War, without embellishment. As it truly is – mud, sweat, blood, rats, no heroism. Only our strong spirit, which the rusnia will never break!
At the end of the video we deliberately shout “Glory to Ukraine” so that the rusnia hears it. It enrages them – and even more so the fact that they cannot break us.
Oleg Fedotov: “Victory Tomorrow!”
Today I have not seen a single feature film that could compare to the work of an ordinary soldier defending his position in a hopeless situation, under artillery barrages and FPV drones.
The voice of an unknown soldier, in its unspoken greatness, once again carries over the battlefield… Nameless, seen by only a few brothers, silent, he dies a lonely death, departs for an infinitely distant world, and his earthly remains are swallowed by emptiness, as if he had never existed at all. These feelings of existential loneliness, experienced by so many of these people – the despair that their silent scream disappears into the boundless vastness of war without leaving even a trace. Historians, essayists, bloggers have already written, and will continue to write, countless accounts of what happened, mentioning individual disasters and compressing losses into a single sentence or a few lines.
But they will never pay special attention to the wretched fate of the soldiers thrown to the mercy of chance. They will never mention the long, agonizing hour of waiting… They will never remember the ordinary soldier – sometimes surrounded by glory, sometimes beaten, sometimes broken… paralyzed by death and decay, and later crushed by disappointment when he realizes that victory will not bring back fallen brothers.
Recently I read an account of an assault in which the author described many details, but completely forgot the everyday life of soldiers, the actions of ordinary soldiers. These ordinary infantrymen are unquestionably heroes. There, in the trench… lies a lone soldier who cannot even raise his head without risking it being shot off, yet he still has to observe the enemy. Every time he cautiously peeks out from cover, he can be hit by a bullet or a drone drop.
Shells fall every day… shaking the ground, throwing clods of earth, the trench trembles, shrapnel whistles overhead. At night, when you see nothing but hear everything, eyes begin to water from tension, imagination runs wild, and the soldier sits for hours, wrapped in fleece, freezing and listening while holding his breath. With the first pale rays of morning, soaked through and chilled to the bone, he crawls into the dugout.
It is cramped there, damp, noisy and dark. And rats. It seems to me that true heroism is precisely enduring this horrific everyday reality.
I once saw a soldier whose trench was half full of water. When his comrade saw it, he offered to switch places! Ask yourselves: have you ever seen anything like that in civilian life – someone willing to stand knee-deep in icy water for you, just so you could rest for a few minutes?
I haven’t.
Although the ordinary soldier has always been at the center of wars – in the 20th century and now in the 21st – historians traditionally focus on “high-level” issues: strategy, tactics, decision-making and organization, which are important, of course, but do not provide a complete picture of war. From this perspective, the soldier is merely an object, a tool for issuing and carrying out orders. A faceless, nameless mass that simply receives commands and performs its role in this play.
The distance between the strategic map and the bloody tragedy is too great. Why should the one standing at the top care? He does not hear the scream, the ragged breathing…
Should he think of those seven swept away by the current? Should he imagine how far they drifted, how wet their uniforms are, how pale their faces? Should he think of the hearts breaking right now – mothers, wives, children?
A soldier must rely on luck – often and heavily. The military oath, a soldier’s joy, soldiers’ songs, a soldier’s death – this is the price paid for a peaceful sky on the home front. War, even in its most primitive form, has always been a complex, refined, highly organized product of human imagination and reason. That is why the “big picture” of war is so attractive.
Field Marshal Archibald Wavell once wrote to the renowned military historian Liddell Hart:
“If I had time to study war, I would concentrate almost entirely on ‘military reality’ – exhaustion, hunger, fear, lack of sleep, the effects of weather… The principles of strategy and tactics are ridiculously simple. Real conditions are what make war so complex and difficult, yet historians usually neglect them.”
These people come from different social, economic and educational backgrounds, but they are united by one thing: they see war at its lowest level, where everyday problems acquire terrifying concreteness. To understand real war as it appears from below, a historian must paint a portrait of the nameless infantryman and examine his dual role – hero and victim at the same time. As heroes, these ordinary people formed a tremendous force to defend their country – a machine of destruction, ready and willing to kill and destroy for victory. As victims, they face daily physical hardship, psychological burden, and often crushing fear of death and of killing, which together form the everyday life of every soldier in combat.
A historian cannot fully reconstruct the life of the ordinary infantryman. He can only strive to paint the most accurate possible picture of the drama, of human aspirations and experiences. When I look at staged war photographs and videos, I immediately notice this: they show everything except the essence of war. From the outside, a soldier’s life looks beautiful and romantic, but these illusions quickly dissolve in the face of naked reality.
Naked reality. Through the rain, soldiers see tents ahead, taut like they were molded from clay. They hurry to dig holes in a waterlogged field… Ahead lies a gray emptiness, the sight of which fills one with loneliness…
Two sentries, collars raised and heads hunched into their shoulders, watch so that the Russians do not attack unexpectedly… Everything around seems to freeze under the weight of dusk… which seeps even through fleece; someone has already frostbitten fingers and toes.
The soldiers quickly join two tents together and cover the dugout… They throw their belongings into the pit… In the darkness they huddle together, pressing against one another.
Someone lights a trench flare… The boys are so exhausted they cannot even think.
Silence presses down.
A historian can describe this reality – miserable or not – only through vivid portrayals of shared human experience. That is why this piece is not about war, but about People: my friends from the 80th Air Assault Brigade, ordinary soldiers. War serves only as a backdrop and an environment, but as in any tragedy, the main theme is human fate and the suffering that a shared effort to endure the unbearable brings. These are stories of fear and courage, brotherhood and personal pain, of human emotions under constant tension, and of the extraordinary experiences created by war.
Too often historians become so immersed in analysis that they lose touch with the individuals and groups whose actions actually create history. Since the ordinary soldier is caught in the whirlpool of great events, this kind of history seeks to portray human destinies woven into the background of faceless catastrophes – while still offering a chance to understand and convey meaning without unnecessary sentimentality. By examining the harsh and horrifying conditions faced by the ordinary soldier, one can learn something about war’s impact on the human soul, and about life itself: cruelty, horror, paralyzing fear, but also compassion, courage, the spirit of brotherhood, and the unshakable resilience with which life’s trials are borne. And about the great power of love.
One of the great paradoxes of war is that while it brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. That is why the story of my friends – paratroopers, infantrymen – is not merely a chronicle of the human mind battling itself. It also contains universal elements that matter to all of us. Too many people encounter war without it touching them at all.
They read Telegram, watch YouTube. They watch war online, without understanding what it means – sitting in a comfortable chair, on a bus, in a café. For many, war appears as nothing more than a slick video clip, something distant, somewhere out there. They do not understand at all what war is.
Understanding military reality is practically impossible for someone who has not experienced it. But by even briefly acquainting oneself with the life of an ordinary soldier, one can catch a quick glimpse of the true scale of war and its complex, contradictory emotional world.
“Victory tomorrow!”
Every day they fight for it – piece by piece.