Читать книгу Confessions of a fighter. Revelations of a Volunteer - Bondo Dorovskikh - Страница 6

We arrived in Donetsk in Rostov Province, which borders onto the territory of Ukraine, and spent about an hour there. People in passing cars stuck their heads out, looking at us with interest – we were almost all dressed in camouflage cloaks. The recruits arrived in a minibus painted a spotty green color. The senior man was called “Mechanic”. It was his job to take volunteers across the border, and also humanitarian goods, which were addressed to the Phantom battalion.

I was still wondering, “Where the hell am I going?” But my legs carried me of their own accord, not allowing the head to think…

We crossed the border in a field, went on for a hundred meters so that the minibus would not get stuck, and found ourselves in Belenkoye village, Krasnodon district of Lugansk Province, a thousand meters from the Russian border.

The recruits were housed in the local club. There were about thirty of us.

We unloaded, and the first thing we saw was a fight between two of the militiamen, heroes of the defense of Slavyansk. A week later, one of these two stole a Makarov pistol from a retired GRU captain7. The retired GRU group consisted of three men, and was going to Russia. They did not conceal who they were, although they did not draw attention to themselves. One of them was from Moscow, one from Nizhni Novgorod and I don’t recall where the third one was from. But I remember the senior of the group. It was obvious he was an officer. Five foot nine, well built, commanding voice and military bearing. He had fought in the First Chechen War and stormed Grozny. He knew how to handle guns and knives, and had basic medical knowledge, including about what kinds of wound there might be and what medicines to use. He was 100% prepared: a real professional. I didn’t meet many of those in the Donbass.

From a few snatches of conversation over ten days, I’d formed a picture of these officers, although they didn’t tell us everything. They had already been in Ukraine three months. They went in armed only with knives. Two attempts were unsuccessful because they encountered large numbers of the enemy. As one of them said: “You would never have known about us if we hadn’t lost contact with Russia, They thought we’d already been killed, so we didn’t get any help.” After a month wandering about, they came to the militia and attached themselves to the humanitarian column.

There had been four in the group at first, but their commander was shot by the militia. They were taking his body to be buried in Russia – or to be precise, the body was somewhere else and they were waiting at the border to escort it.

“Why did they kill your commander?” I asked.

“For no reason at all”, one of them replied. “They just shot him, that was it.”

It seemed out of place to inquire any further.

Two hours later, a column from Alcheyevsk8 joined us. They all looked really impressive. Some wore bulletproof vests, anti-shrapnel goggles and Kevlar helmets. Nikolayich, the deputy commander of the battalion, got out of his Land Cruiser with a pistol in his hand.

“Why haven’t the two fuel tankers gone where they should?” he shouted.

“We had no such orders, we were only told to wait here”, replied one of the drivers.

“I could have you shot on the spot! The tanks are stuck, they can’t move! Where’s the other driver?”

“I don’t know”, replied the bewildered man.

“Arrest both of them! Take them to battalion headquarters”, ordered Nikolayich.

One of the guys I had just arrived with came up to me.

“Something here sets my heart pounding, though I fought in Chechnya”, he said.

Another one came up and agreed.

“Yes, it’s no joke any more.”

I was also concerned. Up to now, I’d had no idea that you could simply be killed by your own side here. We had rapidly found ourselves in a different reality, and I started looking towards the Russian border.

It was already dark, and this column was supposed to take us to Alcheyevsk, where the Phantom battalion was deployed. Some of those we had arrived with were tank troops, and this was where they were formed into tank crews (engineer-drivers, gunners, gunlayers and tank commanders)

Fougasse, who had come with me from Rostov, suggested:

Stay behind, Bondo, we’ll teach you to be a gunner or gunlayer, you’ll be a tank man then!»

I was in an apprehensive mood, and I didn’t want to travel any farther, not that day anyway, so I decided to stay where I was. When the column had gone, we all sat at the table with the commander. They started interrogating us, asking who had served where, what specialty and so on. I hadn’t served anywhere, but my comrades said that I was a hunter and could shoot a squirrel in the eye from three hundred meters. The commander gave me the callsign “Hunter”. and promised: “When we get back from Rostov, you’ll be our sniper.” I had no objection, in fact that was the very position I had been hoping for.

After we’d been allocated to crews, we decided to have a bite to eat. Although we’d been offered food as soon as we arrived, somehow we felt it would have choked us. We took what we had from our bags, ate something, and I went out to the street. It was night time, quiet, there were bats about. The only light came from the open door. I was calm. “Fucking hell!” I thought.

About one in the morning, Fougasse called me.

“The column, Bondo! Look, our guys have arrived.”

About a hundred meters away, a column of military vehicles was moving along the road: Grads9, APCs10 and loaded tank transporters were proceeding from the Russian border towards Krasnodon11.

“Here they are at long last”, said one of the militiamen.

We would see this picture every night right up to our August advance.

We were staying in the club building, sleeping on the floor. We just threw the mattresses down and slept as we were, in our clothes. With the exception of the new arrivals, everyone had combat experience – they were almost all locals, from the Donbass. They were all about the same age, from forty to sixty-five. Their faces were coarse, not always pleasant, not like those we were used to seeing in peacetime.

The next day the militiamen under Batya’s command arrived. As I understood it, until a week ago he had been Mozgovoy’s deputy commander. He was a middle-aged man, about fifty-five. They arrived in expensive new Jeeps confiscated from civilians for the cause of “the struggle against fascism”. As he got out of the vehicle, Batya asked: “Who’ll join me? I’m creating a new battalion. If you come to us, there won’t be any tanks, Mozgovoy won’t give us anything like that. I’ll send all the tank crew lists to Russia.”

We new arrivals, of course, looked blank and didn’t understand anything. A few did go over to him though, five or six of our party.

The militiamen did not yet have weapons, they had all been disarmed back at Alchevsk, because they were supposed to be going to one of the tank training grounds in Rostov province for initial training and exercises, and to be given the equipment they’d need in combat operations.

One with the callsign Rost had already been there, and told us how the training went. “One to three weeks, from five in the morning till late evening, on the tank training ground. Then a test. Get fully clothed and shod, get weapons. They even give you brand new assault rifles, still with oil on them.” I had nothing against taking a ride to Rostov-on-Don and riding in tanks. I was in no hurry to get to the war.

We agreed to ring Mechanic at once if Batya and his comrades came back.

We did not have long to wait. The very next day, Batya got us fallen in and said:

“You realize, don’t you, that you’re like a flock of sheep, you can’t make your minds up to anything? Anyway, there’s an order from Phantom to shoot looters, because whatever town you go in, people are suffering from looting.”

Then Mechanic turned up with the reinforcements, We were between two armed groups. The situation had become tense. One of the drunken militiamen switched his gun’s safety catch off, which couldn’t go unnoticed.

“Hey, calm down, Don’t do anything stupid”, they told him as they disarmed him.

“I remember how as soon as I thought about going from Mozgovoy to Batya, I was cut by a knife, in his presence, in his office”, shouted one of those who had come with Batya, and showed us the scars of his ordeal. “And how many businessmen has Mosgovoy shot because they didn’t want to cooperate with him?”