Категорія: en

One of the biggest mysteries of the beginning of the war, which remains unresolved due to military law restrictions, is the question of blowing up bridges in Mykolaiv, Kyiv, and the Kyiv region.

The Antonivskyi Bridge in Kherson is not included in this list. As it turned out, despite the obvious threat of an attack from Russia, this strategic bridge was not mined before the war. And during the events of February 24-26, the military simply did not dare or did not manage to blow it up, since Ukrainian troops were still on the left bank and had to retreat to Kherson through this bridge.

For a better understanding of the situation, it might be worth quoting an interview with Mykhailo Podolyak, advisor to the head of the President’s Office, given to the newspaper “Fakty” in September 2022.

“That morning of February 24, we were not psychologically ready to blow up bridges, for example… The first few hours we thought: we invested money in comfort for people, how now to destroy all this?.. We thought that on the other side there are also people, that they would treat houses, bridges, and other infrastructure carefully,” recalls Yermak’s advisor.

As we already know, two days before the final occupation of Kherson, Ukrainian troops retreated to the neighboring Mykolaiv. This regional center was also not ready for defense, but fortunately, General Dmytro Marchenko, who arrived in Mykolaiv on February 25, managed to quickly organize the city’s defense and save it from occupation. And here I draw your attention again. An episode from an interview with Marchenko, which he gave to the local site “Nikvesti” in May 2022, is interesting.

In a conversation with a journalist, the general recalls that during the defense of Mykolaiv, when the fate of the 500-thousand city hung by a thread, an unnamed person from Kyiv repeatedly called by phone and demanded to blow up the Varvarivskyi Bridge. An astonishing demand, considering that this bridge, unlike the Antonivskyi in Kherson, has a completely different geographical significance for defense. Kherson is located on the western (right) bank of the Dnieper. The Antonivskyi Bridge connected Kherson with the eastern (left) bank, to which the Russians from Crimea were approaching. Therefore, blowing it up could at least delay the enemy.

The Varvarivskyi Bridge in Mykolaiv, on the contrary, connects the eastern (left) bank of the Southern Bug, where the city is located, with the safe western (right) bank, from which the road to Odesa runs. That is, if Marchenko had blown up the Varvarivskyi Bridge as ordered from Kyiv, then Mykolaiv would have been completely encircled, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces would have lost communication with the Odesa group.

“They took us by the Mariupol plan − to encircle, to push out all (Ukrainian) troops to the center of the city, to some object, let’s say, the 61 Communards Plant, cut off electricity, water and wait until we start to go mad, until we run out of ammunition, food, water,” said Dmytro Marchenko.

The next episode of the war, raising many questions, is related to blowing up bridges in Kyiv. According to BBC sources, on February 26, an unnamed person called the then head of the Security Service of Ukraine, Ivan Bakanov, demanding that he order a special unit of the SBU to blow up the bridges across the Dnieper. Bakanov decided to pass this task to the military and called Zaluzhny so that his subordinates could perform the explosion, but the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces refused.

“Blow up the bridges? No way! That would be a betrayal of those left on the left bank of the Dnieper — both military and civilians,” Zaluzhny said.

So who could be Bakanov’s interlocutor, who ordered the head of the Security Service of Ukraine to blow up the bridges in the capital? There are only two options: Zelensky or Yermak. Considering the configuration of Ukrainian power, other persons are excluded.

And why such panic? As of February 26, the Russians were indeed close to Kyiv. But they did not capture either Brovary or the residential areas on the left bank of Kyiv. Why would one of these two: Zelensky or Yermak, panic so much that they were ready to preemptively, without a fight, hand over more than a million residents of the left bank to the enemy? It is quite possible that it was not panic at all, but the execution of some plan. But this plan was definitely not in the interests of Ukraine.

And finally, the third episode concerns the situation with the blowing up of the bridge across the Irpin River in the Kyiv region. As claimed by a former intelligence officer of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Colonel of the Armed Forces Roman Chervinsky, the bridge across the Irpin River, which would have stopped the rapid advance of the Russians into Kyiv, was blown up on February 25 contrary to the order of the President’s Office.

“A serviceman came to our unit. He was the deputy commander of the 72nd brigade. He says, when they managed to reach Irpin overnight, set up some positions to stop the Russians, but he realized that they would not be able to. The forces are not equal. He has one brigade, and there are tens of thousands of people and equipment coming from the other side. And he says, logically I needed to blow up the bridges across Irpin. He says, when I reported this situation to the brigade commander, he said: “The President’s Office sent a command − do not blow up the bridges without their sanction.” This is the second day of the war. He says, I blew it up on my own discretion,” Chervinsky said in an interview with the site “Censor.net”.

So, two calls and one order. If the Varvarivskyi Bridge had been blown up, then Mykolaiv and its defenders would have faced the fate of Mariupol. If the bridges across the Dnieper in Kyiv had been blown up, then the Russians would have occupied almost half of the capital, where more than 1 million people live, without a fight. If the military had followed the President’s Office’s order not to blow up the bridge across the Irpin River, then Russian troops could suddenly appear on the northern and eastern outskirts of Kyiv.

>>> 47. The Bakanov Case

Table of contents

The city of Kharkiv, with a population of 1.5 million, was considered one of the most dangerous defense directions. The reason was its geographical position: the city is located just 30 kilometers from the Russian border. On January 20, additional alarm was caused by Zelensky’s remark, who for some reason publicly suggested that “Kharkiv could be occupied.” As it turned out, the city really was one step away from occupation.

On the night of February 24, the people of Kharkiv woke up to explosions. Around five in the morning, Russians began shelling the northeastern residential areas with artillery. At the same time, an offensive began from the direction of the Russian border. Several small villages separating Kharkiv from Russia did not stop the occupiers. As it turned out, the Ukrainian Armed Forces had no fortifications on the near or far approaches to the city.

Russian troops appeared on the ring road of Kharkiv, from the direction of Pyatykhatky and Tsyrkuny, already at noon on February 24. Here, the first battle began: Ukrainian military burned several units of enemy armored vehicles. At that time, the first photos of dead Russian soldiers against the entrance sign with the name of the city went viral.

Later, one of the captured Russians said that their task that day was to break through to the center of Kharkiv to Freedom Square, to capture some administrative building and hang a Russian flag on it. Like under Kyiv, the Russians did not expect organized resistance.

On February 25-26, the occupiers entered the city several times from the direction of the ring road, but each time unsuccessfully. In the first days of the war, they simply did not expect Kharkiv to be defended so actively. As it turned out, in vain. On February 26, on the highway leading from Staryi Saltiv, Ukrainians smashed an entire column of the Russian National Guard: militarized police that had no heavy weaponry.

Through the internet, Russians tried to intimidate the defenders of Kharkiv with the announcement that the city awaited a night landing of thousands of paratroopers from helicopters. The calculation of this disinformation was only that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would surrender the city without a fight. There was no helicopter landing. Ukrainian military by that time already had portable anti-aircraft systems, both American and Soviet. Therefore, Russians did not dare to risk their helicopters.

February 27 should be considered the turning point of Kharkiv’s defense, when in the morning several dozen Russian special forces broke into the city in Tiger armored vehicles. They did not reach the city center, but they managed to capture school № 134 and secure themselves in it. This became their fatal mistake. In Kharkiv, along with the police and volunteers, there were from 30 to 40 thousand Ukrainian servicemen. The school was almost immediately blocked, after which it was fired upon from a tank. Two hours later, a fire started in the school and most of the Russians were killed. Several people surrendered.

After the events of February 27, the Russian army no longer attempted to enter the city. Instead, they regularly shelled Kharkiv with artillery and missiles. But the risk of capturing the country’s second-largest city by population had disappeared by then.

>>> 46. The Secret Advisor on Blowing Up Bridges

Table of contents

On February 23, 2022, the day before the invasion into the Kherson region, Russians at their checkpoints suddenly stopped letting people into Crimea and back without any explanation. Earlier, Ukrainian marines noticed that the enemy was demining the territory they controlled in front of their checkpoint.

That same day, February 23, the command of Ukrainian troops in the Kherson region received information that the enemy might provoke an incident: they themselves would shell the “Titan” chemical plant located on the territory they controlled, to blame Ukraine for it. This case could be used as an analog of the Gleiwitz incident in 1939, when Hitler found a pretext to start a war against Poland.

On February 24, around 4 a.m., Ukrainian military personnel recorded more than thirty military aircraft taking off in Crimea. At first, they circled over the peninsula, obviously forming a battle order. After that, the planes dispersed over the Azov and Black Seas and began a massive missile launch.

The first missile strike hit the locations of Ukrainian units, command points, launch positions, and air defense control points, including the Melitopol airport. Almost all military objects in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions were targeted. At 4:30 a.m., Russian occupiers shelled Chernobaevka Airport in Kherson with “Kalibr” missiles. But by that time, Ukrainian helicopters had already been relocated elsewhere.

Around the same time, Ukrainian command received information from the commander of the 137th battalion, Colonel Rymarenko. He reported that the Russians began an artillery barrage, shelling the forward positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the Kalanchak and Chongar checkpoints.

The failure of the defense in the south of Ukraine had catastrophic consequences. Despite the fact that the small number of Ukrainian troops on the border with Crimea resisted fiercely, the Russians managed to break through the defense without much effort, enter the operational space, and by 10 a.m., reach the city of Nova Kakhovka. There, they captured the dam of the Kakhovka HPP and the system of facilities of the North Crimean Canal, through which water from the Dnieper is supplied to Crimea.

That same day, February 24, Russian troops reached Kherson. Approximately at 11 a.m., the Russian airborne troops, having landed from helicopters, took positions near the Antonivskiy Bridge. They failed to secure their positions, as they did not control the western part of the bridge in Kherson, and from the east, Ukrainian units were breaking through to the bridge, not wanting to be surrounded on the left bank of the Dnieper.

Around 8 p.m., on February 24, a tank group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces destroyed Russian paratroopers near the Antonivskiy Bridge and took a defensive position. After that, a column of Ukrainian troops almost an hour crossed the bridge from the left to the right bank of the Dnieper.

At midnight from February 24 to February 25, the Russians conducted an air raid on the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near the Antonivskiy Bridge, after which they began an assault. The Ukrainians retreated into Kherson.

In the morning of February 25, information appeared that the Russian army had crossed the Dnieper through the dam in Nova Kakhovka and was moving towards Kherson by land from the northeast, in the rear of the Ukrainian defense. The Ukrainian Armed Forces had to retreat to Chernobaevka, and then towards Mykolaiv.

The occupiers did not rush to enter Kherson, preferring to encircle the city and advance towards Mykolaiv. The regional center was completely captured on March 1. There was no organized defense of Kherson, except for a spontaneous battle by volunteers in Buzkovy Park, on Naftovykiv Street. A small group of several dozen local men, who had joined the territorial defense a few days earlier, tried to stop the Russian column. Since they had only light weapons (rifles, a few assault rifles, and Molotov cocktails), this attempt was doomed. About 30 territorial defense fighters died in the park that day.

It should be noted that on February 24-25, Ukrainian troops quite successfully carried out airstrikes on columns of Russian troops in the Kherson region. Videos published online show more than ten units of military equipment with the letter Z destroyed on the road between the villages of Radensk and Oleshky. Another column was destroyed near the village of Veliki Kopani. There was also a battle on one of the streets of the town of Oleshky.

The strategic plan of the Russians was to quickly advance to the border with Moldova. Then the Ukrainian troops in the Odesa region would be cut off from the main forces in the center of the country. If this had happened, Ukraine would have lost all of its Black Sea coast. The rapid advance of Russian troops faltered near Mykolaiv — the next regional center after Kherson.

As recalled by General of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Dmytro Marchenko, when he urgently arrived in Mykolaiv on February 25, the city was engulfed in panic. On one of the streets in the city center, he even saw a man removing the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag from a house. When Marchenko, stepping out of the car, asked why he was doing this, the man replied: “They’ve already taken Kherson, they will be here tomorrow!”

The occupiers advanced with two groups. About 2000 units of equipment, including tanks and armored vehicles, moved from Kherson towards Mykolaiv. The second group: another 1200–1300 units of equipment, began a detour to the north towards Moldova.

The chaos that reigned in the first days of the war is best illustrated by a meeting of the military in Mykolaiv. When Marchenko, who was sent from Kyiv to organize the city’s defense, asked one of the commanders about his combat task, he replied: “Circular defense of my military unit.” Shocked, the general asked again: “And who will defend the city?”

Mykolaiv was saved from occupation by a miracle. Marchenko managed to quickly build fortifications on the outskirts with the help of excavators gathered from all over the city. About 70 kilometers from Mykolaiv, near the town of Voznesensk, fighters of the 80th Separate Airborne Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces blew up a bridge over the Mertvovod River. This stopped the further advance of mechanized columns of the enemy and did not allow them to capture the South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant. They also failed to secure positions near Voznesensk.

The maximum achievement of the Russians in this direction was a landing at the Mykolaiv airport. But Ukrainian troops managed to drive the occupiers out of the airport. Failing to fulfill the order to encircle Mykolaiv and reach the border with Moldova, the occupiers returned to the Kherson region.

On the other side of the south of Ukraine, in the direction of Berdyansk and Mariupol, events unfolded more dramatically. After brief battles on the border with Crimea, the Russians broke through the defense of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and within a few hours reached the outskirts of Melitopol. Notably, at the time the war began, there were no Ukrainian troops from Crimea to Melitopol. A small garrison was in the city itself, which managed to delay the Russians for a short time. There was not a single brigade that could cover Mariupol from the side of Crimea, near Melitopol or Berdyansk.

On February 26, the remnants of the Ukrainian troops retreated from Melitopol to the north, to Vasylivka, and then to the village of Kamianske in the Zaporizhzhia region, where they managed to secure positions and prevent the enemy from advancing further north, to Zaporizhzhia. The capture of Melitopol, which occurred on February 25, meant that the 500-thousand-strong Mariupol was doomed to be encircled.

Why couldn’t the Ukrainian army stop the enemy in the south? About a year after the war began, Ukrainian society actively discussed the conspiracy theory that the border with Crimea had been demined in advance. And this was supposedly done according to secret agreements reached in Oman between Zelensky and Patrushev, so that the Russians could easily occupy the so-called land corridor between Russia and Crimea. Some instead of Zelensky put Yermak in the place of the main traitor, but the essence did not change much.

In 2023, when journalists began to actively research this topic, the version about demining disappeared. Minefields on the border with Crimea indeed existed, but this did not mean that the entire border was covered with them. The main part of the Russian troops burst into the Kherson region along paved roads that connect the Crimean peninsula with mainland Ukraine.

As for the Ukrainian military, in their opinion, the main problem of the defense of the south was the lack of personnel. According to Major General Andriy Sokolov, who was responsible for the southern direction in February 2022, at the time of the invasion, the Russians had a 20 to 1 advantage. About 25 battalion tactical groups (20,000 people) with air support advanced from Crimea. On the Ukrainian side, the border with the peninsula was defended by 1500–1600 people. Of them, only 250 fighters of the 137th Marine Infantry Battalion were directly on the border with Crimea.

To understand the difficult situation in which the Ukrainian military found themselves, it is enough to say that these 250 military personnel from the 137th battalion were divided into three platoons. The first platoon (15-45 people) was located at a support point directly in front of the Chongar bridge. The second platoon held positions at the Kalanchak checkpoint. And the third platoon was at the village of Kairy − this is the Chaplynka checkpoint, opposite the “Titan” chemical plant. These three platoons met the occupiers on February 24.

Who is to blame for the catastrophe in the south? Military personnel, who for obvious reasons cannot publicly criticize the political leadership, hint at a lack of personnel. The defense plan assumed that the southern direction should be protected by four brigades. In reality, on February 24, 2022, only one brigade in incomplete composition defended the border with Crimea.

Zelensky categorically refused to implement the defense plan. Even though, starting in November, US intelligence directly indicated that Putin was planning to start a war. The first and main reason why the president refused to strengthen the defense was financial. On February 18, six days before the start of the full-scale war, in an interview with the news agency “RBK-Ukraine,” Zelensky frankly and with childlike directness explained his position: “We can increase the army two or three times, but then, for example, we will not be able to build roads.” In other words, Zelensky did not want to give up the corruption scheme, hoping that everything would somehow calm down. Putin is just scaring, and the money is here and now, just reach out.

The second reason for the catastrophe in the south was the wrong strategy for defending this direction. According to Major General Sokolov, the strategic defense line should have run along the Dnieper. Blowing up the Antonovsky Bridge could, at least for a few days, stop the Russian troops in front of Kherson. During these days, it was possible to stabilize the situation and pull up reserves. But the Antonovsky Bridge was not even mined. Whose fault is this? Some believe that the commander of the Joint Forces, Lieutenant General Serhiy Naev, should be held responsible. Others blame the President’s Office, which prohibited blowing up bridges without their order.

The analysis of military operations in 2023 showed that on the Zaporizhzhia direction, the Russians took half a year to build an impregnable line of defense with numerous minefields and a multi-level system of fortifications. All this could have been built on the border with Crimea. Especially since the geographical location for defense there is much more favorable than in Zaporizhzhia. However, by the time of the invasion, the Ukrainian army had not built anything similar. General Sokolov explains this by the fact that the land plots on which it was necessary to build a system of fortifications on the border with Crimea were privately owned. Without the introduction of martial law, the army had no right to use them or mine them. Only the president had the right to introduce martial law or a defense plan.

Without a doubt, the forces available at that time for the defense of the south were extremely insufficient. This problem could only be solved by increasing mobilization. And again, only the Supreme Commander-in-Chief — President Zelensky — could give an order for this. Neither Zaluzhny, Naev, nor Defense Minister Reznikov had such powers.

Transferring troops to the south from other directions was impossible. Troops were lacking everywhere, not only at the border with Crimea. Kyiv was covered by only one 72nd brigade. Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, was covered by only one 92nd brigade. Taking troops from Donbas was extremely risky, as the main strike was expected there.

Additional mobilization, which Zelensky refused, could have saved both Melitopol and Mariupol. But it was not conducted. In the opinion of the Ukrainian president, building roads was more important than preparing for war.

>>> 45. How Kharkiv Was Saved from Occupation

Table of contents

The killing of more than 1,000 civilians in the Kyiv region by Russian soldiers, about 500 of whom lived in the small town of Bucha, shocked the entire world. A distinctive feature of this massacre was that the killings did not occur instantaneously. Russian military personnel killed peaceful Ukrainians over several weeks in March 2022. Most victims were shot, dozens were tortured before death, and there were cases of rape.

To this day, there is no unanimous opinion on the reasons for this violence and what the position of Russian commanders was regarding the actions of their subordinates. Only one thing is known: the officers not only did not prevent the unmotivated violence against the civilians of Bucha but also committed murders themselves.

Russian propaganda and the Kremlin’s policy on the Ukrainian issue have one feature. It suggests that the Russian-speaking population of Donbas are ethnic Russians, while the Ukrainian-speaking population is supposedly hostile to Russia. Obviously, this influenced the motivation of Russian military actions against the locals. Moreover, the occupiers were embittered by the fact that a few days before the occupation of Bucha, Ukrainian forces decimated several Russian military columns. One was burned at the approaches to Irpin, another in Bucha itself, on Vokzalna Street. The version that the killings in Bucha were ordered to suppress any resistance from the local population, regardless of civilian casualties, should not be excluded.

Mass killings of men, women, and children in the Kyiv region can be divided into several groups:

1. Random shootings of civilians who were driving or walking within sight of Russian military personnel. This group includes not only those killed on the streets of Bucha but also those trying to evacuate to safe areas. Dozens of motorists, most of whom were killed on the Zhytomyr highway, fell victim to these crimes. They were trying to leave Kyiv towards Western Ukraine but did not know that Russian troops were stationed along the M-03 highway. At least ten civilians were shot dead near the Warsaw highway close to Vorzel. The Russians were aware that they were committing crimes: after the killings, they burned the cars and bodies to hide evidence of the murders.

• Unmotivated killings of civilians. This category includes cases where Russian military personnel killed men, women, and even teenagers during house searches or when trying to leave their homes. There are numerous eyewitness accounts of Bucha residents being killed simply for going out for food or firewood. Some were killed by snipers, who entertained themselves or honed their skills in this way.

• Killings of civilians, predominantly men, on suspicion of pro-Ukrainian sentiments. Already on March 4, almost immediately after the occupation of Bucha began, Russian military personnel started searching for citizens based on pre-prepared lists. They checked every house and conducted filtration, looking for former Ukrainian army servicemen and civilians who supported the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Those found were executed, many victims were tortured before being killed. The Russians killed anyone they found suspicious. For example, Bucha resident Pavlo Vlasenko was detained because he wore military-style trousers belonging to his son, a keeper. When Vlasenko’s body was later found, it bore signs of burns. On March 12, another Bucha resident, Ilya Navalny, was shot in the head. He was not affiliated with the Ukrainian military or local political activists. The Russians simply disliked his surname because it was the same as that of Putin’s longtime foe Alexei Navalny.

• Killings committed during looting or after rapes. At least two women were known to have been killed after being raped by Russian soldiers in Bucha. In total, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, by the end of 2022, 62 cases of rape committed by the occupiers were recorded.

On August 8, 2022, the official Ukrainian authorities published the number of civilians killed in the city of Bucha: 458 bodies (419 with signs of shooting, torture, or violent injuries) and 39 bodies, likely to have died during the occupation from natural causes. Among them, 366 were men, 86 women. The gender of five victims was unidentifiable due to the poor condition of the body remains. Nine were children. Fifty bodies remain unidentified along with body parts and ashes.

Besides Bucha, killings of civilians during the occupation were recorded in other settlements of the Kyiv region. For instance, in the small town of Borodyanka, 162 residents died during the occupation (48 of whom were found under the rubble of buildings bombed by Russian aviation) and 28 went missing. Among those killed in Borodyanka were many young men, shot in the head.

The Russian authorities’ reaction to the disclosure of information about mass killings in Bucha was predictably cynical. On April 3, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense declared that during the time Bucha was under the control of the Armed Forces of Russia, not a single local resident suffered from any violent actions.

After some time, as photographs of corpses on the streets of Bucha quickly spread across world media sites, the Kremlin was forced to present a new version of events. On April 12, Vladimir Putin claimed that all images and videos of the alleged dead in Bucha are fake, “a setup by the West.” Concurrently, pro-Kremlin media concocted another version: the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” wrote that the killings of civilians in Bucha did occur, but they were committed by Ukrainian nationalists, after Russian troops left the city.

It’s probably unnecessary to say that this stream of nonsense was completely refuted in the course of several independent investigations, including those by journalists from The New York Times and CNN.

The mass killings in Bucha and other towns and villages in the Kyiv region showed Ukrainian society and government representatives that this war aims to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. Without any doubt, a Bucha on a thousand times larger scale awaited Kyiv in case of occupation. Fortunately, thanks to the heroism of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the residents of the capital avoided this.

>>> 44. What Really Happened in the South

Table of contents

The further we get from the day of the full-scale invasion, the more Zelensky and his allies try to mythologize the events of those days in a favorable light for themselves. However, facts indicate that the war was not a surprise for the president. As early as January 18, CIA Director William Burns detailed Putin’s plan during his visit to Kyiv. On January 27, 2022, in a phone call, Biden again warned Zelensky that war “was almost certain as soon as the ground froze over later in February.” Although the Ukrainian president tried to deny this forecast, citing his own data, he was well aware of all the necessary information and the full extent of the risk.

Even accounting for Zelensky’s naivety and incompetence, he knew from at least February 22 about the inevitability of the attack. On that day, Ukrainian intelligence learned that Russian military at the border with Ukraine began receiving combat orders. Nonetheless, Zelensky still pretends that the onset of war was a shock to him.

To put it mildly, that’s not quite true. It can only be agreed that the president was not prepared for war. He consciously and voluntarily sabotaged the execution of a set of actions that could have minimized the consequences of the Russian invasion. Here, it would be apt to quote item 20 of Article 106 of the Constitution of Ukraine:

“The President decides, in accordance with the law, on the total or partial mobilization and the imposition of martial law in Ukraine or in its particular localities in case of a THREAT OF AGGRESSION, danger to the state independence of Ukraine.”

One does not need to be a major analyst or expert to understand the fatal mistake made by President Zelensky. By neglecting the security of his citizens, he doomed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to occupation, and tens of thousands of civilians died.

Representatives of Zelensky’s team have repeatedly noted the “fearlessness” of the president. Apparently hinting that after the start of the war, he refused the Americans’ offer to evacuate him to a safe region, to Lviv or another locality in Western Ukraine. This information did indeed appear on The Washington Post website on February 25, citing American officials and Congress members.

“U.S. government officials spoke with Zelensky about security issues, particularly about the safest places for the president to ensure the continuity of state leadership,” said an unnamed White House representative.

However, several months later, The Washington Post, which initially reported the evacuation offer, added important details to this narrative. In an article dated September 24, 2022, Paul Sonne and Isabelle Khurshudyan wrote that Zelensky expressed willingness to resign or LEAVE KYIV if it would help end the war:

“In the first hours of the war, when Western officials urged him to evacuate, Zelensky told them he would gladly leave or resign if it would end the war.”

These words can be interpreted in various ways. But it’s worth noting that Volodymyr Zelensky now carefully avoids any mention of the fact that he indeed considered the possibility of fleeing Kyiv and leaving his post.

Insiders from the President’s Office claim that in the first days of the war, Zelensky simply did not know what to do, and some people in his circle seriously considered the possibility of reconciliation with Putin, even at the cost of territorial concessions. However, he did not pursue this due to two reasons: the flight of the head of state could have returned the country to a state similar to February 2014, in other words, Zelensky’s departure could be interpreted by the opposition as treason. There was a risk that Poroshenko would take control of the parliament and become the acting president. Another reason was that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny, explained to Zelensky that the situation was not hopeless.

What was happening in Ukraine at the moment of invasion? Let me provide just a few facts:

On the border with Belarus, there were practically no Ukrainian troops, only border guards. Russians easily entered Ukrainian territory through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and started advancing towards Kyiv. The 72nd brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which was supposed to protect the capital, was redeployed towards Irpin only on February 23.

Days before the war began, almost all units of the National Guard were withdrawn from the Gostomel airfield. The airfield, which, according to U.S. intelligence, was one of the main targets for the Russians, was left with only 150 soldiers for protection.

Kyiv’s Zhuliany airport had no military protection at all: neither police nor National Guard. To protect against a possible assault, General Serhiy Krivonos ordered the airport’s runway to be doused with machine oil.

A week before the invasion, Zaluzhny received orders to redeploy the 92nd Brigade of the Armed Forces from the Kharkiv direction to Donbass. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces did not follow this presidential directive and kept the military near Kharkiv, thereby saving Ukraine’s second-largest city from occupation.

Interestingly, on January 20, 2022, a month before the war, Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with The Washington Post suggested that “Kharkiv could be occupied.” These words caused such a large resonance in Ukraine that even the president’s loyal mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, expressed his outrage.

Almost all the Western weapons: portable Javelin, NLAW, and Stinger missile systems, provided by the UK and the USA, were in storage at the Yavoriv military range near the Polish border at the time of the invasion. The armed forces were given only a few units.

The Russians’ plan on the Kyiv direction was relatively easy to read. The Kremlin had so overestimated its forces that it hoped to replicate the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Russian special forces were supposed to quickly capture the Gostomel and Vasylkiv airfields, after which these airfields were to continuously receive military transport planes with thousands of paratroopers. Kyiv was intended to be blocked from three sides: north, west, and east. Kremlin strategists hoped that Ukrainian forces would not resist.

This plan was partially successful. Russian forces did indeed almost reach Kyiv. In the east, they entrenched themselves in villages near the satellite city of Brovary, but did not enter the city. In the north, they entered the satellite city of Bucha (15 km from Kyiv), but in the neighboring Irpin, they could not establish control. Russians crossed the Zhytomyr highway leading from Kyiv to the west several times. But further south, towards Boyarka and Vasylkiv, they could not proceed. On the night of February 26, near the Vasylkiv military airport, Russians landed paratroopers from parachutes. The battle lasted all night, but the occupiers failed to capture the airfield. That same night, a Ukrainian Su-27 shot down a Russian military transport plane IL-76 with several dozen paratroopers on board.

As for the Gostomel airport, which served as a base for the world’s largest transport aircraft “Mriya” and other planes produced by the Antonov plant in peacetime, the battle for it began on February 24. That day, 34 Russian Ka-52 and Mi-8 helicopters landed approximately 300 paratroopers on its territory. During the flight across the Kyiv Reservoir, several helicopters were shot down, but this did not prevent the Russians from capturing the airfield.

In the evening of February 24, Ukrainian military recaptured the airport, but the Russians captured it again, this time with the help of ground forces. Time passed, but Gostomel did not start receiving military transport planes with the Russian paratroopers, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces damaged its runway with artillery fire. In the battle for the airport, the AN-225 “Mriya” aircraft was destroyed. According to the official Ukrainian version, the Russians are to blame.

Experts believe that the failure to capture the airfields in Gostomel and Vasylkiv was a severe blow to the Russian military leadership, as they apparently had no backup plan for capturing Kyiv.

Almost everywhere, Russians encountered fierce resistance from Ukrainian troops. On February 25, the situation was exacerbated by the blowing up of a dam on the Irpin River. Water from the Kyiv Reservoir turned the small river into a large natural barrier over the following weeks. As a result, the Russians could not enter Kyiv and Vyshhorod from the north. From the west, along the Zhytomyr highway, the road to the capital was also closed: near the village of Stoyanka, Ukrainians blew up a bridge.

Unable to break through the defense near Irpin, in early March, Russian occupying forces decided to focus on advancing to Kyiv through the village of Moschun, located to the northwest, halfway between Irpin and Vyshhorod. The Battle of Moschun became one of the bloodiest in the early stage of the war, with dozens of soldiers dying on both sides. The Ukrainian Armed Forces held their positions, and on March 16, they drove the Russians out of the village. A few days later, Ukrainian units, with the support of heavy artillery, pushed the Russian forces back to the Irpin River.

The Battle of Kyiv ended in defeat for the Russians. Putin realized that his plan had failed, and capturing Kyiv would not be possible. The Kremlin was not prepared for a real war: the calculation was only that the Armed Forces of Ukraine would not last even a few days, Zelensky would flee the capital, and the Russian army would triumphantly hold a victory parade on Khreshchatyk. Without a backup plan, on March 29, the Russian General Staff began withdrawing troops from under Kyiv to reinforce their positions in the East and South of Ukraine. In these directions, the occupiers were lucky. They managed to capture vast territories, which they now had to hold at any cost.

>>> 43. The Bucha Massacre, Changing the Character of the War

Table of contents