Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“In keeping silent about evil, and burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evil doers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Looking back on the stages by which various fresh ideas gained acceptance, it can be seen that the process was eased when they could be presented, not as something radically new, but as the revival in modern terms of a time-honoured principle or practice that had been forgotten. This required not deception, but care to trace the connection-since 'there is nothing new under the sun'. A notable example was the way that the opposition to mechanization was diminished by showing that the mobile armoured vehicle-the fast-moving tank-was fundamentally the heir of the armoured horseman, and thus the natural means of reviving the decisive role which cavalry had played in past ages.”

– Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Strategy

“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.”

– Eric Hoffer

1. Excerpts from President Joe Biden Speech on 80th Anniversary of D-Day at Pointe du Hoc

2. Remarks by President Biden on Democracy and Freedom | Normandy, France

3. The Greatest Generation’s Greatest Gift

4. Biden vs. Reagan at Normandy

5. Biden Enlisted Qatar and Egypt to Pressure Hamas. It Backfired.

6. Deepfakes, Fraudsters and Hackers Are Coming for Cybersecurity Jobs

7. Israel Says It Rescued Four Hostages Held in Gaza

8. Opinion Today’s western alliance needs the spirit of the Boys of Pointe du Hoc

9. The Human Cost of a Hesitant Ukraine Policy

10. The Fearless:An elite squad of fighters has been on the front lines of every major battle for Ukraine’s independence. This is the story of their war

11. War in Gaza Turns Out To Be Less Deadly Than Claimed

12. Women and children of Gaza are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises, AP data analysis finds

13. Takeaways from AP analysis of Gaza Health Ministry's death toll data

14. Human Rights Groups Call for ICC Investigation into Russian Propagandists

15. Lloyd Austin tells CNN granting Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes on Russian territory will be ‘very, very helpful’

16. Two Words That Could End the War in Ukraine For Good

17. America’s Military Strategy: Can We Handle Two Wars at Once?

18. Chateau Vouilly: The hideaway where war correspondents chronicled the aftermath of D-Day

1. Excerpts from President Joe Biden Speech on 80th Anniversary of D-Day at Pointe du Hoc

Can any American find fault with these quotes? Kudos to the speechwriter(s)

JUNE 07, 2024

Excerpts from President Joe Biden Speech on 80th Anniversary of D-Day at Pointe du Hoc

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/06/07/excerpts-from-president-joe-biden-speech-on-80thanniversary-of-d-day-at-pointe-du-hoc/

“When we talk about democracy – American democracy – we often talk big ideas like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What we don’t talk about enough is how hard it is.”

“American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we’re a part of something bigger than ourselves. So democracy begins with each of us.”

—

“I’ve long said that history has shown that ordinary Americans can do the most extraordinary things. And there’s no better example of that in the entire world than right here at Pointe du Hoc. Rangers from farms, from cities, from every part of America.”

—

As we gather here today, it’s not just to honor those who showed such remarkable bravery that day June 6, 1944. It’s to listen to the echo of their voices. To hear them. Because they are summoning us. They’re asking us what will we do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. They’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.

2. Remarks by President Biden on Democracy and Freedom | Normandy, France

Excerpt:

Americans like Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, Texas. When the military asked for a battalion for this daring mission, he raised his hand and said, “My Rangers can do the job.” He knew their capacity. He knew the strength of their character.

And a few days after they scaled this cliff, he wrote a condolence letter to a mother of one of the Rangers who gave his life here. And that letter said, “A country must be great to call for the sacrifice of such men.”

Remarks by President Biden on Democracy and Freedom | Normandy, France

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/06/07/remarks-by-president-biden-on-democracy-and-freedom-normandy-france/

Pointe du Hoc

Normandy, France

4:43 P.M. CEST

THE PRESIDENT: John, how are you? Please, sit down. (Applause.)

At last, the hour had come. Dawn, 6th of June, 1944. The wind was pounding, as it is today and always has against these cliffs.

Two hundred and twenty-five American Rangers arrived by ship, jumped into the waves, and stormed the beach. They could see — all they could see was the outline of the shore and the enormity of these cliffs. And I’d like to lo- — I know I’ll get in trouble with the Secret Service if I go to the edge and look over but — (laughter) — think of those cliffs, as my host just sh- — showed me. That’s what we’re standing on top of.

They could hear — all they could hear was the crack of bullets hitting ships, sand, rocks — hitting everything. All they knew was time was of the essence.

They had only 30 minutes — 30 minutes to eliminate the Nazi guns high on this cliff — guns that could halt the Allied invasion before it even began. But these were American Rangers. They were ready.

They ran toward the cliffs, and mines planted by Field Marshall Rommeny — Rommel exploded around them. But still, they kept coming.

Gunfire rained above them. But still, they kept coming.

Nazi grenades thrown from above exploded against the cliffs, but still they kept coming.

Within minutes, they reached the base of this cliff. They launched their ladders, their ropes, and grappling hooks, and they began to climb.

When the Nazis cut their ladders, the Rangers used their ropes. When the Nazis cut their ropes, the Rangers used their hands. And inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, the Rangers clawed — literally clawed their way up this mighty precipice until at last they reached the top.

They breached Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. And they turned, in that one effort, the tide of war that began to save the world.

Ladies and gentlemen, yesterday I paid my respects at the American Cemetery just a few miles from here, where many of the Rangers who died taking this cliff are buried. I spoke of what the — about what the fallen had done to defend freedom.

Today, as I look out at this battlefield and all the bunkers and bomb craters that are still surround it, one thought comes to mind: My God. My God, how did they do it? How were these Americans willing to risk everything, dare everything, and give everything?

They were Americans like Sergeant Leonard Lo- — Lo- — Sergeant Leonard Lomell from New York. He was one of the first Rangers to jump off his ship and run toward the cliff. He almost was shot right above the hip initially, and he didn’t — wasn’t sure, but he was. He kept going.

At one point, he was scaling the cliff and another Ranger yelled, “I’m not sure I can make it.” And Lomell yelled back with every ounce of strength he had in him, “You’ve got to hold on.” And he did, and they did.

Americans like Sergeant Tom Ruggiero from Massachusetts. A German shell hit his boat as he was approaching the shore. Everything exploded. The Sergeant was knocked into the freezing water, and, as he told it, he began to utter a prayer, “Dear God, don’t let me drown. I want to get in and do what I’m here and supposed to do.”

Americans like Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, Texas. When the military asked for a battalion for this daring mission, he raised his hand and said, “My Rangers can do the job.” He knew their capacity. He knew the strength of their character.

And a few days after they scaled this cliff, he wrote a condolence letter to a mother of one of the Rangers who gave his life here. And that letter said, “A country must be great to call for the sacrifice of such men.” “A country must be great to call for the sacrifice of such men.”

And Americans like John Wardell of New Jersey. And John is here. John, we love you, man. Thank you for all you’ve done. (Applause.) You deserve that and a lot more, John.

Just 18 years old, he deployed to this cliff to replace the surviving Rangers on that D-Day invasion. He would go on to fight across France and Germany. In early in December of 1944, during one of those battles, shrapnel pierced his skull. But by Christmas, he was back, fighting with his unit.

And here is what he said about — what — the notes he kept at that time. He said, “Knowing that my buddies and I always looked out for one another” — that’s why he came back. That’s why he fought so hard to get back. He always looked out, and his buddies looked out for one another.

When we talk about democracy — American democracy, we often talk about the ideals of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. What we don’t talk about is how hard it is, how many ways we’re asked to walk away, how many instincts are to walk away — the most natural instinct is to walk away, to be selfish, to force our will upon others, to seize power and never give up.

American democracy asks the hardest of things: to believe that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. So, democracy begins with each of us.

It begins when one person decides there’s something more important than themselves; when they decide the person they’re serving alongside of is someone to look after; when they decide the mission matters more than their life; when they decide that their country matters more than they do. That’s what the Rangers at Port — at Pom- — Pointe de Hoc did. That’s they decided. That’s what every soldier and every Marine who stormed these beaches decided.

A feared dictator had conquered a continent had finally met his match. Because of them, the war turned.

They stood against Hitler’s aggression.

Does anyone doubt — does anyone doubt that they would want America to stand up against Putin’s aggression here in Europe today?

They stormed the beaches alongside their allies.

Does anyone believe these Rangers would want America to go it alone today?

They fought to vanquish a hateful ideology in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Does anyone doubt they wouldn’t move heaven and earth to vanquish hateful ideologies of today?

These Rangers put mission and country above themselves. Does anyone believe they would exact any less from every American today?

These Rangers remembered with reverence those who gave their lives in battle. Could they or anyone ever imagine that America would do the same — wouldn’t do the same? They believed America was the beacon to the world. And I’m certain they believed that it would be that way forever.

You know, we stand today — where we stand was not sacred ground on June the 5th, but that’s what it became on June the 6th.

The Rangers who scaled this cliff didn’t know they would change the world. But they did.

I’ve long said that history has shown that ordinary Americans can do extraordinary things when challenged. There’s no better example of that in the entire world than right here at Pointe du Hoc.

Rangers from farms and cities in every part of America, from homes that didn’t know wealth and power, they came to a shoreline that none of them would have ever picked out on a map.

They came to a country many of them had never seen for a people they had never met. But they came, they did their job, they fulfilled their mission, and they did their duty.

They were a part of something greater than themselves. They were Americans.

I stand here today as the first president to come to Pointe du Hoc when none of those 225 brave men who scaled this cliff on D-Day are still alive. None.

But I’m here to tell you that with them gone, the wind we hear coming off this ocean will not fade. It will grow louder.

As we gather here today, it’s not just to honor those who showed such remarkable bravery on that day, June 6th, 1944. It’s to listen to the echoes of their voices, to hear them, because they are summoning us, and they’re summoning us now.

They’re ask us: What will we do?

They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs, but they’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.

They’re not asking us to give or risk our lives, but they are asking us to care for others and our country more than ourselves.

They’re not asking us to do their job. They’re asking us to do our job: to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy, to stand up aggression abroad and at home, to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

My fellow Americans, I refuse to believe — I simply refuse to believe that America’s greatness is a thing of the past.

I still believe there is nothing beyond our capacity in America when we act together.

We’re the fortunate heirs of a legacy of these heroes, those who scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. But we must also be the keepers of their mission — the keepers of their mission, the bearers of the flame of freedom that they kept burning bright. That — that is the truest testimonial to their lives — our actions every day to ensure that our democracy endures and the soul our nation endures.

To come here simply to remember the ghosts of Pointe du Hoc isn’t enough. We have — need to hear them. We have to listen to them. We need to listen to what they had. We need to make a solemn vow to never let them down.

God bless the fallen. God bless the brave men who scaled these cliffs. May God protect our troops. God bless America. (Applause.)

4:55 P.M. CEST

3. The Greatest Generation’s Greatest Gift

Excerpts:

On my most recent visit to Normandy, I paid my respects to the Hoback brothers and so many others who made the ultimate sacrifice, observing a minute’s silence. I also walked across Omaha Beach. The tide was out. I stepped over runnels, in awe of the grit and courage of the citizen soldiers who landed 80 years ago as part of what Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower called the Great Crusade—the liberation of Northwestern Europe from Nazism, a genocidal evil that plunged the Old World into five years of darkness and left some 19 million Europeans dead.

Next year, and every year until I can no longer walk, I’ll go back to Normandy. I’ll squat down, again touch the sands on Omaha Beach, and thank God the Allies succeeded on D-Day. I’ll marvel at the enormity of the greatest gift the United States has ever bestowed. For 80 years, the longest period in history, the Europe set free by my American heroes has enjoyed what so many of us take so much for granted—peace and democracy. And every time I return, I’ll repeat to myself the words inscribed on the wall of the chapel in the Colleville-sur-Mer graveyard above Omaha Beach: “Think not only upon their passing. Remember the glory of their spirit.”

The Greatest Generation’s Greatest Gift

thedispatch.com · by Alex Kershaw

World Events

The Greatest Generation’s Greatest Gift

Remembering the heroes who helped save the world on D-Day, 80 years ago.

American World War II veterans listen to the playing of “Taps” at a ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery on the 80th anniversary of D-Day on June 6, 2024, in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

By Alex Kershaw

Published June 7, 2024

Scroll to the comments section

There are so few left from so many. The 80th anniversary of D-Day on June 6 was yet another reminder of how thin the ranks have become of those who served this nation in World War II. Of the around 16 million Americans who did their duty, about 119,000 were still breathing as of 2023. From this cohort of extraordinary survivors, I know of fewer than a dozen Americans who actually saw action on that day in 1944, arguably the most momentous date of the 20th century.

As the 80th anniversary commemorations were underway in Normandy, in my role as resident historian for Friends of the National WWII Memorial, I stood at the memorial in Washington, D.C., reading out loud the names of some 9,000 Americans who died on D-Day and during the subsequent Battle of Normandy.

Indeed, I would rather visit the fallen and the sands where they died when there are no crowds, no politicians spouting platitudes, when I can be alone with my memories of soldiers I’ve met who helped save the world on D-Day. Every time I go there, I hesitate before I walk down weather-beaten steps onto the golden sands. I feel the spirits. Then I’m standing on Omaha Beach’s Dog Green sector, the deadliest place on that day. It was there that more than half of A Company, 116th Infantry Regiment, died in the first wave of Americans to land on that longest of days 80 years ago. The 1998 film Saving Private Ryan opened with a harrowing recreation of the slaughter.

On Omaha Beach, I say thanks to the warriors I’ve met who fought there and have since passed away. The first D-Day veteran I befriended was Sgt. Bob Slaughter from Roanoke, Virginia, who counted himself extremely lucky to have survived D-Day as an 18-year-old, because his landing craft came ashore hundreds of yards from where it was scheduled to land and therefore fires and smoke provided a modicum of protection from relentless machine gun fire. Fifty years later, he stood on Omaha Beach with President Bill Clinton to commemorate the battle’s anniversary.

Until he died in 2012, Slaughter honored his dead buddies from D Company of the 116th Infantry Regiment—11 were killed on D-Day. More than any other veteran, he helped during the research for my 2003 book, The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice. When I interviewed him, he was brutally honest about combat: “Your best hope was for a million-dollar wound, nice clean sheets and a pretty nurse. … You didn’t want it in the groin or stomach but the legs, shoulders, hands. That would have been wonderful. Fingers didn’t count.”

Slaughter also introduced me to Roy Stevens, a Bedford boy who lost his identical twin brother, Ray, on D-Day—one of 19 men from Bedford County, Virginia, who served in the 116th’s A Company who gave their lives on D-Day. Every time I met Roy, often at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, he would tell me: “Freedom is not free.” When you lose your twin and so many childhood friends in combat, those words are no mere slogan.

Lt. Ray Nance knew only too well that democracy comes at a price. He was the only officer from Bedford to return home, half his heel shot away, having staggered across Omaha Beach as the tide flooded in behind him, washing away those too badly wounded to crawl. He was so traumatized by the events of that day that he refused to speak to me about his experiences until after I begged him to describe the carnage before he passed away so that at least there would be a record. Seven years before his death in 2009, he told me he remembered trying in vain to dig a hole in the beach with his hands so he could hide from a machine gunner who sent volley after volley of bullets toward him: “He’d send a line of bullets my way, pass on to another target and then come back for me, like he was playing cat and mouse.”

Nance turned and faced the bullets head-on, making his body a harder target. He said God saved him on D-Day, but he was not spared from enormous survivor’s guilt. He delivered mail around Bedford after the war and recalled parents of dead Bedford boys shunning him, enraged at his return when so many sons had come home in coffins.

Pvt. Bob Sales of Lynchburg, Virginia, recounted hilarious tales of nights in cold pubs sipping warm beer, of his encounters with skinny English girls during his many months of training before D-Day, and of dancing with wild abandon to Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller in London. Just 18 years old, he landed in the second wave on Omaha Beach and used the corpses of other Americans to shield himself from a hailstorm of bullets. He was the only man on his landing craft who survived. “D-Day was the longest day,” he said. “There’s no doubt about that. But for those who survived it was just one day. I had a hundred and eighty to go. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many men right beside me got killed.”

One D-Day anniversary more than a decade ago, I walked across Omaha Beach with a small and wiry former Army Ranger called Dan Farley. He needed a couple of whiskey shots before he recrossed the beach for the first time since 1944. He didn’t say a word until a few hours later, while standing amid the huge bomb and shell craters at Pointe du Hoc, which was seized by his fellow Rangers after they had scaled high cliffs in one of the most dramatic and heroic operations of D-Day. He would never forget the bullets whipping through his legs and buzzing past his head, saying they sounded “like honeybees.”

Farley had passed away in 2017 by the time I met Leon Gautier, a French commando who landed at Sword Beach. Gautier was one of some 200 Frenchmen who had the immense honor of fighting to free their homeland. I interviewed Gautier, who died last year at age 102, in his home in Ouistreham, less than a mile from where he had attacked several German pillboxes. After the war, he had moved to the very town he had helped liberate. His green commando beret was his most prized possession. Every June 6 he placed a wreath to his fallen comrades at a memorial within walking distance of his home. He told me a new generation must now ensure that Europe is never again enslaved. Others must now be “vigilant.”

While researching my book, The First Wave, about the first to fight on June 6, I came across Warren Goss, now 99, who landed on Utah Beach before the first wave of soldiers, tasked with providing covering fire for engineers as they destroyed beach defenses. “The Germans had obstacles—big iron crosses stuck in the sand—and they had mines tied to them,” Goss said. “I took cover under the obstacles as best I could. I was lying by one of these things being shot at, only they weren’t shooting at me. They were trying to hit the mines to blow a lot of people up.”

Goss fought to the end of the war, witnessing the death of so many Americans, some of the more than 400,000 who died in WWII to set others free and earn this nation the greatest respect it has ever known. This week, Goss was in Normandy for the 80th anniversary, staying with a French family not far from Utah Beach.

On June 6 this year, as I read out the names of some of the more than 2,000 Americans who died on D-Day, I thought of another D-Day warrior, Maj. Gen. John Raaen, the last surviving officer from the 34,000 Americans who landed on Omaha Beach and a Silver Star recipient. As a captain in the 5th Ranger Battalion, he arrived in the third wave around 7:50 a.m., was wounded six months later, and went on to serve his country for 36 years in all. I’ll always treasure a selfie I took with him in his living room in Florida, his many medals filling a display case nearby. He is now 102 and unable to do interviews because, as he explained earlier this year, he finds it “hard physically and mentally to respond to all the demands of our society.” He previously told me that on June 6, 1944, amid the din of death, he could hear a constant “Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop” as bullets passed just overhead: “The machine gun fire was absolutely continuous.”

A few weeks ago, in a chateau in Normandy, I celebrated another D-Day hero’s upcoming 100th birthday. Charles Shay, a Penobscot tribal elder from Maine, is the last living medic from the legion of life-savers who did their best to help wounded young Americans on Omaha Beach. Shay lost a close friend, Pvt. Edward Morozewicz, but managed to save others that day, pulling them from the blood-red shallows to safety: “[Morozewicz] had a wound that I could not help him with because I did not have the proper instruments. … He was bleeding to death. And I knew that he was dying. I tried to comfort him. And I tried to do what I could for him, but there was no help. … He died in my arms.” Shay now lives in Normandy, far from Maine, cared for by a wonderful French woman, and will be 100 on June 27.

This weekend, I’ll think about all these men and also about a remarkable woman, Lucille Hoback Boggess, who turns 95 on June 8. She had to wait more than six weeks to find out what had happened to her brothers, Raymond and Bedford Hoback, two of the Bedford boys, on D-Day. The only time she saw her father cry was when he walked to a barn on the family’s farm having received the second of two telegrams informing him in July 1944 that he had lost both his sons. Bedford Hoback is buried at the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, not far from where he was killed, surrounded by 9,386 white crosses, perfectly aligned, headstones facing west, toward the New World, toward home. Raymond Hoback’s name is inscribed on the Wall of the Missing in the same graveyard, alongside some 1,500 warriors whose bodies were never found. “You wonder what they might have done with their lives, how Bedford would be different if all those boys had come home,” Lucille once told me. “You never forget. I miss them every day.”

On my most recent visit to Normandy, I paid my respects to the Hoback brothers and so many others who made the ultimate sacrifice, observing a minute’s silence. I also walked across Omaha Beach. The tide was out. I stepped over runnels, in awe of the grit and courage of the citizen soldiers who landed 80 years ago as part of what Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower called the Great Crusade—the liberation of Northwestern Europe from Nazism, a genocidal evil that plunged the Old World into five years of darkness and left some 19 million Europeans dead.

Next year, and every year until I can no longer walk, I’ll go back to Normandy. I’ll squat down, again touch the sands on Omaha Beach, and thank God the Allies succeeded on D-Day. I’ll marvel at the enormity of the greatest gift the United States has ever bestowed. For 80 years, the longest period in history, the Europe set free by my American heroes has enjoyed what so many of us take so much for granted—peace and democracy. And every time I return, I’ll repeat to myself the words inscribed on the wall of the chapel in the Colleville-sur-Mer graveyard above Omaha Beach: “Think not only upon their passing. Remember the glory of their spirit.”

Alex Kershaw

Alex Kershaw is the resident historian for Friends of the National WWII Memorial and the author of numerous books on World War II.

thedispatch.com · by Alex Kershaw

4. Biden vs. Reagan at Normandy

I read the words of President Biden adnI was impressed (I was not able to hear it delivered live).

I thought I might find this Editorial a hit job but I do think there is some objectively fair criticism (rather than political or partisan) when looking at the present context and current actions.

Actions still do speak louder than words, even if there were some excellent words.

Biden vs. Reagan at Normandy

The scene and rhetoric were similar, but not the power and credibility.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-ronald-reagan-d-day-normandy-pointe-du-hoc-speech-95df8b40?mod=latest_headlines

By The Editorial Board

June 7, 2024 5:54 pm ET

President Joe Biden delivers a speech next to the Pointe du Hoc monument in Normandy, France on Thursday PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Biden gave a fine speech in France Thursday on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, full of laudable sentiment about America’s commitment to Europe and decrying isolationism. The press says it echoed Ronald Reagan’s address 40 years earlier, which was no doubt part of the White House intention. But the two speeches differed greatly in their political context and credibility, and it’s worth underscoring why at this dangerous moment in history.

Reagan gave his famous address about “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” in 1984 after three years of struggle to restore American power after the Soviet advances of the 1970s. He had pushed through Congress an historic defense buildup that would eventually produce a 600-ship Navy and reach 5.8% of GDP or more for five straight years.

The Gipper had proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative for a missile defense against Soviet ICBMs. Most important to Europe, he had rallied the allies to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles on the Continent to counter Soviet deployments. In doing so, Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt faced down massive protests calling for a “nuclear freeze.”

When Reagan addressed the crowd at Normandy, in other words, he was speaking from a position of renewed U.S. military and economic strength. The U.S. economy was roaring again, and Reagan had demonstrated the will and ability to deliver on his revival promise. As it happens, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden opposed all of those Reagan initiatives.

As President this week, Mr. Biden spoke with a much different first-term record. He has proposed cutting the defense budget in real terms for four straight years, though military spending is down close to 3% of GDP.

While Mr. Biden has supported Ukraine, he has only grudgingly delivered advanced weapons and has limited how they can be used. His withdrawal from Afghanistan cast doubt on U.S. commitments around the world, which may have caused Vladimir Putin to think he could take Ukraine at low cost.

The war has exposed the weakness of the U.S. military industrial base, and of American deterrence. Hamas’s strike against Israel has reinforced that deterrence failure. Mr. Biden has responded by putting more diplomatic pressure on Israel’s government to end the fighting than he has on Iran to rein in its militias attacking U.S. bases and our allies.

The power of a presidential speech doesn’t depend only on the eloquence of its words. It derives its influence far more from the power of America and the credibility of the President delivering those words.

Soaring pledges to fight for democracy sound noble and inspiring. But they can be dangerous without credible power and leadership behind them. The words might even invite a dictator who senses weakness to create new trouble, or take new territory. That’s the difference between D-Day 1984, and 2024.

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Wonder Land: In 1986, Sen. Joe Biden mocked as ‘reckless’ Ronald Reagan's 'Strategic Defense Initiative,' a program to counter the ballistic missile threat. Israel ran with it, creating the 'Iron Dome' missile-defense system—the hero of Iran’s April 13 bombardment. Images: Bloomberg News/C-Span/Bettmann Archive Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the June 8, 2024, print edition as 'Biden vs. Reagan at Normandy'.

5. Biden Enlisted Qatar and Egypt to Pressure Hamas. It Backfired.

Biden Enlisted Qatar and Egypt to Pressure Hamas. It Backfired.

The militant group’s leaders dug in after threats of arrest, sanctions and expulsion from Doha if they didn’t reach a truce with Israel

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/biden-enlisted-qatar-and-egypt-to-pressure-hamas-it-backfired-bcc4a9e8?mod=latest_headlines

By Summer Said

and Jared Malsin

June 7, 2024 9:02 pm ET

Efforts by President Biden to get Israel and Hamas to agree to a permanent cease-fire in Gaza have been fruitless. PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK

Qatar and Egypt have told Hamas leaders in recent days that they face possible arrest, freezing of their assets, sanctions and expulsion from their haven in Doha if they don’t agree to a cease-fire with Israel, officials familiar with the talks said.

The threats were made at the behest of the Biden administration, which is searching for a way to cajole a U.S.-designated terrorist group into striking a deal that the president needs amid a political maelstrom over the war.

It had the opposite of the desired effect. On Thursday, after the threats were made, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the group’s political bureau in exile in Qatar, said he wouldn’t agree on a deal that doesn’t meet the group’s conditions. Bearing a message from the group’s most important leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, Haniyeh said the current proposal—broached by President Biden himself in a news conference a week ago—is unacceptable for Hamas because, in the group’s eyes, it doesn’t guarantee an end to the war.

Hamas’s response is the latest stumbling block for Biden’s effort to revive the long-stalled negotiations toward a deal that would halt the fighting in Gaza and free Israeli hostages held by Hamas in exchange for Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails.

In a phone call Monday, Biden urged Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani of Qatar “to use all appropriate measures to secure Hamas’s acceptance of the deal,” according to a White House statement.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani earlier this year in Doha. PHOTO: MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

U.S. officials said they haven’t received a final answer from Hamas on the revived cease-fire proposal. “We are still waiting for an official response from Hamas,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. “We’ve seen some public comments, but we don’t take those as official or in any way confirmatory one way or the other.”

The war in Gaza has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians and reduced much of the coastal enclave to rubble. Most of those killed are civilians, Palestinian health officials say, though the figures don’t specify the number of dead combatants. Israel launched its war on the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas attack inside Israel that killed 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, said Israeli authorities. The militant group and its allies also took about 240 hostages.

The war has heaped political pressure on Biden, who faces opposition from within his own party over the U.S.’s ongoing supply of weapons that Israel uses to bomb Gaza and criticism from Republicans over his pressuring of Israel to reduce civilian casualties.

Biden attempted to break an impasse in the cease-fire negotiations last week when he delivered a speech outlining what he said was an Israeli proposal for a three-phase deal that would free the hostages that he said was part of an effort to reach a “permanent end to the war.”

Biden has called Hamas “the only obstacle to a complete cease-fire.”

Since Biden’s speech, the talks have deadlocked over issues that have dogged negotiations for months. Hamas is demanding a guaranteed end to the war, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he seeks the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, refusing to accept a permanent truce until those aims are achieved.

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The Palestinian Authority said at least 40 people were killed. Israel said it targeted militants who belonged to a unit that participated in the Oct. 7 attacks. Photo: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg

This week Hamas objected to language in the written version of the latest cease-fire proposal, viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The plan plays down the possibility of a permanent cease-fire, which it says would be contingent on negotiations to take place in the first phase of the deal. The proposal repeatedly mentions “sustainable calm.”

The small variation in wording has become a sticking point, particularly after Netanyahu responded to Biden’s speech by reiterating that Israel won’t accept a cease-fire without the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, an aim that some Israeli and American military and intelligence officials say is likely out of reach even after eight months of fighting.

“There is a gap between what is in the paper and Biden’s statements, leading to confusion and debate,” Hamas said in a statement Wednesday.

Blood remained at the scene of an Israeli strike this week on a U.N. school that had been turned into a shelter in Nuseirat, central Gaza. PHOTO: JEHAD ALSHRAFI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Top U.S. officials, including William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, flew to the Middle East this week to push forward Biden’s initiative. Burns held talks with the Qatari prime minister and Egypt’s intelligence chief in Doha.

Burns told the Qatari and the Egyptian officials to tell Haniyeh that international mediators would guarantee that negotiations over a permanent cease-fire would begin as soon as the third week of the deal’s first phase, and that the terms of a permanent truce would be agreed upon by week five of the initial stage of the deal, according to officials familiar with the talks. Those terms are part of the written cease-fire proposal.

Haniyeh refused that suggestion, saying Hamas would only accept the deal if Israel made a written commitment to a permanent cease-fire, especially since Netanyahu has publicly said he wouldn’t accept any deal that results in an enduring truce, the officials said.

It was then that Qatari and Egyptian officials told the Hamas leader that the U.S. had asked them to deliver the warnings of possible sanctions and arrest.

A woman held hostage by Hamas was reunited with her family at an Israeli military base in November. PHOTO: PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE/REUTERS

Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel as part of a weeklong cease-fire late last year in exchange for more than 100 hostages taken on Oct. 7. PHOTO: ATEF SAFADI/SHUTTERSTOCK

This week wasn’t the first time that Qatar has threatened to expel Hamas leaders from their base in Doha, where they have been based for over a decade. Qatari officials warned as early as March that Hamas leaders would face expulsion if they didn’t accept a cease-fire deal.

“They know that Qatar will have no choice but to expel them if the Americans ask them to do that,” said one official familiar with the negotiations.

Biden played an instrumental role in negotiations that achieved a weeklong cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in November that also freed more than 100 hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. After that truce collapsed, the two sides engaged in months of fruitless indirect negotiations.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli official and negotiator, said the current round of negotiations is at risk of repeating the failures of previous iterations.

“The Biden speech seemed to offer the tantalizing prospect of breaking the impasse by setting out a path to a permanent cease-fire in which all phases would be linked,” he said.

“Once Netanyahu opposed the Phase 1 pause on-ramp to a permanent cessation, the U.S. failed the test and caved. In refusing to assert the clear linkage to a permanent cease-fire, the Biden administration set us back on a predictable path,” he said.

Gordon Lubold and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.

Write to Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Jared Malsin at jared.malsin@wsj.com

6. Deepfakes, Fraudsters and Hackers Are Coming for Cybersecurity Jobs

Cyber companies would seem to need their own sophisticated counterintelligence capabilities.

Deepfakes, Fraudsters and Hackers Are Coming for Cybersecurity Jobs

Cyber leaders are defending against bad actors armed with artificial intelligence who are applying for openings

https://www.wsj.com/articles/deepfakes-fraudsters-and-hackers-are-coming-for-cybersecurity-jobs-e2a76d06?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Belle Lin

Updated June 7, 2024 3:41 pm ET

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Former federal agent Lili Infante, CAT Labs CEO, shares some of the new recruiting challenges she is experiencing in the private sector.

Companies in the market for cybersecurity professionals could face a new method of attack, made harder to spot because of artificial intelligence: Hackers posing as job applicants.

As cyber threats targeting U.S. companies multiply, some security leaders have increased scrutiny during hiring to weed out bad actors—or simply applicants with over-embellished résumés.

Globally, the cyber sector faces a shortfall of roughly four million professionals, an increase of 12.6% from 2022, according to ISC2, a professional and certification group in cybersecurity. Fraudsters are seizing on the demand.

Lili Infante, founder and chief executive of CAT Labs, said during The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live: Cybersecurity conference on Thursday that North Korean hackers frequently target her cryptocurrency asset recovery startup by pretending to apply for jobs. Some are even referred by recruiters.

“We’ve weeded out over 50 candidates that were North Korean spies,” she said, “to the point where I had to put certain controls in place in my hiring process.”

If hired, the spies could seek out intellectual property and steal corporate data, Infante said. If they’re able to infiltrate a crypto firm, they could put vulnerabilities into code to loot assets, she added.

international sanctions and raise billions of dollars through computer fraud and hacking efforts—often helped by westerners posing as would-be job applicants.

More than 300 U.S. companies unknowingly hired foreign nationals with ties to North Korea for remote IT work, the Justice Department alleged last month.

It isn’t just North Korean spies cyber hiring teams are looking to block. More common are applicants whose skills might not match their listed accomplishments.

Brent Conran, chief information security officer of Intel, at Thursday’s event said he personally interviews job candidates hired into a senior level within the chip giant. Intel has also arrayed “technical gates” to check for skills aptitude—a test Conran said he was required to pass.

Meredith Harper, senior vice president and CISO of credit-card issuer and financial services firm Synchrony Financial, said she’s typically able to detect if job candidates embellished résumés in the first five minutes of a conversation.

“It’s important to be able to see them, whether it’s on video or in-person, to feel the energy, to hear their answers to the specific questions,” Harper said at Thursday’s event.

The rise of AI tools, however, has made it harder to spot impostors.

Chatbots like ChatGPT can help job applicants perfectly tailor résumés and generate answers for cover letters. AI-created deepfakes, which bad actors can use to mimic real people on video and voice calls, have already led to cyber breaches and an increase in sophisticated impersonation attacks.

“I always ask them to show their ID on video. That’s it. It has to match your face,” Infante said. “With deepfakes and remote work, it gets pretty easy if you’re not careful to hire a North Korean spy.”

To root them out, Infante said she’s suspicious of résumés that seem too good to be true. They also tend to have education listed in countries like Malaysia or Singapore, but work experience only in the United States.

Some résumés may contain phone numbers that are voice over internet protocol technology, or VoIP, which don’t require contracting with a cellular provider like Verizon or AT&T. Job candidates who lack an online presence also raise eyebrows.

Infante said she also puts applicants through an automated identity verification before a conversation, and verifies their education credentials.

Since the start of the generative AI boom nearly two years ago, the cyber sector has been on high alert for an increase in AI-aided hacks and cybercrime. While the technology has given hackers a head start, 85% of surveyed cybersecurity professionals say it will aid their work in the long-term, Clar Russo, CEO of ISC2, said at Thursday’s event.

Write to Belle Lin at belle.lin@wsj.com

7. Israel Says It Rescued Four Hostages Held in Gaza

Israel Says It Rescued Four Hostages Held in Gaza

Rare daytime operation took place in the central area of the strip

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-rescued-four-hostages-held-in-gaza-f264e284?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Carrie Keller-Lynn and Eduardo Kaplan

Updated June 8, 2024 8:33 am ET

TEL AVIV—Israel’s military said it rescued four hostages held in central Gaza on Saturday morning, in a complex daytime operation that jolted the war effort, cease-fire talks and Israeli politics.

The four were held in two separate locations in the heart of the Nuseirat section of central Gaza, the military said, after being kidnapped from a musical festival in Israel on Oct. 7. Noa Argamani, 26, rescued in Saturday’s operation, was shown in one of the first images of the Hamas-led raid into southern Israel as a clip of her kidnapping circulated on social media.

In a single hourslong effort, Israel rescued more hostages alive than it had during the entire previous eight months of the war, bringing the total freed by military operations to seven. The result was an immediate boost for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose chief rival, Benny Gantz, postponed an expected resignation from the wartime unity government.

Along with Argamani, Israel named Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrei Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, as the rescued hostages. Israel said they were in good medical condition and had been taken to Israel’s most renowned hospital, Sheba Medical Center, for evaluation.

Noa Argamani with her father and a family friend after Israel said she was among the four rescued hostages. PHOTO: NIR GIVON/REUTERS

Saturday’s operation involved forces from Israel’s military, Israel’s internal security force, known as the Shin Bet, and police hostage-rescue units. The military said its army, navy and air force provided cover for the rescue team.

“It was a daring operation in the light of day,” said Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military’s chief spokesperson. He said the rescue required several weeks of planning with several intelligence sources.

“Intelligence for this operation was very complicated to obtain,” he said.

At 11 a.m. Israel’s military chief Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet head Ronen Bar gave the final approval for the operation, Hagari said. Shortly after, Israeli forces simultaneously entered two buildings in Nuseirat, where the four hostages were spread, Hagari said. Armed militants guarded the hostages in locations embedded within an area flush with civilians. The Israeli air force and Southern Command provided air cover. One Israeli police commando was injured in the raid, according to Hagari.

Andrei Kozlov after the rescue operation. PHOTO: MARKO DJURICA/REUTERS

Israel’s hostage-rescue operations in Gaza have been risky, and Israel’s military has said that previous rescue attempts killed at least one hostage, 25-year-old Sahar Baruch.

Both Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Argamani, who according to the Israeli military was flown separately from the other hostages. Netanyahu told her “not for a moment did we give up on you,” while Herzog told her that “it just brings tears to my eyes” to speak with her, according to transcripts released Saturday.

“We are overjoyed to have you home,” wrote Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on X, following the operation. “We will keep fighting until 120 hostages are home.”

Families of the hostages in Gaza asked the Netanyahu government and Hamas to keep working on the return of those still held captive.

“With the joy that is washing over Israel, the Israeli government must remember its commitment to bring back all 120 hostages still held by Hamas—the living for rehabilitation, the murdered for burial. We continue to call upon the international community to apply the necessary pressure on Hamas to accept the proposed deal and release the other 120 hostages held in captivity; every day there is a day too far,” said the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an advocacy group.

Israel said Shlomi Ziv and the other hostages rescued on Saturday were in good medical condition. PHOTO: MARTIN POPE/ZUMA PRESS

Ziv’s father at a hospital that the hostages were taken to for evaluation. PHOTO: JACK GUEZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The Al Nuseirat refugee camp is the third largest in the Palestinian territories, a warren of apartment buildings and villas that was densely packed before the war and swelled with displaced people in recent weeks. Gaza’s refugee camps were formed after the 1948 war with Israel and have become permanent neighborhoods and cities in the ensuing years.

Palestinians reported sudden explosions in Nuseirat shortly before noon on Saturday. Witnesses said they saw large plumes of smoke and heard loud noises, amid widespread confusion.

Osama Humaid, 36, said he heard loud explosions and saw heavy black smoke around 11:30 a.m. “I’m trapped now in my buildings,” he said, “I don’t know what to do.”

Analysts said that Saturday’s raid would bolster support for Israel’s government and the war, as public trust in both is flagging. “This is a strategic moment,” said Yossi Shain, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University and former parliamentarian. Saturday’s rescue “will lift the spirit of Israelis, it will strengthen the government, it will change the momentum and determination to continue the war,” he said.

This developing story will be updated.

Write to Eduardo Kaplan at eduardo.kaplan@wsj.com

8. Opinion Today’s western alliance needs the spirit of the Boys of Pointe du Hoc

The Washington Post Editorial Board gets it exactly right in the subtitle. We need to "just say no" to appeasement anywhere and everywhere.

They also make one of the very few cases for age and historical perspective while still offering some criticism of our President.

Excerpts:

Mr. Biden is, to be sure, an imperfect messenger. His decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan led to foreseeable disaster. He is an old man in a young country, a fact that hampers his candidacy for reelection. The 81-year-old was a toddler on D-Day. First elected to the Senate 52 years ago, the president is eight years older than Reagan was at Pointe du Hoc in 1984. D-Day itself is as far removed from today as World War II was from the Civil War.

And yet moments like the D-Day commemoration remind us that Mr. Biden’s seniority confers valuable perspective. He was not a World War II veteran but grew up surrounded by them, in an America made possible by their sacrifices — and in that sense, he personifies the country’s lasting connection to the spirit of that age. Certainly, the worldview expressed in his words at Pointe du Hoc on Friday does not carry an expiration date.

Opinion Today’s western alliance needs the spirit of the Boys of Pointe du Hoc

D-Day would have been unnecessary had America and its Allies not appeased Adolf Hitler.

By the Editorial Board

Follow author

June 7, 2024 at 6:04 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board

On June 6, 1944 — D-Day — 225 U.S. Army Rangers set out to scale the strategically vital cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, overlooking the beaches of Normandy, in France. Their mission was to neutralize Nazi artillery that threatened to thwart the Western Allies’ invasion of Europe. Only 90 were still able to bear arms after two days of fighting. When President Ronald Reagan spoke at the site on the 40th anniversary of the Allied invasion, 62 “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” sat in the audience. But by the 80th anniversary, which fell on Thursday, not one of the heroes who clawed their way up that precipice remained alive.

President Biden summoned “the echoes of their voices” during a moving visit to the cliffs on Friday: “Does anyone doubt that they would want America to stand up against [Vladimir] Putin’s aggression?” the president asked. “Does anyone believe these Rangers would want America to go it alone? … Does anyone doubt they wouldn’t move heaven and earth to vanquish hateful ideologies of today?”

They were rhetorical questions, but with them Mr. Biden got at the truth that today’s “America First” movement — like its disgraced predecessor from the years before World War II — has found a receptive audience for isolationism. The invasion of France might never have been necessary had the United States and its Allies from World War I not tried to appease Adolf Hitler. Who would have thought so many Americans would seem to forget, or reject, this costly lesson today, much less that they would support former president Donald Trump, even as he raises the discredited banner of “America First”?

Formed after World War II as a bulwark against future totalitarian attempts to dominate Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization finds itself tested today by a revanchist, autocratic Russia. Mr. Putin’s best weapons in the war he launched against Ukraine might be historical amnesia and myopia. He’s counting on the United States to grow weary of its global commitments and abdicate them. Mr. Biden has staked his legacy on proving Mr. Putin wrong — and showed it by welcoming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the D-Day commemorations. “Isolationism was not the answer 80 years ago, and it is not the answer today,” the U.S. president said. “The price of unchecked tyranny is the blood of the young and the brave. … The Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now, the question for us is: In our hour of trial, will we do ours?”

The 2024 election will help answer this question. Mr. Trump threatened to pull out of NATO as president and declared recently that he would “encourage” Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” against member states that don’t spend enough on defense. He has made clear that, if he wins, he will force Ukraine to accept a negotiated settlement with Russia that requires ceding territory. Mr. Trump represents appeasement in our time. Notably, he campaigned in Phoenix on the D-Day anniversary with Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a leading neo-isolationist who has made a cause of abandoning Ukraine and is being vetted by Mr. Trump as a potential running mate.

Mr. Biden didn’t name Mr. Trump in France — and didn’t need to. His message was clear enough. What he could have said, but didn’t, is that a U.S. retreat today would be doubly unforgivable given that protecting American values and interests does not require anywhere near the level of sacrifice made by those who stormed the beaches of Normandy. It does, however, require understanding the national interest, putting it above self-interest — and electing leaders willing to do the same.

Mr. Biden is, to be sure, an imperfect messenger. His decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan led to foreseeable disaster. He is an old man in a young country, a fact that hampers his candidacy for reelection. The 81-year-old was a toddler on D-Day. First elected to the Senate 52 years ago, the president is eight years older than Reagan was at Pointe du Hoc in 1984. D-Day itself is as far removed from today as World War II was from the Civil War.

And yet moments like the D-Day commemoration remind us that Mr. Biden’s seniority confers valuable perspective. He was not a World War II veteran but grew up surrounded by them, in an America made possible by their sacrifices — and in that sense, he personifies the country’s lasting connection to the spirit of that age. Certainly, the worldview expressed in his words at Pointe du Hoc on Friday does not carry an expiration date.

The Washington Post · by Editorial Board

9. The Human Cost of a Hesitant Ukraine Policy

Or said another way the cost of the war against Putin by the US and the West is fighting to the last Ukrainian.

The Human Cost of a Hesitant Ukraine Policy

Shortages of weapons and limits on their use left Kharkiv oblast vulnerable. Iryna Tsybukh saved lives and ended up losing hers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-human-cost-of-a-hesitant-ukraine-policy-loss-death-russia-war-eb4ae1bf?mod=latest_headlines

By Jillian Kay Melchior

June 7, 2024 4:51 pm ET

A portrait of Iryna Tsybukh taken by her friend Julia Kochetova. PHOTO: JULIA KOCHETOVA

Iryna Tsybukh rescued the wounded from Ukraine’s bloodiest battles. While working as a combat medic, Ms. Tsybukh, 25, slept in abandoned homes a short drive from the front, and when the call for help came she and her crew raced to the trenches, often under shelling or through mined territory, to get soldiers the medical care they needed.

Ira, as her friends called her, “was always as close as possible” to the action “and to the place where her help was most needed,” said Julia Kochetova, a Ukrainian photojournalist who sometimes accompanied her friend at the front. In late May that place was Kharkiv oblast just south of the Russian border, a region that has recently borne the consequences of America’s hesitant Ukraine policy.

As Russia was pummeling the Kharkiv region with missiles, drones and glide bombs, U.S. lawmakers signed off on some $60 billion in aid for Ukraine on April 20, after months of delay. The Ukrainian broadcaster Suspilne reports that at least 216 civilians have been killed in the oblast in 2024, including 106 in May alone. The city of Kharkiv, the country’s second most populous at 1.3 million, has seen fatal strikes on a leisure center, a printing house and a crowded shopping mall in the past few weeks. Air-defense shortages remain so acute that if city residents step outside, they “don’t have a clear understanding if they will be alive in the second moment or not,” Mayor Ihor Terekhov said late last month.

Brig. Gen. Serhii Holubtsov, the aviation chief of Ukraine’s air force, said Russia is launching a minimum of 15 glide bombs each day at the city of Kharkiv and 30 and 60 across the oblast. These bombs can glide between 25 and 40 miles from the planes that launch them and leave “a crater in which you can fit a truck,” he said. The biggest glide bombs can destroy a five-story residential building and send shrapnel flying nearly 1,000 yards.

The U.S. has long prohibited Ukraine from using the weapons it provides to strike Russian territory. Around Kharkiv, that policy has created a sanctuary for Russian attackers. On May 10 Russia began an offensive operation targeting Kharkiv oblast, and the next day it dropped at least 20 glide bombs on the frontline village of Vovchansk, according to the Institute for the Study of War.

Ukraine lacks the air-defense interceptors to shield effectively against incoming missiles and drones, and U.S. delays in providing military aid created severe ammunition shortages across the Ukrainian front. Ukraine still needs to hold the line against the Russians pressing in on Kharkiv. So its soldiers had to stay put and endure the aerial and ground assault, despite the casualties.

Ira wanted to give those wounded in Kharkiv a chance to survive. “I am not a person who dreamed of working as a paramedic all my life,” she said in 2022. She had periodically volunteered as a combat medic before February 2022, but she also worked in Kyiv on the reform of the public broadcaster Suspilne and made documentaries. Someday she wanted to own a house, plant tomatoes and have children. But “a full-scale war changed everything,” she told Elle Ukraine.

Iryna Tsybukh with Oleg Gryn, a friend and fellow combat medic. PHOTO: COURTESY OF OLEG GRYN

She became a full-time unpaid volunteer with the Hospitallers Medical Battalion. “Her crew was always one of the best,” said Oleg Gryn, 24, a combat medic from the Azov Brigade who worked with Ira. “Everyone was calmer when they knew that Cheka”—her call sign, meaning the pin of a grenade—“was nearby.” Ms. Kochetova recalled that Ira painstakingly outfitted her evacuation vehicle until it looked like a “spaceship” to make it “as warm and convenient” as possible for her wounded passengers, “not a cold car that’s carrying a body.”

Over 27 months, Ira evacuated sometimes as many as 20 people a day and helped save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives, Ms. Kochetova said. Among them was Ira’s friend Taras Homenyuk, a 35-year-old marine. A Russian drone dropped a grenade on his combat vehicle on Oct. 28, 2022, near the village of Opytne in Donetsk oblast. Surprised to have survived, he realized he could barely see and hear. Ira handled his wounds flawlessly, he recalls. “No one died that night. . . . Iryna was really calm, and she instilled this calmness in her crew.”

Ms. Kochetova photographed Ira’s missions in Donetsk around that same time, where she witnessed Ira’s rescue of a soldier with eye injuries—perhaps Mr. Homenyuk, though neither he nor Ms. Kochetova is sure. Afterward, Ira told Ms. Kochetova the wounded man was “someone close to her heart,” that she had been nervous “but you can’t show it,” and that she had resolved “not to become friends with the people I work with, because any of them could be in my car being wounded.”

“I was like, ‘Ira, that’s not true. You’re that friendly, you have that big heart,’ ” Ms. Kochetova recalled. “No matter how tough Ira was, she always was that vulnerable with the people she crossed. . . . I would say everything she was doing was just because she loved people around her, loved her country.”

Ira knew going to Kharkiv was risky. “The chance of dying increases with each battle. This is mathematics,” said Mr. Gryn. “Evacuation vehicles are a priority target for the enemy.” But “she believed there was an obligation. She perfectly understood that she would die and chose this path every time. We talked about it a lot.”

On May 23, Ira tweeted: “It’s my B-day soon, and I’m very proud of having made it to 26.” She didn’t. Her birthday was June 1, and on May 29 she was killed in action in Kharkiv oblast. She was “so f— young,” Ms. Kochetova said. “I’m extremely angry that we’re losing the best of our people.” The Hospitallers Medical Battalion hasn’t released the details of her death but says another combat medic who was with her, Ivan Nikolenko, survived with leg injuries.

Julia Kochetova and Iryna Tsybukh. PHOTO: COURTESY OF JULIA KOCHETOVA

“If we were able to strike the military targets from which the enemy is launching their strikes, we would have had less victims, many people would have been still alive, and we would not have scorched-earth situation” in Kharkiv, Gen. Holubtsov said on May 29. That was the day Ira died, although we didn’t know it as we spoke.

Gen. Holubtsov said that if Ukraine “had been able to strike targets beyond our borders,” it would likely have been able to preclude the attack on Kharkiv. As Congress dithered over aid, “we have lost some territory, and they have begun attacking again. The situation is not critical, but now just to stop their advances, we need probably three times as many weapons—and this is just for stopping their new attacks.”

Gen. Holubtsov says the only way to stop Russian aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities is to target the factories that make glide bombs, missiles and drones as well as the planes that launch them and the air bases where fighter jets rest. An interception-only strategy “is expensive, it is ineffective, and we will hardly be able to afford this, because the number of air-defense missiles, of interceptors, that we have is dozens of times fewer than the Russians have glide bombs. So it’s basically impossible in terms of numbers.”

Two days after Ira’s death, the Biden administration announced it had changed its policy to allow Ukraine to use some U.S. weapons to strike Russian territory. But the U.S. still won’t let Ukraine use long-range ATACMS missiles inside Russia, and Washington has been vague about where in Russia Ukraine can target. Gen. Holubtsov declined to comment on the specifics of the new permissions and restrictions. But the U.S. half-measures won’t eliminate Russia’s sanctuary, merely push it further back.

This is an insane way to expect Ukraine to fight a war. Ira’s loss is an example of the enormous human cost.

Ms. Melchior is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

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Wonder Land: Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to growing threats abroad with a much needed U.S. defense buildup. The Biden Democrats' approach is to focus on domestic spending only. Images: AP/Bloomberg News Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the June 8, 2024, print edition as 'The Human Cost of a Hesitant Ukraine Policy'.

10. The Fearless:An elite squad of fighters has been on the front lines of every major battle for Ukraine’s independence. This is the story of their war

This is a very long read. Please go to the link to read the 5 "chapters" in proper format, and to view the extensive photos, maps, graphics and videos: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-the-fearless-ukraine-soldiers-front-lines/

There is the basis for a screenplay and a future movie in this.

The Fearless

An elite squad of fighters has been on the front lines of every major battle for Ukraine’s independence. This is the story of their war

MARK MACKINNON

ILLUSTRATIONS BY MIKO MACIASZEK

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

PUBLISHED JUNE 6, 2024

66 MIN READ

The Ukrainian military helicopter had been shot down about seven kilometres behind Russian lines, crashing in a field browned by winter, on the edge of a leafless forest. Those aboard were scattered dead and mortally wounded across the burning landscape of southern Ukraine weeks after the Russian invasion.

Trying to reach the casualties – the crew of the helicopter, plus fighters who had been rescued from the besieged port city of Mariupol before the craft was shot down on its return trip – would be something close to a suicide mission. The last person who should have taken the assignment was Nazar Borovytskyi.

The helicopter missions into Mariupol were seen as so risky that each team – usually a pilot, a mechanic and two special-forces fighters from Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service – was only supposed to make the trip once. The soldiers joked among themselves that they were volunteering for seats on a one-way flight.

Nazar, 28, had already flown two such missions in the spring of 2022, escaping both times with a handful of injured fighters from a surrounded steel factory in a shattered city slowly falling under Russian control. Now one of the missions had gone awry, necessitating an even more dangerous rescue.

It was definitely not his turn, but when the commander asked for volunteers, Nazar asked to be sent back in.

In the framed photograph on the wall of the HUR headquarters, Nazar, muscular, with chiselled cheekbones and a dark blond beard, stands in the back row wearing a black T-shirt under his camouflage bulletproof vest.

The image, displayed outside the Kyiv office of Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov, captures a group of Ukrainian soldiers in what was then one of the most dangerous places in the world – the Kabul airport in the summer of 2021. The soldiers were members of a specially assembled unit that flew multiple missions to rescue Ukrainian nationals, as well as one of The Globe and Mail’s translators and his family, from Kabul ahead of the anticipated Taliban takeover. An inscription in the corner reads “26.08.2021, Kabul, Afghanistan.”

In all, there were 32 operatives – 30 men and two women – on the ground in Kabul that day, plus the pilots and crew of the military cargo plane. All except the pilots were experienced HUR officers.

When the team landed in Kyiv after flying the third and final planeload of evacuees out of the country, they would be greeted by Gen. Budanov, as well as President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff. Medals would follow.

The mission is remembered fondly by the team because it was short, the team accomplished what they needed to, and they came home to a hero’s welcome. In other words, it was everything the current war with Russia is not.

A few days after the rescue, I flew to Kyiv to assist the Afghans – and to thank the team of strangers who had carried out the mission.

An officer code-named Markus had been my point of contact throughout the rescue. I didn’t know him, but he had been co-ordinating from Kyiv as the Ukrainians ventured outside Kabul airport on Aug. 27, and escorted the families of Sharif Sharaf, The Globe’s long-time Afghan news assistant, and Jawed Haqmal, a translator who had worked with the Canadian military. Markus and I met for drinks along with Dima Logginov, a medic and communications specialist who had been on the ground in Kabul and had taken part in the mission.

Five months later, as Russia was amassing its forces ahead of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I ran into both Markus and Dima again separately as they helped prepare their country’s defences. I came to understand that the HUR special-forces team that had been deployed to Kabul in the summer of 2021 were indeed the country’s elite, and I became intent on covering their struggle to defend their country.

Markus eventually introduced me to Gen. Budanov, who agreed to give The Globe unprecedented access to his top fighters, a group brought together for the 2021 mission but usually serve in different, smaller units deployed on the hottest sections of the front line in Ukraine. I was taken to the secret base of the special-forces fighter code-named Shaman, and debated God and the rules of war with the leader of the most feared battalion fighting on the Ukrainian side of the war against Russia. I was given permission to meet one of the founders of a unit that had led the defence of Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv – and found him deeply worried about what comes next.

I spoke to Lieutenant-Colonel Iryna Andrukh, a military psychologist who played a very different role on the ground in Kabul – and who nearly became a casualty there.

Eventually, I met Maks, the commander of the team in Kabul, who today heads his own unit as it contends with a dwindling supply of ammunition on Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia front. I spent hours talking to Cesar, one of Gen. Budanov’s deputies, who played a lead role both in Kabul and in designing the overall strategy in the country’s war against Russia and who wonders whether the West has the stomach for what’s to come.

I also met with members of the Kabul Team who have been wounded, family members of one who has been killed, and heard whispers of discontent from inside the ranks about how they have been pushed to the limits – and beyond – over the 27-plus months since Russia invaded their country.

This is the story of their war.

CHAPTER 1

THE KABUL

TEAM

11 min read

Chapter 1

Ukraine’s HUR military intelligence service was born in 1992, shortly after independent Ukraine was itself reborn from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Ukraine’s early security and defence policies were often indistinguishable from Moscow’s, and soldiers and spies who had served the Soviet Union dominated Ukraine’s new security services.

All that changed in early 2014, when a popular revolution on the streets of Kyiv overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. A furious Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered masked troops to seize the strategic Crimean Peninsula, in the south of Ukraine, which Mr. Putin annexed shortly afterward. Other Russian operatives appeared in Donbas, a largely Russian-speaking region in Ukraine’s southeast, stirring up a proxy war that would kill 14,000 people between its outbreak in 2014 and the start of the full-scale invasion.

At the beginning of the Donbas conflict, the country was unprepared to fight its giant neighbour, one many Ukrainians had a hard time even perceiving as an enemy. But attitudes quickly hardened. In 2016, then-president Petro Poroshenko unveiled an overhaul of HUR that included a new logo – an owl plunging a giant sword into a map of Russia. It surely wasn’t missed in Moscow that the mascot of Russia’s own military intelligence service was a bat, and owls are one of the few creatures that prey on bats.

The logo captured the spirit of a service that quickly became the backbone of the new fight for Ukraine’s full independence.

Nazar Borovytskyi always wanted to be a soldier. When he was in the fourth grade, he was bullied; he took up sports and started training “so that he could push back,” his mother, Lesya, recalled in September, 2023, when I visited the family home in Pashkivka, a tiny farming town in the Poltava region. Nazar grew up there after his parents and older sister Oksana were relocated from their former home on the edge of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster zone.

Sports and fitness became an obsession for Nazar. Oksana recalls her brother, while doing pull-ups on a bar their father had set up for him in the garden, asking her to throw a basketball at his stomach as hard as she could. He wanted it to hurt, to build up his tolerance for pain.

He had good grades, Lesya said, but when he graduated from high school he applied only to the academy of the country’s SBU security service. Before he had even graduated, Nazar responded to a call for volunteers, and found himself fighting in the proxy war.

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It was on the battlefields of Donbas in 2016 that Nazar, then a member of a different special forces unit, first encountered the HUR team, when his unit was assigned to work with them. Nazar ended up fighting side-by-side with Ivan, a fighter from western Ukraine who was the same age and who had also bucked his parents’ wishes and joined the military.

The mission was a success, though the skirmish is likely to go unremembered in the long history of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Ivan and Nazar became fast friends and later that year Ivan helped recruit Nazar to a unit that would be sent to the United States for a three-month training course. Nazar’s friends dubbed him “Universal Soldier” after the 1992 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie about the half-man, half-cyborg perfect fighter. A hero who was supposed to be impossible to kill.

After the events of 2014 – as Russia faced sanctions for annexing Crimea – Mr. Putin’s Kremlin came to see itself in a struggle not just with Ukraine, but the entire West. Though Western governments wanted to avoid direct conflict with Russia, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency began looking for ways to covertly join the battle against its Cold War adversary.

In 2016, the CIA reached out to HUR with an offer to train top operatives in the United States; in exchange, the newly formed Unit 2245 would share what it learned on the battlefield – including any technology it captured – with the CIA so that it could better understand their shared adversary. The training covered everything from how to provide close protection to their country’s political leaders to more advanced types of spycraft.

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Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov oversees Ukraine’s elite special forces.

OLGA IVASHCHENKO/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Gen. Budanov was one of the initial Unit 2245 members – as was Maks, a 41-year-old with deep brown eyes and a square jaw, whom Gen. Budanov selected to lead the initial reconnaissance mission into Kabul in the summer of 2021. He was a natural choice, having served in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010 as a member of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. He had also fought as part of Unit 2245 in Donbas, preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Maks had only a couple of days to prepare after Gen. Budanov asked him, on Aug. 13, 2021, to head a team tasked with evacuating hundreds of Ukrainian citizens living in Afghanistan.

The crack 10-member unit landed in Kabul for the first time on Aug. 15 to a scene of utter chaos: tens of thousands of desperate people trying to get into the tightly guarded airport.

The team also had a pair of side missions: to rescue a group of Ukrainian security contractors, as well as Fatema Hosseini, a freelance journalist who had worked for USA Today. Like other Afghan translators, she feared for her safety under renewed Taliban rule. The risks were even higher for Fatema, as a woman who had worked for Westerners and taken to dressing like them during the 20-year U.S. military presence in her country.

Fatema was put in contact with Col. Iryna Andrukh, a military psychologist and hostage negotiator who was added to the Kabul Team to deal with unforeseen circumstances that might require her skill set. Throughout the night of Aug. 19, 2021, they messaged back and forth.

“Last night I woke up several times having nightmares,” Fatema wrote. “I will die.”

“You will not die,” Iryna responded.

She told Fatema to get as close as she could to the East Gate of the airport, and then the HUR team would come out and get her.

After some tense moments as she pushed through the desperate crowds – and just after she had talked her way through a pair of Taliban checkpoints – Fatema received another, starker, text message from Iryna. Fatema now had to make her way instead to the North Gate of the facility. And the plane was leaving in 30 minutes. “Either you make it or you don’t.”

People were shouting, shoving, trampling. Someone shot a woman beside her. Fatema decided to return home and accept her fate.

Just then her phone rang. This time it was a male voice on the line. “Fatema, I bribed this Taliban to come out and take you. Where are you?”

At the assigned meeting point, Fatema shouted the name she had been given. “Ivan!” She could see safety – and a better life – just on the other side of the airport fence.

Ivan spotted her and sent Nazar into the crowd. He pulled her from peril and into the airport.

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A Taliban fighter threatens a woman waiting to get access to Kabul airport on Aug. 18, 2021.

JIM HUYLEBROEK/THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

By the time they were on the plane back to Kyiv, Maks had seen enough of the situation in Kabul to realize when they returned to Afghanistan to rescue the rest of their citizens, they would need a much larger team.

The Kabul Team ran two more missions into Afghanistan, this time bulked up with an additional 22 members. Maks and his comrades from Unit 2245 provided the muscle, while the additional operatives were there to handle the unexpected, and to make sure they were putting the right people on the plane back to Kyiv. The new members of the team were led by one of Gen. Budanov’s deputies, a blue-eyed, silver-haired spy codenamed Cesar.

The group, Cesar told me later, was the “best of the best” from Ukraine’s military intelligence service. Like characters in some cinematic ensemble cast, each new member was added because of a specific skill that their commander believed might come in handy on the ground in Afghanistan. Some were added because they were the best fighters Ukraine had. Others were snipers or medics or communications specialists – or had an all-round skill set best summed up with the word “spy.”

“We sent those we were sure of,” was the typically curt answer Gen. Budanov gave me when I asked him later about the composition of the team.

Standing second from the left in the photo outside Gen. Budanov’s office is the man they call Shaman. Thirty years old, he can barely remember life without war. He’s been fighting against Russia for almost a decade now, since the day after he graduated university with a psychology degree.

Though he keeps his identity and the details of his background a closely guarded secret – he only agrees to be photographed with a balaclava on – he acknowledges that he’s from the battle-scarred Donbas region.

He describes the mission to Afghanistan and the assignment to help rescue civilians as a break from his day job of fighting the Russians. “For me, as a soldier who grew up on the steppes of Donbas to fly to Afghanistan – it wasn’t exactly a vacation, but it was a very interesting and challenging mission. So, I’m thankful to your colleagues that they got into trouble,” he told me with a laugh.

Russia has its feared airborne troops and its notorious Wagner mercenaries. In Ukraine, there are few units more legendary than the Shaman Battalion, a subunit of HUR founded by the burly, bearded fighter with piercing blue eyes who speaks of killing Russians with the passion of an artist mixed with the dark humour of a survivor.

“Welcome to the last pirate ship,” he told me last September, when we finally met in person at the unit’s secret base in an abandoned hotel near Kyiv. We sat in what was once the laundry room, with assault rifles, ammunition, uniforms and a half-empty whiskey bottle piled atop ancient washing machines.

Asked why he had been selected for the mission in Kabul, Shaman shrugged and drew on the cigarillo smouldering in his left hand.

“I wasn’t assigned to this team, I was invited,” he said with a smile. “It was a team of people who had no fear and were willing to go wherever it was required.”

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Shaman leads one of the most famous units fighting in Ukraine and behind Russian lines.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Standing near the back of the photo, with his sunglasses resting atop his ballcap, is Den, another of Ukraine’s most accomplished fighters. Before the start of the proxy war in 2014, he was a 35-year-old engineer working in the city of Donetsk for the firm that had built the city’s state-of-the-art new airport.

By the end of the year, Den’s young family had fled to Kyiv, and Den was fighting on the Ukrainian side of an epic battle that left Donetsk’s airport a smouldering ruin.

Also in the photo is Ivan, who would later walk away from Unit 2245, refusing to serve any longer as part of a group he said had been treated as a “suicide squad” during the Russia-Ukraine war. He asked that I use the generic “Ivan” – rather than his actual code name – so that even his former colleagues wouldn’t be able to identify him.

When it became clear in August, 2021, that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would endanger anyone who had collaborated with Westerners, I began making phone calls to try to get Sharif Sharaf and Mukhtar Amiri, two translators who had worked for The Globe and Mail, out of the country.

Over the frantic next few days and nights we tried Canadian rescue plans, U.S. rescue plans, Qatari rescue plans – but with chaos spreading in the city, it proved to be impossible for the two large families to reach the airport gates. Sharif and Mukhtar, it seemed, were trapped.

Then a source in Kyiv gave me a tip that there was also a Ukrainian plane on the ground in Kabul. And they were willing to help.

On Aug. 26, I was given Markus’s number. I called him on WhatsApp, expecting to speak to someone jazzed up for a mission. Instead, the man who answered sounded like he’d been awakened from a sound sleep. But he was confident. “We are coming,” he said nonchalantly, though it would take another 24 hours for the rescue to unfold.

During the anxious wait, I had yet another request for this man I’d never met: one of the two Globe translators had decided at the last minute to remain in Afghanistan with his ailing grandmother. Could the team collect Jawed Haqmal, a friend of Sharif’s who had served as a translator for the Canadian military, and his family instead? Markus – to my shock – told me to just send the new names so he could add them to Ukraine’s evacuation list. “It is a humanitarian mission,” he explained.

It was a very different response from what I had received from the Canadian military. Though the Canadians had been willing to fly out Sharif and Mukhtar, the Afghans and their families first had to get through the crowd of tens of thousands of people thronging the gates of the Kabul airport.

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British and Canadian soldiers help an Afghan climb up on a wall near Kabul airport on Aug. 22, 2021.

WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The U.S. Army set similar parameters. NATO troops weren’t going to take additional risks to rescue those who had worked with them, let alone the former employees of a Canadian newspaper.

The directive to rescue Sharif and Mukhtar had come to HUR via Mr. Zelensky’s office. Mr. Zelensky and his staff saw helping journalists from media organizations such as The Globe and Mail and USA Today as a way of thanking their Western allies – and perhaps as a means to draw the country a step closer to NATO membership.

For Markus, it was just a mission. When we finally met several days later to celebrate the rescue over beer and sausages at a bar in Kyiv, he told me that he was a senior HUR officer. He had been in Kyiv, not Kabul, that night, helping run the rescue operation from afar. He was so senior, he implied, that I could probably figure out who he was if I searched in the right places. So far, I haven’t. (My greatest success has been to learn his first name – and it isn’t Markus.)

Four months later, as the days ticked down to what already felt like an inevitable invasion, our paths crossed again in the eastern city of Kharkiv, just 40 kilometres from the Russian border. The mood was sombre. Markus by then was predicting a full-scale invasion in which Russia’s much larger military would seize swaths of Ukraine. He was there to help prepare the resistance.

CHAPTER 2

THE BATTLE

FOR KYIV

18 min read

Chapter 2

At that first meeting in Kyiv, Markus and I were joined by Dima Logginov, one of the few members of the HUR unit to have anything like a public profile. In the Kabul Team photo he’s in the second row, a little bit to the left of the flag. While most of the others are almost expressionless, Dima is smiling broadly.

His father, Taras, was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society. Dima had volunteered there before going into advertising and becoming CEO of his own company. In between, he had served as an organizer in 2004 for future president Viktor Yushchenko during the first of Ukraine’s two revolutions this century against Kremlin domination.

Like many Ukrainians of his generation, Dima’s career path was forever altered by the 2014 start of the war in Donbas. He first went to the front line as a medical volunteer, drawing on the skills he had acquired with the Red Cross. Then he began giving combat medicine courses to some of the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who suddenly became soldiers. Eventually he was drawn into HUR, though it was often hard to tell exactly what Dima’s role was.

On Feb. 17, 2022, a week before the wider Russian invasion began, I flew aboard a Ukrainian military helicopter to Stanytsia Luhanska. The eastern town was on the front line of the proxy war between the Ukrainian army and Kremlin-backed separatists who had held large parts of the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk since 2014.

We went to see a kindergarten that had been hit by artillery fire. As our small group of journalists strode through the largely deserted town, occasionally cringing at the sound of more shelling somewhere in the distance, I saw Dima.

His youthful face was framed as always by a black beard. He was at the side of Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, who was also touring the area.

Dima shook my hand and walked with me closer to the front line, but when I asked him what he was doing there, he replied only: “Working.”

Today, the town is deep in Russian-occupied territory, the fate of the civilians we met that day unknown.

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A woman surveys the damage to a kindergarten classroom in Stanytsia Luhanska on Feb. 17, 2022.

ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

In the months to come, I would often see Dima in the background of key events in the war for his country, frequently standing close to Mr. Zelensky.

By February, 2022, HUR leadership was confident a wider invasion was about to begin, even if Mr. Zelensky was still telling the rest of the country that war was unlikely. “It was irreversible,” Cesar said later, referring to the scale of the Russian troop deployments around Ukraine.

Older members of the Kabul Team – those with spouses and children – moved their families to safer parts of Europe. That way they could focus on the fight without worrying about what was happening back home.

Nazar called his father, Bohdan, two weeks before the start of the invasion and said a war was “99.9 per cent” certain to happen. Bohdan stayed in his hometown of Pashkivka. Like many Ukrainians, he had by then heard many warnings of a looming war, but didn’t quite believe them.

Nazar called his father again just before 4 a.m. on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, 20 minutes before the opening salvo of Russian missiles struck Ukraine. “He told me I should drive the women and children out to safety and then make my own decision about what I should do,” Bohdan said. “He didn’t want to worry about the family. He just wanted to fight.”

As Nazar was warning his family, HUR’s top operatives, including Markus, Dima and several other Kabul Team members, were being summoned to the organization’s base on the edge of Kyiv.

Gen. Budanov briefed them that the worst-case scenario was unfolding. The Russians had expanded their assault on Donbas, and were also pushing toward Kharkiv and had entered the southern city of Kherson. But the primary thrust was coming from the north, through Belarus. They were headed straight for the capital.

Dima and a team were assigned to take shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to the northern edges of the city and help assemble the defences there.

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The other members of the Kabul Team were scattered. “We divided into small groups all along the front line so that we could exchange very fast information,” Cesar explained later.

“Budanov told us to prevent the capture of the capital, because if the capital of Ukraine is captured, the war would be done,” he said. As members of HUR, they knew their fate if the Russians took Kyiv. “We all understood that if we were captured or surrounded, we had zero chance to stay alive.”

A day before the Russian invasion began, Shaman assembled a group of 12 of the toughest fighters he knew, and handed out patches with a stylized white skull on a black background. Without any grander ceremony, the Shaman Battalion had been formed.

They took up their weapons and headed toward Hostomel, a military airport on the outskirts of Kyiv that intelligence gathered by HUR – which Gen. Budanov had shown to Mr. Zelensky hours before – suggested would be the prime Russian target in the hours ahead. The Russian plan, HUR had learned via a double agent, was to seize the airport and use it to land tanks and troops on the edge of Kyiv for a quick thrust to the capital.

In the darkness before dawn on Feb. 24, Shaman and his men saw the intelligence was correct. A row of Russian helicopters was making its way toward the airfield.

Maks and his own newly formed unit – the Kabul Nine, proudly named after the 2021 mission, though it was not entirely made up of original team members – had woken up that morning at their base outside Kyiv with the same orders: get to Hostomel as quickly as possible.

We all understood that if we were captured or surrounded, we had zero chance to stay alive.”

– CESAR, A DEPUTY UNDER GEN. BUDANOV’S COMMAND

Though HUR had anticipated the invasion, what was happening nonetheless made little sense to Maks. The number of Russian troops stationed in Belarus wasn’t enough to seize the Ukrainian capital.

And yet there they were on the horizon: a line of 30 to 40 Russian helicopters, approaching with almost no support – as though they expected the Ukrainians to let them land. The incredulous HUR fighters opened fire.

“It really was a ‘special military operation’ – to frighten us, seize Kyiv and finish this,” Maks said, using the Kremlin’s terminology for a conflict Mr. Putin insisted, until this spring, was not a full-out war. “They made a lot of mistakes because they did not expect resistance at all.”

Ukraine’s military, Mr. Putin had assumed, would collapse in the face of his army’s vastly superior firepower. Its people might protest initially, but the majority would eventually accept the return of rule from Moscow as though their 30-plus years of independence had been just a blip.

Western governments broadly shared the Russian President’s assessment of how the war was likely to go. It would be over in a matter of days, if not weeks. Canada, the U.S. and most NATO countries saw the same intelligence that Gen. Budanov did, and withdrew their embassies and staff.

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Ukrainian servicemen at a military airbase in the Kyiv region, late February, 2022.

MAKSIM LEVIN/REUTERS

The only people who didn’t panic were the Ukrainians doing the fighting. But even they didn’t expect the Russian assault on Kyiv to founder as spectacularly as it did.

“It was unbelievable,” Cesar later told me. The bumbling Russian tactics and ferocious Ukrainian resistance in Hostomel and elsewhere had given life to the belief that Ukraine could resist Russia, one that spread to Western governments, which began supplying Kyiv with more advanced weaponry.

“I thought that we could fight only from seven to 10 days,” Cesar said. “I think it’s a lack of normal command officers in the Russian army that made the conditions that allowed us to fight them very effectively.”

Ivan and the bulk of Unit 2245 woke up on the first day of the larger invasion in the city of Kramatorsk, which since 2014 had served as the administrative and military capital of the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donbas. Though the region was already well used to war, it was apparent – as a trio of missiles slammed into Kramatorsk just before dawn – that this was now a different type of conflict.

After withstanding the initial barrage, Unit 2245 were given orders to head 150 kilometres straight north, to the city of Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region. “We were like first responders,” Ivan said. “We were in the most dangerous direction in which the Russians were supposed to be deployed.”

The mission was to slow the Russians down any way they could, to blow up bridges, lay land mines and conduct hit-and-run strikes on the advancing columns.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

As of June 3, 2024

Russian-controlled territory

Reported Ukrainian

partisan warfare

Russian-controlled territory

before Feb. 24, 2022

BELARUS

RUSSIA

Hostomel

POLAND

Borodyanka

Brovary

Irpin

Ruska Lozova

Kyiv

Kharkiv

Lviv

Kupyansk

UKRAINE

Vinnytsia

Luhansk

Donetsk

Zaporizhzhia

MOLDOVA

Mariupol

Mykolaiv

Melitopol

ROMANIA

Odesa

Sea of Azov

CRIMEA

Snake Island

Sevastopol

Black Sea

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCES: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF WAR;

OPENTOPOGRAPHY; OPENSTREETMAP

Soon, Ivan and his team were creeping up on 15 Russian armoured vehicles heading toward Kharkiv. They struck the first two vehicles with rocket-propelled grenades, damaging them enough to force them to stop. Then they called in a larger Ukrainian unit, which obliterated the Russian column with artillery.

In Kharkiv, another new battalion was forming, this one a volunteer force brought together by two things – a fierce love of the city’s Metalist Kharkiv soccer team and a hatred for their Russian neighbours. The Kraken Battalion, as it would be named, was a HUR operation from the start, founded by a pair of agents including Kabul Team veteran Den, whose gently greying hair was offset by a dark beard.

The 600 lightly armed volunteers headed to the Saltivka neighbourhood on the northern outskirts of the city. The area was being held by the 92nd Brigade of the regular Ukrainian army but the defenders were on the verge of being overwhelmed until the Kraken arrived and helped stop the Russians from driving into the city centre.

As with the battle unfolding in Kyiv, the HUR operatives were mystified by the Russians’ tactics as they advanced. Their tanks drove toward the central square along main roads, rather than seeking to surround the city and choke off supply lines.

Russian special forces drove carelessly into central Kharkiv in a line of armoured personnel carriers, seemingly with the mission of raising the Russian flag over the city. They were stopped five kilometres from the main Freedom Square and instead took over the city’s yellow-walled School No. 134 to use as a temporary base. They were quickly surrounded by Ukrainian forces, including the Kraken Battalion.

The Russian fighters put up a fierce defence with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades over the course of a seven-hour battle. Eventually, however, the school was set ablaze. Some of Russia’s best fighters died inside the burning building.

“We asked them to surrender, and they said no,” Den told me later.

Den agreed that the Russians genuinely hadn’t expected any resistance. They believed their government’s propaganda about how Russian-speaking Ukrainians were hoping for liberation from the supposedly “neo-Nazi” government in Kyiv. “When we took prisoners, they actually believed that everybody in Ukraine was waiting for Russia to arrive.”

”How go things?” I texted Markus on the evening of Feb. 24, 16 hours after the invasion had begun.

He replied to my text within minutes. “Quite bad in some regions, quite good in others,” he typed. “We are waiting for big bombing of Kyiv this night. Other cities are very possible as well.”

“Safer to be in a car or the hotel tonight?” I asked, wondering how long it would be possible to remain in Kyiv as Russian forces approached the capital.

“In bunker,” he replied. “Or move to the outskirts.”

I did the latter, moving with some colleagues into a country home in the Kyiv region. Those defending their capital city, of course, did not have such options.

“Hope you’re safe,” I messaged Markus the next day. “Alive,” he replied, adding a reassuring happy face at the end of his one-word note.

We would have similar exchanges throughout the next two-plus years of war.

As the Russians advanced on Kyiv, Cesar and Markus were sent to Brovary, a bedroom community on the eastern edge of the capital, to prepare defences against the 60-kilometre-long column of Russian military equipment that was snaking its way through the country.

On March 10, a video emerged online showing a long line of Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and at least one mobile thermobaric rocket launcher system driving down the main highway to Kyiv, through the town of Skybyn, the last settlement before the Russians would reach Brovary.

The video shows the first tank being struck, seemingly at close range, by an anti-tank weapon, and the rest of the column – at least three dozen vehicles – making a panicked decision to reverse course. Chaos erupts as Ukrainian fire strikes another tank, this time one of those at the back. The rest of the tanks retreat at top speed, leaving two burning vehicles and their crews behind.

“Skybyn!” I wrote to Markus when I saw the video. “That your guys?”

“Yes,” he replied, adding another of his smiley faces. “Nothing special. Just logic.”

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A destroyed tank near Brovary in March, 2022.

FELIPE DANA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Three decades on from the Russian army’s humiliating defeat in the First Chechen War – which turned on a Chechen ambush, striking the first and last in a Russian column of tanks that entered the capital city of Grozny on New Year’s Eve in 1994 – Moscow’s troops were using the same smug tactics in the Battle of Kyiv.

Two days after the hit-and-run battle at Kupyansk, Ivan and the main 2245 team were ordered to head west and join the battle for Kyiv.

Nazar was already in the Kyiv region, working to arm and train the Territorial Defence Forces, the units of volunteer fighters that would prove crucial to stalling the Russian advance on Kyiv and Kharkiv. The TDF became the stuff of legend, with local volunteers – who were lightly armed, but defending their hometowns and villages – firing at the Russians from every window and alley.

While raising the TDF was a successful military strategy, Shaman believes that it also led to some of the greatest tragedies of the war, as the Russians came to see every Ukrainian civilian as a potential enemy fighter.

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Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces members train in Kyiv in late February, 2022.

GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS

After linking up with Nazar’s team, Unit 2245 pushed north, taking bites out of the advancing Russian columns in the commuter cities north of Kyiv – places like Bucha and Irpin – that would become synonymous with the horrors of this war.

By the end of March, the Russians had realized they were in a real fight and abandoned the parade-style tactics that had imperilled their initial invasion. And the Ukrainians began taking casualties.

In an early clash near a gas station on the eastern outskirts of Bucha, two snipers from Ivan’s squad were killed by Russian fire. The rest of the team was running dangerously low on ammunition, forcing them to pull back to Kyiv with their wounded. On their route back, they encountered a local resident who took them to a basement where 10 injured civilians were sheltering from the crossfire.

With their two military jeeps piled high with their own casualties, Ivan’s team only had enough space to take the three most severely injured civilians with them. Ivan realized as they drove away that they were likely leaving the rest behind to die.

As members of the Kabul Team entered the scorched streets of Bucha after the sudden Russian withdrawal on March 31, they encountered a scene that haunts many of them still.

The roads were filled with charred vehicles and bloated corpses. The basements where Russian security forces had carried out their interrogations and executions were somehow even worse. Many of the more than 450 Bucha residents who were killed during Russia’s month-long occupation of the city – once considered one of the most desirable places to live in Ukraine – were found dead with their hands tied behind their backs, killed by a single bullet to the head.

“The reaction of Russians in Hostomel and Bucha was dictated by their fear. It was the reaction of a cornered rat, who had no control or any power. It was just chaos and they were delivering maximum damage,” Shaman told me. “They were just killing everyone around.”

There was no explanation at all for some attacks. In nearby Borodyanka, the Russian air force dropped bombs on ordinary apartment blocks, entombing everyone inside as the buildings collapsed on top of residents who had huddled together in the basements for safety.

Maks said seeing what the Russians had done in Bucha and Borodyanka was “a mental turning point,” for those who were there. “Everybody was mad,” he told me. “It was something you couldn’t believe could happen in the 21st century in the centre of Europe, that civilians could be massacred for nothing.”

It was then that he and his men realized they were in a war that would not, could not, end any time soon. “You cannot negotiate with barbarians.”

Gen. Budanov said that while his men had “already seen a lot in their lives,” the scenes in Bucha and Borodyanka affected everyone who saw them. “It is clear that inhumane treatment of civilians cannot be accepted normally.”

Nazar’s family said something inside him snapped after Bucha.

“His commander told me that unfortunately Nazar lost his fear,” his sister Oksana told me. “After he saw what had been done in the Kyiv region, he started taking crazy missions that no one else was willing to do.”

Bucha after liberation in early April, 2022.

FELIPE DANA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Borodyanka after liberation in early April, 2022. HUR fighters remain haunted by what they saw after the Russian withdrawal.

VADIM GHIRDA/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Days after the liberation of Bucha at the start of April, 2022, my request to interview Gen. Budanov about the defence of Kyiv was granted. I was told to wait on a street corner in Kyiv’s historic Podil neighbourhood one Tuesday morning and, at precisely the appointed time, a black SUV pulled up. Markus and Cesar were inside.

“Nice to see you again,” Markus said as we drove through the deserted streets of the Ukrainian capital, which most residents had fled during the first weeks of the war.

At the riverside HUR headquarters, a compound known locally as The Island, a small concrete sub-building inside the base had been struck by a Russian missile days before.

Outside Gen. Budanov’s office, I could see bare wires dangling from the ceiling, where several panels had been dislodged by the force of the blast.

Cesar, who was in the main building when the adjacent structure was hit, recalled how it seemed as if all the dust in the room was sucked into the air for an instant, just before a blast wave struck, knocking everyone down. “Then Budanov walked in and just said, ‘Calm down guys, everything is fine.’ "

As I waited to go in to meet Gen. Budanov – to thank him for what his team had done in Kabul, and interview him about the recently won Battle of Kyiv – I asked Markus whether everyone in the photo hanging outside his boss’s office was still alive. “Unfortunately not,” he replied.

Every time Ivan goes out on a mission that he’s worried he won’t come back from, he writes a letter to his family saying farewell. He buries it deep in his uniform, hoping it will be found and delivered to his wife and baby whenever his body is recovered.

He wrote one of those letters in early April, 2022, when he learned that he, Nazar, and other members of Unit 2245 would be heading by helicopter into besieged Mariupol. The port city was surrounded by Russian forces and the team’s objective was to drop off supplies and fly out some of the wounded fighters holed up inside the sprawling Azovstal steel mill, the last Ukrainian-held position.

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Smoke billows from the Azovstal steel plant, a structure that sheltered wounded Ukrainian fighters in April, 2022.

ALEXANDER ERMOCHENKO/REUTERS

The missions were so time-sensitive that each one – two helicopters at a time – was only supposed to be on the ground in Mariupol for 10 minutes.

Ivan, like the other members of Unit 2245, doesn’t scare easily. But there was something uniquely unsettling about skimming low over enemy lines at night in a helicopter. “You understand that nothing depends on you. Unlike when you’re on the ground, where you know yourself, you know your people and you know your skills, and that you can shoot people before they shoot you. In the sky, you’re just scared.”

Ivan and his team of four were on the first mission, which successfully reached the Azovstal factory after a 40-minute flight, the final 20 minutes of which was over occupied territory. The team dropped off ammunition, medicine and food, and loaded the eight most seriously wounded fighters onto their helicopter on stretchers. Then they made the terrifying flight back to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Nazar was on the third mission several days later, a flight that dropped off volunteer fighters willing to join the defence of Azovstal, in addition to more supplies.

And then, when everyone in Unit 2245 had flown one mission, Maks – who was commanding the rescue effort – asked who was willing to fly an extra one. Despite the risks, and it not being his turn, Nazar volunteered to go again.

He made it there and back a second time. But after one of the Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopters was shot out of the air on the next mission, Nazar demanded to be part of the April 5 effort to rescue his downed comrades.

As Nazar and his team approached the crash site they were greeted by a horrifying scene. Mangled and charred bodies were scattered amid smashed pieces of helicopter.

The situation was desperate, and dangerous. Nazar’s team was flying into a trap. As they approached the wreckage of the downed helicopter, their helicopter was shot out of the sky, crashing a few hundred metres from the first one.

Video of the attack, presumably taken by Russian soldiers who arrived on the scene, was posted to the messaging app Telegram by a Russian military blogger. It was filmed so quickly after the second helicopter was shot down that the pant leg of one of the dead Ukrainian soldiers is still on fire.

A Ukrainian survivor, despite serious injuries, made his way to a nearby village where pro-Russian collaborators handed him over to the occupying forces.

“Under interrogation … he named names – officer Nazar Borovytskyi commanded the group,” states a news report from the Kremlin-run RIA Novosti. Nothing else was said about Nazar’s fate.

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At the Borovytskyi family home, photos of Nazar share wall space with his military medals.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Maks knew he had been asking a lot of his men with the helicopter missions in and out of Mariupol. He heard the jokes about the one-way tickets. But he, like Gen. Budanov, believed the mission was worthy and necessary. The defenders of Azovstal needed to know they were not alone.

“I talked later to the commander of Azovstal, and he told me the deliveries of food and medicine and ammunition really raised their morale,” Maks said as we walked along the bank of the Dnipro River in March of this year. He told me that he had grown up idolizing his grandfather, an officer in the Soviet army, and always wanted to be in the military. He had joined when he left high school in 1996.

But the responsibilities of command clearly weigh on him. Not only did Nazar – a friend and colleague since 2016, when they were both recruited to Unit 2245 – keep volunteering to fly rescue missions, Maks said Nazar had asked on his second trip to be left behind in Azovstal so he could join the fight.

“I said no and he was angry. He took it personally, but I told him the order was to go to Mariupol and come back because I need you here.”

Maks has played that moment over in his head again and again, especially as some of the Azovstal defenders were later captured and traded back to Ukraine as part of a prisoner swap. “I sometimes think that maybe if I had let him stay, maybe his life would be different. He really wanted to go into the centre of hell and fight – with almost no chance that he would come back.”

CHAPTER 3

THE AFGHAN

RESCUE

8 min read

Chapter 3

By the time the larger, 32-member Ukrainian team was ready to fly back to Kabul on Aug. 21, 2021, the situation had deteriorated dramatically.

The Taliban had taken over most of the city outside the airport and was erecting checkpoints to control who could and couldn’t leave. There was panic even among those lucky enough to enter the facility – one video captured several Afghans clinging to, and then falling off, a U.S. cargo plane as it took off.

Colonel Yevhen Shkurat had flown some risky missions in his two decades at the helm of Ilyushin-76 military cargo planes. But nothing quite prepared him for having to navigate his giant aircraft with its 50-metre wingspan through the mountains that surround the Afghan capital, while instructing his crew to keep an eye out for Taliban or Islamic State fighters who might try to shoot the plane down.

The square-faced 45-year-old had been nervous after receiving his assignment, but quietly stoked. He assembled a cockpit team that he knew he could trust with his life and the lives of everyone on board. “Whenever I watched adventure movies about pilots doing crazy things, I thought: ‘This destiny will pass me by, I will never do such things.’ I was wrong.”

Flying through the mountains, Col. Shkurat could only make radio contact with the ground when he could physically see the airport. Though there was no sign of a threat as the plane banked toward Kabul, Col. Shkurat decided to fire off flares – designed to draw away any missiles that might be homing in on the aircraft – anyway. He would do the same every time he flew the Ilyushin in or out of the Afghan capital over the days to come.

“I will never forget Kabul airport,” Col. Shkurat said. “We couldn’t know if there was a plane above us, or whether someone was manoeuvring around us. We had no information.”

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Col. Yevhen Shkurat, seen here in his home city of Vinnytsia, piloted the Ilyushin military cargo plane that carried out the Kabul rescue mission.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Among the expanded Ukrainian team, Lera, a 29-year-old combat medic, was one of the few who had been to Afghanistan before, having served, like Maks, in the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. As one of two women on the team, she would play a key role dealing with the hundreds of women and children the Ukrainians would evacuate.

“Each of us, we had our own specialization. But we fulfilled everything as a team. We’re very multifunctional, I think, all of us,” she said.

Dima had the dual roles of combat medic and communications specialist. Part of his mission was to record every moment and to make sure Ukrainians – and their NATO friends but not-quite-allies – knew about HUR’s rescue effort.

Iryna, the military psychologist and hostage negotiator, was the one who took the Kabul Team photo with the camera on her iPhone.

She said later that she had found it ironic to be on a mission with the types of battle-scarred fighters she might otherwise be diagnosing and counselling. Some of the men, Iryna said, had been skeptical of her last-minute addition.

“I don’t shoot well. I don’t lift anything heavy if I don’t have to. I’m a different type of officer,” she said with a laugh. “Maybe for a hangout or some drinks, Budanov would not have invited all of us together. But for the mission it was the perfect team.”

For Westerners, leaving the relative security of the airport was never without risk. In my communications with Canadian troops on the ground in Kabul in the summer of 2021, it was clear that for them, the idea of heading out into the Taliban-controlled city to rescue the Canada-bound Afghans who couldn’t reach the airport was considered semi-suicidal.

The Ukrainians admit now that they had been perhaps too nonchalant about the threats around them, seeing the whole mission as something of a break from the war in Donbas. That changed after one of their first excursions outside the perimeter when Iryna – who had defiantly refused to adapt to conservative local customs and went on the mission wearing sunglasses, jeans, pink sneakers and a T-shirt reading “Aloha!” – suddenly disappeared into the dense crowds while the rest of the team was looking for the minibuses full of Afghans that they were supposed to find and escort into the airport.

“We went to the city, we saw the buses, but some people were around them and the Taliban was around as well. And they started shooting. And some people just picked me up and pulled me into the crowd,” Iryna recalled, shuddering at the memory almost three years later. “Some strong Afghan men were trying to tear me apart.”

Iryna had gone into the city along with some of Ukraine’s fiercest fighters – including Cesar, Nazar and Shaman – which is why she briefly let her guard down. Her comrades quickly validated her trust by wading into the fray to retrieve her. “If not for our special forces. I would have stayed there and I would have died there.”

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Iryna Andrukh, military psychologist, in Washington D.C., 2024.

KENT NISHIMURA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

By Aug. 26, the team had made repeated forays into Kabul over four days – sometimes on foot, sometimes using a pair of Afghan police trucks they had commandeered – and most of the Ukrainian citizens they had come to collect were onboard and ready for departure.

But a few problems remained. First, the mission wasn’t complete; there were still some people on their list that they hadn’t been able to locate. Second, with about 200 evacuees, the Ilyushin was too heavy to take off with the HUR team and all their gear onboard. And thirdly, an Islamic State suicide bomber had attacked amid the panicked crowd outside the airport earlier that day, killing 183 people, including 13 American soldiers.

Maks made the call to keep the team – except Iryna, who would fly out with the first group – on the ground for the night so the evacuees could be airlifted out to Islamabad, the capital of neighbouring Pakistan. They gathered for a quick photo, to capture the moment, just before their plane lifted off, leaving the other 31 behind.

Spooked by the suicide attack – and making plans for their final departure – U.S. and NATO forces established a tight perimeter inside the airport. The last Canadian military plane had left several hours earlier.

The Kabul Team, meanwhile, set up in a small fire station inside the airport and made it their headquarters for the night, taking up shooting positions in case the outer wall of the airport was breached. The U.S. troops watched what was happening from their perimeter with incredulity. They asked the Ukrainians why they hadn’t left Kabul when their plane did.

“The Americans were like, ‘Are you crazy?’” Lera recalled, laughing at the memory. “We were joking that if the plane did not come back, we would have to go to the Turkmenistan border by ourselves.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Maks said. “I was surrounded by my best operatives. Whatever would happen would happen, but we were together and we were prepared.”

The first 200 evacuees were dropped off at Islamabad International Airport, with Iryna left to try to sort out logistics such as food, water and bathrooms. She would also need to find commercial planes to take them all to Kyiv. The Ilyushin was needed back in Kabul as soon as possible to collect the stranded HUR team and a planeload of Ukraine-bound Afghans.

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A flashing red light illuminates the open rear cargo area of a Ukrainian aircraft as it prepares to take off from Kabul with Afghan refugees aboard.

UKRAINIAN ARMED FORCES

Iryna resorted to tactics akin to those she might use as a hostage negotiator. Still dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, she approached the ground staff.

“I said ‘Hi guys, my name is Iryna, and we are going to use the bushes as a restroom unless you let us into the terminal.’ " The Pakistani ground staff, mortified at the idea of conservative Afghan women and men relieving themselves in public, relented.

Col. Shkurat and his empty plane were soon on their way back to Kabul.

The next day, the Ukrainians again ventured outside of the walled airport. This time it was to collect the Afghan interpreters and their families whom The Globe and Mail had asked for help rescuing.

A video, captured by a camera attached to Cesar’s bulletproof vest, shows members of the Kabul Team firing in the air – sometimes just over the heads of the crowd of civilians outside the airport – as they jog toward two minibuses that had been allowed to approach the airport, one carrying Sharif and Jawed and their families, the other full of United Nations staff. “We need these two buses on the right side,” Cesar said in English.

VIDEO 3:34

‘Get back! Get back!’ Ukrainian soldiers direct the crowd in Kabul on Aug. 27 to get evacuees to safety.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Pointing to the crowds of desperate Afghans, he directs three of his men to clear a path. Taking the lead in his black T-shirt is Nazar.

Some in the crowd are desperate enough that they risk creeping forward every time Cesar stops shooting. Each time they do, he fires another burst. “Move! Move to the side!” he yells as the buses start to advance. Just then, someone shouts that there’s a suicide bomber in the crowd.

“Something’s fucked up!” Cesar yells to his team and the Ukrainians sprint for cover behind a nearby garbage container.

Amid the chaos, the Taliban begin firing in the air as the Ukrainians look on, trying to assess the situation. Eventually, the team resumes their escort of the two minibuses.

Despite the drama of the scene, the Ukrainians later described the mission as light work. Shaman told me that he didn’t even bring his assault rifle with him, only a pistol.

“We did it because we could,” he shrugged.

When the Ilyushin landed in Kyiv after its final flight, the team was met on the tarmac by Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who awarded each of them a medal for their service. Col. Shkurat, who had already earned the Medal of Bravery, was given a pistol by Gen. Budanov as a gesture of thanks.

At a separate ceremony later, Mr. Zelensky presented Nazar Borovytskyi with the Order of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Ukraine’s highest military honour. In a photograph of the moment, the square-jawed fighter with the shaved head towers over the President.

The photo, shot inside the presidential palace in Kyiv, now looks like it was taken in a different era. One in which the windows were adorned with graceful purple curtains rather than white sandbags. A time when Mr. Zelensky shaved every day and wore black business suits, rather than the stubble and military green khakis he has sported since Feb. 24, 2022.

Three years later – with Sharif and his family safely living in Canada and Jawed and his family in Germany – members of the Kabul Team can recall the mission with startling clarity.

“To be honest, from the start until the end it felt as though I was acting in some movie,” Col. Shkurat, the pilot, tells me over lunch near his base in the western Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia.

Cesar uses similar language. “It was the greatest adventure of our lives,” he said with a grin.

CHAPTER 4

SCORCHED

EARTH

10 min read

Chapter 4

Ukraine’s victory in the Battle of Kyiv – forcing the Russians to withdraw from the outskirts of the capital on March 31, 2022 – likely saved the country as an independent state.

In the aftermath of the Russian retreat from the capital, Mr. Putin seemed to downsize his aim from destroying Ukraine to grabbing as much of its territory as possible.

Kharkiv became the new focal point. While Russian troops had failed in their plan to quickly seize the eastern city, they were still on its outskirts, pummelling it with artillery.

A key Russian firing position was Ruska Lozova, a village 10 kilometres northwest of Kharkiv that had been under occupation since the start of the war. Gen. Budanov decided to storm it, removing the threat it posed to the 1.5 million Kharkiv residents whose homes were within firing range.

In a remarkable move, Kraken members say HUR commander Gen. Budanov travelled from Kyiv to personally join the late April assault.

“He’s not the kind of commander that stands only in our command centre. He puts on the vest and helmet and goes with the guys to fight into the battles,” said Cesar, who also took part in the fight to retake Ruska Lozova. “First of all, I think he likes it. Also, I sometimes think he doesn’t know any fear.”

The first attempt to storm the village had to be called off after the Ukrainians discovered the road they had been planning to use for the attack was carpeted with land mines. On the second attempt, Gen. Budanov and his men approached at night, on foot, through the surrounding forests.

The special forces fighters seized control and set up base in the main church, where they held out for three days against Russian tanks and aircraft until the main Ukrainian army cleared the highway and entered the village with heavy equipment. The battle was over, and though nearby Kharkiv was far from safe, some residents began to return now that it was no longer under constant artillery fire.

There are other tales of Gen. Budanov personally taking part in combat missions. Given the propaganda victory he would be handing the Kremlin if he were captured or killed, I asked him why he risked joining his men on the front line.

“These are my people. If I give tasks to people, I have to be responsible for this,” Gen. Budanov said, declining to discuss any specific mission he had taken part in. “If I myself am afraid to take part, then the question of morality comes.”

Soon after, much of the Kabul Team would reassemble for the first time since the summer of 2021, for an audacious attempt at retaking Snake Island, a rocky outcrop less than one square kilometre in size that juts above the dark waves of the Black Sea.

It was there, on the first day of the war, that an outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian garrison – just 13 men – rejected a call to surrender and instead told an approaching Russian missile cruiser, the Moskva, to “go fuck yourself,” an act of defiance that encapsulated the country’s intention to resist.

The Ukrainian troops were nonetheless taken as prisoners of war, and the island’s capture by Russian forces put the nearby port of Odesa in danger of being the next to fall. Recapturing the strategic outpost became a major military – and political – objective.

On April 14, Ukraine scored a win as the Moskva was sunk by two Neptune anti-ship missiles fired from the shore. Suddenly, the invader’s famed Black Sea Fleet seemed beatable.

The prospect of retaking Snake Island was so tantalizing that much of the Kabul Team was reunited three weeks after the sinking of the Moskva for a hastily planned assault. Ivan and most of Unit 2245 were there. So were Shaman and his eponymous battalion. As was Cesar from HUR headquarters.

After intense but brief training at an airfield near Odesa, a squad of Ukrainian helicopters carrying the assault force lifted off on May 8, for the 37-kilometre trip to Snake Island. Though it was a surprise attack, the Ukrainians knew the Russians would eventually be able to see and hear the helicopters coming.

“Our aviation and artillery and Bayraktars [drones] is supposed to destroy anti-aircraft defences of the island, but they were not so effective,” Ivan recounted. “When the helicopters approached, we were challenged by portable missiles. We survived by a miracle.”

The helicopters eventually managed to land, but the team continued to take heavy Russian fire. A bullet whizzed past Shaman’s head, clipping his right ear and damaging his helmet.

“God saved my life,” he said. Two members of the Shaman Battalion were killed in what turned out to be a short-lived victory. The Ukrainian flag was raised, briefly, before they were forced to retreat.

“It was a classically chaotic operation,” Shaman recounted, one that exposed how little experience the Ukrainian military, at the time, had in conducting offensive operations.

After months of responding to Russian attacks – and taking advantage of their mistakes – it was one of the first times the Ukrainian forces had tried to seize the initiative. And it had been, from the perspective of those who fought in the battle, a failure.

“It left a negative aftertaste with me. I lost two excellent members of my team. I won’t disclose what other teams lost, but we paid too high a price,” Shaman said.

Even the elite Unit 2245 was shaken by the fallout from the Snake Island operation. Ivan asked to be assigned away from a team he felt had been treated like “a suicide squad.” He was replaced, and 2245 was shuffled and given a new name.

After the failed assault, Ukraine returned to striking the island with artillery and missiles from afar, and on June 30, the Russian garrison was forced to withdraw. A week later, the Ukrainian flag once again was raised on Snake Island.

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Ukrainian soldiers install the state flag on Snake Island on July 7, 2022. Photo provided by the Ukrainian Defence Ministry Press Office.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Every millimetre of liberated territory is already an achievement. This is first,” Gen. Budanov told me when I challenged him about whether political and symbolic objectives had taken precedence over military preparations in the Snake Island operation. “Secondly, it had a very serious economic significance. As soon as we regained control of the island, we were able to resume maritime trade.”

It was perhaps the first time the HUR commander, who emerged alongside Mr. Zelensky as one of the chief heroes of the early months of the war, would see his reputation dimmed by battlefield events.

Cesar declined to give his account of what happened on Snake Island, but agreed it was one of the more difficult engagements of the early part of the war. “I don’t like to discuss the battles, when you are losing friends and other soldiers and officers. It’s very hard to remember and to live these moments once again.”

Russia’s military leadership refocused on the east of the country after the retreat from Kyiv, trying to capture the remaining parts of the Donbas region that were still under Ukrainian control.

The euphoria over the successful defence of the capital was swiftly replaced by a harsh new reality. Russian troops were now grinding forward in Donetsk and Luhansk, the largely Russophone provinces that Mr. Putin said he had launched the war to “protect.” Along much of the front line, the Russian artillery advantage was often seven to one.

In July, the Russians conquered the industrial city of Sieverodonetsk, the Red Army’s first victory since the defeat around Kyiv. Next it trained its guns on Lysychansk, Sieverodonetsk’s sister city that lay just across a river from the new Russian positions.

A Ukrainian serviceman takes cover during shelling outside the city of Lysychansk, in the Donbas region, in May, 2022.

ARIS MESSINIS/GETTY IMAGES

A resident of Lysychansk passes his neighbour’s shelled house in June, 2022.

SERHII NUZHNENKO/REUTERS

Dima Logginov, the ad executive-turned-combat medic, was dispatched to Lysychansk with a HUR team to try to stiffen the resistance. “It was a really difficult situation, because the Russians had a big advantage in artillery and air strikes. They had a lot of offensive potential – hundreds of tanks. It was quite difficult to stop them.”

After a close-quarters battle, the order came to withdraw. Lysychansk was lost. But first, Dima and his team had to get their dead and wounded off the battlefield just outside the city.

They came under intense artillery fire. The smoke was so thick that the drivers of two HUR cars slammed into each other as they tried to speed away. Dima fell out of the second car, unconscious, and had to be loaded back into the vehicle and driven to safety. He suffered a concussion and a neck injury that would have him wearing a brace for the next several months.

It could have been worse. The back seat of the car he was in was stuffed with 25 rocket-propelled grenade launchers that somehow didn’t explode in the collision.

Late in the summer of 2022, the Kraken Battalion discovered a crucial weakness among the Russian forces holding the front line opposite them in the Kharkiv region. They didn’t have generators, meaning their communications relied on the local power grid. So, on Sept. 6, the Kraken struck, taking over the local power plant and setting it ablaze.

The Russians, who were already thin on the ground as their commanders anticipated a major Ukrainian push toward the southern city of Kherson, were now in the dark as the Ukrainians launched a surprise attack on the city of Balakliya.

The plan had been devised by Den and Lieutenant-Colonel Vitaliy Prashchuk, another HUR officer who, like Den, had helped found and guide the Kraken.

They had made a papier mâché mock-up of the region’s topography to help them envision the battlefield. Ahead of the attack, 64 different officers – everyone from brigade-level commanders to the heads of small reconnaissance teams – came to the Kraken base to get instructions for the days ahead.

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The Kraken Regiment meet at a command centre in the frontline town of Kupiansk in September, 2022.

PAULA BRONSTEIN/GETTY IMAGES

Astonishingly, the battle unfolded largely as the Kraken commanders had designed it. As Ukrainian forces punched through at Balakliya, the Russians began a panicked retreat that led to the rapid recapture of more than 12,000 square kilometres – nearly the entire Kharkiv region. Ukrainian units that had been deployed on the southern Kherson front suddenly swung north to join the attack.

Den and the Kraken Battalion led the way, liberating entire towns and villages on their own. “We were the only local unit. We knew every road, we knew everything,” Den said. As the Russians retreated, the Ukrainians raced ahead of them to cut them off.

“Our military brigades just penetrated the front line and went as deep as possible,” he said. Then the smaller units like the Kraken swept up the isolated pockets of resistance. “We cut them into pieces. Slicing the pie and eating it step by step.”

When I reached Izyum, the largest city liberated after three weeks of lightning warfare, on Sept. 16, there were tanks marked with the Kraken symbol parked at major intersections.

That day, Ukrainian prosecutors discovered a makeshift cemetery in a forest on the edge of the city, where 445 people who had died during the six-month Russian occupation had been buried. Most of their graves were marked only by a simple wooden cross with a number.

Ukrainian servicemen search for land mines at a burial site on the outskirts of Izyum, in eastern Ukraine, on Sept. 16, 2022.

JUAN BARRETO/GETTY IMAGES

A mother and child embrace a Ukrainian soldier in the central square of Kherson on Nov. 13, 2022, after Russian forces retreated from the city.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

The second year of the war started on a bleak note for Ukraine. The spectacular success of the Kharkiv operation was in the past, as was the subsequent liberation of Kherson, from which Russian troops withdrew in November, 2022.

The focal point had become the eastern city of Bakhmut, in the Donetsk region, which was gradually being reduced to rubble by “scorched earth” tactics that were once used by the Red Army to force the Nazis back, block by city block.

As the Russians – many of them from the Wagner mercenary company – continued to move forward, and the Ukrainian hold on Bakhmut became more perilous, both the Shaman Battalion and the Kabul Nine were deployed to bolster defences.

The Kabul veterans developed a grudging respect for their opponents and their grisly tactics. “I think the system that Wagner built and implemented is genius,” Shaman told me. “I’m sure that on the front line between Soledar and Avdiivka, there were days when Wagner was losing thousands of men per day. However, that never stopped them from achieving their goals.”

“Our snipers would shoot and shoot and they kept coming,” Maks said.

The Ukrainian commanders came to appreciate Wagner as a formidable opponent. So much so that the Kabul Nine team was assigned to target the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had made a series of videos showing he and his men had reached the centre of Bakhmut.

Maks and his team studied each video, looking for clues to how they could assassinate the most famous Russian fighting in Ukraine. But they were always one step behind.

Four months later, Mr. Prigozhin was killed – not by Ukrainian fire, but by an explosion aboard his private aircraft shortly after he had staged a brief rebellion against Mr. Putin’s military commanders. There was no mourning in Kyiv. “In the end,” Maks said with a laugh, “Putin did our job for us.”

CHAPTER 5

THE SCARS

OF WAR

15 min read

Chapter 5

After more than 10 years of war – and more than 830 days from the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion – the Kabul Team, like the country they’re defending, has been pushed to the point of exhaustion.

When about 50,000 Russian troops opened a new front in early May, attacking northeastern Ukraine – and once more threatening Kharkiv – Gen. Budanov made headlines by saying he was running out of forces to deploy. “I’ve used everything we have,” he told The New York Times, referring specifically to units such as the Kraken, the Shaman Battalion and the Kabul Nine that are under his direct command. “Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”

The official HUR channel on Telegram still tells stories of victory after victory. In a video, members of the Shaman Battalion are shown in a series of battles, edited together with cinematic music added, ambushing Russian trucks and armoured personnel carriers. The enemy dead are numerous, the heroes – at least in the video – unscathed.

Another video shows an FPV (first-person view) drone operated by the Kabul Nine team crashing into a Russian military truck and exploding. Viewers are told that the Kabul Nine has, over the course of the war, destroyed 12 tanks and two Sukhoi-25 fighter jets, along with dozens of other pieces of Russian military equipment.

As Ukraine has struck back at targets inside Russia, Gen. Budanov has moved to the top of the Kremlin’s list of enemies, perhaps second only to Mr. Zelensky. Russian courts have accused him of masterminding a series of “terrorist” attacks, including hundreds of drone strikes, as well as the October, 2022, bombing of the bridge linking Russia to occupied Crimea.

Gen. Budanov regards the charges against him as a badge of honour, a sign that he is doing his job.

When I first met the HUR boss in April, 2022, I asked him about an explosion that morning that had destroyed a key railway bridge in the Belgorod region of Russia.

“I can’t either confirm or deny that,” Gen. Budanov said of the Belgorod blast, which I later confirmed had been carried out by his men. “I would like to underline that it is Russia that is carrying out acts of aggression toward Ukraine. I don’t understand why some people are surprised that some things are happening on the territory of the country that delivers that aggression.”

But among Ukrainians, criticism of Gen. Budanov is slowly rising.

Along with Mr. Zelensky, he stands accused of painting too rosy a picture of how the war is going. After the liberation of the Kharkiv region and the subsequent Russian withdrawal from Kherson, both men raised expectations of a looming Russian collapse and an inevitable Ukrainian victory.

Many in Ukraine feel misled by a forecast Gen. Budanov made in early 2023, predicting Ukrainian troops would enter Crimea by that summer. Coming from the man who had correctly predicted how the start of the invasion would unfold, many took Gen. Budanov’s optimistic prognosis as a promise that the war would be over soon. (Gen. Budanov has since said that his prognosis was correct because HUR fighters did briefly land several times in Crimea last year, including an operation that saw them mark the country’s Aug. 24 Independence Day by temporarily raising the Ukrainian flag on the Crimean Peninsula’s western tip.)

Instead, the Ukrainian counteroffensive that began last summer, which was supposed to cut Crimea off from the Russian-occupied parts of Donbas, failed. Western tanks, given specifically to aid the counterattack, foundered against heavily fortified Russian defence lines.

When we meet again this spring, Gen. Budanov won’t talk about Ruska Losova, or the other missions, including a brief landing in Crimea, that he is reputed to have personally taken part in. He leaves the job of spreading his legend – the fact that he was wounded fighting in Donbas, the rumour that he has survived at least 10 assassination attempts – to others.

He shrugs when asked whether he was the target of a November, 2023, poisoning that briefly hospitalized his wife. When I ask how often the Kremlin has tried to kill him during the first two years of the invasion, he replies with practised insouciance. “As you can see, I’m still here.”

The veterans of the Kabul Team are fiercely proud people. They know they’re good at what they do. But killing – even when it’s an enemy that invaded your country – takes a toll on anyone, especially after more than a decade of war with Russia, and more than two years into the full-scale invasion.

“When you are shooting at them from a distance, you don’t have any feeling,” Ivan tells me over beers in Kyiv. But what if it’s close range, I press him – what if you can see the face of the person you’re pulling the trigger on?

“There’s definitely no satisfaction when you are killing someone,” he says after a pause. “But when the other person has a gun, your task is to kill him before he kills you. That’s all.” After replying, Ivan downs his beer and orders another round.

“It’s a permanent mode for your body,” Cesar says of being at war. “Lots of people are tired and they want this war to stop, but I just say, ‘Look guys, it’s a permanent situation. It’s happening today, and it will happen tomorrow. Get used to it.’”

But even the veteran spy sometimes worries about the disassociation he feels, the lack of connection between the sometimes deadly acts of violence that he takes part in, and his flat emotions. “I find myself from time to time thinking that this is not my life. This is some kind of TV show.”

There are four memories Shaman says he’ll always treasure: “My first sporting achievement. The first time I had sex. The liberation of the Kyiv region.” And the time he and his unit staged their first cross-border attack into Russia itself. “It definitely belongs on that list.”

It was May, 2023, when the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps – two units composed of Russian citizens fighting on Ukraine’s side in the war – first crossed the border into Russia’s Belgorod region, where they briefly took control of three villages before retreating back into Ukraine.

The appearance of anti-Putin fighters seizing ground inside Russia was meant to rattle the Kremlin, to create the perception that at least some Russians were rising up and to perhaps inspire others to join them. But the rebels weren’t there alone. They had Shaman and some of his best men at their side on the raids, which were carried out using a pair of U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters.

It was the first in a series of cross-border raids carried out by HUR. Shaman says that while he wasn’t a fan of “shaky helicopter rides” – one of the few things about war he doesn’t seem to relish – the cross-border missions he had taken part in were a success. “We had very specific parameters for our tasks – to destroy certain objects, to deliver damage, to eliminate someone,” he said in an apparent reference to a series of assassinations targeting Russian military commanders in Belgorod and the neighbouring Bryansk region. “One hundred per cent satisfaction comes when there are no casualties on our side.”

Ivan, the former Unit 2245 member, says striking back at Russia via the cross-border missions is a proud moment for him, too. “It’s very hard to watch innocent people suffering. After you see this, you want to deliver some kind of punishment.” He says he couldn’t discuss the specific operations he had taken part in inside Russia.

Shaman, for one, can’t even estimate how many Russians he’s killed. While both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries put out regular – and difficult to believe – claims of how many enemy soldiers have been killed in the fighting, it’s always an “abstract figure,” he says. When you’re firing a rocket launcher, or calling in an artillery strike, you rarely see the result.

Shaman doesn’t express any remorse for killing his enemies. His life has been dominated by war, and he believes war has no rules.

“All these rules and laws of war are just an attempt by frightened people to explain the unknown – just a hopeless attempt to structure the war and to give an explanation for war to other frightened people,” he says, swapping his cigarillos for a hookah pipe as we continue our conversation in the laundry room of the abandoned hotel. “In a real war, you can’t explain, you can’t predict, you can’t structure and you can’t control anything.”

I try to protest – to suggest the laws of war were key to the democratic society that people like him were fighting for and dying to defend – but he ignores me. “War crimes are a creation of the liberal world, of those who believe in some greater power or greater justice. We are the people who understand that rose-coloured glasses always fracture into your eye.”

When he spoke earlier in our discussion about being shot in the ear on Snake Island, he said he felt he’d been saved by God. I ask Shaman if that means he is religious.

“I believe I will have a very interesting conversation with God when I will get there,” he says.

“And how will that conversation go?” I reply.

Shaman stares at me for nearly a minute.

“I believe when there is the final fight between good and evil, God will need me to command his army.”

Maks, the leader of the Kabul Nine, is starting to fear that Ukraine might be left to face Russia alone.

“A lot of books have been written about war through the centuries, and when you read them you realize that to do something you have to have enough weapons, supplies, logistics – you have to have them or you don’t achieve your aim,” Maks tells me in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia this spring, where he and the Kabul Nine had switched to defensive operations after the failure of the counteroffensive.

As we speak, the Russians are again grinding slowly forward, and military aid from the West has slowed almost to a stop. When I visited a rocket-launcher unit in the Donbas region this spring – shortly after the fall of the industrial city of Avdiivka – the Ukrainians had been reduced to firing one shell for every 10 or more the Russians launched at them.

“It’s a hard moment for us,” he said as we walked along the western bank of the Dnipro River, across from the hulking Zaporizhstal steel factory. “I think, in history, every nation goes through this. As a nation, we must prove that we can exist as a country – and not as a region of the Russian Federation.”

Den also worries about the direction the war is heading in.

Instead of mobilizing more troops after the successes of 2022, those who had already been fighting for 10 months were asked to stay in the field and to press forward. That included sending those who had signed up for the Territorial Defence Forces to the front line.

I think, in history, every nation goes through this. As a nation, we must prove that we can exist as a country – and not as a region of the Russian Federation.”

– MAKS, LEADER OF THE KABUL NINE

While the TDF had proven valuable when defending streets and cities they knew well, Den says they suffered heavy casualties when asked to conduct offensive operations against the Russian Army. He says the reservists had been treated as “cannon meat.”

That has had severe effects on recruitment. Signing up to be a hero liberating cities from occupation is one thing. Enlisting to sit in a trench under superior enemy fire is a very different decision.

“After our successful offensive operations, everybody started to relax and think, ‘Oh, the Russians can’t do anything.’ Every country has its propaganda, but even our government started to think that everything is fine,” Den says over a breakfast in Kyiv just before the second anniversary of the invasion.

“In 2023, we saw the consequences of our wrong decisions at the end of 2022, when everybody thought that everything is fine. But it’s stupid when you’re fighting against a country with a three-times-larger population, a real big country with everything, including nuclear weapons.”

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A former prisoner of war after his release in January.

DANYLO PAVLOV/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dima, now recovered from the head and neck injuries he sustained at Lysychansk, has switched to fighting on the information front, wading into the Russian-language internet to undermine the Kremlin’s message. “I fight now with a computer and mouse,” the former advertising boss says with a chuckle. “My work is secret, I’m sorry, but I’m sure you’ve seen it.”

Early in the war, he says the Russians had been the ones on the offensive – information-wise – generating panic inside Ukraine with fake news that spread online. In one incident that Dima witnessed, a Kremlin misinformation campaign had even led to Ukrainian units firing on each other during the Battle of Kyiv. Now, he says, it’s Ukraine that’s pushing back online, generating dissent and confusion in the Russian ranks.

But for some of the Kabul Team, the defeats are starting to pile up.

After Bakhmut, the Shaman Battalion was assigned to defend another shattered city in the Donetsk region, Avdiivka, that slowly but surely fell under Russian control at the start of this year.

This wasn’t the easy Russian conquest that Mr. Putin had envisioned years earlier. But nor was it the liberation of all Ukraine that Mr. Zelensky, Gen. Budanov and others had started to talk about after the Kharkiv operation and the liberation of Kherson later in 2022.

Instead, it has become a bloody war of attrition, in which the Russian side is better armed, and has many more men than the Ukrainians could sacrifice.

Markus and other members of the HUR team say they were worried that the city of Kupyansk – one of the places in the Kharkiv region that had been liberated in the fall of 2022 – would eventually go the same way as Bakhmut and Avdiivka. The Ukrainians were fighting bravely, but the Russians simply had more men, tanks, artillery, warplanes, missiles.

“We’re short on everything. Small arms, we’re okay, but if we’re speaking about 80 millimetres and higher, like mortars, artillery, shells, rockets, we’re missing those,” Den says. “All brigades have some reserves for a sudden attack or something like that, but after that we can shoot maybe 500 rounds in two weeks. We just split it over 15 days, and you understand how much you can shoot every day. You don’t shoot like you don’t have limits.”

Taking Kupyansk would allow the Russians to again press toward Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.

Den and his Kraken fighters held off the Russian assault on Kharkiv at the start of 2022. But speaking just before Russian troops staged a fresh incursion into the region – seizing several border villages and opening a new front – he tells me he wasn’t sure the Ukrainians would now win a second battle for the city.

The Russians had made two mistakes in the first attack, he says. In addition to their lack of respect for the Ukrainians defending the city, the Russians had launched their attack in the spring, when the ground was too soft for tanks and other heavy equipment to move along – forcing them to use main roads.

“Now they understand how they can do it. We’re going to see,” he predicted almost two years later, as summer and firmer ground approached. “If they surround the city, sooner or later it’s going to surrender.”

Gen. Budanov is proud the Kabul Team has only lost one of its members over more than two years of high-risk missions. He says it’s a testament to the skill set of the fighters – and, he says, to the fact that Ukrainians are on the right side of history.

“There are also good specialists there [in Russia], but they are not lucky – let’s put it that way. Because they are not doing a good thing, and they know it for themselves,” he says. “When you do bad things from the very beginning and you know that you are doing something bad, then God will definitely not help you.”

Cesar, however, says it could all have gone very differently, even back in Kabul. “We were at the place where the suicide bombers did their attack on the crowd, just 15 or 30 minutes before it happened,” he says, referring to the Islamic State attack.

“We just got back to our plane when we heard the explosion. So it’s luck. Or God. People can choose what they want to hear.”

Staring at the same photo that Gen. Budanov has outside his office, Maks – who keeps a copy on his phone – gives a similar answer.

“Some of our guys have been wounded pretty heavily. And one of them spent four months in Russian prisons in Donetsk and Moscow. It’s thanks to God that the rest besides Nazar are still alive,” he says pensively.

“It’s just fate. Nothing else.”

In May, 2023, as part of a deal with Russia, the remains recovered at the crash site of the two Mi-8 helicopters in Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia were returned as part of a larger exchange of the dead.

Among the items returned to the Ukrainian side were a skull and, separately, a jawbone that forensics experts identified as belonging to Nazar Borovytskyi. A funeral was held last summer, and Nazar was honoured yet again, posthumously named a Hero of Ukraine.

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Nazar Borovitskyi’s gravestone in Kyiv.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

But the return of the remains and the bestowing of awards has not convinced Nazar’s family that he’s dead. The family accepts that the returned jawbone belongs to him – the local dentist said it matched his records – but still it’s not enough proof for them to give up hope that their son and brother is out there somewhere.

Nazar had been trained, his sister Oksana reminds me, to withstand maximum amounts of pain. He had a scuba diving certificate, and knew how to skydive. His favourite movies were about heroes who survived impossible situations and made it home. In other words, if anyone could survive the gruesome scene of the helicopter crash – which his father keeps a video of on his phone – it would be Nazar.

“Son did you get some rest?” his mother Lesya wrote to him in a text message sent soon after he had gone missing on the Mariupol mission. “God bless you! Love you!”

There was no reply. “Son, don’t you have someone who could replace you for a couple of hours?” she tried again some time later. “This must be completely exhausting. Are you eating anything?”

Again, Lesya received only silence in reply. But she continued to send her son messages on a regular basis, long after she had been told he was dead, on the faint hope he was somehow able to read them. “My son, just give a +,” reads one attempt, referring to a habit in Eastern Europe of replying with only a plus sign to indicate that a message has been received.

“War is a difficult thing,” Lesya wrote to Nazar later (there are no dates on the messages that Oksana shared with me). “It won’t be as fast and beautiful as they describe.”

Even now, about two years after her son’s helicopter was shot down over southern Ukraine – and a year after the family received his partial remains – Lesya refuses to believe he’s not coming home.

“We will definitely sing the Ukrainian anthem with you, my son, on our Victory Day,” reads the most recent message. “I’m waiting for the +.”

“I love you.”

In Nazar’s childhood bedroom, one wall is covered with four oversized photos of the brave young man who will never grow old. Two of the four pictures are from Kabul. In one of them, he’s standing near the perimeter fence of the airport, with an assault rifle slung over his shoulder. In the other, he’s holding a small Afghan child who was about to board a flight to a new life in the West.

The same photograph of the Kabul Team that hangs outside Gen. Budanov’s office has pride of place on the wall of the sitting room of Nazar’s family home. Staring at that image, with her brother alive and grinning and surrounded by his comrades-in-arms, Oksana smiles even though her eyes well up with tears.

“Long before the invasion began, Nazar told me that independence is not given,” she says softly. “He said it must be fought for.”

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Nazar’s immediate family, including Oksana (pictured at centre), believe that Nazar, who was named a Hero of Ukraine, could still be alive.

ANTON SKYBA/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Mark MacKinnon

Mark MacKinnon is a senior international correspondent for The Globe and Mail, based in London. Mark first started writing about Russia and Ukraine in 2002, when he served as The Globe’s Moscow bureau chief. He covered the Orange Revolution in 2004, the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and witnessed firsthand Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, the start of the eight-year proxy war in Donbas and the full-scale invasion in February, 2022. He has been in and out of Ukraine covering the war over the past two years.

11. War in Gaza Turns Out To Be Less Deadly Than Claimed

I could not find any reporting about the AP report in any of the big three (WSJ, NYT, or WP). Perhaps we will see something in coming days. But the NY Sun is on it.

War in Gaza Turns Out To Be Less Deadly Than Claimed

The Associated Press takes a deep dive into the numbers, and comes up with a startling report.

It turns out that even the Gaza health ministry’s data no longer support Hamas propaganda. Yet many in America and around the world, including at the United Nations, are buying into the terror organization’s well-designed war strategy of defeating Israel by turning it into a global pariah. A headline Friday says fewer women and children than commonly believed are killed in Gaza — even as in another headline the United Nations is maligning Israel as a child killer.

That first headline comes from a deep dive by the Associated Press into Gaza casualty numbers. “The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply,” the AP reports. It’s important, it adds, because these figures are the “best available proxy for civilian casualties.” The findings are not based on some Israel-friendly website, but on figures provided by the health ministry in Gaza.

In October, according to the report, 64 percent of Gaza casualties were women and children. In April it was down to 36 percent. “Yet the shift went unnoticed for months by the UN and much of the press, and the Hamas-linked health ministry has made no effort to set the record straight,” the AP reports. Meanwhile Hamas figures lead one Hague-based court to accuse Israel of genocide, while another court calls to arrest Israeli leaders.

Friday’s second headline has Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, saying that Secretary-General Guterres officially notified him that the Israel Defense Forces are blacklisted by the UN as a party that commits violations against children. It joins a list of countries like Afghanistan and Syria, and organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS. Russia was added last year, and Hamas is in now too. Mr. Guterres apparently missed this morning the wire’s mea culpa.

Israelis fear that as they’re added to the UN blacklist, Europeans could block ammunition sales. The pro-Hamas caucus in Congress often uses UN findings to beseech President Biden to end arms sales as well — and that is exactly what the terrorists want. “Hamas took every law of war and reverse-engineered it” to fit its strategy, the chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point, John Spencer, tells CNN. Civilian deaths are an essential component.

In Mr. Spencer’s analysis of the Hamas health ministry figures, the death ratio in Gaza is one combatant to 1.5 civilians. He adds, “given Hamas’s likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to one to one. Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.” The norm in similar combat is one terrorist to nine civilians. So the IDF better protects civilians while fighting terrorists than most, if not all, militaries.

It is not our purpose here to minimize suffering. Like every war, the one in Gaza is hell. Yet, unlike in other wars, every IDF move is put under an intense global magnifying glass. Hamas has made that scrutiny a cornerstone of its war machine and turned the deaths of women and children into its most prized asset. Inflated statistics of civilian deaths will lead to more casualties, and help Hamas. That strategy relies on outsiders’s eagerness to spread a blood libel.

nysun.com

12. Women and children of Gaza are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises, AP data analysis finds

Women and children of Gaza are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises, AP data analysis finds

AP · June 7, 2024

World News

AP · June 7, 2024

13. Takeaways from AP analysis of Gaza Health Ministry's death toll data

Takeaways from AP analysis of Gaza Health Ministry's death toll data

AP · June 7, 2024

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israel-Hamas war appears to have become much less deadly for Palestinian women and children, according to an AP analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data.

The shift is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties in one of the 21st century’s most destructive conflicts.

Women and children made up fewer than 40% of those killed in the Gaza Strip during April, down from more than 60% in October. The decline both coincides with Israel’s changing battlefield tactics and contradicts the ministry’s own public statements.

Here are takeaways from The Associated Press’ reporting.

FATALITY TRENDS AND THE TACTICS OF WAR

After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, Israel launched an intense aerial bombardment on densely populated Gaza, and then invaded with thousands of ground troops backed by tanks and artillery.

By the end of October women and people 17 and younger accounted for 64% of the 6,745 killed who were fully identified by the Health Ministry.

After saying it had achieved many key objectives, the Israeli army began withdrawing ground troops earlier this year. It has focused lately on drone strikes and limited ground operations.

As the intensity of fighting has scaled back, the death toll has continued to rise, but at a slower rate – and with seemingly fewer civilians caught in the crossfire. During the month of April, women and children made up 38% of the fully identified deaths, the Health Ministry’s most recent data shows.

A TALE OF TWO DEATH TOLLS

The ministry announces a new death toll for the war nearly every day. It also has periodically released the underlying data behind this figure, including detailed lists of the dead.

The AP’s analysis looked at these lists, which were shared on social media in late October, early January, late March, and the end of April.

As recently as March, the ministry claimed over several days that 72% of the dead were women and children, even as underlying data showed the percentage was well below that.

Israeli leaders have pointed to such inconsistencies as evidence that the ministry is inflating the figures for political gain.

Experts say the reality is more complicated and that the ministry has been overwhelmed by war, making it difficult to track casualties.

CIVILIAN DEATHS FUEL CRITICISM OF ISRAEL

The true toll in Gaza could have serious repercussions.

Israel faces heavy international criticism over unprecedented levels of civilian casualties in Gaza and questions about whether it has done enough to prevent them in an eight-month-old war that shows no sign of ending. An airstrike in Rafah last month killed dozens of Palestinians, and one on a school-turned-shelter in central Gaza on Thursday killed at least 33 people, including 12 women and children, health officials said.

Two international courts in the Hague are examining accusations that Israel has committed war crimes and genocide against Palestinians – allegations it adamantly denies.

Israel says it has tried to avoid civilian casualties, issuing mass evacuation orders ahead of intense military operations that have displaced some 80% of Gaza’s population. It also accuses Hamas of intentionally putting civilians in harm’s way as human shields.

The fate of women and children is an important indicator of civilian casualties because the Health Ministry does not break out combatant deaths. But it’s not a perfect indicator: Many civilian men have died, and some older teenagers may be involved in the fighting.

MANY DEATHS COUNTED IN GAZA REMAIN ‘UNIDENTIFIED’

The ministry said publicly on April 30 that 34,622 had died in the war. The AP analysis was based on the 22,961 individuals fully identified at the time by the Health Ministry with names, genders, ages, and Israeli-issued identification numbers.

The ministry says 9,940 of the dead – 29% of its April 30 total – were not listed in the data because they remain “unidentified.” These include bodies not claimed by families, decomposed beyond recognition or whose records were lost in Israeli raids on hospitals.

An additional 1,699 records in the ministry’s April data were incomplete and 22 were duplicates; they were excluded from AP’s analysis.

Among those fully identified, the records show a steady decline in the overall proportion of women and children who have been killed: from 64% in late October, to 62% as of early January, to 57% at the end of March, to 54% at the end of April.

Some critics say the ministry’s imprecise methodologies – relying on families and “media reports” to confirm deaths – have added additional uncertainty to the figures.

The Health Ministry says it has gone to great lengths to accurately compile information but that its ability to count and identify the dead has been hampered by the war.

HEALTH MINISTRY STANDS BY ITS COUNT

Dr. Moatasem Salah, director of the ministry’s emergency center, rejected Israeli assertions that his ministry has intentionally inflated or manipulated the death toll.

“This shows disrespect to the humanity for any person who exists here,” he said. “We are not numbers … These are all human souls.”

He insisted that 70% of those killed have been women and children and said the overall death toll is much higher than what has been reported because thousands of people remain missing or are believed to be buried in rubble.

Israel last month angrily criticized the U.N.’s use of data from Hamas’ media office – a propaganda arm of the militant group – that reported a larger number of women and children killed. The U.N. later lowered its number in line with Health Ministry figures.

The number of Hamas militants killed in the fighting is also unclear. Hamas has closely guarded this information, though Khalil al-Hayya, a top Hamas official, told the AP in late April that the group had lost no more than 20% of its fighters. That would amount to roughly 6,000 fighters based on Israeli pre-war estimates.

The Israeli military has not challenged the overall death toll released by the Palestinian ministry. But it says the number of dead militants is much higher at roughly 15,000 – or over 40% of all the dead. It has provided no evidence to support the claim, and declined to comment for this story.

Michael Spagat, a London-based economics professor who chairs the board of Every Casualty Counts, a nonprofit that tracks armed conflicts, said he continues to trust the Health Ministry and believes it is doing its best in difficult circumstances.

“I think (the data) becomes increasingly flawed,” he said. But, he added, “the flaws don’t necessarily change the overall picture.”

AP · June 7, 2024

14. Human Rights Groups Call for ICC Investigation into Russian Propagandists

Strong accusations here:

The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), acting with Ukraine’s Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) and the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), and an unnamed Russian NGO, sent an appeal on Thursday, June 6 to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate instances of hate speech by six Russian propagandists and government officials, which they say are tantamount to war crimes.

Human Rights Groups Call for ICC Investigation into Russian Propagandists

Four human rights organizations have called for six of the main purveyors of Russian hate speech against Ukraine to be made to answer for their crimes.

by Steve Brown | June 7, 2024, 3:28 pm

kyivpost.com · by Steve Brown · June 7, 2024\

Kharkiv Propaganda International Criminal Court

Four human rights organizations have called for six of the main purveyors of Russian hate speech against Ukraine to be made to answer for their crimes.

by Steve Brown | June 7, 2024, 3:28 pm

The six propagandists named in the FIDH submission: Rear, L to R - Sergei Mardan, Dmitry Medvedev, Alexei Gromov. Front, L to R - Vladimir Solovyov, Dmitry Kiselyov, Margarita Simonyan. Photo: X/Insider.ru

The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH), acting with Ukraine’s Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KHPG) and the Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), and an unnamed Russian NGO, sent an appeal on Thursday, June 6 to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate instances of hate speech by six Russian propagandists and government officials, which they say are tantamount to war crimes.

Its appeal names TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov and Dmitry Kiselyov, Sergei Mardan writer for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Margarita Simonyan RT television’s editor-in-chief along with Dmitry Medvedev deputy chairman of the Security Council and Alexei Gromov the First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration.

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Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.

The request was submitted under Article 15 of the Rome Statute of the ICC and focuses on hate speech violations covered by the statute’s Article 7.

It says in its opening paragraphs:

“Words can’t kill, but they can demean and humiliate members of a group and create a climate where mass violence against them is normalized and encouraged. Russia’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, and the resulting mass atrocities against Ukrainian civilians, have been made possible by years of intense and escalating propaganda of hate designed to justify and facilitate Russia’s territorial conquest of parts or all of Ukraine, and the subjugation or removal of civilians who oppose becoming part of the ‘Russian World’.”

Russian Foundation Front for Kremlin Intel Ops in Europe, Investigations Say

Investigations identified multiple senior members among Pravfond legal organization’s management are ex-Russian intelligence officers, with the group’s finances linked to propaganda efforts abroad.

It goes on to say that those named in the petition are “are only a representative group of a larger state-sponsored incubator of hatred; they were selected based on their positions of influence and the gravity, frequency, and reach of their statements.”

It then equates much of the propaganda techniques used in Russia with historical atrocities against groups perceived as enemies of the state such as that targeted against Jews in Hitler’s Germany, Tutsis during the genocide in Rwanda, and Croat and Bosnian Muslims in the former Yugoslavia.

It says those named have used their professional and social status to “continuously and repeatedly” spread ideas using TV, radio mainstream and social media to “incite hatred and violence against Ukrainians… in the minds of millions of their viewers and listeners, as a matter of state policy.”

The FIDH says it is submitting evidence based on the detailed analysis of the media output of the named individuals during which they identified over 300 separate instances of hate speech, much of which is available on its website.

The FIDH is an NGO founded in 1922 that brings together 188 human rights organizations from 116 countries to act with one voice. It has its headquarters in Paris, France with offices located close to the main international organizations including the EU and UN.

In March 2023 the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, forallegedly overseeing and facilitating the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia.

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Steve Brown

After a career as a British Army Ammunition Specialist and Bomb Disposal Officer, Steve later worked in the fields of ammunition destruction, demining and explosive ordnance disposal with the UN and NATO. In 2017, after taking early retirement, he moved to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and two sons where he became a full-time writer. He now works as a senior writer and English language editor with the Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Steve Brown · June 7, 2024

15. Lloyd Austin tells CNN granting Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes on Russian territory will be ‘very, very helpful’

Lloyd Austin tells CNN granting Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes on Russian territory will be ‘very, very helpful’ | CNN Politics

amp.cnn.com · by Haley Britzky · June 6, 2024

CNN —

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told CNN Thursday he believed the new policy allowing the Ukrainian military to carry out limited strikes inside Russia with US munitions will be “very, very helpful to the Ukrainians going forward.”

“[W]hat we have done is provided Ukraine the ability to counter fire, to fire back at those Russian troops that are firing at them and to be able to take out their artillery batteries as they’re firing at the Ukrainians,” Austin told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room.”

Austin spoke with CNN from Normandy, France, where he has joined other world leaders for the 80th anniversary of D-Day, including President Joe Biden, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, and more than 20 other heads of state including French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Austin’s comments came days after Biden gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russian territory — though limiting it to targets close to the border of Kharkiv where Russian forces have been concentrating their efforts — with US munitions.

Asked about waning support in the US, Austin said he believed there has been “strong support for Ukraine” among both political parties, despite how long it took for Congress to pass its security aid package for the embattled country and emphasized that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely won’t stop at Ukraine.

“I was confident that the right thing was going to happen, because anytime you see that type of support on both sides of the aisle for a cause, Congress will find a way to get things done. Which is what they did in this case, because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “And Ukraine matters … not just for Ukraine’s purposes alone, not for Europe alone — it matters for to us and it matters to the entire globe. So, we have to make sure that Putin doesn’t have the ability to trample Ukraine because as the president said there’s a good chance, almost certain, that Putin won’t stop there. He will continue to move forward in other acts of aggression.”

On Thursday, Biden gave a blistering critique of Putin, telling ABC News’ David Muir that Putin is “not a decent man, he’s a dictator.”

Standing in the Normandy American Cemetery, Austin told CNN he believed the “number of leaders who lean towards autocracy” around the globe pose the greatest threat to the US, and that the sacrifice so many gave to “ensure our freedom” should never be forgotten.

“[I]t’s those sacrifices that really gave birth to the rules-based international order that served us so well for so many years,” he said. “And we have to protect that — we have to work hard to protect it. Democracy is worth having, but it’s something that you have to work on, you have to fight for.”

‘Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people’

Austin declined on Thursday to comment on an overnight Israeli strike in Gaza on a UN-run school that was housing displaced people, which killed at least 45 people, saying he would “leave it to Israel to talk about what happened in that strike.”

He emphasized though that Israel must take more actions to avoid civilian casualties, and that accomplishing their military objectives and protecting civilians should not be mutually exclusive.

“I think the way you ensure long-term success is by making sure that you take the civilian population, eventually strip them away from Hamas, and demonstrate that Hamas does not equal the Palestinian people,” Austin said.

Asked if he believes Israel has committed war crimes in its operations against Hamas in Gaza, Austin echoed Biden’s comments that it is “uncertain” and should be investigated, which he said Israel would be doing.

“This is a professional force,” he said, “and we would expect they do the kinds of things that professional forces do, you know, make sure they’re doing the right things to employ the weapons appropriately, and also if there are problems, investigate those problems and learn from that.”

So far, Austin said, the US has still not seen Israel begin a “major movement into Rafah.”

US and China must ‘continue to have a dialogue’

Austin also spoke briefly on Thursday about challenges in the Indo-Pacific and his recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Adm. Dong Jun, in Singapore.

He reiterated that it is important for the US and China to “continue to have a dialogue” and that he voiced concerns over what is happening in the region. Just two weeks ago, China launched military drills encircling Taiwan after the democratic island swore in a new president.

“I voiced my concerns about some of the things that we’ve seen in the region, and we’ll continue to do so going forward,” Austin said. “But unless you’re talking to each other, you don’t have the ability to prevent miscalculations and address misperceptions. So I think this is a good first step, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done in terms of engaging and in terms of moving things in the right direction.”

This story has been updated with additional details.

amp.cnn.com · by Haley Britzky · June 6, 2024

16. Two Words That Could End the War in Ukraine For Good

The Russo-Ukraine War is more correctly named "Putin's War."

Two Words That Could End the War in Ukraine For Good

The Russo-Ukraine War has long since slowed to a grinding halt in which neither side seems capable of making meaningful territorial gains; neither side appears capable of forcing the other into capitulation. Accordingly, a peace agreement seems the most reasonable way to end the conflict.

The National Interest · by Harrison Kass · June 7, 2024

Is a Peace Agreement Possible to End the Ukraine War? The Russo-Ukraine War has long since slowed to a grinding halt in which neither side seems capable of making meaningful territorial gains; neither side appears capable of forcing the other into capitulation.

Accordingly, a peace agreement seems the most reasonable way to end the conflict.

But a peace agreement doesn’t seem to be on the immediate agenda. So, how far are we from ending the Russo-Ukraine War through a peace agreement, and what needs to happen for peace to take hold?

Peace through Defense for Ukraine?

The Biden administration is still escalating the conflict in Ukraine, still sending weapons and funds, meaning peace seems unlikely in the near future.

Actually, Biden just gave permission to use American weapons to strike inside Russian territory and is considering the deployment of NATO soldiers to Ukraine (for training purposes).

So while Biden could compel the Ukraine to negotiate for peace, either explicitly, or implicitly through the withholding of arms and cash, Biden seems committed to funding Ukraine’s continued push to expel the Russians from Eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainians, for their part, are still invested in the war, advocating for more weapons and more money, under the guise that the right weapons, and enough money, will crack the Russian seal and allow for Ukrainian victory. But victory for Ukraine seems unlikely; Russia is simply more powerful, and Putin appears deeply committed to the invasion he initiated in February 2022, despite suffering nearly half a million casualties and the degradation of Russian political capital on the global stage.

With Ukraine and Russia on year three of an impasse, with a peace settlement seeming inevitable, the question becomes, what can Ukraine do to ensure they have the strongest possible negotiating position? Investing in offensive weapons has so far failed to pay dividends for Ukraine; an expensive and highly touted Ukrainian counteroffensive failed last year. Additionally, “public support for Kyiv across the West is declining, and the conflict is at a stalemate,” Foreign Affairs reported.

So, accordingly, some pundits are proposing that Ukraine invest in defense, and solidify their position before sitting down to negotiate terms of peace.

“If Ukraine can defend the territory it control in the coming months by using capabilities such as antitank mines and concrete fortifications, it can deny Russia a path to complete victory and perhaps even open the door for negotiations,” Emma Ashford and Kelly A. Greico wrote. “Putin evidently believes that time is on his side; a strong, sustainable Ukrainian defense would prove him wrong.”

But according to Ashford and Greico, Ukraine (and America) needs to pursue defense for the right reasons. “On both sides of the Atlantic, defense is viewed largely as a stopgap measure to buy time to build capacity for future offensive operations.” But defense “can itself be a path to victory if Ukraine and its Western backers can succeed in convincing Putin that there is no way for him to achieve [his] strategic objectives.”

Regardless, a suit for peace does not appear to be on anyone’s immediate agenda.

About the Author: Harrison Kass

Harrison Kass is a defense and national security writer with over 1,000 total pieces on issues involving global affairs. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, Harrison joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison holds a BA from Lake Forest College, a JD from the University of Oregon, and an MA from New York University. Harrison listens to Dokken.

All images are Creative Commons or Shutterstock.

This piece has been updated to fix a coding error.

The National Interest · by Harrison Kass · June 7, 2024

17. America’s Military Strategy: Can We Handle Two Wars at Once?

Or three (MIddle East, Euro-Russia, Asia). or 3.1 (Middle East, Euro-Russia, Asia [north Korea and Taiwan])?

America’s Military Strategy: Can We Handle Two Wars at Once?

Does the United States need the ability to fight more than one major war at a time? The Senate Armed Services Committee has been asking this question of late, and it is right to do so.

The National Interest · by Michael O'Hanlon · June 6, 2024

Does the United States need the ability to fight more than one major war at a time?

The Senate Armed Services Committee has been asking this question of late, and it is right to do so.

Today, according to official Pentagon planning doctrine, the United States could not. One need not believe literally in a “new axis of evil” that includes Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China to worry that if America and its allies wound up in a fight against one of these four states, another one might consider opportunistic aggression. This could be particularly concerning if the potential adversary believed it could win fast, creating a fait accompli that the United States would be challenged to reverse even after concluding war in another theater.

For many decades, seeking to ensure deterrence and prevent opportunistic aggression by a second foe if engaged already against a first, the United States aspired to some variant of a two-war capability. During the Cold War, the United States generally aimed to be able to fight a major war alongside NATO allies against the Soviet bloc in Europe and at least one other simultaneous conflict (like the Korean or Vietnam war) elsewhere. Accordingly, the U.S. military during the Cold War was generally 60 to 100 percent larger than it is today.

Once the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the United States cut back its armed forces but kept a two-war planning goal. However, those two wars were imagined to be against much less capable foes: the likes of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or perhaps Syria. In fact, the United States wound up fighting two overlapping wars for many years in Iraq and Afghanistan—though they differed from the typical scenarios envisioned in these force-sizing paradigms since they were long and moderate in scale rather than short and big (like Operation Desert Storm in 1991). Because of their duration, the United States had to stagger its peak efforts in those wars, emphasizing Iraq under President George W. Bush and Afghanistan in the first term of President Obama.

Starting around 2015, things changed again. Pentagon planners, starting with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph Dunford, created a “4+1” threat framework with Russia and China joining Iran, North Korea, and transnational terrorism on the Pentagon’s list of top concerns. Then, under Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and Secretary Mark Esper during the Trump years, the Pentagon prioritized Russia and China; the Biden administration under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has kept a very similar National Defense Strategy.

According to official doctrine [media.defense.gov], today’s U.S. military should have the capacity to do the following all at once:

-Together with allies, fight and defeat China or Russia (but not both at the same time), presumably in conflicts centered on the western Pacific region and eastern European region, respectively,

-Defend the American homeland while also maintaining a nuclear deterrent,

-Deter North Korea and Iran (without specifying exactly how), and

-Maintain momentum against transnational violent extremist organizations as part of the so-called “war on terror.”

But this is still just a one-war framework. Is that enough military for today’s world?

Before jumping to the conclusion that we need a big defense buildup, a few other considerations are in order. Leave aside the fact that, at nearly $900 billion, America’s national defense budget already exceeds the Cold War peak and is roughly triple China’s and six times Russia’s—at a time when the U.S. structural federal deficit of more than $1 trillion a year makes a big defense buildup challenging to imagine. More to the point, the four nemeses mentioned above, while certainly in cahoots with each other already on some issues, are not likely to fight literally for each other. For any of them, going to war deliberately against the United States would be a decision of huge consequence not likely to be reached just because America seemed temporarily preoccupied elsewhere. In addition, the Army today cannot even recruit to fill out the currently desired troop strength and most of the other services have been struggling to make personnel targets as well.

Most of all, for both the Trump and Biden administrations, the quality of the armed forces has been rightly seen as a higher priority than their size. Defense planners have wanted to focus on improving military lethality, survivability, sustainability, resilience, and adaptability in an era of rapid technological change.

The United States does need to buttress its deterrence of simultaneous, opportunistic aggression. But the right standard for doing so is probably to ensure that the country has sufficient key capabilities for each of the four key potential foes that—with allies—it could prevent a quick, successful aggression by any of them even while concentrating most of its forces on a single big war. As recently argued compellingly by Thomas Mahnken as well, another key benefit of a multi-war planning framework is that it would, in effect, create a strategic reserve of munitions. By producing and pre-stationing ordnance for several wars at once in key overseas theaters on a larger scale than today, the United States would, in effect, create a hedge against a single war going longer or taking more weaponry than initially expected. This policy would also buy time to start manufacturing more weapons to restore a rock-solid multi-theater capability if and when a war broke out in one place. Fortunately, these are attainable and affordable goals that the National Defense Strategy already pays lip service to. We need to ensure that we have the capabilities, not just the right words.

Some of the key additional capabilities that might be needed to support such a strategy include a couple of squadrons of dedicated “fifth generation” fighter aircraft for Korea (to attack North Korean missile launchers early in any war, limiting damage to Seoul); unmanned submarines stationed in the western Pacific with anti-ship sensors and missiles to help Taiwan resist a Chinese invasion attempt; vertical-lift aircraft on Okinawa with ordnance usable for the same purpose; dedicated missile defense systems for the Middle East of the type that helped stymie Iran’s recent missile and drone barrage against Israel; and a brigade of U.S. ground troops backed up by fighters and attack helicopters in the Baltic states as a permanent deterrent against Russian aggression there. Again, augmentations of some sensor networks and munitions stockpiles also make sense.

The price tag for this sort of modest force expansion would hardly be trivial but would not exceed tens of billions of dollars a year. It could be partially funded by selective cuts in the defense budget elsewhere. As we gear up for a presidential election this fall and a new defense review next year, these issues of possible simultaneous war—but simultaneous deterrence—should be front and center in the American strategic debate.

About the Author: Michael E. O'Hanlon

Michael E. O’Hanlon is a senior fellow and director of research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, and American national security policy. He directs the Strobe Talbott Center on Security, Strategy and Technology, as well as the Defense Industrial Base working group, and is the inaugural holder of the Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy. He co-directs the Africa Security Initiative as well. He is an adjunct professor at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington universities, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He also serves as a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense. O’Hanlon was a member of the external advisory board at the Central Intelligence Agency from 2011-12. O’Hanlon’s latest book, “Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars Since 1861” (Brookings and Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) was published in January 2023.

All images are Creative Commons or Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Michael O'Hanlon · June 6, 2024

18. Chateau Vouilly: The hideaway where war correspondents chronicled the aftermath of D-Day

Chateau Vouilly: The hideaway where war correspondents chronicled the aftermath of D-Day

Stars and Stripes · by Alexander Riedel · June 7, 2024

A front view of Chateau Vouilly in Normandy, France, during the commemorations of the 80th anniversary of D-Day. The chateau served as the first Allied press camp during World War II and now hosts visitors commemorating its history. (Alexander Riedel/Stars and Stripes)

SOMEWHERE IN NORMANDY, France — This nondescript dateline intentionally hid the precise location where news stories following the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings were written.

Reporters could only cable back their stories under strict security review from military censors, who didn’t want to give away troop movements.

“Somewhere” was Chateau Vouilly, a quiet hamlet surrounded by Normandy’s rolling green hills and hedgerows, just a 20-minute drive from Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach.

Three days after American troops landed in Normandy, the 1st Army liberated Vouilly and set up its first press headquarters. Within days, the chateau hosted war correspondents, including Ernest Hemingway and Walter Cronkite.

“It’s not on the main road, so it’s quite hidden,” said James Hamel, whose family has owned the grounds for nine decades. “The decision to set up the press camp here was strategic. They needed a place that was safe but also close enough to the action.”

The heart of operations was the small, wood-paneled dining hall. It’s where correspondents typed out their reports, detailing the brutal fighting just miles away.

“They wrote their articles and had to pass them on to the censorship next door,” Hamel explained. “Their dispatches only ever mentioned ‘somewhere in Normandy.’”

Once the dispatches were approved, the reporters could cable them back to an eager world waiting on news from the front via a wire strung through the window to a radio transmitter set up in the garden.

Today, guests eat in the room, which is part of a small bed-and-breakfast the Hamel family runs to support the maintenance of the historic building and grounds. Each morning, where the clatter of typewriters echoed so many years ago, butter knives and coffee spoons now clink gently against plates and cups.

James Hamel stands in the press copy room at Chateau Vouilly, Normandy, France, on June 3, 2024. The room once buzzed with activity as war correspondents typed their dispatches during World War II. (Alexander Riedel/Stars and Stripes)

Instead of a large map of Normandy that once helped leaders like Gen. Omar Bradley brief the reporters on troop movements, a large photo shows the newsroom in the turbulent summer of 1944.

“There is something special here. The feeling remains and you can feel that something important happened here. It’s magnetic,” said Emmanuel Pelot, a family friend who helps Hamel preserve the chateau’s legacy during commemoration events and tours. “Everybody who comes to visit seems to automatically treat this room with respect.”

Hamel’s grandmother, Alexandrine Hamel, welcomed the war reporters. Known as “Grandma” to the correspondents, she had endured the Nazi occupation of her land and showed resilience by making their stay difficult.

“My grandmother kept the room overlooking the bridge free, claiming her children were sick to keep the Germans out,” he recounted. “She didn’t want them to settle in too comfortably.”

She also supplemented the correspondents’ Army rations with the family’s homemade butter and milk, while they shared chocolate and candy with her family.

More than 54 correspondents typed their stories at Vouilly. The list is a who’s who of journalists, including writer Ernie Pyle and war photographers Robert Capa and Lee Miller, who planned assignments and developed their photos here.

Stars and Stripes reporters G.K. Hodenfield and Andy Rooney, later of CBS News fame, also worked here.

An undated photo shows, at center, war correspondents G.K. Hodenfield of Stars and Stripes, Yvan H. Peterman of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Ernie Pyle of Scripps Howard as they work on their stories at Chateau Vouilly, Normandy, France, in June 1944. The map behind them was redacted in the original photo to protect then-confidential information on troop movements. The chateau served as the first Allied press camp following the D-Day invasion. (Hamel family)

A mannequin dressed as a war correspondent sits at a typewriter in a tent, part of the 80th anniversary exhibit at Chateau Vouilly, Normandy, France. The exhibit honors the journalists who covered the D-Day invasion. (Alexander Riedel/Stars and Stripes)

A wartime ambulance truck parked in front of Chateau Vouilly in Normandy, France, during a reenactment event. The chateau was the first Allied press camp established after the D-Day invasion. (Alexander Riedel/Stars and Stripes)

“The plan called for the Rangers to break out of Pointe d’Hoc before noon on D-Day … Then it would be a fairly simple matter — I hoped — for me to find 1st Army Press Camp and file my stories,” Hodenfield recalled in a Stars and Stripes story in 1964. “The Rangers didn’t get off Pointe d’Hoc for three days.”

Eventually Hodenfield found the press camp at Vouilly. A photo shows him working on his typewriter, jacket hastily slung across the foldable Army table.

For many journalists, the chateau’s lush grounds offered a refuge from the day’s stresses. After exiting combat zones, they returned to write their stories, grab a meal and sleep in safety, Pelot explained.

“Every night, Mme. Hamel stood smiling in the background as her son, Dumilly, who had been a prisoner of the Germans for three years, toured the work tables with glasses of milk and plates of cookies for the dusty correspondents,” Associated Press reporter Hal Boyle recalled after revisiting the site in 1954.

On the tougher days, Hamel served glasses of Calvados, the famed local spirit made from distilled apple and pear cider. Reporters called it the “breakfast of champions.”

While they enjoyed the calm of the chateau, the war moved fast and with it the journalists. Two months after they had set up camp, the front lines shifted.

An undated aerial view of Chateau Vouilly, the first Allied press camp during World War II, located in Normandy, France. The chateau was a working location for war correspondents following the D-Day invasion. (James Hamel)

The Hamel family dog rests in the shade by the chateau's moat at Chateau Vouilly, Normandy, France. The historic chateau has been maintained by the Hamel family for generations. (Alexander Riedel/Stars and Stripes)

As fast as they had come, the reporters packed their cameras and typewriters to move toward Paris with the advancing troops.

What remained to this day was the sign on the door, reading: “Copy room.”

“Many journalists returned over the years, sharing their memories and expressing their gratitude,” Hamel said.

A bronze plaque, placed with help from Walter Cronkite in 1994, commemorates the chateau’s history as a press camp. Maintaining the chateau, with foundations dating back to the 10th century, is a labor of love for the Hamel family.

“My family bought the castle in 1934,” Hamel explained. “It’s been a dairy farm for generations, and my granddaughter will be the fifth generation to take over the business.”

Today, their 150 cows graze in the surrounding fields. Despite financial constraints and the need for constant upkeep of the chateau, the family remains committed to preserving its legacy.

During the D-Day 80th anniversary celebration, the Hamel family opened a temporary exhibit honoring the correspondents. Mannequins in uniforms, typewriters and cameras re-create the scene.

One centerpiece is a table thought to have been used by Pyle, who was revered for his ability to tell the stories of ordinary soldiers on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific before his death on Okinawa in 1945.

Much like his grandmother, James Hamel continues to welcome visitors, sharing the stories of the correspondents who chronicled the heroism and tragedies of D-Day.

“Many visitors come to see the battle sites and battlements with big guns. Of course, there were no guns or battles here,” Pelot said. “Journalism played a critical role during the war, and the information shared from here was as vital as any weapon. It’s not a museum; it is still alive.”

Stars and Stripes · by Alexander Riedel · June 7, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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