the times | Wednesday May 25 2022 2GM 17News
A retired Russian general flying a
ground attack aircraft has been shot
down over Ukraine, becoming the
highest ranking pilot killed so far.
Major General Kanamat Botashev,
63, was pulling out of an attack run
when he was hit by an anti-aircraft mis-
sile fired by Ukrainian paratroopers.
He had no time to eject and was killed
instantly in the explosion.
Botashev had a history of unauthor-
ised flights, a trait that ended his career
in the military. In June 2012, he crashed
an Su-27 two-seat fighter jet he was fly-
ing without permission.
Although not qualified to fly it, he
had ordered a subordinate officer to
transfer the controls to him while on an
exercise and then tried to perform an
aerobatic stunt.
The jet went into a tailspin and the
two men baled out at 500m as it plum-
meted towards the earth. “I rememberthe Besovets airbase in Karelia, but he
retired after the 2012 incident. He went
on to work as deputy chairman of the
Voluntary Society for Assistance to the
Army, Air Force and Navy, a state-
funded institution that trains cadets.Half a lifetime ago she was dancing at
the Kremlin. Now she is hiding from
Moscow’s cannons.
At 73, Ludmila Yusova still has the
lithe agility of her younger days, when
she was a gymnast and a member of the
Kvitka Dance Ensemble, a Ukrainian
folk troupe that toured the Soviet bloc
and beyond. She once danced in
Moscow for Nikita Khruschev, the
former Soviet leader.
As she begins her fourth month shel-
tering in the Kharkiv metro from the
Russian shelling that has made her
apartment block uninhabitable, she
ponders how her life came to this.
“It is hard to express openly how I
feel,” she said. In part, that is because
she does not know where her children
are — she hopes they will return to res-
cue her but fears they are trapped in
Russia. She has no mobile phone.
The border is only 20 miles away and
many residents of Kharkiv fled in that
direction when the invasion began.
She is not alone in questioning her
Soviet past. Hundreds of thousands of
elderly Ukrainians have been left try-
ing to square their fate with their
former lives as loyal, even enthusiastic,
Soviet citizens, “brothers and sisters” to
their Russian neighbours.
Nowhere is this more the case than in
Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second and most
obviously ex-Soviet city.
The metro, the city and the sur-
rounding countryside, some of it re-
cently liberated from the Russians, is
full of men and women who spent their
lives working in state-run factories or
on collective farms or teaching in insti-
tutes once dedicated to promoting the
Soviet communist ideal.
Valery Shamanayev, 69, is Ukrainian
only through historical events. He was
born in Sakhalin, the Russian-ruledRussian general shot down and killed during attack mission
Maxim Tucker space, although relentless Russian air-
strikes have continued. President Zel-
ensky has repeatedly asked Ukraine’s
western friends to provide longer-
range air defence systems and fighter
jets to repel Russian air power, which
has targeted the civilian population.
In a strike on a theatre in Mariupol,
which was marked “children” in letters
visible from the air, Russian bombs are
believed to have killed about 600
people. Refugees from the city said they
endured near-constant attacks from
the air.
Moscow has ratcheted up the tempo
of its airstrikes on Ukrainian positions
in Donbas, raising the prospect that its
pilots are exhausted.
Dissatisfaction among pilots is evi-
dent from their Telegram social media
forums. In response to a video of a fly-
past tribute to a Ukrainian pilot, one
Russian wrote: “Our dead airmen are
being buried as discreetly, quietly and
quickly as possible.”Botashev, who was shot down by a
Stinger anti-aircraft missile over
Luhansk on Sunday, is the 13th Russian
general Ukraine claims to have killed.
His piloting of the Su-25 attack air-
craft would have required significant
support from ground crew and control,
and it is speculated that the Russian air
force allowed him to fly the £9 million
aircraft because it is short of pilots.
Botashev’s death highlights the
Kremlin’s failure to achieve air superi-
ority three months into the invasion.
Ukraine claims to have shot down 205
Russian fixed-wing aircraft and 170
helicopters since February 24.
Western estimates are lower, but
the BBC has confirmed from material in
the public domain that at least 31
Russian pilots have been killed in
Ukraine.
Nato anti-aircraft systems given to
Ukraine, including British Starstreak
and American Stinger missiles, have
helped its forces to defend their air-a number of such incidents from my
time in the Soviet air force — when
generals believed their aircraft should
pay their rank the same respect as their
subordinates,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, a
retired Soviet air force colonel.
“Unfortunately for them, an aircraft
doesn’t care.”
Botashev was tried in a military court
because he had been suspended from
flying at the time, having flown an Su-
34 without permission the previous
year. He pleaded guilty and was handed
a further ban.
“I just wanted to fly a fighter of this
type, but did not take into account that
such an aircraft has its own characteris-
tics,” he told the court.
Born in 1959 in the north Caucasus
region of Karachay-Cherkessia, Bota-
shev graduated from the Yeysk Higher
Military Aviation Institute, where he
qualified as a fighter-bomber pilot.
He rose to the rank of general and
commanded an air force regiment atKanamat Botashev retired in 2012. He
was shot down by a US Stinger missileedge of Kharkiv. Many of its residents are continuing to shelter in the metroNews
key city and sever supply lines
From Soviet ‘brothers and
sisters’ to sworn enemies
Pacific island off Japan. But his mother
was from Belgorod, a Russian town
near the Ukrainian border.
When Valery was 16, his mother,
tired of the cold climate, applied to
move back home. The family was allo-
cated a berth at a state-run farm out-
side Kharkiv. When the Soviet Union
broke up, Shamanayev was given the
choice of Russian or Ukrainian nation-
ality. He chose Ukrainian. He did not
regret his choice, he said, as he stood by
his house outside Kharkiv, which was
recently liberated from Russian rule.
“If I were younger, I would have
taken up a gun,” he said. “That’s how I
feel about the Russians.”
As a young man, he took up a gun to
perform his Soviet national service.
That seems a long time ago now.
After the Second World War, western
Ukrainians fought a long guerrilla war
against the Soviet Union as they came
under direct rule from Moscow. The
Russian-speaking eastern side of the
country, however, was integrated into
Russia. For a time, Kharkiv was the cap-
ital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic
and the third largest city in the USSR.
As part of the Soviet military indus-
trial complex — rocket engineering in
particular — the Kharkiv metro was
built with a secondary use in mind, as a
nuclear bunker. The Soviet leadership
feared that the city would be a target in
a war with the West.
The bunker has proved a godsend
for the Sydorov family, whom The
Times first met in April. At the time
Gennady Sydorov, 72, a precision
toolmaker, his wife Tatiana, 70, and
daughter Olena could not imagine
staying in the dark confines for a
week. Now they refuse to
leave. They no longer trust
officials to find them another
place to take shelter or help
them repair their flat. So
they are staying put while
they can still hear shelling.
There is not much to
return to. The apart-
ment blocks in the dis-trict of Saltivka, on the northern edge of
the city, have been devastated.
The apartments were the last gasp of
Soviet reconstruction in the 1980s. At
first the families were unchanged by
the break-up of the Soviet empire. But
attitudes changed at the start of the
2014 war with Russia.
Oleksiy Shkriabin, 45, has chronicled
the conflict in a series of audio blogs.
The Soviet generation was brought
up not to think about politics, he said.
Border controls were not imposed after
Ukraine became independent. People
could travel freely to Russia, where
many had relatives. The countries were
bound together — until Russia invaded.
Shkriabin was 13 when the Berlin
Wall fell, followed by the collapse of the
Soviet Union. He said he thought dif-
ferently from his parents — until the
invasion on February 24. “I was lucky in
that I stepped into a new world when I
was a teenager,” he said. “I wasn’t brain-
washed like older people who lived
their whole lives under that system.”
His parents spent 30 years thinking
things would go on as before, without
much thought for who was running the
country. Now they are more Ukrainian
in their outlook, he said.
Yusova said that she also never
thought about politics after she retired
as a dancer. Now the future seems be-
yond her comprehension. “I have no
idea what the future of our city will be,”
she said. “We will have to do what
we can.”
It is a harsh choice. In Saltivka,
Mikhail Fedorovych, 74, was
helping his daughter clear their
devastated apartment. As an
electronics teacher at a techni-
cal college, he held a spe-
cial position. Now he was
surrounded by carnage,
the smell of death in the
air.
When I asked what
he thought of the Rus-
sians for whom he
once worked, he broke
down. “I hate them all,”
he said as he turned away
to hide his tears. “I just hate
them.”hTIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL; ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGESRichard Spencer finds
Kharkiv grappling with
a troubled past.
Photographs
by Jack Hill
ggggggggg
Ludmila Yusova once
danced for Krushchev