers sold everything not nailed down at their bases. Light bulbs, steel rods, electrical cables. They even sold their own weapons to their enemies. In 1993, two naval officers stole three uranium fuel rods. They were caught trying to find a buyer. Estimates suggest that as much as 50% of the defense budget was stolen by individuals. As President Boris Yeltsin pursued partnership

with the West, the Kremlin unveiled a new military doctrine that positioned its army as a regional force, no longer focused on global domination. The generals disagreed. They dreamed of resurrecting the army of their remembered Soviet glory, and open debate permeated the establishment. Russian troops, meanwhile, fought on a series of conflicts called the Southern Wars. Most Russians, including Ivan, barely heard about these military operations in faraway places like South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, Tajikistan,

and Dagestan, except for the one in Chechnya, a secessionist republic where a humiliating stalemate laid bare the limitations and the brutality of the sclerotic force. Waves of ill-prepared conscripts and young officers were sent into urban combat with guerrilla fighters, suffering heavy casualties while perpetrating gross human rights abuses, including forced disappearances, torture, rape, and extrajudicial executions. When Putin came to power, he too was eager to work with the West on security issues, even flirting with one day joining NATO.

But he was repeatedly rebuffed, in part because of the Russian military's poor human rights record, particularly in Chechnya, which Putin pacified by destroying its capital, Grozny. Russians often cite the hypocrisy of such claims, given America's own track record in Iraq and Afghanistan. During Putin's first two terms in office, oil and gas prices started rising, so the government finally had money to spend on military reform. In 2001, Putin appointed Sergey Ivanov, a former official in the KGB, and his successor agency the FSB, to the post of defense minister.

Ivanov pushed for shortening mandatory national service to 12 months, and for greater reliance on enlisted soldiers, contractniki rather than conscripts, to professionalize the service. But recalcitrants among the top brass continued to thwart meaningful change. Moscow's early attempts at rapprochement with the West were nearing their finale. In 2003, the Russian Defense Ministry issued a white paper that emphasized that the United States was again

the country's main security threat. The military budget increased fourfold. Corruption continued. If earlier military fraud revolved around theft and the sale of state assets, it took on a different dimension under Putin. Direct embezzlement of the budget. In August 2008, while Ivan was on summer vacation from the Academy, Russia invaded Georgia, ostensibly to stop Tbilisi from asserting control over the breakaway regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but more to prevent Georgia from joining NATO. Though the operation succeeded politically, the Russian military's performance was pathetic. There was horrible coordination between branches, poorly

executed flight missions, malfunctioning equipment, and deaths from friendly fire. Russia had not held a combat training exercise for about a decade. The embarrassment provided the defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukhov, an opportunity to push through New Look, a major reform campaign designed to make the military a leaner, more professional force by upgrading equipment, cleaning up the corruption, and reducing the numbers of officers and conscripts. Ivan would experience the reform's unintended consequences.

Hiring's froze, promotions ceased, and officer academies paused new enrollment. With no one coming up the ladder to relieve them, officers like Ivan remain stuck in lower ranks, forced to juggle multiple roles. At the same time, politicians talked while the top brass stole and all Ivan was left with was mindless paperwork and now character assassination. None of the corruption was cleaned up. Sergei Shoigu, whom Putin appointed as defense minister in 2012, did nothing to change this.

The military increased large-scale strategic exercises, but these functioned more like choreographed performances. Appearances outweighed reality. The most glaring example of this was the emphasis on metrics, verified by the photo report. Activities had to be photographed for documentation. That meant that a commanding officer was supposed to not only do his job, run an exercise, say,

but also produce a photo report about it to send to his commander the same day. The requirement covered everything from trainings to storehouse checks. There was no task more universally derided. The Soviet-era adage, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us, was reborn for the digital age. One former service member I spoke to, Alexei Olshansky, who was a warrant officer responsible for the training grounds of the 4th Guards Tank Division of the Western Military District used Photoshop to repaint old spotted camouflage uniforms into new, Shogu-favored Ratnik pixels so that his unit could recycle old photo reports.

I swear I'm not joking, he told me, laughing, about the proliferation of the practice. I've even seen photo reports verifying the making of photo reports. As the slideshows went further and further up the district ladder, Russia appeared to have the most fearsome army on Earth. But at the ground level, everyone despised the requirement. For commanders, it doubled the workload. For grunts, it meant an absurd amount of time wasted standing around posing. Many ignored the trainings themselves and just did the photo report. There was no time for both,

even for those commanders who actually wanted to work. The outcome verged on cartoonish. Typically, one man was chosen and photographed. He was sweeping the barracks, doing the dusting, cleaning the bathrooms, fixing the piping and raking the lawn. Everyone knew it was bogus. What kind of one-man company were they running? What a great guy who could do everything in two hours. Photographs of warehouse stores were taken from below, so it looked as if all the shelves were full when only the bottom one was. Early in the pandemic, when it wasn't clear whether the photo report should show a service member wearing a mask or not wearing a mask, Ivan just photographed the same scene twice and turned in both pictures, so the duty officer could pick which one he sent up the chain

of command. Ivan managed to transfer to a hardship posting, where his service counted double toward his retirement. He got a raise, but he still spent all his time making photo reports or filling out useless paperwork. The new base was even more grim than the last. It reminded him of the western movies he watched as a kid. Tumbleweeds, fields, deserts, broken swings.

The town was pathetic, zero infrastructure, two rundown bars. Ivan and Anna lived on the main street. From their second floor apartment, they could see the skate park downstairs. Next door there was an open field. In the winter it was a hockey rink, in the summer a soccer field. When Ivan went out with Sasha, their baby, he could sit on the bench and watch Anna inside. Sasha had been born a week late.

Anna had worried about her pregnancy constantly. She joked that she was so unable to let go that she must have willed the delay herself. Ivan decided to stop drinking in advance of the baby's arrival. He wanted everything to be perfect, including himself. He put the crib together and set up the nursery while Anna was in the hospital. He held her hand through her two-day labor, barely leaving her side. At work, Ivan spent his days shifting papers.

He would submit a spreadsheet about drivers, surname, first name, patronymic, license category, motorcycle, car, truck, car owner, service member or spouse. He would enter the data and send in the spreadsheet. But a week later the columns changed places and he was told to submit it again. I submitted it last week, didn't I? Submit it again. A week later the same thing.

That was just one piece of paper from one division commander. Multiplied by all the other chiefs, there were a billion pieces of paper. There were also endless loops of morning, afternoon, and evening roll call assemblies on the parade grounds. 8.45 a.m. for 9 a.m. flag raising, 1.45 PM for lunch, 3.45 PM afternoon roll call, 6.15 PM assembly. Then there were the officer meetings at 8 in the morning and 5.30 in the evening in the command headquarters tactical room, where everyone had to leave phones outside and watch slideshows. After those meetings, Ivan would be assigned more paperwork that he needed to submit in

the morning so that his commander to submit in the morning, so that his commander could go to the internal formation and the base commander could say to him, Did you do your job? And he could say, Yes. No one cared that they ended up sitting in their offices until 10 p.m., working on filling out useless columns. If anyone asked for the overtime they were entitled to, the commander would say, what, you overworked? Your shoelaces untied, uniform violation, reprimand. For an officer that reprimand was six thousand to seven thousand rubles or sixty-five to seventy-five dollars. No one wanted to pay that kind of money so

no one said anything. Still some of the new look reforms appeared to be working, and the Kremlin started to actively use the military to further its foreign policy aspirations. In 2014, Ivan had watched on TV as Moscow took advantage of Ukraine's domestic unrest and internal divisions to annex Crimea. A small elite unit of little green men

in Shoigu's newly redesigned green pixel uniforms stormed the peninsula. Their discipline and professionalism were obvious. No Russian lives were lost. Though Europe and America responded with sanctions and sanctimony, the Kremlin was able to thwart Ukraine's aspirations for ascension to the European Union and force the West to acknowledge Russia's opinion on geopolitical affairs. The operation's success produced a wave of patriotism. Most everyone in Russia, including Ivan, believed that Crimea was theirs, that it had only been given to Ukraine by a drunken Khrushchev.

It was a good way to get people to forget about their outhouses. Even opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny did not oppose the move. When unrest roiled eastern Donbass in 2014, the state-run media told Ivan that the Ukrainian province wanted to secede, but that Kiev wasn't letting it. Russia needs to help the ethnic Russians there, it intoned. The Kremlin sent in unmarked troops to support the separatists, but Ivan and Anna's TV showed them none of that. To them, in the distant reaches of their base, it all felt so far away.

Across Russia militarism was rising. After successes in Crimea and Donbas, Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015 to help Moscow's embattled ally Bashar al-Assad stay in power. There the military reforms again appeared to bear fruit. Demonstrating that the Russians were capable of small, quick operations and showing off the country's new weapons, strike fighters and ship-based cruise missiles fired from more than 900 miles away in the Caspian Sea. Russia's emboldened military intelligence agency, the GRU,

experimented with international influence campaigns. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians had felt their geopolitical influence wane. As former Soviet republics elected pro-western governments and chose to join NATO, Putin's early attempts to partner with the West ended in rebuke and shame. Now Moscow was returning to the international stage in triumph, and President Barack Obama, who had ridiculed Putin at news conferences, dismissing Russia as a regional power, had to shake his hand for photos in the United Nations General Assembly. Ivan wanted in on a Syria deployment.

It wasn't ideology or patriotism. Word had spread that most Russian soldiers did barely anything there. Most of the actual ground combat was done by Wagner, a paramilitary group that first cropped up in Ukraine. Though soldiers saw little violence, Ivan heard that the salary for an overseas assignment was double. He also heard that a combat veteran's certificate entitled a man to a monthly payment and two more weeks of leave per year, like a war vacation that continues to pay.

Ivan asked to be sent, but he was denied. It turned out that most people had to pay for the prestige of a rotation. If their new posting was bad for Ivan, it was even worse for Anna. She cooked their meals with the food rations they were allotted. The bases' stores of dry cereal were crawling with worms. The service fed them old fish. She didn't like the other officer's wives much and didn't have close friends or work that absorbed her. Was a far cry from her life in St. Petersburg,

reading Brodsky over wine in the kitchen with her friends. Still, she remained madly in love with Ivan and Sasha. It was the small family she had always dreamed of. She took a job in the municipality. She was committed to making their situation work. Around town everyone knew them. Anna and Ivan, Ivan and Anna. She was talkative, opinionated, and different.

When they got the chance, they took a trip to St. Petersburg to see Anna's friends. Ivan noticed immediately that the couple's apartment was nice. While they settled in, the husband continued working. He was an IT developer, programming something. On his desk there were two huge sleek monitors and virtual reality goggles. Ivan noticed that the man could get up and do something and then sit back down to work. He wasn't chained to his desk watching the clock. It was his choice how and when he worked. They were in St. Petersburg, but the man was talking to a colleague in America in English.

The couples went out for a beer. Ivan had thought he was making decent money as a military man, but he couldn't afford the kind of beer the husband ordered. The guy just glanced at the menu and chose the most expensive one, 400 rubles for a liter, roughly $4.50, and casually ordered some food for the table. The beer was delicious, much better than what Ivan was used to drinking. He realized that their standard of living was completely different, and of course he wanted this too.

When they got home to the base, Ivan found that he was bored with this little life they had built. He had always liked taking photos and started dabbling in Photoshop. He began teaching himself coding at night, helping Anna's cousins with marketing their small business and designing friends' websites for fun. Ivan and Anna made a plan. He would leave the military and become a web designer. He was almost done with his 20 years of service and would be eligible for retirement in 2023. He would bank the next two years of vacation and promised overtime, enroll

in the military's bullshit civilian retraining program before his contract ended, retrain, study web design himself and make appearances at the mandatory lectures, and take all his accumulated vacation time while looking for a civilian job. Then, by the time his contract was ending that summer, he would be settled as a design specialist with a new job and a higher income. They would move to a new city and start a whole new kind of life. In February 2022, Ivan registered for a retraining course that would start in September. His commanding officer signed off. All he and Anna had to do was wait and follow the plan.

But as Ivan would later say, Vladimir Vladimirovich decided this was a bad plan. He had a better one. Part 2. A Change of Plans On February 24th, news broke that Russia invaded Ukraine. Though everyone said they couldn't believe it, almost 200,000 Russian service members had been stationed at the border with Ukraine for weeks. The troops had been told it was just an exercise. But for some reason they had been handed weapons, medical kits, and gear. Around 4 a.m. local time, they began to roll across the border. The U.S. government estimated that Ukraine would

be overrun within days. When Ivan lined up in formation for assembly, the news was everywhere, but the commander made the announcement anyway. We have launched an operation to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine." On base, the reaction was muted. Things continued as if nothing had changed. The same morning, afternoon, and evening formations. The same unit commander meetings at headquarters with the Colonel. The same photo-report minutiae paperwork BS routine. Perhaps it will all be over in three days anyway.

Just like Crimea, they told one another. But very quickly it was clear that things weren't going the Kremlin's way. The second-strongest military in the world was failing to capture and hold territory. Russian troops were stalled on highways, unable to occupy major cities and losing equipment to Ukrainian farmers on tractors. Anna joined a wave of liberal Russians expressing outrage at the invasion on social media. A few hours after she posted a story on Instagram,

her supervisor called her and demanded that she take it down. Did she want to get her entire office in trouble? Did Anna not care about her own family at all? She agreed to remove it. They had been living in Putin's Russia for more than two decades now. They knew that their opinions didn't really matter, nor could they say them aloud even if they had them. Mass political gatherings of any kind had been effectively banned for almost a decade.

By 2022, solo pickets were the only allowed form of political expression. In major cities, thousands of people took to the streets anyway. Many were picked up in police wagons and given 15 days of administrative arrest. In the first two weeks after the invasion, more than 13,000 protesters across the country were detained. Still, many Russians did what they do best. They tried not to pay attention. In Ivan and Anna's small town, life went on as usual.

Most everyone was employed by the government in one way or another. No one was interested in losing a job to hold a piece of paper in the air. If before the war everyone used to say, yeah, we have a lot of problems, but at least there is no war, now they began to say, well, at least the war doesn't touch us. We live as we live. We have our own problems here. Across Russian bases in mess holes and offices during the twenty-four hour shifts at duty stations, bored and chatting to fill the time, everyone seemed

to just assume that because this war was happening, then this war was how it should be. They should just continue to practice their patience, that moral apathy they had been honing. Their TVs told them that things were going well, anyway. Those who followed the news on Telegram might talk about it with those they trusted. Did you see that the 90th Guard's tank division had been ambushed on the outskirts of Kyiv? Or that tanks were stalled on highways because they didn't have enough fuel? But no one talked explicitly about why. A person could not say that they were against what was happening.

At most they might wonder aloud, why do we need this war? Well, we have enemies in the West. But couldn't this have been handled more intelligently? Couldn't the Crimea scenario have been followed? Couldn't we have supported pro-Russian forces in Ukraine or done a coup? Maybe there's no other way. Many probably did not have a strong opinion. Collectively, Russians didn't seem to know what to think. The Independent Levada Center found that while 81 percent told pollsters they supported the

actions of the Russian armed forces in Ukraine, 51 percent felt pride for Russia, and 31 percent felt anxiety, fear, horror. 36 percent believed that the rest of the world condemned Russia for the conflict because those countries obey the United States and NATO, while 27 percent said it was because the world has always been against Russia. The West responded with sweeping sanctions. The ruble cratered. But if the move was intended to get the Russian people to rise up against Putin's regime, it failed. Of course, there were some radical patriots who truly supported the invasion, but there

were also careerists. And even if they had a negative attitude toward the war, there were plenty who thought, yeah, it's bad, but it's ours. Or, well, since my army is fighting, I can't betray it. The thing about men in the military is that they are military men. They believe the propaganda that Kiev was overrun with neo-Nazis, or that NATO was poised to invade Russia, or they just wanted to see combat.

But anyone who expressed surprise at Russia's initially dismal performance had obviously never set foot on a base. All those photo reports taken at clever angles, showing full shelves at empty warehouses. A decade of Shoigu's appearance over reality theatrics had left Russia's soldiers poorly trained and equipped. The reforms half completed and never fully rooted in military culture. It was much easier to walk in unopposed in Crimea, send in soldiers without insignia

to support separatists in Donbas, or dominate rebel militias in Syria through air superiority. Moreover, it didn't seem that Russia's armed forces actually understood what they were doing in Ukraine. Their commanding officers had not been given instructions or battle plans in advance. Rather than following traditional Russian military doctrine, the invasion looked like a botched operation based on faulty intelligence arranged by a few civilians in the Kremlin who had never served a day in their lives. It didn't even follow the basic tactical theory that Ivan learned as a cadet.

To go on the offensive, you needed to outnumber your opponent three to one. The Kremlin's reaction to failure was swift. In early March, the rubber-stamped parliament fast-tracked two laws imposing a jail term of up to 15 years for spreading fake news about the armed forces or discrediting its actions. Two weeks later, it amended the laws to effectively ban criticism of all Russian government actions abroad. Calling what was happening in Ukraine a war or an invasion was quickly made illegal. Instead, it would be called a special military operation,

made illegal. Instead it would be called a special military operation, SVO. The few bastions of independent media that held out through the last two decades were banned or closed one by one. Most of the foreign press quickly fled the country. By April, the authorities had detained 15,000 protesters. Russian courts had already made a practice of charging people retroactively under other laws for extremism, for engaging with undesirable organizations like those promoting human rights and personal liberties, and for social media posts made before those organizations were recognized as undesirable. Many started deleting their social media profiles completely. Others, like Anna, just censored themselves. Some horrified liberals left the country. It was only a matter of time before the authorities

would start sending those caught protesting to the front lines. At Ivan's morning formation, commanders began asking for volunteers to go to the SVO. The first group of roughly 30 soldiers from his base shipped out in April. At the beginning, the men stepped forward quietly on their own. No one forced them to do it. So everyone on the base was surprised when two of them returned not too long after deployment.

Ivan sought them out. It's completely savage, they explained. A total bacchanalia. Chaos. We are never going back there. The looting, the drinking, the utter lack of military discipline. Insanity. Their platoon leader had simply vanished.

The rest of the troops seemed to disappear too. I'm walking alone, one of them told Ivan. I don't know what to do. I see some dry rations lying there, so I took it and ate it. I thought, what the fuck do I need all this for? Picked up, packed up, and left. The man left his machine gun in Ukraine and owed a large fine for losing it. I don't care about the fine, he told Ivan, I'll pay it.

Just fire me faster. A few men became a horde, soldiers stampeding their way back to base. Men who had been scattered along different parts of the front line ended up running into one another at the airport in Moscow. They had fled on their own dime, unauthorized. Oh, you're alone too? Yeah, I'm not fucking going back there. Soldiers were just walking off the battlefield and returning to their bases.

Across Russia, entire units refused to fight. In late March, 300 servicemen from a unit from Bunaksk-Dagestan laid down their arms and left Ukraine. By April, 500 National Guardsmen had been dismissed for leaving Ukraine after just four days. That month, it became public that eleven members of Oman, a dreaded unit of riot police officers, had refused to deploy. In July, a hundred and fifty contract soldiers from the Fifth Separate Guards Tank Brigade

were dismissed after refusing to cross the border into Ukraine. At the time, a soldier could be AWOL for over a week without prompting a criminal investigation. So the early refuseniks didn't face immediate imprisonment for leaving the front. But they could be fired, and for many soldiers the threat of termination was deterrent enough. These men were often their family's only breadwinner. They would be giving up their entire life's accomplishments, their right to free healthcare, child care, apartments, extra veterans' payments, to step into the abyss and poverty of civilian life with no

training in anything other than posing for photo reports ripping up dandelions. But even those who actually wanted to be fired didn't necessarily get their wish. Depending on a man's supervisor, it wasn't always easy to terminate a contract, especially as rank increased. There was a ton of paperwork and headaches for everyone, especially the higher-ups. So there were men who drank a bottle of vodka, went to the police officers, and did something stupid in front of them so that they would be taken to the medical department where they would refuse a medical examination.

According to a provision in the military regulations, this would trigger an early discharge. Refusal of a mandatory medical examination is akin to the use of banned substances in Russia. A soldier could lose his driver's license and be forced to attend a drug treatment center. But if this allowed him to get out, that was not too high a price to pay.

Not everybody was ready to go to such extremes. There were those who thought, yes, it's bad, and I do not want to participate in it, but I've got a bit of time left until retirement, so I'll try to sit through it, and maybe no one will notice me and I'll just stay here on my base. Those people would have loved to quit, but on their terms, with all the pay, benefits, and so on, sure, the army they served in might be killing people, but they weren't the ones doing it. Just cogs in the larger mechanism. The existential question repeated, who should be held accountable for the will of one man? Russians had been honing their skill of tolerance, that patient waiting without truly expecting

anything to change. The thing is, they weren't asking for anything more than what they had worked hard for all those years. This would describe an overwhelming majority of Russian service members, and it included Ivan, who believed he could continue to follow his plan. They wanted to stay in a military that was fighting a war, collect their paychecks, get their retirement benefits, and leave without ever stepping foot on the front line. The phrase, to have your cake and eat it too, in Russian slang is,

to eat the fish and sit on the dick. Evidence that this hope was misplaced was mounting. After the first few months of the invasion, volunteers began to dry up, and the authorities began an enlistment drive. Plackards went up around the provinces heralding heroes of the SVO, calling men to join as private mercenaries or enlisted contractniki. Recruiters offered huge sign-up bonuses and promises of coffin money. The Ministry of Defense would ultimately produce sleek television ads that exhorted taxi drivers, personal trainers, and security guards to man up, showing footage of their boring lives and asking them,

is this the path you really want to choose? Each man then morphed into a kitted out soldier moving through fog. The video explained that the monthly payments started at $2,000, roughly triple the nation's average income. Another ad promised land tax exemptions, compensation for household utility bills, and sanitarium vouchers. The ministry placed ads in subway stations, at bus stops and in store windows. Anna saw them so often she had memorized them.

Strategically, the Kremlin could have started a mobilization right away to build up a reserve force, but it instead made the political choice to get by with the troops it had, hoping the war would not disturb too much for too many. It tried to entice more people into service. The Russian regime passed a law that allowed people over forty to serve in the armed forces. Even though a man couldn't call it a war out loud, the authorities promised that all combatants in the special military operation would be considered veterans under Russian law, entitled to a host of lucrative long-term benefits. Recruiters promised cash bonuses for heroic deeds, like a knocked out tank,

plane, armored personnel carrier, and so on, so on, so on. Conscripts who Putin had vowed would never be sent to the front lines were being cajoled by their platoon leaders to sign contracts so they could be sent out. We're all a team, they were told. We have to go defend the motherland. The money was good if you were lucky. If a soldier was 300, Russian military slang for injured, even slightly wounded, it meant three million rubles,

roughly $33,000. After a few months, there were fewer and fewer troops at Ivan's formation. Some entire outfits were gone. Unit leaders were asked to make their own lists of men to send out. The base needed to send fifty men, twenty men, five men, or twenty again. At HQ meetings at 5.30 p.m., even Ivan's commander was angry. Why am I always being asked to send people to the SVO?

The chief of staff told his subordinates to prepare a document saying that each of them Alexander was angry. Why am I always being asked to send people to the SVO? The chief of staff told his subordinates to prepare a document saying that each of them could not possibly send more people, as it would disrupt the operation of the base. Every time anyone so much as hinted at Ivan going, he refused. Only when a name appeared on a combat order was a soldier obliged to go to the front. Ivan was able to make excuses for most of his subordinates. This one had to attend one thing or another. This one has a back problem.

This one has a heart problem. This one has a family emergency. People could still go to the local medical commission to get certificates saying that they were unfit to go to the front. Some people dodged for months that way. When commanding officers were asked to make lists, they often took only the names of their men who would go voluntarily and turn those in. Other bases weren't as tolerant.

There were men who were called to formation at seven a.m. and asked to volunteer, and those who refused were forced to stand at assembly for more than fifteen hours. The military police were called and men were handcuffed, forced into buses, taken to the airport and flown to Belgarod. There they were told that they were going to war, with no belongings, no equipment, nothing. They stayed there for another twenty-four hours and then they made their own way back to base.

By August U.S. intelligence estimated that Russia had lost up to 80,000 servicemen in Ukraine, nearly 500 casualties per day. Pressure was building. Generals asked the colonels who asked their subordinates for lists upon lists to throw at the front. Russia's military strategy was unchanged from Soviet times. The appetite from the top for bodies was insatiable. Russian military slang for killed in action is two hundred. Many of the two hundreds were platoon leaders, younger officers, lieutenants, senior lieutenants,

and captains leading ill-prepared troops on the offensive. If a platoon commander lasts even three weeks at the front, that's happiness, soldiers said. Rumors spread quickly across group chats from officer school. Brutal careerists sitting fat in the back basements sent young officers to die without a second thought, without intelligence, without provisions. They were being given incorrect information. Their commanding officers were making basic tactical mistakes for no reason. An order has come from above.

You have to fulfill the order. You have to. Panyatna. That's it. What kind of losses would result? Irrelevant. Cruelty had long been part of the Russian military experience. Since the time of the Soviet Army, there had been no professional non-commissioned officer

corps to manage millions of conscripts. Officers used violence to enforce discipline, including a hazing system known as Diedovshchina, in which second-year conscripts, tets, or grandfathers, brutalized first years as part of the method of control. A 1994 Russian Academy of Sciences report found that a man entering the army had an 80% chance of being beaten, 30% in a particularly savage or humiliating form, and a 5% chance of being raped. Though the service time had been shortened and the first and second year distinction eliminated, this war resurrected the worst instincts of Russian military culture.

The violence was cyclical. The younger officers, who had been abused by their superiors in Russia's earlier wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, were now the generals. Reforms proved to mean very little to wartime command. The savagery of Dzyadovshina quickly returned. It soon got back to Ivan's base that commanders weren't showing much remorse over the deaths of so many of their subordinates in Ukraine. One time the men overheard their commander on the radio saying, Now I will send you my meat further toward your position. This guy

was calling his own subordinates meat. They threw a grenade in his hideout to kill him. It didn't work. The guy had always been a bastard so Ivan had no reason to doubt the rumors. Another commander earned the nickname the Butcher because of how many men he had lost. Once the Butcher was sitting in his basement playing some kind of racing game on his phone when a platoon commander who had just been on the attack, came in and told him, here, comrade colonel at the attack, there are this many 300s, this many 200s. The butcher continued playing as he listened,

then he sat straight up and shouted, duty guard, order me a pizza, and returned to his game. On August 1st, their base commander, Colonel S, asked Ivan and his platoon to line up in front of the podium during flag raising. In front of the entire assembly, he informed them that they were being sent to the SVO as infantry. They had been expecting something like this. The whole platoon refused on the spot.

They demanded to see a combat order that officially listed their names. Do you want to be terminated? S asked them. Since you refuse, write me a report of your refusal. Ivan believed that S was bluffing, that there was no combat order with their names. But if they wrote a statement of refusal, it would be the pretext to terminate their contracts. Many of his men did it anyway. They were young. They didn't have anything to terminate their contracts. Many of his men did it anyway.

They were young. They didn't have anything to lose but their lives. But Ivan had worked too hard for too long. He had completed nearly 20 years of service, more if you counted all his overtime. He was ready to start his new life. He was enrolled in retraining, taking coding classes online, trying to set up a Bitcoin mining business on the side.

Everything was within his reach if he stuck to the plan. Ivan consulted with a lawyer who told him that the army could fire him only for refusing orders. So in his refusal report he wrote that he hadn't actually refused. Instead he had misunderstood the task his commander had set out. He was not refusing to go to the SVO outright. He would go, but in his current position, which would keep him far from the grinding front line. He cited his failing health. For years, Ivan had a herniated disc. He wanted to be medically excused.

Since his experience with Pig, Ivan had been collecting documents, so he already had everything to prove that he had medical problems and was owed more than three hundred days of overtime. He took the paperwork to the Human Resources Office and submitted a statement requesting his time off. Ivan wanted to show that he was problematic. If the Army wanted to fire him, fine, but he would not go down without a fight. If it was more work for the army to terminate him than it was to let him continue serving, maybe it would leave him alone. Perhaps he could draw this out for the few weeks that remained until he left for retraining.

But when Ivan called the retraining center, he was told that his enrollment had been canceled. He couldn't believe it. He had the confirmation paper in hand, stamped, signed by the retraining center, signed by his supervisor, and signed again by the base commander. How could the center just cancel his admission? Was that even possible? He could only guess that the colonel's office had contacted the center, called him a bastard for refusing to serve, and that was it.

"'Can they really deny me retraining?' he asked the head of the program. "'Kind of,' came the reply." Russia's legal system uses the trappings of a rules-based order as window dressing for an authoritarian state. If you follow the complicated minutiae of the law to the letter, sometimes you can stand your ground and win. That gives people hope to keep trying, but other times the regime changes the rules in the middle without warning. It was as if you were playing chess with an abusive opponent. Sometimes you could pull a queen's gambit. Sometimes your opponent just smashed

you in the face with a board. Ivan decided he would fight back. He would sue Colonel S for denying him his rightful retraining if he tried to fire him. Where is the refusal report? S confronted Ivan at the parade grounds another morning. I'm going to sue you, Commander, sir, Ivan replied. S walked up to him, bent down to his ear.

Fuck you, he whispered before straightening up. That's it, get out of here. Don't show up at the base again. Ivan was suspended. His lawyer advised him to continue attending the morning formation so no one could accuse him of being AWOL. They would fight his dismissal in court as wrongful termination. Ivan never technically refused any official order.

If he were fired, he would be left with nothing. Ivan would show up to the base for roll call and go home for the rest of the day waiting for his termination. Ivan and Anna discussed it and tried to put a positive spin on things. It could be a lot worse. After he was fired, they would start their lives again, even with nothing. Across Russia, other officers were refusing to go to the front. A far more dangerous trend for the war effort than the refusal of an average contractnik. Officers who refused couldn't be discharged. They were too valuable. The state

had paid for them to be trained for this. Instead, all manner of pressure was applied to ship them out. They were mocked mercilessly in front of assemblies, marched around to the base's political affairs office for conversations, sent from there to different cabinets of commanders for more conversations. Everywhere, it was as if they were reading from the same playbook. What are you? A traitor? Abandoning your own subordinates? You're not a man. Pull yourself together, coward. Then threats. We'll put you in jail. We'll find a reason to put you away. We'll turn you into the prosecutor's office. Then harm.

We will take you out, handcuff you to a radiator, and shoot. The risks of refusing orders once a man arrived behind the ribbon, as the front was called, were even greater. They had all heard rumors about the pits, the basements where officers were held against their will for refusing to fight. There was also a bulletin board, which soldiers took to calling the wall of shame at the center of Ivan's base, displaying the portraits of these men. Everyone knew that the Russian military

had no squeamishness about extrajudicial reprisals. Throw a man in a ditch and shoot him, and tell his relatives he deserted. As rumors of Ivan's refusal to be sent to the front spread through their small town, people in the street butted into Anna's life. Your husband came up with the idea of not participating or something, they clucked. Soon the head of Anna's department again called her into her office. What do you mean your husband doesn't want to?

We must defend our country. He's in the military. That's his job." Anna wanted to shout at them that it was Ivan's job to protect his country, to defend the homeland. If something happened on their territory, she was sure Ivan would be the first to volunteer. But forcing a man to kill for no reason, it was a big difference. She didn't dare say any of that aloud. Yes, I understand, she would reply. We've made that decision, that's it. She tried to speak neutrally,

to stay detached without stirring up unnecessary conversations. She felt she had no other tools, only that she could deaden her bright eyes on command. Anna and Ivan were part of the state machine. If she wanted to survive, she could not start any fights, but she could not rhetorically cave either. This small shred of dignity was all that remained. On September 21st, Putin appeared on their televisions and announced a partial mobilization. There had been rumors for weeks.

The front was hemorrhaging men. I will repeat, we are talking specifically about partial mobilization, Putin decreed, trying to preempt the panic that followed. The priority will be those who have served in the ranks of the armed forces and have certain military specialties and relevant experience. Before being sent to the place of service, those who are drafted will undergo mandatory additional military training based on the experience of a special military operation. What Putin had not announced, but was written clearly on the defense ministry's website, was that the mobilization included a stop-loss measure,

in which personnel remained on active duty involuntarily until the end of wartime conditions. Military strategists weren't sure what took the Kremlin so long. With very few exceptions, no man could be terminated. No contracts would be broken. Ivan had no idea if his commanding officer had submitted his termination documents in time. Would his punishment be his salvation? Anna was at a girlfriend's house when Ivan called her.

Did you hear the news? Mobilization? She asked, though she already knew. Yes, he replied. She understood everything. She hung up. He's announced a mobilization, she told her friend. I'm off.

Anna got up, went outside, and realized she was floating. A kind of shock where she couldn't feel anything happening around her. A man walked toward her. You understand that mobilization is happening, she told him. What? he asked. You understand mobilization is happening, she shouted. She needed to get through to him, to someone, even the stranger.

She needed him to know that he should run. Previously, there were plenty of ways to skip mandatory national military service. A man could rack up deferments until he was over 27. If he went to trade school, if he went to college, if he entered a graduate program. If he was in college, he could sign up for the military department and graduate as a lieutenant in the reserves without ever serving a day. Defense Minister Shoigu did this.

He could get a health exemption, sometimes real, sometimes not so real. There had been no meaningful penalty for non-compliance with a draft notice, a fine of fifty dollars for ignoring it. But the mobilization threw all that into disarray. If the war's toll had been confined largely to military families who were mostly from the poorer interior of the country, now the regime was coming for the sons of the middle class. On the day of the announcement, 1300 people were arrested for protesting,

risking jail terms of up to 15 years. But most showed their opposition by fleeing for their lives. Plane, train, and bus tickets out of Russia were selling out quickly at astronomical sums. Everyone worried that the borders were closing. The land crossings to Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Finland swelled with carfuls of men. They waited for days.

There were rumors, arguments, stabbings, stampeds. When people died in line, ambulances couldn't make it through the crush to pick up the bodies. Telegram groups monitored the situation, advising which roads were blocked and which checkpoints had the shortest lines. The Georgian authorities closed one of the pedestrian crossings. Only people on wheels would be allowed in. Men traded belongings for bicycles and scooters and dumped them after reaching the other side, a mangled monument to their leaders' ambitions. Hotels and hostels in border towns were so full that people camped out on the floors of movie theaters,

mosques, and railway stations. In the first week after the partial mobilization, an estimated 200,000 people left Russia. But the population of Russia is 146 million, as many as 25 million of whom were draftable, including retired senior officers up to age 65. There were still plenty of bodies to choose from, people without the means to flee, or those without a good understanding of their rights.

The state called up 300,000 reservists at first, but the total permitted number of mobilized was classified. The opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, said it could number up to one million. The country's bureaucracy was not ready to handle such a Herculean undertaking. Officials did not have a strong reserve force, just lists of men who had done their national service and what their specializations were, which most hadn't maintained or refreshed for years or decades. It was clear that the authorities were targeting poorer regions. Quotas were levied on districts, which simplified the task, but it also incentivized the local

authorities to speed up their results. Instead of serving specific people with summonses, they started rounding up men en masse. They pressured them to go to the front and demanded that they turn over their documents in order to process them as draftees. In those circumstances, the men hadn't technically been served as summons and could leave, but no one told them that. Others were served draft notices at their places of employment by secretaries, some of whom were themselves on the verge of tears.

People received papers at their homes, at their parents' homes. Doctors were drafted. Sometimes the only medical provider in town was ordered to the front. Women too. Surgeons, gynecologists, dentists, all sent to Ukraine. By mid-October, 2,457 protesters had been arrested. Many of the men who were detained were given military summonses. 1,747 administrative cases were opened, and 58 people faced criminal charges, 10 of whom

posted their protest online. 36 military recruitment offices and other government buildings were set on fire. Penance for decades of national silence was beginning. Dutifully, the avalanche reported to local enlistment offices with their summonses. But those offices were also at a loss. Reservists needed to be served, processed, medically checked, switched to active status, sent to training, outfitted, housed and fed. But there didn't seem to be a plan in place to do any of that. The draftees arrived with their friends, their wives, their girlfriends,

their children, their mothers. Everyone was stressed and in shock. Where are they going? With whom? What should they bring? Do they really have to go? They had dependents, debts, health problems. People were arguing, shouting, demanding. Many were already drunk. It was obvious that the officials had no idea how to answer their questions. In Dagestan, protesters blocked a highway and besieged military personnel at the local draft office.

In the Sakha Republic, one military commissar was punched in the face. The men were corralled from enlistment offices into training facilities that were ill-prepared to receive them. There were no medical checks, or only perfunctory ones. Not enough first aid equipment, zero or limited training, not even properly demarcated areas for sleeping. Families hurried to buy the men's supplies. Camping store shelves emptied out. The mobilized gathered money from friends and family to equip themselves with basic boots, jackets, and yoga mats to sleep on. From the outside, it was easy to see the assembled men as a faceless, zombified Russian mass lining up to board helicopters and transport planes to their own deaths.

But of course, it was never that simple. Many of these civilians – drivers, tileers, plumbers, security guards, computer programmers, miners – never wanted to end up in Ukraine. They barely had any opinion on politics. They did not know or even believe they had rights. Once their summonses came, they did not think they had a choice. It was a command issued by their government. I'm an honest person, an actor who was mobilized in the first days told me. I've never once

in my life had any police record, nothing, not even any fines, ever. If someone gives me a paper and an order from the government, I couldn't imagine I would just break the law. When I asked another man, a municipal office worker, why he hadn't run when he was served his summons, he was dumbfounded by my question. How would I have expected that idea to even occur to him? I work four jobs just to survive, he told me. I had never left my town. I couldn't even afford to travel to Moscow two hours away. Where would I have gone?

And how? The day after the mobilization was announced, Colonel S called Ivan back into the tactical room where they held command meetings. All the deputies, the commanders, and the leadership of the base were in attendance sitting at their desks. Ivan took a seat at the first table.

They handed him a piece of paper. Familiarize yourself, Comrade Captain, he was told. Your name is on the combat order. Though he saw his name and that he was clearly ordered to leave for the area of the special military operation, Ivan read every single word on that paper. Everyone had to sit and wait for him. He was in no hurry. Do you refuse?

No, I'm not refusing. He left to tell his wife. Anna was already there when Ivan arrived at home. I'm going to be sent away, he told her, and that's it. No, they won't send you, she said. Right, I don't know what, right, that you refuse, right anything, everything, you can't go. Anna started looking for help on telegram channels, writing to every human rights organization she could think of, searching for keywords like defector, refugee. She wanted to get Ivan out of Russia, but his passport, like those of other officers,

was kept in a safe at the military base. Anna knew it was probably hopeless, but she needed to do something. The Internet was alight with promises. Anyone who hates Putin's path and loves liberal democracy is welcome in Germany. Germany's Justice Minister Marco Bushman tweeted on the day the mobilization was announced. Nancy Faeser, the German Interior Minister, echoed his vow. Deserters threatened with serious repression can, as a rule, obtain international protection in Germany. She told a German newspaper the next day.

Anyone who courageously opposes Putin's regime and thereby falls into great danger can file for asylum on grounds of political persecution. American officials made similar pronouncements. Perhaps politicians had forgotten how many people actually take them at their word. Anna emailed organizations in Germany and France. Russian NGOs, bots or humans, she had no idea. No one answered. She had always been their dreamer.

While Ivan was practical and goal-oriented to the point of pigheadedness, he didn't think running away was realistic. He didn't have his passport. Where could he hide? If the authorities wanted to, they would find him anywhere. An officer in war was a valuable commodity. Ivan believed he had two choices, go to jail for refusing combat orders or go to the front. If he ended up in jail, they would send him to the front anyway.

But first they would befriend him with a mop and then send him as a Zek, stormtrooper, the convicts who were being rushed to the front line. It had happened to the uncle of a friend of his. Ivan resigned himself to going to Ukraine. Let's figure out a code to communicate, Ivan told Anna. He assumed that contact would be difficult. Everything could be intercepted, so there would be no cell phones, no texting or calling or talking.

He remembered some codes from his training. If I say 103, it means it's okay, he explained. If I say 102 that means I'm going on a combat mission so there's a chance I'll be out of touch for a long time. There's a chance I might not get in touch at all. 102 is downright serious and 105 is I love you. Anna dutifully wrote the numbers in her notebook through tears. is I love you." Anna dutifully wrote the numbers in her notebook through tears. Ivan wasn't sure exactly when he was leaving. The military transport aircraft were notoriously unreliable. He would go to work, go to formation, go home, go back, go to formation and wait. A few days later he got home and told Anna he had been informed that they would go the next morning. We have one night left, he said.

Anna did not want to believe it. Please, can we stay up all night, she begged. Let's have tea, like always. Just be close to each other. Let's not go to sleep, please. Anna gave him a little icon and a cloth prayer to keep in his flak jacket. When you're really scared, she told him, imagine you're in a dome. I'm protecting you.

Just imagine my love protecting you from everything. They stayed up all night just looking at each other. Anna, Ivan whispered. The hardest thing is that I don't know how I will kill people like us who have the same Sasha. Why would I have to do that? I won't be able to. Please, I want you to live.

Please, she told him. Please, just survive. Part Three. The Battle for the Boot. There was little pomp to their departure from the base. Ivan was one of three junior officers in the transport helicopter. All of them had gotten a reputation for refusing to go to the front. These scoundrels were joined by two dozen contractniki in what they jokingly called the Flight of the Rogue Officers. Ivan had always been a nervous flyer, but he didn't

feel anxiety anymore. He was busy making lists of things he would need to acquire to ensure that he would see Anna and Sasha again. The troop transport made multiple stops as it crept across Russia. Along the way, Ivan started buying things to augment his military-issued gear. He got kit from an injured Wagner fighter who had just returned from Mariupol. The guy sold him everything he had, body armor with a rope and a carabiner, as well as a tactical belt and a first aid kit. The mercenary didn't rip him off.

He even went to the airport to meet him because he knew Ivan was in a rush. Ivan also bought himself Loa boots. He had read online that they withstood shrapnel from improvised explosive devices. him because he knew Ivan was in a rush. Ivan also bought himself lower boots. He had read online that they withstood shrapnel from improvised explosive devices. He wasn't sure it was true, but anything was worth trying. He bought an axe and a knife. He tried to cajole the men around him to equip themselves too. Guys, you're going to war, you could die.

Of course the bullet is a fool, he quoted Alexander Suvorov, one of Russia's most famous generals. But the odds go up when you have normal equipment. I can't, they replied, I'm bad, man. Ivan thought it was depression. Maybe he just wanted to be alive a little more than they did. Maybe, as Anna had said, he really was greedy for life. Ivan's transport truck rolled across the border into Ukraine with little fanfare.

Just one and a long convoy on a broken road. It had taken them three days to reach this point. They were never briefed on anything, just loaded, unloaded, and reloaded into helicopters, planes, and trucks. The front was squalid. Their final stop was a tent encampment somewhere in a strip of forest. But even there, Ivan spotted Ukrainian quadcopters overhead. There was trash everywhere, toilet paper, bottles,

rations wrappers, boxes, boots in the grass. Ivan was baffled. Didn't these men realize that the Ukrainians would see this crap? They would throw their own shit back at them in the form of rockets at their heads. Some lieutenant colonel from troop services with a mustache came by in an old Soviet car to welcome them. Settle in here and they'll come get you, he said as he drove away. And Ivan soon discovered an immutable fact, war can be exceedingly boring.

The newly arrived men set about collecting the trash. The Russians had deployed across the front corresponding roughly to the military district that the troops were from. So a base from the Leningrad region would be at a different spot than a base from the Novosibirsk region. As a result, everyone knew someone when he got to the front. The newly mobilized Mobiks were usually distributed to units from their own region. When a new shipment of soldiers arrived from their base,

the units sent their buyers, scouts, to plug holes in their rank and file. They would come by looking for a rifleman, or an RPG gunner, or a tank driver, and so on. The men who weren't chosen by scouts passed their time talking or drinking whatever they had managed to bring. One by one, everyone was selected until just the rogue officers were left. Maybe no one wants us. That was fine with them. They had no cell reception, but Ivan took photos of everything. The trench, the tents, the coffee, thinking he would find a way to send them to Anna. After a few days of loafing around,

they decided to go to a village they saw on their drive over. They stopped the first civilian car they saw. Will you give us a ride? The older man obliged. Ivan imagined it from his perspective. Big guys with machine guns sauntering down the street. Who could refuse? The driver had no idea that the officers hadn't even been issued ammunition.

In town it seemed that everything was set up to service the front. There were power banks charging and a big plastic tank where people gathered to get water. The post office was selling SIM cards so soldiers could call home. A girl at the local shop was even running a currency transfer service. Families in Russia could transfer money to a Russian account, and for a commission the girl would give the soldiers the cash. They bought water, bread, and sausages.

It felt to Ivan just like being in Russia. The same small villages, the same old Soviet cars, the same broken roads. Though he tried to ask how things were, he knew the locals wouldn't tell him the truth. It didn't occur to Ivan to consider himself an occupier. After all, he was there against his will. Guilt is a peacetime luxury. They had been at the front for five days when Colonel S himself arrived. He was looking for Ivan personally.

I need you to write a report, as told him. What report? Didn't you file a lawsuit against me? They need you to write an additional report. We'll take a picture of it and send it in. Ivan couldn't even fathom it. A report? Like on a paper with pen? He didn't have those. They didn't even fathom it. A report? Like on a paper with pen?

He didn't have those. They didn't even have water. This clerical work seemed like such absurdity. They could all die right now. Comrade Colonel, what report, Ivan said? I'm already at war, what more do you need? The Colonel looked at him. What lawsuit, Ivan said?

It's over, I'm already here. Then is everything okay, S asked. Yeah, everything's fine, Ivan said. He didn't need to consider it. He had been on bad terms with S in Russia, but in war he'd better not look for any enemies. The next day, the mustachioed lieutenant colonel returned and found Ivan and his fellow rogue officers. Guys, we totally forgot we had three

officers here. Completely forgot, he said. Let's go. The Mobics have arrived. He will train them. After Ivan left, Anna remained immobile on the floor of their hallway. The pain came from inside a place she didn't even know was empty, and she began to howl. She lay there without sensing time or space until she realized she needed to watch Sasha. She got up and walked back into the kitchen. A friend arrived to try to help. Anna heard the sound of an aircraft flying past the house. She understood that

Ivan was on it. Her friend put her in bed. The next day, Anna tried to go to church to pray for Ivan, but she was too ill to make it. She called the only psychiatrist in their town. I need medication, she told the doctor. I can't handle it. I just can't handle it. She walked to the drugstore and found a line of women out the door waiting for the same pills. I'll give them to all of you without a prescription, the pharmacist announced. I have a son there myself. Anna took two different antidepressants at a time. They made her ill, but she was hollow anyway. A blunt, stinging pain along with bitter hatred.

She despised everybody, but especially people who talked about the war. It filled her with a kind of rage she'd never experienced. She couldn't criticize the SVO or say anything about the government. She couldn't scream or grab hold of the person speaking and shout, you've never sent a loved one to their death, you bitch. You'll never know what it's like. Everything she felt was compounded by the communal silence, the feeling that everyone was indifferent or resigned or worse. She was horrified by the response of some of the women she knew.

One of them threw her husband a party the night before he deployed, gathered friends to see him off for the lavish dinner. Anna couldn't believe it. Celebrations. The worst part is he didn't fly out that day. He came back, the woman told Anna. I was like, why the hell are you back? I've already seen you off.

It wasn't just enthusiasm. There were plenty of stories of women who ran pressure campaigns to persuade their husbands to enlist. There were plenty of stories of women who ran pressure campaigns to persuade their husbands to enlist. Men earn money in war, and you sit at home and get a measly thirty dollars, they chided, pointing to a neighbor's new lotta. They threatened divorce. They drove their husbands to their wits' end.

There were mothers who escorted their sons to the enlistment office, sometimes against their will. One woman, the story went, sent her husband to Wagner, and then took the payout for his dead body. She married another man who joined Wagner and met the same fate. Then she married a third and a fourth. She became rich. Her social media was covered in their photos.

Oh, my dearest, you are remembered, loved, mourned. The government's recruitment propaganda campaign targeted women, too. The regional authorities took pictures of the wives and children of dead soldiers who were given coffin payments and ran them on telegram channels. They didn't seem to realize how awful it looked when a young family stood there holding ten thousand rubles, roughly a hundred dollars, with the caption, We help the widow of the man who died for our country. Still, for such impoverished people, even such a sum meant something.

Besides, a mother who received her son's body in a zinc coffin did not want to think that her son was an occupier. She wanted to believe that her son was a hero. State propaganda convinced her and her entire social circle that her son was a hero. State propaganda convinced her and her entire social circle that her son died for a reason. Not for the ambitions of Vladimir Vladimirovich, not for his power, not for his money, but as part of World War III.

And she could find some semblance of comfort in that. Russian children were already exposed to war glamor from birth. Playgrounds with decommissioned tanks, instilling in them that war is normal, that military hardware is normal. But after the invasion, the campaign entered overdrive. In the 2022 budget, about $130 million was designated for things like military propaganda lessons, the acquisition of state insignia for schools, and the funding of children's

patriotic events. In 2023, this rose to more than $560 million. In September 2022, the Kremlin rolled out conversations about important things, compulsory lessons that would focus on cultivating patriotism, love of country, and the correct history. Putin taught the first lesson himself at a school in Kaliningrad. Two months later, the Education Ministry announced a new course in schools that would become known as Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Motherland. Secondary school students would be required to shoot guns with real ammunition. They would learn how to handle Kalashnikov rifles, throw hand grenades, and operate drones.

At school assemblies, administrators lined up children in the form of the letter Z, Russia's symbol of support for the war against Ukraine. Schools installed hero desks in classrooms, featuring images of Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine. Active-duty soldiers as well as Wagner mercenaries were often invited to speak to students. Publishers began scrubbing mentions of Ukraine from history textbooks. A campaign for school children to collect empty cans to make candles for soldiers in the trenches was a success. It didn't stop with children. New patriotic shows and segments aired regularly on Kremlin-curated television. Russia fights only defensive wars, people assured themselves, a myth cultivated since

Soviet times. Across government offices, state employees were subject to propaganda. At Anna's office, the bosses forced everyone to watch a movie explaining why Russia had no choice but to save Ukraine, showcasing gruesome injuries that the fascist Ukrainian regime had supposedly inflicted against ethnic Russians. Severed hands, injured children. They blocked the room's exit.

Anna put her head down on the table and refused to look at the screen, but her coworkers were captivated. Is it really so? they exclaimed. What a nightmare! Anna wondered how sick in the head they had to be to believe this. After Anna's first social media post at the start of the war, she decided that she would not post her own content anymore. When she reposted someone else's,

the head of her department called her in and threatened her with prosecution for discrediting the military unless she removed the repost. If you say anything again, you'll get a criminal record, the department head told her. This is not a joke. Delete it. Then her direct supervisor called her, I'm begging you.

I'm asking you as a human being, please don't put my head on the scaffold. I'm responsible for you. Anna deleted the repost. And so, whether it was propaganda or intimidation, the ensuing silence was the same. Anna stopped speaking to her work colleagues. But after Ivan deployed,

Anna stepped through the mirror. The same people who had cursed and heckled her when rumors spread that Ivan was trying to avoid fighting now told Anna what a hero he was. They told her how much they respected her, how they valued her family's sacrifice. Don't worry dear, they coot. He'll come back. He's defending the country. She wanted to spit venom in their faces. Seven platoons formed up in front of a forest clearing. It was mid-October, warm, muddy, and lush. The Russians had set up a hive of tents, constructed a firing range out of the earth, and organized the mobiques. The three rogue officers were assigned their people.

Arrest were led by lieutenants who had themselves just been mobilized. The men were nothing like Putin promised. Only some of them had military experience. Others had zero training. Ivan set about choosing his three squad leaders so that when he set a goal they would be the ones to corral the ten men under them to the task. In the encampment, many of the men were drinking. Ivan couldn't blame them, but he told his squad leaders that they should tell everyone

that there was no alcohol in his platoon. Drunks were capable of anything. A drunk could see a squirrel run into a tent and throw a grenade at it. And it was worse with civilians who had been handed draft papers out of the blue. The mobilized, when they are drunk, they are not human, Ivan explained. If anything shoots, you have my permission to fire. If a drunk walks in our direction and doesn't follow your command to stop, shoot in the air and I'll come out.

If he still doesn't understand, we'll end him. The next morning, Ivan and his platoon reported to a company wide formation of the training grounds. There were obstacle courses and stations for machine gunners, snipers, and RPG gunners. Ivan had assumed that there would be specialists conducting the training for the different activities. But instead, Colonel S tasked him with teaching his own men most of it.

Ivan had never been in the infantry, but he tried to remember what he could from the academy. He taught his men how to run, how to shoot and cover. Keep the shooting constant. When you take a position, try to shoot single shots so that you don't use up ammo quickly, so that the enemy keeps his head down. There's no difference between firing three rounds in one. Periodically, without aiming, just shoot once.

Ivan drilled with every man he had. This had nothing to do with patriotism or benevolence. It was all in the service of self-preservation. Each one of them could end up being by my side in a fight and making the difference to my life. But the opportunities for practice were abysmal. While the Ukrainians actually trained with their American javelins, the Russians treated their missiles like treasure.

Ivan heard that the anti-tank specialists got to train on one only once. He was told that a single mortar cost 500,000 rubles, roughly $5500. Later Ivan saw a specialist totally miss his shot and cost everyone their cover. The Ukrainians hit back and ten Russian soldiers were killed. But as the butcher was known to quip before an operation, the female reproductive organ will bear more children, but the rocket is expensive. The Russian military remained the Russian military, no matter the location. Ivan found that he was always being called somewhere to write a report,

attend some meeting, stand in a formation. Useless tasks as if they were on their boring base in Russia, not five kilometers from death on a stranger's land. It was always raining or miserable. Ivan was constantly trekking through mud and puddles. It was impossible to remove the grime from his boots. Still, he made it a point never to complain. Got it, he chirped.

That's right, Comrade Colonel. He answered every request, attended every formation, kissed every ass he had to. My life depends on me right now. It's clear what sabotage leads to. The basement pits were never far from anyone's mind. A few weeks passed before they were told to pack up. They would be going to join their new units. The buyers were coming back and the guys gathered their kit.

Scouts drove in and looked them over. Are you Captain- Yes, Ivan said. First Battalion, the scout shouted, and Ivan climbed into the carrier. The town they arrived in looked as though it had been a nice place, the kind Ivan would have loved to visit in peacetime. People had taken care of their homes and gardens. They grew grapes on canopies over their carports.

Now the whole place was pockmarked by battle. Houses leaning sideways, fences collapsing, roofs shattered by shells. The Russians didn't know or didn't care about the street names. They called them by numbers, first, second, third. Ivan was directed to head along First Street to command headquarters. The road was marked by a tank that was wrecked when the Russians drove it over a pile of their own mines. As he walked, he picked up an apple from the ground and bit into it.

It tasted so sweet. He saw a familiar face, a sergeant from his base, call sign Fiend. Fiend recognized him too. They greeted each other enthusiastically. It was nice to run into someone from home. Fiend showed Ivan around a dilapidated house the soldiers had occupied. They sat in the kitchen. Rations wrappers and half-open containers the soldiers had taken from

the village cellars lay on the table. Between onions sat a grenade. Ivan took a photo with his phone, amused by the oddity of his new reality. Everyone was smoking, lazing around on the floor. They explained that they had nothing to do but wait. What if a shell hits this house, Ivan asked? You could at least sit in the basement. It's a roulette, they replied.

There have been cases where people hid in basements. The mortars didn't hit you, but they hit the concrete foundations and kill you anyway. Nah, I'll probably sleep in the basement, Ivan decided. He went to have a look. Ten feet away from the basement entrance, a grad was stuck in the ground. The men were sleeping next to an unexploded rocket. There's a toilet there, but don't use it or it may detonate, the guys called to him. Back at the table, Fiends started explaining the setup.

The battalion's headquarters were across the street. Although they were supposed to be a specialized reconnaissance unit, they were now in charge of initial assaults, the first group to take territory. It had turned into a bloodbath. For months they had been trying to take a windbreak in the rolling farmland that everyone called the boot for its shape. By early October they had already been repelled half a dozen times and taken a lot of casualties. They knew they would make another attempt, they just didn't know when.

The boot was heavily fortified. The Ukrainians had dug extensive tunnels. It's fucked there, a guy who survived the last offensive told Ivan. It's not like you just walk in and that's it. There are a ton of guys sitting down there. Their commander, whose call sign began with an L, so we'll call him Lion, was another man Ivan knew from home. Lion had been a tanker but ended up as a commanding officer in infantry.

He left their base in August as a major and was promoted to lieutenant colonel during his time in the SVO. At the base he had been an asshole, but the guys agreed that as far as commanders who stayed safe in the rear trenches go, Lyon was a good one. He pushed back against his superiors when he was given stupid orders. Fiend relayed a story in which Ly Lion refused to send his men forward during one assault on the boot. There's no option, Lion shouted.

It's a meat grinder there. The guys believed that they had been punished for Lion's intransigent refusals, assigned to worst patrols at the point of contact, but they didn't mind. At least their commander didn't think of them as trash. By the spring, Lion would be dead. Ivan headed to the command HQ to officially receive instructions. Lion was in the basement, the walls covered in rugs. I'm here, Ivan reported.

Well, Lion looked him over. You can't get the fuck out now, can you? That's right, Ivan replied. Lyon passed him a list of his platoon personnel and dismissed him. Ivan asked his new deputy to collect the rest of the men who were living all over the village. It took an hour to assemble everyone. When his 30 men lined up,

Ivan learned they were all contractniki. Ivan addressed them. Okay, men, let's work. Let me say right off the bat that I have no combat experience. We'll get it together. Whoever has combat experience, step out and tell me about it. One man stepped forward.

His call sign was student. He had fought before in one of the southern wars of Ivan's childhood. He was a machine gunner there. Are you ready, Ivan asked him? Yes, I'm ready. You'll help me if I need it. Yes. The assembly was over.

The guys explained that over near a fence there was a can. If you put your phone on the can, sometimes you could catch cell reception. Ivan went over, opened WhatsApp and messaged Anna. 103. It hadn't taken Anna long to quit her job, leave the base and move home to her family after Ivan's deployment. She started trying to renovate their apartment

to give herself something to do. Before Ivan left, he removed his wedding ring and gave it to Anna for safekeeping. She wore it on a chain around her neck like a talisman. As the child of a deployed officer, Sasha was placed into a good daycare right next to their apartment. They could have their pick of any in the city, and Anna chose the closest one. It disgusted her when the other parents fawned over them during pick-up and drop-off.

She avoided their attempts at conversation. Anna kept her phone on her at all times with the volume all the way up. It was always charged. She continued to watch telegram channels and contact groups about Ivan's case. She corresponded most with an organization called Edite Lessem, which worked specifically

to help service members escape. The group's name could translate as Get Lost, Go Fuck Yourself, or Go By The Forest. It was started by Grigori Svairdlin, an exile from St. Petersburg who had fled the war and gone to Tbilisi, Georgia. Svairdlin graduated from college as a reserve officer, the same method that Defense Minister Shoigu employed to avoid actual service, and had the idea for the project within days of the mobilization.

He wanted to find a way to help people not go to war. It was a way to take civic action, to prevent Ukrainian deaths and the Russian army's atrocities, as well as to save Russian lives. If they were all guilty of paving the way to this war, they could at least atone by trying to prevent the greatest amount of harm. When he announced the idea on social media, Sverdlin immediately received hundreds of replies and volunteers. Designers, I.T. people, psychologists, lawyers, people who had cars and offered to drive deserters,

those who wanted to contribute money to help evacuate those who didn't want to fight. Messages poured in. I live near the border with Kazakhstan and I know how to bypass the checkpoint. Please keep my contacts but delete all the messages. Within a week, Edita Lesim had developed a database of information about the rights of service members, the mobilized and their families, advising people on how to avoid their draft papers and how to leave the country. Edita Lesim had helped junior officers escape Russia, but never anyone as high-ranking as

a captain. Anna lived from one phone call to the next. She slept fifteen minutes at a time, fifteen minutes of sleep and then awake, fifteen minutes of sleep and then awake. In her dreams, there was only Ivan, only war and only death. She started scratching her wrists and ankles. They were covered in blood. They would scar and shimmer like burns. The guys in Ivan's platoon were, as he put it, decent men. They had all picked their own call signs when Ivan passed around a sheet of paper. Among them were Bareblood, the deputy platoon leader and first squad commander.

Fiend, second squad commander. Kiba, third squad commander. Achilles, Apricot, and Student, machine gunners. Frost, old man in space on the RPGs. Hunter, paddle, shepherd, and tin man, rifleman. Richlake, the medic. When Ivan talked to them, they explained that they hadn't been dragged there against their will.

Some were career enlisted. Others signed three-month contracts, thinking they could make some money and go home. After signing, they were told to report back the next morning for transport to the SVO. They never even met the commander of the base they were assigned to. None had received the training they were promised. Ivan couldn't believe they chose to be there. You do realize you can die in a war, he asked. This isn't a job where your failure is your termination. Your failure in the army is your death. Yeah, yeah, they replied. They told Ivan that they fought in another man's war for the economic well-being of their children

After a while as more and more of their comrades were killed that war would become theirs as well It was more than just the money The government promised that their children could be admitted into schools normally reserved for those with high marks bribes or connections Back home Shepherd was a rancher. He bred sheep and horses. It paid well, about 400,000 rubles, $4,400 a month in profits, which was four times what Ivan made. Shepherd explained that he had five children

and eight sisters and brothers. He made a decent living, but he organized weddings for his siblings and helped their children. Now, one of his daughters was trying to get into the police academy. Shepherd explained to Ivan that he had been told it would be much easier for her to get in if he was at the SVO. Three months for her whole future. The mobilization had put an end to these ideas. Now every kontratnik was obliged to serve until the end of wartime conditions, which

could continue indefinitely. The platoon got along fine. When someone went to town to buy something, he brought back extras for the rest of the men. People would drop by and grab coffee or a cookie and talk. They didn't have much else to do. Humanitarian parcels were often passed through Ly Lion's basement, though they had already been picked over by others along the way.

The good stuff never made it to the front line. Instead, they got chocolates and socks, and sometimes they got postcards from school children who wrote to them during patriotic lessons. Ivan took one to his kitchen of grenades and onions and pinned it up on the wall. Soldier, come home, it said, accompanied by a child's drawing. Remember, we're waiting for you. He thought it might cheer someone up, but when he looked at it, he just felt empty. It wasn't long before Ivan was summoned back to Lion's basement and shown drone footage of the boot.

They could see the trench full of Ukrainians in the frames. Lion told them that the two companies had been assigned different segments of the boot. One company would move first, then the other like a pincer to force the Ukrainians to retreat through the middle. Lion's three platoons would divide their section into three parts and do the same pincer move on a smaller scale. Ivan and his three squad leaders re-watched the drone footage more closely. The ground was scorched from past battles, and overturned armored personnel carriers were scattered around the burned brush. The guys who participated in previous attempts pointed out where the Ukrainians had positions

earlier, a pumping station and a vineyard which housed a sniper's nest. Ivan and his deputies agreed that they would run in shooting, throw a grenade at the Ukrainian trench, take the point and wait for reinforcements. It wasn't a brilliant strategy, but Line didn't care. They just had to advance. 90 lives for two miles of Earth. Previous attempts to take the boot had been on foot. They had crawled across minefields and been overpowered. Now, without radically increasing their numbers, they were told that they would ride in with

a tank which would clear the mines with a visor that dragged on the ground and raise the topsoil. Command said the men would walk behind it. If it snagged a mine, the vehicle would take the impact. Everyone agreed it was idiotic, like banging your spoon on your plate and yelling to the Ukrainians, I'm here, I'm here. They had two days to train, so they went back to the range. During one practice, they were told to line up in formation.

The general, in charge of their entire operational direction, strode out to address them. Comrades, we've got to get the boot, he began, leaning against a tree with his hands on his stomach. I know exactly how you feel. I have a son in the airborne. I was storming a forest the other day, ran into a wooded area just like this myself. He told them not to worry.

Another company would come in from the right side. We're gonna have artillery like you've never seen in your lives. There will be thirteen tanks. You're going to be covered from all sides. Reconnaissance reported that there are no more than fifteen people in this forest belt. There are only mobilized men guarding it. Don't worry, they are even more afraid than we are. They'll run away as soon as they see you."

Ivan knew this was a lie. Their own drones had shown them the troop strength and the extensive tunnel system. as soon as they see you." Ivan knew this was a lie. Their own drones had shown them the troop strength and the extensive tunnel system. He knew from school that any stronghold should be attacked by 280 artillery shells, not fired just in the general area, but at an actual target. And only after that would the infantry, at three times the defense's strength, go on the offensive. Ivan had watched the YouTube videos of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade of Ukraine, formerly

known as Azov. He saw how real warriors took territory, the ones who were fighting to liberate it. But Ivan didn't want any territory. He didn't want to do a particularly good job. He wanted to find a hole to sit in. The main thing was just to survive. The night before the operation Ivan prepared his supplies. He took apart all the magazines, wiped down the springs, oiled them and carefully hung all the

grenades in the proper way. He put extra ammunition in his backpack along with his first aid kit. He distributed medical supplies to his squad leaders. They would leave their phones in Lyon's basement in a bag so no one could see their geolocation. Before Ivan handed his phone in, he sent Anna a message. 102. When Anna got the message, she remembered a video she saw online of a psychologist who said that we go crazy

the moment we allow ourselves to go crazy. She told herself that Sasha couldn't lose two parents at once. Take yourself in your hands. You have a mission. She grabbed herself, slapping herself on the cheeks. Without that she would stay still, looking at the same point on the wall like being submerged in water. Sasha was worried, clearly aware that something wasn't right. For that, Anna beat herself more. If Ivan had to survive, so did they. She scrolled the news on Telegram endlessly. Russians were on the retreat and the defensive. That month, General Sergei Serovkin, previously known as the Butcher of Syria, had been named Russia's overall commander in Ukraine.

Serovkin had a reputation for efficiency and brutality. Under his command, the Russians began constructing what would come to be known as the Serovkin Line, miles of concrete pyramids known as dragon's teeth and deep ditches called tank traps for the defense of their supply lines. They would build miles of trenches with pillboxes, small fortifications that their troops could shoot from.

The newly mobilized would be put to work. Units could rotate, even rest. There would be reinforcements from men like Ivan. The commander of Ukraine's armed forces, General Valeriy Zeluzhny, stated bluntly, Russian mobilization has worked. It is not true that their problems are so dire that these people will not fight.

They will. But the mobilization had also awakened the ire of some of the most sympathetic quarters of society. Women. Mothers of newly enlisted conscripts, wives of mobilized men gathered on telegram groups to coordinate humanitarian packages. Memories of the mothers of conscripts

from the Chechen War who moved like ghouls in the dark of the eastern Caucasus Mountains looking for the bodies of their sons were hard to erase from the national psyche. The Kremlin worried that these women would eventually take to the streets. They were active. They wrote to their governors, to their mayors, to the Committee of Soldiers Mothers, to the President's Office, to Defense Minister Shoigu, begging for their husbands and sons to be

returned. Anna drove herself to exhaustion, sourcing humanitarian packages for Ivan. She contacted everyone she could to collect money for his parcels. When he told her he needed a thermal night vision scope, Anna started looking for it everywhere. She was not the only wife trying to supply her husband at the front. Everything near her was sold out. Everything was expensive.

She found one for sale in Moscow and contacted a girlfriend there. Neither of them had any idea what a thermal night vision scope even was. It looks legitimate, she reported back to Anna. Or at least like a tube you can look through. When Ivan called her and told her that everything was fine, she knew he was lying because he periodically sent pictures. She watched as Ivan shrank to half his former size. They didn't discuss it, but she knew he sent the pictures

to help her geolocate his body. So many Russian women did not know where their husbands died. Anna knew she didn't decide. She knew that if Ivan were killed, she would go there herself to collect his remains. She would not let him rot in pieces in some sunflower field. At 0500, the company arrived at its position and waited. Ivan saw Spicy, the second platoon leader, who would take the middle of the belt.

Well, see you tonight, Spicy told him. Yeah, see you later. They shook hands. Guys, it's gonna be okay, Ivan told his platoon as they waited. We've been practicing. Everything's gonna be fine. Don't panic. If you have any questions, tell me right away.

The main thing to remember is to cover each other. The most important thing is not to panic. Do not panic. Panic is the enemy on the battlefield. Everyone sat there, breathing out, waiting for the sounds of the other company moving in. But it was silent. I couldn't understand where everyone was.

Lion radioed Ivan to advance anyway, and Ivan passed the command down the line. The tank, followed by an infantry fighting vehicle, rolled loudly into open territory. They were less than a mile from the Ukrainian position. Spicey's platoon was moving, too. Ivan could hear the men shooting from their tank. No one fired back. Everyone stopped and dismounted. Immediately they came under fire. Everyone down, Ivan shouted. There was a machine gunner shooting from the Ukrainian stronghold. The Russians returned fire.

Ivan's deputy, Bareblood, was holding his hand, screaming. Part of his finger had been blown off. Down, Ivan shouted, don't move. Old man went to work. He fired the RPG straight into the Ukrainian stronghold. It exploded, and it was quiet, except for the radio. Spicy is 200, it blared, spicy is 200. It had been about five minutes since the offensive started.

The guy Ivan had just shaken hands with, they had been 50 yards apart. From Ivan's vantage point on the ground, it looked nothing like the drone footage he studied back in the basement with his squad leaders. He could see only the trees, no landmarks, no black dirt, no water towers or high points. The earth began to burst. Then there was a double sound that Ivan didn't register until he saw something

tough the earth five meters ahead of him. A splash, then another, moving toward him like stones skimming a lake in reverse. A sniper was working on him. He turned and saw a crater. He crawled backward until he tumbled down into the hole. Ivan looked around and saw a handful of others from his platoon also hiding in the crater. The hole was huge, created by a bomb roughly ten feet deep and twenty feet in diameter.

The radio screamed periodically, This one's three hundred, this one's two hundred. We need an evacuation right away. Urgent. Help. They had changed all their call signs before the offensive, in case the Ukrainians had been bugging them. It was Lyon's directive, and instead of 200s and 300s, they should call them Xs and Os. But in the end, it didn't matter. Everyone was screaming as usual, 200, 300.

When Ivan poked his head out of the crater, he could see Apricot, a machine gunner, Fiend, second squad leader, Bare-Blood, deputy platoon leader, Tin Man, the senior rifleman, all lying there. He saw someone running toward their crater, totally upright despite the sniper's bullets and leaping through the air for the final steps. At the last moment, there was a grimace of pain on his face. Ivan watched it all as if it were in a slow motion film. I'm hurt, Achilles shouted as he landed. He was hit in the back, his pelvic bone shattered.

They started bandaging him. They stayed in that crater for an hour or a few minutes. They didn't know how long. Thinking about what to do, hoping for backup. I have two 200s I've been called for support. There are 300s and a heavy 300. A Ukrainian tank broke out of the tre line, firing, hitting somewhere near them, retreating somewhere, and then it was quiet again.

Ivan looked out and radioed what he thought were the tank's coordinates. The Russians fired from behind Ivan with an automatic grenade launcher and missed. Twenty meters right, Ivan corrected. They kept firing. Ivan kept adjusting, but the Russian efforts kept failing. They were just totally inept, wasting opportunities. Each time Ivan had to figure out the adjustment, he stuck his head out of the foxhole, playing whack-a-mole with the sniper.

It would be a dark comedy if the punchline weren't Ivan's life. Half an hour went by, a dozen attempts, until it was clear that it was useless to keep taking the risk. What began as an obviously bad idea would grow ever more absurd. Achilles started to turn pale. No one had thought to check him for an exit wound. When the men turned him over, it was right there on his stomach.

Ivan pulled out hemostatic powder that Anna had sent him and poured a ton of it in the hole where the bullet came out. With gauze on top, they pressed down hard. I need a fucking evacuation, Ivan kept shouting on the radio. Go back on the fucking offensive line, radioed. They must have been there for hours when they saw the Ukrainian drone. The Russians started shooting at it. The drone dropped its munitions 10 feet from their hole.

They managed to knock it down, but they knew they had been spotted. Where's the trophy money I was promised, one of the men joked. Go get it and bring it back to me, Ivan replied, and I'll put it in order. At least they still had their sense of humor. A voice above called to Ivan. He poked his head out of the hole. It was Student, the second machine gunner. He was 20 feet away, pinned down by his heavy backpack and

couldn't cut off the strap. One of his arms was mangled. They had two options, get Student from above and risk the snipers or dig a trench toward him. Dig, Ivan shouted at his men. They dug for hours trying to make ridges and shelters out of the ground, but the earth kept crumbling in. They dug a ten foot trench, but the more they dug, the more it crumbled.

They were tired, they hadn't eaten, it was already the afternoon and they had set out 12 hours ago. A man could die, Ivan commanded. Let's keep digging. They stopped to take stock and realized that the digging had made their own hole smaller. As the dirt fell into their crater, they were raising themselves up to level ground, and was like a cartoon.

Guys, let's stop, Ivan commanded. We're going to dig ourselves to the surface. Their water had run out. All they had left was cigarettes. It felt as if they were smoking one a minute. Everything they touched was clawing at their throats. Somebody had some candy. They passed it around until it was gone.

They had no idea what to do next. They made a rope out of their belts. Old man volunteered to run out and clip in Student with Ivan's carabiner, and then they could all drag him into the crater. Old Man crawled over to Student and for some reason he decided to inject him with Premadol right there. The powerful anti-pain drug that the Russians were given at the front was known to relax people.

It made Student floppy and impossible to drag. As they struggled to heave him, the sniper started again. Old man ran back and jumped in the crater. When he stood up, his pants were hanging low off his body. His jacket and belt were split in half. The sniper's bullet had skimmed him. Dumb luck was their only savior. Attack, Lion continued to radio.

Attack! Guys, we gotta do something, Ivan said to the men. I can't just ignore orders from command. They will lock me up if I go back. What are we going to do? Everyone knew that there were snipers out there and that if they left the hole, one of them would surely die. Let's pretend we are attacking, one of them offered.

You go on the radio and talk as if we're attacking and we will shoot from inside here. Let's do it, Ivan decided. Everyone here in favor of this story? Do you understand what we are doing right now? Everyone agreed. Is everyone clear, Ivan repeated? We all say the same thing. Yes.

Ivan got on the radio. I'm attacking, we're advancing, we're advancing. All of them pointed their weapons out of the crater and started firing rounds in the air. I'm attacking, Ivan shouted through their own melee. We're advancing, we're advancing, I'm trying to move out. I can't get out and the enemy is firing. There's a tank coming, Lion radioed.

Get behind the tank and follow the tank. The Russian tank drove past Ivan's crater. Is everybody ready, Ivan asked his men. Let's at least fake it, stand up. The men stood up and the tank let off a round. All of them fell over from the bang. The tank pulled back its turret right above the crater, and from ten feet above their heads let off another round.

The men were deafened. Everything inside their pit was shaking. Little grains of sand jumping up as though gravity had been dismissed. They grabbed their ears, falling down even lower. Slowly, Ivan heard voices more distinctly. It was Lion on the radio again, screaming and cursing at them to advance. I need an evacuation, Ivan shouted. Moments later, explosions, sparks, smoke. Ivan looked out of the crater and saw more men running toward their hole. The evacuation vehicle had been blown up. The commander of the evacuation group

ended up in their hole too. Come on, Ivan shouted at him. Report from your side that the evacuation group was hit so that this comrade doesn't think we're just fucking around here. The evacuation team has been hit. We need a way out. We have a lot of wounded.

Ivan decided he had had enough. If no one came to help them, they would wait until dark and move back. "'We're getting out,' he radioed Lion. "'Don't leave without the 200s,' came the reply. "'If you leave them, you're going back to retrieve them.'" After the sunset, the soldiers crawled out of the hole. They each grabbed a wounded man

and took turns dragging everyone back. They left the dead, Apricot and an engineer who had been attached to the platoon a few days earlier for the operation, because they didn't have enough hands. Ivan crawled all the way back, the dirt and the rocks shredding the knee pads off his uniform. He turned and saw that some of the men had disregarded reason. Despite at least two snipers, they walked upright without helmets. Ivan, who always wanted to survive just a little bit more, kept crawling.

In the safety of their rear trenches, as far from the front as you could get and still be near the point of contact, Lion had the luxury of fury. Why did you leave the 200s, he demanded of Ivan? You bastard, I should lock you up. Fucking pussy, Ivan just listened. He knew it was important for the widows to have proof of their husband's bodies, to try to collect the coffin payment or to have peace of mind. Otherwise, the state could and probably would declare them deserters and try to deny

the women the payouts it promised. But Ivan had no regrets. He had to save the lives he could. He also didn't think that was why Lyon was so worked up about it. Battalion commanders must get some kind of penalty for leaving bodies behind. When Lyon finished cursing Ivan out, he told him that his platoon would be going to support the third platoon, led by Soviet, who had taken the territory they were supposed to. No sleep, no food, just more walking and fighting. Yes, Comrade Colonel, Ivan replied. Ivan returned to his men and explained the situation.

Four of the men refused immediately, but Lyon threatened them with arrest and they relented. It was past midnight as they trekked through the darkness. Ivan's back had started hurting. They got to the trenches, dug near some trees, and bunked in for the night. They hadn't eaten in 24 hours. The third platoon shared some of their rations. Ivan chewed a scrap of lard someone passed him, and

they lay down to sleep, huddling close to one another. They were freezing. Ivan woke up to a mouse biting his finger. He was furious, not that the mouse was hurting him, but that it ended his slumber. It was so cold that he couldn't fall back asleep. It began to drizzle. Though it was uncomfortable, the rain would make them less visible.

Ivan heard a buzzing overhead. At first, no one realized what it was. A quadcopter with a thermographic camera, which meant it could see them even though they were hidden under trees. It could sense their heat and adjust a mortar. Ivan had only heard that the Ukrainians had these. His battalion didn't have anything like it.

Immediately they could hear the artillery exits, and the arrivals began falling around them. It was carnage. Wherever they ran, the explosions followed. When a shell missed a direct hit, it hit the thicket of trees above them. Branches splintered and fragments of wood, earth, and metal engulfed them. A man near Ivan started screaming, Arm! Arm! More screams. As Ivan ran, he thought of Anna. Imagine that all my love, all my tenderness for you, it will be transformed into a protective balloon that will protect you from bullets,

from explosions. He could nearly see the dome's boundaries surrounding him as he ran at full speed. Ivan saw nothing, felt nothing until he tumbled down into a trench. A shell slammed somewhere nearby inches from the opening. A fragment hit the third platoon commander, ripping out his stomach. Ivan was a few feet away. He grabbed a soldier who was stumbling and started walking. The rain had turned the road from clay to sludge.

It stuck to their feet. Every step they took, their shoes getting heavier and heavier. Between the grease, the body armor, the helmet, and the guy he was carrying, Ivan could barely move. His back was hurting, and he began limping under the weight. As he walked, Ivan started thinking. In the first attack just hours ago, he lost two men. Now this, going back to Lion again, what would happen?

They'll say, you're resting one day, tomorrow we'll attack again. Ivan's back was twinging. He knew a guy back at the base, Roman, whose herniated disc had gotten so bad after wearing a flak jacket at the front that he lost the use of both legs. Too bad mine isn't more like his, Ivan thought to himself. Or is it? Ivan focused on his pain. He turned it over in his mind.

What a tantalizing daydream. He heard on the radio that an evacuation vehicle was coming. He limped along toward the point and saw it there. Men were starting to load up. He passed the soldier's slack body to a medic and stood by to give others a hand up when he saw Fiend. Fiend's leg was wounded. Did you know Warrior died, Fiend asked?

No, brother, I didn't, Ivan said. Ivan knew Warrior was Fiend's closest friend. Fiend was on the verge of tears. Brother, I'm sorry, Ivan said. Ivan knew Warrior was Fiend's closest friend. Fiend was on the verge of tears. Brother, I'm sorry, Ivan repeated. The main thing is that you're alive, that we're standing here with you. Fiend clambered up the evacuation vehicle. Shepard was sitting on top of it. What's the next move?

Ivan looked up at them, thinking. Is that it, the driver called down? Shall we go? Ivan turned it over again, thinking, is that it? The driver called down, shall we go? Ivan turned it over again. No, he shouted. He climbed up. Now, let's go.