Letters from the Republic

Spring is here. Hell, it’s nearly passed, the chestnut blossoms having already fallen. June is announced with another bombardment as Russian forces habitually break their record for explosive tonnage launched at Ukraine’s residential neighborhoods. Terms used in western press like “one of the largest of the war” tend to not mean much. It’s the largest since the last one. No shit.

Putin has every reason to start tossing ballistic missiles out of the pram in tantrum. The front line has gone static and his boys are actually seeing reverses in the territorial trade. For all of Russia’s resources, he is simply running out of men to go out and die with any sort of military gain; as such, all he can do for the moment is rattle his nuclear and diplomatic sabers – even threatening embassies ahead of May 31’s Kyiv Day* celebrations. Considering that – despite all my personal dread – May 29, 30, and 31 all went pretty quietly as somber diplomats mustered whatever shreds of dignity they maintain to collectively communicate to a murderous dictator that threatening their own livelihoods is beyond the Pale.†

As humanitarian missions lose funding from all sources and the full scale invasion goes through the motions of its 5th year, many of the expats start to disappear. A lot of them have put up with a lot in 4 years of work, but there are more than a few who leave nothing to speak for after a fat professional stint of caustic uselessness. Their exits leave a bit of a social vacuum, but to say they’re entirely missed would carry some untruth.

The humor of those that have stayed has travelled well beyond the gallows.‡ The impact of death is inescapable as the funeral processions pass with such regularity and the cemeteries and memorials grow beyond a scale that’s emotionally ingestible. That same inertia that blunts Russian forces bears battlefield realities that struggle through narrative barriers before they reach the West. Certainly every grave, flag, flower, portrait belies the squalid and commonly stupid nature of death in the age of drone warfare; so dramatically have they changed the very nature of how we understand how people fight.§

To be clear, there are not a lot of people here who hold the US to be at all prepared for a shooting land war against a modernized opponent; it’s certainly difficult to communicate at a military cultural level that heavily muscled soldiers bristling with weapons and equipment like Starship Troopers can be snapped by 20-year-old girls with pink hair, call signs like “kitten,” and porn star-level body counts of dead Russians to their name. I hear a good amount of frustration from soldiers who have gone on to train foreign militaries on how to manage new threats, mainly from the same armies that believe they are somehow exempt from the limitations that prevent Ukrainians from rescuing soldiers who have been wounded anywhere in 70 kilometer stretch from Russian lines. I have my own words for foreigners even in Kyiv who tell me that, actually, the Ukrainian military really doesn’t need tourniquets because there’s an issue with over application that causes unnecessary amputations while forgetting that evacuation times for wounded soldiers can stretch to weeks before they get any medical assistance and therefore make tourniquets much more of a priority than dipshit from, say, Switzerland appreciates.

It’s a bit hard to advance with drones in the air, especially over a country with as much farmland as Ukraine. Caught out in the open, if you see one you’re more likely than not already, in military parlance, fucked. Humans are rather impressively hardy creatures all things considered, but it really doesn’t take much of a misstep to kill someone over here. The memorials tend to erase someone’s political beliefs and moral defects, but also the manner of one’s death whether it be from walking out in an open field to retrieve the crashed drone you were unqualified to practice with in the first place or from bleeding out because of improper application of a junctional tourniquet by the careless cowboys that have infiltrated the civilian volunteer medical corps. War is also famously dangerous in the first place, so there is such a thing as simply being unlucky like those who from one second having a friendly conversation tens of kilometers from the front go to the next in a pink mist that leaves maybe a third of their original figure left recognizably human.

In a war with stories of heroism that regularly exceed Hollywood standards fought by and with the assistance of some of the greatest human beings I have ever heard of, the flowers of spring are good homage on a day like today.

It’s really starting to get nice out, the sound of AA fire in a relatively rare daytime attack on Kyiv aside.

* Happy 1,544th birthday

† The night of June 1 broke that quiet streak, but at least the blasts that shook the whole block knocked out the annoying light across the alley that shines right into my bedroom so silver linings and all that.

‡ Example:

Which translates roughly to

NB: “fool” is actually more accurately translated to “dickhead.” I’m pleased to say I typically get along well enough amidst all the personal trauma of people here, an approach probably informed by my own experiences growing up. “Gay,” comments my bisexual and indulgently Gen Z Ukrainian office administrator at the suggestion of trauma from peacetime (mid-cigarette, mind you).

§ I know a sniper who tells me sniping is dead, because even if you can nail someone a mile out you’re of relatively limited use in a small arms fight where effective range reaches 70km. He also tells me that poorer Russian soldiers use simple steel plates for armor, which will work against a smaller 5.56 NATO round but a 7.62 will irrevocably crush their sternums sans shock absorbtion. A .338 Lapua Magnum will go right through and yield a little “ping” of aural feedback like you would hear on a rifle range which is darkly but inescapably kind of amusing.