The Sunday Times June 5, 2022 21
WORLD NEWS
Pro-Russian
separatists in
Donetsk, right,
have turned
heavy fire on
Ukrainian troops.
Left, craters left
from Russian
shellingMorale suffers as Kyiv’s losses grow
With up to 100 fighters
dying every day, Ukraine
urgently needs weapons
from the West to counter
Putin’s artillery onslaught
Kremlin trolls sow discord
in Bulgaria by stirring
up trouble for refugees
No house or unarmoured vehicle can
provide any protection. The sense of iso-
lation and gnawing uncertainty chips
away at the bravest. The soldiers dig tren-
ches as deep as they can. But only a con-
crete bunker — or at least 20ft of earth
overhead — can offer any safety.
The constant, random nature of shell-
ing makes any movement a risk to life.
Getting casualties out and supplies and
reinforcements in is a high-risk activity.
Battle-hardened regular soldiers manage
it with some degree of equanimity. Citi-
zen soldiers lifted from civilian life only
weeks ago must learn quickly — exactly
the experience of the British citizens who
volunteered for “Kitchener’s army” in
1915 and found themselves being
pounded on the western front.
Brutal dynamics are at play here:
Ukraine is gradually trading land and
dead soldiers for the depletion of Russian
combat power, buying crucial time for
the West to deliver the heavy weapons
and ammunition it needs to match Rus-
sian artillery in range and lethality. There
is a direct connection between the will of
the Ukrainian soldier to face immense
Russian firepower and the will of western
states to deliver the equipment needed to
change the odds — and make the sacrifice
worth it.
Like all wars, the outcome is forged
through a combination of effort, will and
luck that endures long enough to break
the opposition’s will to continue. Taking
Ukrainian will to resist as a given, this war
ends either when Russia gives up or the
West gives up on Ukraine.
But does Ukraine have the capability,
with western assistance, to throw the
Russians back over the border?
Wars are won in the end by effective
offensive action. There are fewer prizes
for even skilful withdrawal and none at all
just for sweating and dying. The situation
today shows us what must be done to give
Ukraine the military capability it needs to
take its country back.
What matters now is long-range artil-
lery. The US and UK decision to provide
rocket launchers with ranges of up to 50
miles is vitally important. Several Nato
countries have also taken some satisfac-
tion from the results of training provided
to Ukraine since 2014: it helped to create
a military more capable and agile in lead-
ership and tactics than the clunky Soviet-
style opposition that crossed the border
on February 24.
Ukraine going on the offensive will give
some advantages back to the Russians,
who will think that they can hold off the
attackers — and their new long-range
artillery — if their force is at least three
times larger, from what are assumed to be
well-prepared defensive positions.If not conducted skilfully, a Ukrainian
“fire and movement” offensive would
involve a risk of even higher casualties
than they are suffering now. It would
demand agile, resilient logistics support,
including medical resources.
At the same time, Ukrainian com-
manders hoping to push Russians out of
their country must understand that this
is more than a land and air war: breaking
the Russian blockade of Ukraine’s Black
Sea coast is also a strategic imperative —
not so vital to the war today, but to the
sustenance of several hundred million
people in fragile parts of the world who
rely on Ukrainian grain. Access to the sea
is an existential issue for the future econ-
omy and prosperity of Ukraine. This
means restoring Ukrainian maritime
capability too.
This will not be achieved only by hav-
ing equipment that outweighs what Rus-
sia can field. Ukraine will also need a very
large supply of highly motivated fighters;
and these two vital ingredients are only
capable of winning battles with the right
leadership, training and logistical, main-
tenance and medical support that allows
an army to endure.
So the artillery and ammunition being
sent in now should be just the prelude to
wholesale military reconstruction and
support. The Ukrainian military needs
not only leadership training, but also
help with command and control systems,
intelligence, surveillance and reconnais-
sance; air defence, offensive air power
and armoured vehicles.
The West will not be doing the fighting
but paying the costs of keeping Russia
in isolation as a pariah state, steadily
depleting its economy, industry and
global prospects.
So the Ukrainian fighter on the front
line and the British family facing huge
energy bills are locked in a combined
effort to conclude the whole ordeal as
successfully and swiftly as possible.
The cost, in the end, will be less than
that of abandoning Ukraine to armed
aggression on the periphery of Europe:
this would not only stoke Russian expan-
sionist ambitions. It would spread to
other parts of our increasingly fractious
world the belief we do not stand up for
our values.
D-Day in Normandy in June 1944 was
the result of at least three years of prepa-
ration. Enabling Ukraine to win on the
terms it sets and the West supports
should be comparatively simpler — and
quicker — but it is no less important to all
our futures.
General Sir Richard Barrons was the
commander of Joint Forces Command
from 2013 to 2016Hipsters in flak jackets shut out the noise of war at Kharkiv’s ‘pocket of peace’ café
Ever since Russia launched its “special
military operation” in Ukraine in Febru-
ary, the world has been mesmerised by
the spectacle of a superpower’s army
being outmanoeuvred and humiliated by
a smaller, better-motivated force. But
now Ukraine’s army, too, is reported to
be struggling with heavy losses in an
increasingly bloody struggle to hold the
invaders at bay.
News from the eastern Donbas region
is grim: the Ukrainian military is losing
ground and between 60 to 100 soldiers a
day, as well as 3,500 a week injured,
according to President Volodymyr Zelen-
sky, suggesting that overall Ukrainian
losses, which in April he put at less than
3,000 soldiers killed, are now far higher.
Ukraine’s huge and easy victories
around Kyiv and Kharkiv may soon seem
a lifetime ago: one-fifth of Ukraine is now
under some form of Russian occupation.
So is President Vladimir Putin in the
process of salvaging a tactical — albeit
Pyrrhic — victory from his extraordinary
strategic folly?
Before the start of the war, the Ukrain-
ian army fielded around 30,000 troops in
the Donbas region. Now many of those on
the front line are volunteers, including
teachers and taxi drivers, with no battle-
field experience and who had signed up
to defend their home towns rather than
fight in the trenches.
Morale among them is reportedly suf-
fering: Russian commanders are concen-
trating massive firepower on Ukrainian
positions. The Russian 152mm diameter
shells, weighing around 114lbs, distribute
shrapnel at 3,000ft per second, which is
lethal at 50 yards — and sometimes as far
as 150 yards.
Nobody who has been shelled is left
unmoved by the experience: six artillery
guns firing together will engulf a space
the size of a football pitch with a
devastating effect on anyone in it: the
human body is no match for hot metal
splinters.
RICHARD
BARRONS
Nobody
who has
been
shelled
forgets itWORLD NEWS
ALEX CHAN TSZ YUK/SOPA IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; ALEXEI ALEXANDROV/AP; PAVEL KLIMOV/REUTERSsomething wrong, we expose
it and start changing it,” he
said. “We can do it because
we were not involved with
setting it up in the first place.”
The government has
claimed a number of anti-
corruption successes. Last
month, the state took control
of a laboratory that tested
biological goods entering
Bulgaria from Turkey after it
discovered that a private
company that had run it for
the past decade had been
habitually corrupt.
Just a few months into their
rule, however, the political
neophytes were faced with an
entirely new set of
challenges: supporting EU
and Nato allies over Ukraine
and sanctions on Russia while
attempting not to provoke the
ire of the Kremlin.
It did not work. At the end
of April, Russia cut its gas
supply to Bulgaria and
Poland, and the Kremlin’s
hybrid warfare machine went
into action. Troll farms began
pouring out content accusing
Ukrainian refugees of
everything from benefit fraud
to ungratefulness. Pro-Russia
groups in Bulgaria began
stoking social unrest.
“They get some crack into
a western society and exploit
it,” Bozhidar Bozhanov,
Bulgaria’s minister of e-
government told me. “[Their
plan] is to create discord, to
create chaos, to undermine
western societies.”
Bozhanov has called on
social media firms to provide
the government with reports
on the types of users posting
on Bulgarian-language
accounts, so they can detect
co-ordinated behaviour. “The
biggest challenge is we don’t
have information,” he said.
Additional reporting:
Martin DimitrovThree months ago, when the
first Ukrainian refugees came
to the upmarket seaside town
of Saints Constantine and
Helena, they were welcomed
with open arms. Thousands
of women and children were
put up in hotel rooms on
Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast,
and hoteliers were paid a
small fee for each from
government and EU funding.
Online, however, it is a
different story. Across
Bulgarian social media, there
has been a violent upswing in
false news articles and
provocative posts claiming
that Ukrainian refugees are
taking advantage of Bulgarian
hospitality — raking in money
from benefit payments and
being ungrateful to boot.
They have found a willing
audience in some parts. A
survey published by Market
Links, a polling company,
showed that in March, more
than half of Bulgarians said
the government should
provide for Ukrainians,
including financially. Now
only 35 per cent agree.
Much of the anti-refugee
traffic posted in Bulgarian,
say analysts and politicians
working closely on the issue,
come from Kremlin-linked
troll farms and others online.
The aim, they say, is to stir
up anti-refugee sentiment in
Bulgaria, causing social
unrest and deepening
tensions in the already
polarised country.
“We do see attempts to
destabilise the government,”said Assen Vassiliev, the
country’s deputy prime
minister and minister of
finance, told me last week in
Sofia. “Concerted efforts
using all the tools available,
disinformation being also a
large part of it, well-funded
and pushed through
Facebook very skillfully.”
It is just the latest challenge
that has hit Bulgaria’s new
pro-western leadership,
elected in November on a
promise to transform the
country — cracking down on
corruption and organised
crime and breaking the hold
of the mafia groups and
Russian-linked oligarchs that
have held the country in a
stranglehold.
Once the most loyal of the
Soviet Union’s satellite states,
Bulgaria has since 2007 been
part of the European Union,
and faces firmly westwards.
Dissatisfaction with the
ruling class runs so deep that
last year voters elected a
cabinet run almost entirely by
people with no political
experience. Vassiliev, a
Harvard graduate who ran an
IT start-up, said a lack of
political experience was an
asset. “Whenever we seeThey are
trying to
create
social
unrestLOUISE
CALLAGHANIn VarnaAN
artillery strikes. It attracts an
unusual crowd, in which
Kalashnikov-wielding soldiers
rub shoulders with
cockapoos and hipsters with
holstered pistols — and where
people in flak jackets order
flat whites.
“The situation is obviously
terrifying,” said Veronika
Veretennikova, a 22-year-old
waitress often accompanied
at work by her brown
chihuahua. “But we need to
keep ourselves busy and
happy about something — at
least just food, or coffee, or
music. If we didn’t open, this
city would be like a ghost
town.”War has a habit of making the
unremarkable seem
remarkable, the
extraordinary, ordinary. That
is how the customers of
Protagonist, a self-avowedly
“hipster” café in Kharkiv,
described their first meals
when it reopened a few
weeks after war forced it to
close.
Having lived under Russian
bombardment for more than
a month, Michael
Chernomorets, 33, barely
noticed the sound of
explosions in the distance as
he walked in. But when he
was served his simple meal —
a modern twist on borscht,
with pulled pork and small,
sweet berries — it seemed like
a revelation. “It was like a
bridge to the past, this bridge
between peacetime and
wartime,” he said. “It was as
though everything had just
stopped for a bit.”
A few other businesses
have resumed operations in
the wake of Russia’s
withdrawal from Ukraine’s
second city in the middle of
May. But for weeks,
Protagonist was the only one
open in an eerie world of
empty streets, boarded
shopfronts, and regularAntonia Cundy Kharkhiv because I don’t have time to “I don’t feel scared here,
think about anything else
other than my job,”
Veretennikova said. “I don’t
think we’re having fun here,
this is just a breathing space.”
Her waitressing income is
also a lifeline, she said, as she
is supporting her parents,
whose businesses are closed.
“If we talk about this with
our parents, they say, ‘what
the f*** are you doing
there?’,” Chernomorets
chipped in. “For us, it’s a
symbol of the fact that we can
control our lives — we can do
what we want — even in this
period.”café’s resumption. Opening
hours were extended, and a
two-item menu of coffee and
borscht grew to offer
halloumi salads, steaks,
pancakes and fresh juices.
Protagonist has made a lot
out of little, creating a
watered-down semblance of
normal life. Its thick glass
walls, which used to stop
blaring hip-hop from seeping
into the streets, shield its
customers from the wail of
air-raid sirens and distant
explosions on the front line.
As they chat and tap at
laptops, customers and staff
are thankful for this pocket of
peace.The café was set up in 2019
by Olena Khromova and her
husband Oleg, creative
professionals and
Kharkivites. At night, it
turned into a bar, with
weekend customers spilling
onto the streets. “We wanted
to bring together creative
people,” Khromova said.
At first, Protagonist mainly
served international
journalists and soldiers — a
shock to Veretennikova,
whose familiar Friday night
customers suddenly
reappeared with weapons.
Then regulars and other
Kharkivites arrived, bearing
Veronika Veretennikova often brings her dog to work flowers in gratitude for theANTONIA CUNDY