KYIV, Ukraine — A hail of shrapnel from kamikaze drones ripped through the tent where off-duty Ukrainian border guards were sleeping near a crossing with Belarus, three hours north of Ukraine’s capital.
Viktor Derevyanko woke to scalding pain, his body burning. Blood spilled from his hand as he tried to wipe his face. A piece of metal had traveled through his arm and stomach and into the muscle around his heart.
“I couldn’t get my bearings,” said Derevyanko, the deputy head of the unit. “Only on the third explosion did I manage to fall out of bed and try to find at least someplace to hide, because the explosions weren’t ending.”
It was around 4:15 a.m. on Feb. 24.
Hours earlier, Derevyanko and the other Ukrainian guards had been joking dismissively about President Biden yet again warning of a Russian invasion. Now they were its first target.
Within minutes, Russian missiles began soaring out of their launchers. They pounded Ukrainian air defenses, radar batteries, ammunition depots, airfields and bases, filling the early morning with the sounds of war.
At almost the same time, Ukrainian Interior Minister Denis Monastyrsky woke to the ringing of his cellphone. In recent days, he had experienced a rush of relief every time he opened his eyes to the morning light, realizing that the arrival of a new day meant Russia hadn’t invaded. This time, it was still dark. Ukraine’s border guard chief was on the line and told him that his units were battling Russians across three of the country’s northeastern regions.
This wasn’t the limited invasion, isolated to the country’s east, that many top Ukrainian officials had been expecting.
Monastyrsky hung up and dialed President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“It has started,” Monastyrsky told the Ukrainian leader.
“What exactly?” Zelensky asked.
“Judging by the fact that there are attacks underway at different places all at once, this is it,” he said, telling Zelensky that it looked like a full-scale invasion bearing down on Kyiv.
“In the first minutes, they delivered terrible blows to our air defense, terrible blows to our troops in general. … There were 20-meter craters, the likes of which no one has seen in their lifetimes,” Monastyrsky later recalled.
The question everyone faced at that moment, Monastyrsky said, was: “How far can the enemy go with that enormous fist?”
[Database of 235 videos exposes the horrors of war in Ukraine]
If the Russians could seize the seat of power in Ukraine, or at least cause the government to flee in panic, the defense of the country would quickly unravel. Moscow could install a puppet government.
That was the Kremlin’s plan.
Instead, what transpired in and around Kyiv in the ensuing 36 days would represent the biggest foreign blunder in the 22-year rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His assault on the city instantly reordered the security architecture of Europe against Moscow and isolated his nation to a degree unseen since the Cold War. To the surprise of the world, the offensive against the Ukrainian capital would end in a humiliating retreat, which would expose deep systemic problems in a Russian military he had spent billions to rebuild.
Despite the flaws that would emerge in Russia’s war planning, the outcome of the battle for Kyiv was far from predetermined. This account of how Ukrainian forces defended, and saved, their capital is based on interviews with more than 100 people — from Zelensky and his advisers, to Ukrainian military commanders, to volunteer militiamen, as well as senior U.S. and European political and military officials.
A reconstruction of events shows that even as Ukraine’s political leadership had downplayed the likelihood of a full-scale invasion, the Ukrainian military had taken critical steps to withstand Russia’s initial assault. Commanders had moved personnel and equipment off bases, despite in many cases their own doubts about what was to come.
Ukrainian forces lacked sufficient weaponry, ammunition and communications equipment. But what they did possess was a profound will to fight — one that would extend beyond Ukrainian soldiers to ordinary civilians and, most important, to the president himself.
The defenders would also take advantage of terrain around the capital — dense forests, narrow roads, winding rivers — that favored their guerrilla tactics, as well as weather short of freezing that thawed the land and bogged down Russian vehicles. In particular, the Irpin River, a waterway that marked the line of defense on Kyiv’s western edge, would help protect the capital when Ukrainian forces released dammed water to flood its banks.
Those fighting to save Kyiv also benefited greatly from key miscalculations by the Kremlin, which set in motion a plan to invade Kyiv based on poor assumptions about the mettle of the Ukrainian military, the durability of the Zelensky government and the determination of the Ukrainian people to resist. In the end, the Russians wouldn’t take any territory inside Kyiv’s city limits, instead remaining stuck for weeks on the capital’s periphery before their retreat.
The Kremlin did not respond to requests for comment.
As the war began, Putin was some 475 miles away in Moscow. Seated at a wooden desk in a black suit and maroon tie, he appeared on television to announce what he called a “special operation” to “demilitarize and denazify” Ukraine. Moscow had been left with “no other opportunity to protect Russia other than the one we will be forced to use today,” Putin said.
As the speech finished, booms resounded across Kyiv. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, said she turned over in bed to find an empty space where her husband had been sleeping. She got up and walked over to find him putting on a charcoal gray suit and white shirt. No tie.
“What is happening?” she asked.
“It has started,” Zelensky replied. He looked at the faces of his children, ages 17 and 9 before leaving for his office. Zelensky said he couldn’t help thinking that Russian missiles were flying “over my children, over all of our children” — that an unthinkable number of Ukrainians were about to die.
The choice Moscow had made, after months of pretend diplomacy, victim-playing and lies on the international stage was beneath all dignity, Zelensky thought. He felt certain that Ukrainians shared his fury, that they would fight.
Zelensky convened a meeting of his top advisers. They decided that part of the cabinet — including those responsible for police and defense — would stay in Kyiv, as others relocated to western Ukraine. Officials watched wide-eyed as border surveillance cameras captured hundreds of Russian tanks and other armored vehicles flowing into Ukraine in columns reminiscent of a World War II advance. From Belarus in the north. From Russia in the east. From Crimea in the south.
“The whole map was red and required attention,” Monastyrsky said.
The Russians pressed into the hazardous zone around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant, where the head of the Ukrainian border guard sector, Vitaliy Yavorskiy, would later find evidence that they had dug trenches in radioactive soil and eaten contaminated deer they shot in the nearby woods.
The goal of the invaders was to penetrate and seize Kyiv, the centuries-old metropolis topped with golden domes above the Dnieper River. Declared the “Mother of Rus Cities” by Oleg of Novgorod when he seized it in the Middle Ages, the city shares a past with Russia that Putin had seized upon to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Putin had characterized Russians and Ukrainians as one people separated by Soviet contrivance and Western interference, building a case for going to war to reset history.
As morning broke over Kyiv, Zelensky began to work the phones, speaking with President Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other leaders to ask for help. Within hours, he sat down at a desk and self-recorded a video to the Ukrainian people — millions of whom had considered an assault on Kyiv an impossibility and were now waking up to explosions and piling into their cars in shock.
“Today I ask you, each one of you, to remain calm. If it is possible, please stay home,” Zelensky said. “We are working. The army is working. The entire security and defense sector of Ukraine is working.” He promised to appear later in the day and stay in regular contact, assuring Ukrainians that they would remain strong. “We are ready for anything. We will defeat anyone,” he said. “Glory to Ukraine!”
Inside the government complex in central Kyiv, the head of Zelensky’s administration, Andriy Yermak, looked down at his ringing cellphone. It was the Kremlin.
The former entertainment lawyer, a permanent fixture at Zelensky’s side, at first couldn’t bring himself to pick up, he said. The phone rang once, then again. He answered. He heard the gravelly voice of Dmitry Kozak, the Kremlin deputy chief of staff, who was born in Ukraine but had long ago entered Putin’s inner circle. Kozak said it was time for the Ukrainians to surrender.
Yermak swore at Kozak and hung up.
"Bookish and pensive, Gen. Col. Oleksandr Syrsky is the kind of seasoned military officer who plans for all contingencies — even the scenarios he deems highly unlikely.The notion that Kyiv — where urban warfare would vex even the most sophisticated military — could be Putin’s primary initial target defied belief for most of the Ukrainian elite, even within the armed forces.
“To think the leadership of Russia would unleash such brazen, large-scale aggression, honestly speaking, I could not even imagine it,” recalled Syrsky, who had fought Russia and its separatist proxies in eastern Ukraine and was tapped to lead Kyiv’s defense just before the invasion. “It seemed to me that if active hostilities were to start, they would most likely start in the east, around or within the borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“But we’re the military,” said Syrsky, one of several top Ukrainian military and political officials who spoke at length about the battle for Kyiv, some of them, like Syrsky, in their first extensive interviews. “Therefore, regardless of what I believed or didn’t believe, how it all seemed, I still carried out the activities required.”
Given the array of Putin’s forces along Ukraine’s borders, Syrsky had determined that if the Russians did attack Kyiv, their columns would advance along two or three major highways on what they foresaw as a fast, decapitating drive to the government quarter in Kyiv. The Kremlin battle plan assumed the city would be left defended by only weak Ukrainian forces, disoriented by the political chaos as Zelensky and his ministers fled.
To protect the city, Syrsky had organized two rings of forces, one in the outer suburbs and one within the capital. He wanted the outer ring to be as far from the inner ring as possible to protect the downtown area from shelling and keep the Russians fighting on the approaches to Kyiv.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment