The Decibel - A Canadian sniper on the battle for Bakhmut, Ukraine

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

A Canadian sniper, whose codename is Teflon, was set up in an apartment building in the destroyed city of Bakhmut, Ukraine, shooting waves of Russian soldiers. He says it was almost too easy: “I actually got to a point where I was like, can you stop? I’m tired of killing people ... I shouldn’t be killing people this easily.”Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, has seen heavy fighting for months because invading Russian forces see it as strategically important. The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon spoke with the sniper about his role in the war, and how the battle for Bakhmut has been playing out on the ground.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Do you mind if I write some of this down? Go ahead. What happened? Help me understand all this. I don't really know what happened. I'm still trying to understand what happened. So the start of this was, I was the only team working over the holidays, over Christmas. I actually got to a point where I was like, can you stop? I'm tired of killing people. I shouldn't be killing people this easily from this spot without moving. That's one of the snipers working with the army in Ukraine.

He's a Canadian Forces veteran from Alberta, and his code name is Teflon. And I'd hide, and I'd have guys doing observer from another area. They'd message on the radio, targets, guys coming. Get up on position and just poof. He's talking about his time in Bakhmut, a city in eastern Ukraine on the war's front line, which is still in Ukrainian hands, but largely surrounded by Russian forces. The war is way too live. It's way too active. You're not dealing with established positions.

You're dealing with waves of assaults endlessly, constantly. Teflon spoke with The Globe's Mark McKinnon. We aren't using his real name because special forces fighters aren't allowed to share their identities. Today, Mark tells us about the state of the battle for Bakhmut, Russia's tactics in the war, and what this Canadian sniper is doing in the middle of it all. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thank you so much for joining me again. Thank you, Manika.

So you talked to this Canadian sniper who's codenamed Teflon. What's he like as a person? I first met Teflon back in September, I think it was. We were covering the, I was covering the Kharkiv offensive and his unit, he's part of the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine, which is sort of these foreigners fighting for Ukraine. And his unit was participating in the action there. And we were just speaking on background then about sort of the role that foreigners are playing in that fighting.

And he's very quiet, very soft-spoken until you turn the microphone on. And then it gets quite effusive when you're talking about what he sees as his job. And he speaks of being a sniper the way that somebody might speak of being a postman or a teacher. You describe it as work. I mean, like you approach it the way anybody else approaches it. It is a job. That's the way I look at it. You know, it's a job. It's what he's paid to do.

And that's what drew him to Ukraine to a certain extent, was an opportunity to do his job. When the war broke out, he was motivated to help Ukraine. He saw a place where his skills would be valuable. And he recently got back from Bakhmut in Ukraine. What was he doing there, Mark? So the story of Teflon's time in Bakhmut is quite a complicated one. So Teflon and his team were sent into Bakhmut in early December, but he'd served with some of them before and they hadn't got on very well.

There's all sorts of accusations back and forth about who failed who on a previous mission. Boiling it down, of the five of them, four of them said, listen, you know, we're not comfortable with working together again. They're like, well, what are you going to do? I said, I have a mission and I have a responsibility to do. So I loaded up the armored vehicle solo

with my rifles, my gear. And Teflon said, well, you know, people on the front line and the Ukrainian units are expecting a sniper. I'm going ahead anyways. On his own? Yeah. And this was what made this story. I mean, it took us three weeks to get comfortable with publishing this story because, you know, it ends up being the tale of one man and what he says happened on Christmas Eve. And so in Bakhmut, he goes there on his own. This later becomes an issue of dispute as his commander tries to order him back. But at this point, he was already in Bakhmut. And as Teflon said to me, it's like, it's not like I could call an Uber. You know, I was there.

He sets up at the position the Ukrainians asked him to. And remember, there's supposed to be five guys setting up a unit in this building on the eastern edge of Bakhut. We stopped three waves of an assault that day with two snipers. And he's there alone with the help of a Ukrainian radio translator who's taking in messages from other Ukrainians in the field, saying, for instance, the Russians are coming at this angle of this speed. And over the next 24 hours, he says... Yeah, it took 15 confirmed on one day and three confirmed on the next day. And Russia just kept sending waves. So 15 confirmed to your heads?

Yeah. On them? Wow. Which, you know, it just speaks, I think, to what a bloody battle it is for Bachmut. And just to get back to the point of verifying the story, the reason why it took us so long is we asked him, Teflon, for whatever evidence he could supply, and he sent us a series of photographs and videos that he'd taken over those 24 hours.

We were able to geolocate him to the building he says he was in on the edge of Bachmut. And actually, the credit should go to my colleague, Patrick Dell, who's our video editor, but he took all the material that I forwarded him, and he didn't know the specifics of the story, but he came back to me saying, these photos were taken from this position, and it matched up with exactly where Teflon had said he was. So we also bounced it off some of the Ukrainians who were fighting in Bakhmut as well, who said this is entirely plausible given the way this battle for the city is going. Okay. And you said he killed 15 people one day, three the next. How was he able to kill

so many people on his own in such a short time? This is the part that I think made this story worth publishing. We were not attempting to glorify one individual's exploits, especially exploits that involve killing 15 people. I think why we thought this was worth publishing is what it tells us about the battle for Bakhmut and sort of what the Russians are, what they're doing to their own troops, frankly. We're defending until we can't defend that spot anymore

because they just destroy it with tanks and they just keep sending another wave. It's just relentless. So he says he basically, for most of this time, was in the same position, a window overlooking an approach to the eastern edge of Bakhmut that the Russians sort of had to sort of

come around a corner and then almost come down an alleyway at him. But I could literally just, it's like a perfect line, it's a perfect straight shot. Where are you, like your position, somewhere higher up there? Yeah. Five stories up in a building recess back. And I'd watch him walk in all the way from out here. And he said, despite the fact that he kept, he'd repeatedly shot and fatally wounded, uh, Russian soldiers from that position, despite the fact that Russians had, um, you know, would have by at some point known,

there's clearly a sniper that they kept coming down this way. And he said, you know, at some point known there's clearly a sniper, that they kept coming down this way. And he said, you know, he began to feel bad for the people that he was shooting at. There's shots I made that I actually somewhat felt bad about because it was so outclassed. He said this is not a professional way of fighting a war. These are conscripts.

They're just being fed forward. He used his terms like human waves to describe what was happening, a very brutal type of warfare. And this is why we thought we should publish this, because it tells you how Russia is gaining ground in Bakhmut and sort of the disregard for the lives of even their own soldiers in this. And you said that he said that he saw they were conscripts. How would he know that, Mark? So this was an interesting point. He said that what was different for him from earlier battles in the war, first of all,

was the level of training. I think they're just so poorly trained and have no concept of any of it. He said these Russian troops that were coming forward had no training, obviously, to him. They had very minimal training. The equipment was not the gear that he'd seen on professional Russian fighters. They come from like two kilometers away. I watched them

walk all the way in. They get within 500 meters, and you're like, okay, right on the kill zone. Poof! And they learned nothing from the fact that you've done that to them repeatedly. And that position had been there for two weeks with other poof. And they learned nothing from the fact that you've done that to them repeatedly. And that position had been there for two weeks with other snipers. And they still keep coming.

And we know already before this article that it was not the regular Russian army that was involved in the frontal assault on Bakhmut, but something called the Wagner Private Military Group. And the Wagner Private Military Company has become infamous over the years for its like an arm of the Kremlin sort of doing its dirty business

in places like Syria and Libya, Central African Republic. And there's a video of the founder of Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, going into prisons and telling these sort of convicts, many of them who are supposed to spend their entire lives in a Russian prison,

that go spend six months on the front line in Ukraine, fight for your country, and when you come home, you're a free person. Wow. So we know and we've seen thousands of Russian conscripts getting drafted into the Wagner private military group and then being sent to the front line. And there was an allegation that's been made repeatedly by Ukrainians saying that the Russian troops that are sort of coming forward in these human waves must be on some kind of drugs. And, like, there's allegations that all these Russians must be drugged.

There's no way. And I don't think it's just lack of training. But what Teflon said was, I don't think these guys were drugged because they were reacting like humans. They're like human beings. And I've watched guys f***ing cry, and I've watched guys scream, and I've watched guys try to pull their friends back when they get killed. They're humans. He said, you know, if I shot one of them, their buddies would come running forward,

they'd be crying, they'd be trying to drag their buddy off the field where, you know, professional soldiers would just say, man down, and keep pushing forward or stay in their position. They said they were running into danger to rescue their buddy and doing things you're not supposed to do. Wow. I mean, seeing the way he's describing it. So seeing people react like humans chase after their buddy who's down. He's killing 15 people who are not well trained, not the standard soldier that you usually think about on these battlegrounds. I mean, Mark, how does he think about killing so many people in this way? It's the most inhumane job in the world.

He calls it the most inhumane job in the world, what he has. And one that he happens to be good at was, again, his wording. But he says that a couple of these shots are going to stick with him the rest of his life. And he talked about two of them in particular. One of them was a guy in a T-shirt who he estimates was about 1,800 meters back from the position that Teflon was in. He was carrying a box of munitions in a T-shirt. And he thought, this guy doesn't think he's in any danger at all. And he says he made what was the longest shot of his career

to hit this guy in his T-shirt. No matter how far back you are there, if I can put eyes on you, I'm going to put bullets in you. And because that starts to stop their guys from working out in the freedom of the day, because that's the role of a sniper, is to ultimately push into the minds of the enemy and make them question everything. And the other one that he remembers was a shot he didn't take,

which was watching sort of the buddies coming on to rescue or drag off the body of one of the people that he had shot. And that shot I made, I watched that guy's friend walk over and try to do CPR. And I chose not to fire a second shot. I let them take that body. He could have, he says, put a bullet into one of these guys who was pulling his dead comrade off the field, and he just decided not to. We'll be back in a moment.

So why is Russia sending these waves of soldiers? Like, why are they using this tactic? It's a tactic we haven't seen in a long time and one that probably should have been consigned to history by now. Military historians talk about these human waves being used most recently in the Iran-Iraq war. Someone else pointed out to me that they were also used in Ethiopia's civil war. It's brutal. They are sending forward troops with little hope of success, but maybe they'll sort of force the Ukrainians to abandon positions. They have lots of conscripts that they've hired, and sadly, it's working. That's why they're doing it.

Like it is going forward. It's working. Yeah, they're gaining ground. The simple answer here is that it works for Russia, as awful as that sounds. They have such a numerical advantage in terms of the number of men, soldiers they can mobilize versus what Ukraine can mobilize, that they can do this. They can send waves of infantry, waves of human beings forward. Effectively, they do this thing called scorched earth, where they use artillery and tanks to flatten entire neighborhoods so the Ukrainians can't dig in and maintain their

positions. But when they destroy that position with artillery and tanks, we have no choice but to fall back to the next position, which enables their infantry to come, you know, 500 meters closer. What they're gaining, they've gained 500 meters of dirt. And then these soldiers are sent forwards, and a lot of them must know, you know, their odds aren't very good. They can see they're not well armed, they haven't had much training, and they're being sent into sort of gunfire. But in Bakhmut, at least, and in the broader Donbass area, you can see the Russian front line slowly grinding forward. They're making advances, but at a massive expenditure of resources, munitions, and lives. So he was holed up there in a building, shooting all these soldiers as they come towards him, Mark. The Russians must have at some point figured out he was there.

Did they try to get at him at all? Yes, he says that at some point it became obvious to even these commanders who were ordering their men forward that there was a problem they had to deal with in this apartment block overlooking the alleyway. And they smashed the building with tanks, they smashed the building with artillery, and I just said, like, I'm not leaving. The tank shelled the apartment building that he was in. And Teflon says he basically, you know, when he realized he was under attack,

he got away from the window he was in. And he says he just sort of went into the hallway and waited it out. And once the tank stopped firing, he just changed windows and went back to his work. Then after this incident, he actually was put under investigation for refusing a direct order, the order to leave Bakhmut. That investigation's ended and apparently his name has been cleared. That's where you were saying at the beginning where he went off alone without his unit. So he was told to come back and he didn't do that. And that's what he was in trouble for then. Yes. And that's why he first reached out to me. And like I said, we'd met before,

but he wanted to tell the story to sort of clear his name. Do you think that's why he was open to talking to you, Mark? Because I think it's fairly rare to be able to talk to a sniper in this kind of situation. Is that kind of his motivation behind actually opening up to a journalist? Definitely. There's also another layer to this where we've had three Canadians who are members of the International Legion who died over the last year. Two of them Teflon was close to. And two of them died very recently, both of them in Bakhmut. And so that was very present in his mind. I think he wanted to sort of get his story on

the record to a certain extent. Why is Bakhmut such an important city for the Russians? Why are they focusing on trying to take it? I think there's two levels to this. The obvious one is if you look at a railway map of the Donetsk area that Bakhmut is part of, there's a couple of major intersections where trains heading north, south, east, and west intersect, and Bakhmut is one of them. And so if you want to be able to move material weapons, soldiers quickly around the Donbass area, controlling Bakhmut is an essential way to do that. On another level, I think what we're seeing here is Russia hasn't had a lot of victories in the last little while. And I think Vladimir Putin certainly would like to see some victories. And there's a lot of talk that in the days, weeks ahead, we're going to see a major, major Russian offensive akin to what we saw at the start of last year coming. And what we may be seeing here is an attempt to tie up a lot of the Ukrainian military in defending Bakhmut while Russia prepares an attack perhaps somewhere else. Oh, wow. I mean, so we are approaching, of course, the one-year mark of the war

later on this month on February 24th. You mentioned a major offensive. What do you think is coming in the next few weeks? Well, what I was hearing when I was in Kiev very recently and from official and unofficial sources is that essentially the Ukrainian army is deadlocked with the Russian military right now.

All along the front line, there's not much movement over the last few months since the withdrawal from Kherson. At the same time, Russia is building up a second army, for want of a better term, that has hundreds of thousands of freshly drafted conscripts, units from the Far East and from other parts of Russia that haven't yet been involved in the conflict. And this army, the second group, so if you've got the Ukrainians tied up in sort of an evenly matched fight, a second attack by a sizable force could be very difficult for the Ukrainians to hold their current positions against anyways. How sizable are we talking about here? It's difficult to say.

Last year, if you remember, before the war started, we saw all sorts of videos of tanks and Russian military equipment being moved east to west across Russia and into the border with Ukraine. We've seen a lot less of that this year. And I think part of that is a Russian control of the internet. Last year, it was a message they wanted the world to see. They wanted everyone to see the size of this force they were building and to put pressure on Ukraine to accept Vladimir Putin's demands. This year, they're being much more covert about the buildup, but Ukrainian intelligence and defense officials believe it's

basically doubling the size of the current force to 300,000 extra soldiers beyond what's currently deployed in Ukraine. Wow. Just lastly here, Mark, I want to go back to Teflon. Where is he now and does he plan to go back to the front lines? Yes, I've been in contact with him since the article was published. And he's had this internal investigation, has cleared his name or so, says the spokeswoman for the International Legion. And now she says they're planning to give him another unit to command. He's the team leader. So he's planning to go back to the front line.

And you ask him about the possibility that this could be where he ends up dying. And he says, you know, if I was to leave and go home, I would regret it knowing that I left unfinished. I don't want to treat this like a bad night of gambling or a good night of gambling. And you don't know when to leave. Like, I don't want to push it too far. You know, given everything that happened, it would be very easy for him to say, you know what, if you guys are questioning my integrity or whatever, I'm going to go home. He seems to want to do the opposite. We all have an expiry date, but so far, trusting on my gut, I'm not there yet. Mark, it's always good to talk to you. Thank you, Manika. That's it for today. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms. Our producers

are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show, Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.