Ukraine War Day #831: A Soldier Who Switched Sides – Part II

Dear Readers:

Continuing this story about Pavel Yakovlev, aka “Prometheus” who fought in the Ukrainian army, then switched sides, and now fights for Russia. We saw that these volunteer battalions, formed from former Ukrainian POWs, fight under the banner and symbol of the Orthodox Cross over a crescent moon.

Volunteer battalion made up of former Ukrainian POWs.

We got to the part of the story where Pavel, during his very first battle, realized that his cowardly Ukrainian commanders were deceiving him. They never bothered to inform their troops that they were sending them into suicide missions, just kept reassuring them that “everything will be okay.” Pavel relates why he believes that the Russian side is superior in this respect, the commanders are more honest, and also more brave.

In this dialogue with military correspondent Alexander Kots, Pavel consistently uses the Russian demonstrative pronouns “this” (на этой стороне – “on this side”) and “that” (на той стороне – “on that side”) to distinguish between “good” on this side, i.e., the Russian side; versus “bad” on that side, i.e., the Ukrainian side. There is a lot of semantics going on here, not to mention emotional payload. Students of the Russian language should recall, that, Russian being a language that dispensed with the articles “the” and “a”, then the use of “this/that” sounds so much weightier and more portentous than the equivalent phrases in English. Like a man who has seen the light, after a traumatic event that changed him forever, Pavel is separating the two halves of his life into “before” and “after”.

Truth On Our Side

Kots: How is the Russian army different from the Ukrainian?

Pavel: Goodness and truth are, of course on this side. Over there, they are constantly deceiving people. They throw people out onto the positions, assuring them that said positions are “under our control” even though that is not the case. Back at the military commission, after I was drafted, I attempted to get into an artillery unit, because I actually had some training in this area: During [earlier] emergency training I had learned how to operate an MT-12 “Rapira” cannon. But they paid no attention to this, they just pushed me into the infantry. They said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure out later how to move you into the artillery.” But they never did. Here, on this side, it’s different. They will look you right in the eye and tell you the truth: What the situation is, what tasks they need you to perform. On that side they didn’t even bother trying to remove the 300’s [dead] and 200’s [wounded] from the front line. Here, they immediately send a group to evacuate people, and it’s our job to clear the way for them.

Kots: But not everyone surrenders. Many fight to the last bullet…

Pavel: There are some who are motivated by ideology. And I’m not even talking about the units like Azov or Kraken. Those guys are motivated by one single factor: Once peace comes, they will have to answer for what they did. Russia will come, and then they will be asked many uncomfortable questions – how they terrorized the populations in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. They do whatever they please. They would just swagger into peoples cottages, break things, steal whatever they wanted, rape people. It is understandable why such types do not want to see peace come, the kind of peace in which they will be punished for what they did. But aside from them, the vast mass of [the Ukrainian army] are just normal guys, who have not the slightest desire to fight to the last drop of blood.

Mercenaries, Mova, and Zombie Programming

Kots: Have you seen a lot of foreign mercenaries?

Pavel: I personally didn’t encounter any of these at the front. But I heard stories about them from acquaintances. They are considered to be, in general, useless creatures who usually act in the role of blocking battalions. They sit comfortably in the rear and receive huge perks. I did actually encounter some of these types back in Kiev, supposedly they were on rotation, or something like that. I was living in the dispatch barracks at the time [waiting to be sent to the front]. So, these gorillas roll into our quarters and just lie down on the floor. We offer them cots, but they’re, like, “No, no, we’ll sleep on the floor.” I think some of them were Brazilians, I have no idea who the others were. They had no ideology, they were just there for the money.

Next: Kots and Pavel address the language question.

[to be continued]