Command post in Huliaipole: 17 of our fighters against three Russians

Author: Violetta Kirtoka

Censor.NET warned back in early December that the city was under threat. And, unfortunately, it was right. As of now, the enemy has already entered Lyman. Soon, there could be so many enemy troops there that it would be difficult to dislodge them.

When a unit commander is killed, the comments rained down: "Why was he going anywhere? He should’ve stayed at headquarters." When someone dislikes a commander’s decisions and vents about it on social media, the comments explode with advice: send that commander to the trenches, let him sit on the front line, let him personally go on assaults…

Of course, there’s no point looking for logic in Facebook estimates. It’s like armchair advice during a football match. But you still need basic respect. And an understanding that the front line is the entire country. Generators used to hum in Avdiivka and in Shchastia. Now they hum across all of Ukraine. But for some reason, even constant shelling still doesn’t drive home that we’re all a target. Everyone.

Unfortunately, all the pretty words about every soldier’s importance and the value of every life remain just that, words in posts from senior leadership. Because once again, commanders who, in extremely difficult circumstances, saved their troops, pulled them out of positions surrounded by the enemy, and figured out how to keep hitting the enemy while still rotating personnel and getting aid to the wounded when it was no longer possible to reach them, are being issued reprimands for exactly that. Yes, yes. Reprimands for fighters they saved! Meanwhile, those who actually flee their positions, exposing flanks and putting neighboring units in danger, or abandon headquarters with flags, not to mention maps and computers, come up with excuses. And journalists and Facebook swallow their excuses. And I remember how, in Moshchun outside Kyiv, a company pulled back from its command post by two streets because the fighting had already moved right up close, and in those circumstances destroyed everything so the enemy couldn’t use a single thing. Ten days later, our troops recaptured the positions. They returned to the same house. And nobody appreciated it. They tried to open a criminal case over the abandoned post even back then. Thankfully, the guys were defended, and they weren’t allowed to be demoralized already in March 2022…But in reality, there are countless cases like this. And they don’t bring order; they lead to many experienced soldiers and officers already leaving the army. The reason is the senior command’s inept demands and claims. I can already see this wave of resignations. And I can’t blame a single one of those who are leaving. As a rule, they’ve been concussed and wounded more than once, scorched by losses and worn down by accusations from command. But this is yet another symptom of what is happening in the military, a symptom of a severe, long-neglected disease.

This disease was allowed to fester because of total lies, lies that, at times, it feels like they even cultivate. We are no longer merely saying that lying at the front leads to human losses and, after that, to lost territory, we are screaming it. But the candid testimony about why Huliaipole is collapsing is still shocking. It confirms everything you already know, yet it still drains you and burns you out all over again.

"I watched it from above, what was happening with the command post, the one people were literally running from. The livestream was coming from that very battalion," says Dmytro Filatov, callsign Perun, commander of the 1st Assault Regiment named after ‘Da Vinci’ Kotsiubailo. Part of his regiment was redeployed to the Zaporizhzhia direction from near Dobropillia, to put out yet another fire. Because the enemy has already built up around Huliaipole. "When I heard at meetings the reports from the unit that had been holding positions here for nearly more than two years, saying everything was under control, I asked myself: then what are we doing here?" Perun continues. "But when we started looking into the situation and went to check the front line ourselves, we realized that the positions they were supposedly holding firmly had been empty for a long time, there was nobody there. What’s more, three to four kilometers short of those supposed positions, soldiers on the ground were saying: ‘That’s it, there’s nobody beyond this point. We’re the last ones.’ So the defensive line looked nothing like what was being reported at the briefing. We found out that a mortar position hadn’t been changed for years! How is that even possible? It suggests either they weren’t working from it at all, or it was so far from the front that there was no need for it to work. It turned out this brigade had invented its own know-how: command and control, if it was happening at all, was carried out using mobile phones and Starlinks… Radios were used to communicate between positions… But there were no repeaters to allow radio contact with the battalion command. And the fact that the brigade’s command posts, the brigade the Russians moved through, were located in the city, eight kilometers from the line of contact, raised questions for me as well. But the answer I got sounded like it was lifted straight from a propaganda handbook: "So the fighters can see that their commanders are close by, nearby, that if needed, they will go into battle alongside them. We saw how they went into battle…"

At the command post that the Russians captured, there were 17 members of the battalion headquarters staff. They were approached by three Muscovites. The location of the HQ was given away by a running generator; the enemy came to the sound. Why no one opened fire on those three… remains an open question. Seventeen officers (!) fled without even attempting to fight back against an enemy force almost six times smaller. The claim that there were three enemy troops comes from members of that same HQ. Observers from the assault regiment clearly saw only one… He had no communications, because he connected to an abandoned Starlink using a code that, as usual, was posted on the wall… That is how he transmitted all the data about the command post being captured. Later, in intercepted communications, the assault troops heard voice messages from the commander of our unit, which the Muscovites were forwarding from a captured phone with no passcode. They do the battalion command no credit. I don’t even want to quote what I was told. Unfortunately, during that escape, amid chaos and panic, we lost two soldiers, the battalion chief of staff and a company commander… And they, sorry, are likely the ones they will try to blame for what happened… 

After that, the assault unit commander immediately offered to take the troops of that same Territorial Defense Forces battalion under his command. But he was told there was no manpower available…In just a day, when he went around the battalions in person, he found 40 infantrymen in one unit and 50 in another. As soon as they learned they were being attached to the assault troops, they shouted: "You’re going to throw us in as cannon fodder!" "I had to explain that our fighters would run additional training with them at our base," Perun explains. "And that is exactly what we did. After that, I won’t put them in the first line behind my assault troops, not even in the second. They will control logistics routes and observe at road intersections. This weekend, the enemy tried to come at us with vehicles, the weather helped them. We couldn’t fly. They took advantage of it. My troops destroyed the first IFV. The second one rolled as far as a Territorial Defense Forces observation post at a road junction. And they stopped it. When people are prepared, when they know what to do and what to expect, they don’t run. They kill the enemy, and they do it effectively. "And if a fighter on a position has regular communications, if warm clothes, food, and batteries for equipment are dropped off or brought to him, he doesn’t feel abandoned; he does what is expected of him." Perun keeps repeating one phrase: "There are no bad soldiers." People can be trained to hold the line, go on assaults, and observe. Everything depends on the commanders those people end up under.

When I heard how easily the enemy walked into our command post, without resistance, without a fight, I was reminded of what happened in the Luhansk region in the winter of 2020. Back then, too, it was initially presented as if the enemy had assaulted one of the positions, and our troops had been forced to abandon the trenches, but after a fight, through heroic efforts, during which one of our soldiers was killed. When I arrived on site and started asking neighboring units what they knew about what had happened, the then-commander of the 1st Assault Volunteer Company, Dmytro Kotsiubailo, Da Vinci, showed me footage from cameras that were monitoring the front line at the time. The enemy was moving as a group of 12, tightly bunched together, not even ducking. They were even hauling sleds behind them, with ammunition. Not a single shot was fired at them. They entered our position without resistance. The video clearly shows our troops running in panic, not even trying to return fire. And the most painful part is that those who fled forgot to wake up a guy who was asleep in the dugout. He was killed by grenades the enemy threw inside. Even I could see that no one was observing the enemy, which is why they didn’t spot that group. Da Vinci asked me then: "Do I really need to explain that this wasn’t a heroic fight, but panic and a rout from the position?" After that, a neighboring unit spent several weeks driving the enemy out of those positions because it was their flank, which had easily and simply fallen under enemy control. If it weren’t for the footage that was being recorded, most likely that "battle" would have gone down in history as heroic and courageous…And back then, Da Vinci, just like Perun, the commander of the 1st Assault Regiment, does now, was not afraid to tell the truth.

Likewise, just days ago in the Sumy region, an enemy Mavic was flying over one of our positions. Instead of keeping watch and reporting the enemy UAV, our guys started flipping it off and making obscene gestures at the camera. The Mavic operator realized our fighters at the position were not exactly in a fit state, they said they had been drinking with locals. The enemy planned its moves and began operating in that direction. Within a couple of days, those "hotheads" were taken prisoner. All of them were drunk. That’s why they didn’t notice the enemy was coming for them… the enemy was coming…Unfortunately, there are many stories like this. That’s why sergeants and commanders sometimes have to be tough, to prevent situations like this. Because someone’s swagger usually ends badly, and then it takes even more effort to save people and fix the situation.

The 1st Assault Regiment, together with other units, is trying to stabilize the situation in Huliaipole. At the very least, to prevent the enemy from taking the city as easily as it did, unfortunately, with Siversk. But the enemy has already built up a sizable force in the city. The only thing that can offer any consolation right now is that the enemy is taking losses at a ratio of 1 to 17. Those are huge numbers.

In the infantry, there is a term in the army: "on a smoke break." It means a unit’s sector goes untouched and unnoticed by the enemy for a long time. There are no assaults there, and the enemy is not trying to break through the line in those exact spots. That’s why the troops defending that sector relax and lose vigilance. But any lull lasts only until a certain point. If you don’t prepare, keep watch, and think through your own actions, the enemy will realize it can slip past quietly here or wipe out the defense altogether.

Since autumn, the Russians’ strategy has been to infiltrate cities and build up forces there. They operate in small groups, sabotage and reconnaissance teams, probing our defenses in different areas. Frontline commanders know how to respond and how to counter this, but unfortunately, not all of them do. These enemy tactics bring results in the enemy’s favor, as we can see in Pokrovsk, Myrnohrad, Siversk, and Huliaipole. More than that, the enemy is already infiltrating Lyman in the same way. I hope the response there will be faster than in the cities we held for so long and have now almost lost. A timely response does produce results. In August, when the Russians rapidly broke through the front and advanced ten kilometers near Dobropillia, the General Staff did not discuss this movement for several days at briefings, calling the changes on the DeepState map fake. At the same time, the 1st Assault Regiment immediately began cutting the enemy off and eliminating them, preventing any buildup or reinforcement. It worked. The breakthrough was stopped, and the area was cleared. Perhaps Lyman, too, will see a timely response, rather than blind faith that there is no enemy there. No one wants to hear bad news, but we have been living with it for many years. It’s time to learn to tell ourselves the truth.

…While this text was being prepared, an interview with the Commander-in-Chief was published. And a quote from it, now being widely circulated, raises questions. Does the general himself simply not know that the heights near Siversk were lost along with the city, or is he being briefed with inaccurate information?

Violetta Kirtoka, Censor.NET