On the menu today: While the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv has been noisy during the first stretch of this visit, it is at least far from the front. The eastern city of Kharkiv is more or less just down the road from the fighting, and yet the city’s condition is one of contradictions — bombed buildings with plywood in the windows downtown, but a thriving shopping mall not far away. In recent days I’ve spoken with three soldiers fighting for Ukraine — one homegrown, one an American volunteer, and the third from Germany, serving in the International Legion. Read on.
Kiril, Dan, and Odin: Three War Stories
Kharkiv, Ukraine — Before the war, Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv was 19 miles south of Russian border. Over the last three years, the Russians have spent a lot of blood and treasure trying to push that border closer to here, including a surprise offensive this past summer. The most recently updated maps put the Russians just north of the village of Lyptsi. This is, by far, the closest I have been to Russian forces during my travels in Ukraine.
The clearest sign that we’re closer to the front is that it feels like we spend more time in a state of air-raid alert than out. The air-raid siren wails in the distance regularly, and phones buzz with alerts warning of enemy “guided aerial bombs” and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). (In fact, I’ve heard two separate air-raid sirens while writing this newsletter. If you’re reading this, that’s a good sign.)
When there’s an air-raid alert, the Ukrainian defense global positioning system (GPS) jammers go into action. If my friends and I are driving when this happens, our position on the map shifts suddenly, and we seem to be driving through buildings and rivers.
Those colorful murals are in the windows because the previous glass windows got blown out when a bomb landed on the roof.
But despite the seemingly constant threat of Russian bombs or drones, life in the city goes on. I’ve seen other correspondents write that “In Kharkiv, leisure activities are rare,” but on a Saturday afternoon — during an air-raid alert — the Nikolsky shopping mall was packed with teenagers and families.
(In case that picture makes you nervous, the mall’s owners changed the roof from glass to plastic as a precautionary measure.)
Shortly after arriving in Kharkiv, I spoke with Kiril, a junior sergeant in the Ukrainian army. (For security purposes, military personnel here usually go by their first names or call signs when speaking with Western media.) He’s 34, and before the war he worked in information technology. He has a wife and two children, who have been sent further west for the duration of the war.
Not too long ago, Kiril was stationed in Kupiansk, a city further east of here that was occupied by Russian forces earlier in the war and then liberated, but Russian forces remain close; the front was about five kilometers from where he was living. Speaking through a translator, Kiril told me he could hear the fighting “all the time — all the stuff, FPV [first person view] drones, missiles, cluster bombs.”
I asked Kiril what his scariest moment in the war has been so far. He described a 500-kilogram bomb (about 1,100 pounds) landing on a house when he was 50 meters away.
Kiril said that when the Western assistance slowed, his units were launching 30 percent of the artillery on any given day, and the Russians were launching 70 percent. He said it’s now closer to 50-50. “HIMARs helps a lot,” he said, referring to the mobile artillery launching system built by Lockheed Martin. “They could destroy anything.”
Kiril helped develop a software system that helps the Ukrainians tap into the video images sent by the Russian FPV drones; seeing what the enemy drone sees helps Ukrainian forces determine is location and target it to take it down, often by disrupting the electronic signals sent from the controller.
I asked Kiril if he and his fellow soldiers have time to follow the news, particularly as it relates to Western assistance to Ukraine, and he says they follow that news closely. I asked him what he thinks of the recent statements from the Trump administration, and he shook his head in dissatisfaction.
“We have no way to give up,” he shrugs. “It’s our territory.” He reminded me of the widespread belief when the full-scale Russian invasion began that Ukrainian forces would capitulate in three days, and here we are, three years later, with Ukrainian resistance still fierce and widespread.
“History is always repeating,” Kiril said. “History says they will not leave until we give them a kick.”
A few days earlier in Kyiv, I had a chance to meet Daniel Connery, an American and former U.S. Army signal corps officer serving in the International Legion of the Ukrainian Army.
“I didn’t even know if I was going to support Ukraine,” Connery told me. “I wanted to cut through the misinformation. I had heard such wildly varying things. You hear things like, ‘Is Russia invading, or did Ukraine start it?’ I was like, ‘I need to be boots on the ground. I need to trust but verify.’ . . . I stayed a month in Poland, on the border, just trying to understand the social, the geopolitical context, the history. You can’t learn all of that in a month, but just to get an idea.”
He said he met a British soldier who had been serving in the International Legion who was “just incredible, just a paradigm of everything an officer and leader should be. Eventually I saw him and said, ‘If he’s willing to put his life on the line for this, there has to be some deep moral clarity.’ And I was right.”
He said joining the International Legion was “a longer process,” because at age 42, he’s older than most recruits. He describes himself as a “tech nerd” who’s joined the Defense Intelligence of Ukraine. “Coming from a software engineering background, with a specialty in AI, there are many areas I’ve been able to help out.” He elaborated he’d been specializing in identifying friend or foe systems for Ukrainian weaponry.
“There has been no point in which the Ukrainians have tried to hide anything,” Connery continued. “It’s always been [encouraging] more education, understand why we’re trying to do this.”
This past weekend, I spoke with “Odin,” the call sign of a former member of the German military who also joined the International Legion. Odin has close-cropped reddish hair, tattoos on his forearms, and looks strong enough to wrestle an ox. He joined the Ukrainian army about two years ago and was accepted because of his experience.
“Most people come here just out of basic training and think they’re ready for war,” he said, indicating that many of them turned out to be not so ready.
Odin said that American volunteers made up the largest share of the International Legion, but Portuguese, Colombians, Brazilians, Austrians, British. He said he found the British and American soldiers he’s served with in Ukraine have notably different mindsets.
“The British are very professional,” while “the Americans see it as an adventure.” Odin said some of the Americans get disappointed because there are fewer gunfights than they expected.
He said his team’s combat medic is Lithuanian, who hates the Russians. “As a kid in school, he had to learn Russian.”
Much of his first year, Odin was working and fighting in the Donbas region, and in the past half-year he’s been serving in Kursk, the Russian territory a bit northwest of here that the Ukrainians seized in a sneak attack back in August.
Odin works in a small team, usually six people, selected because of their experience. He said in Donbas the biggest problem he encountered were drones. In Kursk, the said the biggest problem were the “meat waves” — slang for the way Russian commanders send waves of often ill-prepared attackers.
He described a recent encounter: “It was crazy. We’re sitting in our position, and command had told us already there were three or four Russian marines there already killed by Ukrainian drones. We were there five days, they tried to storm us three times during those days. They’ll have a BTR (a Russian armored personnel carrier) with eight people inside, and others on top. The Javelin teams (using U.S.-made man-portable anti-tank missiles) and the drone teams did very good work.”
He joked that he’s encountered so many grenades that he doesn’t really worry about grenades anymore, that if you run and get more than five meters away, you should be protected. I told him I’d take his word for it rather than testing that guidance myself.
I asked Odin what he expected before he joined the International Legion, and he said he felt he had been well-trained in Germany. “We’re a NATO army. I expected something like Afghanistan. . . . NATO training has a massive effect.” He added that there’s a glaring improvement in the Ukrainian infantrymen who have been trained by NATO. “Massively different. Confidence. They know they’ve been trained better than everyone else.”
He said that while every mission and encounter is different, compared to his expectations, “The Russians are very much not well trained. Much worse than I expected.” He said he’s encountered Russians armed with poorly maintained, “barely fixed AKs” — Kalashnikov rifles.
Equipping his team is an intermittent challenge; sometimes they can obtain recently manufactured European rifles and gear, and other times they get much older equipment that had likely been sitting in the back of a warehouse since the Cold War. Odin described being issued grenades and an M-40 rifle made in the 1950s, but, “It still works okay.” He said he was issued a container of 30 rounds, and they were wrapped with wax paper. “It was disintegrating when you touched it.”
I asked Odin for his most bizarre experience, and he answered, “The time I was shot by a tank.” It turns out he had been shot at by a tank, while crossing a field, in between two minefields. “It was daylight, an open field, totally stupid.” But he and his partner had orders, supporting a reconnaissance team.
Odin showed me the video of that encounter, recorded on his helmet’s GoPro camera, hearing his heavy breathing and footsteps as he advanced along the muddy path. Then in the distance, top center of the screen, a BOOM and a puff of smoke — and then Odin’s pace and breathing increased considerably. He and his partner concluded that the Russian tank was moving its position and used the opportunity to go back the way they came.
The videos on Odin’s phone make everyone else’s look tame.
ADDENDUM: The Ukrainian restaurant that Odin, my friends, and I visited served a selection of specialties, including deep-fried cow brains. Picture a tasty McNugget that was a little squishier. I’d rate them a bit below the gourmet bees I tasted in Kyiv — “raisins . . . but crunchy. And with a stinger.”