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In response to
"Using Adoptions, Russia Turns Ukrainian Children Into Spoils of War"
by
crash davis
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‘I want to kill them all.’
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ALONG THE KHERSON FRONT, Ukraine — In one small village in southern Ukraine, all of the residents have left. Stray dogs wander the streets, noses down. The wind ripples across their fur and blows through the many broken windows in the village. Most houses are abandoned, except for a small green one that has become a hive of activity.
The windows are blacked out with cardboard. Several television antennas poke up from the roof. Ukrainian soldiers stomp in and out at all hours. Inside is a drone studio, and it’s from here that the Ukrainians pinpoint deadly attacks.
The other day, one soldier sat in front of a flat-screen monitor and calmly clicked a mouse. From previously recorded drone footage, he showed the Russians’ neatly dug trenches, their tanks hiding under trees, even little black shapes of Russian troops scurrying around. The enemy is about five miles away, he explained, and the images on the screen possessed a stunning clarity. From the all-seeing drone, one could even make out the long, dark, late-afternoon shadows of singular trees. It was eerie.
“Watch this,” said a Ukrainian commander, Lieutenant Oleh.
His assistant clicked the mouse. A video showed a tank parked in a potato field. It was a bright sunny day. Then poof! — the tank suddenly exploded. Everything and everyone inside was turned into an angry red fireball. It was a Ukrainian artillery strike, guided by one of the drones flown by Lieutenant Oleh’s reconnaissance unit.
Does Lieutenant Oleh ever think about the individual Russians killed in these strikes?
“I hate them,” Lieutenant Oleh said. “I want to kill them all.”
The fighting in Ukraine’s south is a slow, bitter artillery war. The Russians and the Ukrainians use the same technology: small, consumer-grade drones to spy on each other. And then artillery, rockets, missiles and mortars to kill.
The Russians are deeply dug in with a lot of artillery and ammunition in the south. The Ukrainians say that for every shell they fire, the Russians fire back 10.
A few miles away, a squad of Ukrainian soldiers waited for orders to fire. They sat in the shade of a bunker dug 15 feet underground. Their scruffy little base was littered with cigarette butts, crushed energy drink cans and a plastic bucket carrying wild mushrooms that someone had picked. This is the other end of the equation: the firing pit.
This team was working with another drone operator, not Lieutenant Oleh, but a similar outfit hiding in a trench a few miles away.
Edward, a young soldier who had a light blond beard, dirty fingernails and an easy smile, lugged a 35-pound mortar shell to the mortar tube.
“I’ve fired at least a thousand,” he said.
The drone teams give him the target. He then translates GPS coordinates into angles on his firing tube. It’s low-tech meets high-tech, World War I meets World War IV. What does he think when he’s shooting a deadly mortar at the Russians?
His answer wasn’t much different from Lieutenant Oleh’s.
“I think: Let them all die so we can go home.”
— Jeffrey Gettleman
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Responses:
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