Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine

Introduction

Everyone must understand: mobilisation is ahead and a global war for survival, for the destruction of all our enemies. War is our national ideology. And our only task, our leaders’ only task, is to explain to and convince all the Russian people that this our heroic future.

Russian writer and volunteer Donbas fighter Zakhar Prilepin, April 20141

‘You’d be happy to meet.’ My old friend Zhenia’s tone on the phone was flat and wary. It was 28 March 2022. The war in Ukraine had been under way for a month. ‘You want to meet just for the sake of happiness – or are you going to try to tell me why I’m wrong?’

‘Maybe you can tell me why I’m wrong? We can do that too. I’m in Moscow.’

There was a silence on the line.

‘Maybe some other time,’ he eventually replied. ‘It’s not a good idea for me to be seen with you right now.’

Once, Zhenia had been a rebel. At various stages of his career he’d worked as a labourer and a security guard, and served as an officer in the paramilitary OMON police and fought in Chechnya. He had edited the Nizhny Novgorod edition of the opposition Novaya Gazeta and had been a leading member of the revolutionary National Bolshevik Party. But by the time I met him at a literary festival in 2008 in Saint-Malo, France, Zhenia had adopted a new pen-name – Zakhar Prilepin – and had become one of Russia’s greatest and most controversial novelists. Zhenia was shaven-headed, physically strong and had a generally threatening mien that had got him into a spot of bother with Saint-Malo’s CRS riot police. I helped him out of it. It was a bonding experience.

Zhenia – Zakhar – Prilepin was smart, well-read, unafraid. He was also passionate about his beliefs – which included a radical faith in the greatness of his country and a withering contempt for the venality of its current leadership. At a writers’ forum in the Kremlin in 2007 he’d sat across from Vladimir Putin and fearlessly taken the president to task for corruption and thievery. After the February 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin’s ideology had turned on its axis, and Putin and Zakhar found themselves in unexpected agreement: it was time for Russia to take up arms against her enemies. Soon after, Zakhar travelled to the rebel republics of Donbas in eastern Ukraine and became the deputy commander of a rebel battalion. In 2020, like his hero the radical writer and National Bolshevik Party founder Eduard Limonov, Zakhar founded a political party of his own. Its vision was of a manly, belligerent Russia whose destiny it was to purge the world of decadence through war.

Zakhar’s views may have been poisonous and insane and were undoubtedly dangerous. But they were sincerely held. And unlike many armchair patriots in the Russian elite who spent most of their time plundering the country they professed to love, Prilepin actually risked his skin for his beliefs. He was once my friend. Now, I suppose, he has become a kind of honest enemy.

I start this story with Zakhar for two reasons. One is that I am interested in what he will do next. Currently, the Kremlin is riding the tiger of Orthodox-fuelled ultra-nationalism that until relatively recently had lurked on the lunatic fringes of Russian politics. What will happen if Putin falters, either through military failure in the field or by losing his grip on the Russian elite or security services? If that were to occur, Zakhar’s vision of his country as a kind of new Sparta, implacable, militant and fired with holy righteousness, could be a terrifying glimpse into one of Russia’s possible futures.

The second reason I mention Zakhar is his refusal of my invitation to meet. I never found out his reasons. Perhaps he was nervous of being caught talking to someone who could be presented as a Western spy. Perhaps he thought I had become a Western spy. Perhaps he assumed that I was being tailed by the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Perhaps he thought he was. Perhaps he was afraid of hearing a different version of events from me that would shake his faith in his belief that Russian Orthodox warriors were battling Ukrainian Nazis (admittedly unlikely).

Whatever his reasons, Zakhar had clearly caught a dose of the pervasive paranoia of the times. It was a paranoia shared by the majority of my Moscow friends, colleagues and contacts. In the days following the beginning of the war it covered the city as quickly and obtrusively as the peat-fire smog that blankets Russia’s capital every summer. And like smoke, paranoia’s lingering smell was pervasive and impossible to avoid.

I have spent, on and off, 27 years reporting in Russia – first as a metro and features reporter for The Moscow Times and then as a correspondent and Moscow Bureau Chief for Newsweek magazine. In over a quarter of a century a total of perhaps half a dozen people refused to speak to me because I was a foreigner, or because they feared repercussions from the authorities.

That changed dramatically after the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – or, more specifically, after the State Duma passed a law in early March making the ‘dissemination of false news about the Russian Military’ punishable with up to 15 years in prison. Soon afterwards the Duma also redefined an existing law on ‘foreign agents’ to include not just Russian individuals and organisations who actually received funding from abroad but also those who had come ‘under foreign influence’. Weekly lists of new ‘foreign agents’ were published and soon came to include almost every non-Kremlin-aligned journalist, broadcaster, blogger and analyst.

To my shock, when I began reporting this book in the first days of the war, friends and contacts whom I had known for years and decades told me that they could not risk meeting in public or speaking on the record. Even pro-Kremlin officials, both current and retired, as well as prominent patriotic media and political figures, grew cautious to the point of absurdity. Many sources refused to meet me in public places where they would be recognised speaking to a foreign reporter. And many of the most revealing conversations took place at the dinner tables, dachas or – in classic Soviet style – the kitchens of mutual friends who were kind enough to arrange private gatherings, not always telling my fellow guests in advance that I, a dangerous foreigner, would be there.

Many of the sources cited in this book are, therefore, necessarily anonymous – in some cases to protect their identity, and in others because the remarks quoted were made in off-the-record social situations or in confidence. It’s frustrating, as a reader, to have to take anything on trust – and equally frustrating for a reporter to have to ask. But such was the atmosphere in which this book was reported, in Moscow and Kyiv, between March 2022 and March 2023. What surprised – and chilled – me most was how quickly Russian society shut down. Before Putin’s 2022 invasion there was a space in Russia’s political ecosystem for political opposition and for free speech. The space was narrow, but it was defined by a series of unspoken rules that were observed by the authorities more often than they were broken. Private anti-Kremlin opinions, even when spoken in public places or on social media, were never proscribed. Before 24 February 2022 stories of covering the telephone at home with a cushion were a quaint tale from Soviet days. After, many of my sources insisted that we sit metres away from our smartphones, or leave them behind when coming to a meeting.

Fear is infectious. Fear breeds especially fast in a world where long-recognised rules have collapsed and new ones not yet formed. Opposition activists and journalists once jokingly described the Putin regime as ‘vegetarian’ rather than carnivorous. With a few notable exceptions, it tended to intimidate rather than destroy. The Kremlin’s chief ideologue Vladislav Surkov – incidentally, a friend of Zakhar Prilepin’s and a relative of his by marriage – presided over a system based on an essentially postmodern, consumerist and ultimately cynical attitude to ideology. Some Orthodoxy here, a dash of Soviet nostalgia there – Surkov played chords of ideas like the keyboard of the organ of scents in J. K. Huysmans’ decadent literary classic À rebours. That relatively tolerant, vegetarian ecosystem collapsed after Surkov’s departure from the Kremlin in February 2020. It was replaced, as we will see, by the exclusive rule of paranoid ex-KGB men convinced that the West was on a mission to undermine and destroy Russia.

Anti-Putin people had always tended to be fatalistic, even cavalier, about their security. A few continued to be outspoken after the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 – but by that time insouciance had become an act of great bravery. What was more striking to me was how the pro-Putin people suddenly discovered fear. The ponyatiye – the set of unspoken ‘understandings’ that had ruled their world – was suddenly superseded by a new and unfamiliar gravitational field of patriotism and war. What was permitted in wartime Russia, what newly forbidden? Nobody knew. One former KGB major-general, a close personal friend and former university classmate of one of Putin’s most senior ministers, took me outside in midwinter to talk by a dacha’s woodshed where he could be sure we would not be overheard or seen. The daughter of a major oil magnate close to Putin asked twice to move tables at the White Rabbit restaurant because she didn’t like the look of people sitting nearby who might overhear us. And so on.

I mention these things not to give the impression that reporting in Moscow has become a cloak-and-dagger, le Carré affair, but to make the point that the political and media landscape of Russia changed very quickly and very profoundly in the aftermath of Putin’s invasion. Some old friends became aggressive, even obnoxious, patriots. Others realised that a Russia where one could pretend to live an open, prosperous European life no longer existed – or perhaps had only existed in their imaginations. Thousands of Russia’s best-educated people escaped into exile. But the vast majority remained and conformed – some actively, most silently. If the paranoia of war was like peat smoke, then the conformity was like snow, blanketing a whole society in a numbing blanket that deadened sound and feeling and sent people huddling for shelter. Some Russians found that shelter in the comforting tropes of their Soviet childhoods. Some found it in actively ignoring and blocking out reality. Until 21 September, six months into the war, life in Moscow continued as an almost aggressive simulacrum of total normality into which the war was not allowed to intrude. On that date Putin took the country – and his own elite – by surprise when he announced a partial mobilisation. Suddenly a war that had been all but invisible became, to tens of millions of Russians with male family members of military age, suddenly very up close and personal. From that moment on, no Russian was immune to the bitter political winter that had descended on their country.

The definition of a great conflict is that it results in the breaking of nations and a reordering of the world. By that measure, the Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis in Europe since the Second World War, and one which will result in far greater global consequences than 9/11. The world’s security architecture, food and energy supply, balance of military power and alliances will be altered by it forever.

At best, Putin’s botched invasion of Ukraine could prove to be the last convulsion of expansive imperialism in European history and mark the final death of the age of empires in the West. It may also give China pause in its ambitions to use conventional military power against its neighbours. In the first weeks of the war Ukraine surprised both its enemies and its allies by demonstrating that overwhelming armoured and airborne force could be defeated by modern infantry-carried weapons, upending traditional Cold War era calculations of attack and defence. The world’s sanctions response to Russia’s invasion also showed that true economic power – including the power to devastate whole economies overnight – has shifted from nation-states to corporations, whose ethical and political decisions can carry more clout than those of governments. And Russia’s attempts to strike back by cutting gas supplies to Europe showed, surprisingly, that energy was in fact less potent a weapon than the West had once feared.

At the same time the Ukraine war made the world a far more dangerous place as Putin and his propagandists brought the idea of battlefield or even strategic use of nuclear weapons from the realm of the theoretical firmly into the realm of the possible. It also posed a fatal – and as yet unanswered – question about how much economic pain Western societies are willing to take in the name of defending the principles upon which their societies are founded.

The Ukraine war is the bloody final act of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hostilities continue as I write, so the story is, therefore, necessarily incomplete. But though we have no idea of exactly how the conflict will end, we already know how it will not end. There will be no complete victory for either Russia or Ukraine. NATO is too invested to allow Kyiv to fall to the Russian army; Putin’s regime and his life are at stake if he allows Crimea, or for that matter the rebel republics of Donbas, to fall to the Ukrainians. He has said repeatedly that he is willing to defend that territory with nuclear strikes if necessary. Therefore this war will eventually end – as all wars that do not result in total victory end – with a negotiated peace.

Putin is likely to declare any final outcome a victory, and his control over Russia’s media is so complete that there is a good chance he will succeed in convincing many of his people to believe him.

But it’s also clear that however much formerly Ukrainian territory Putin manages to hang on to after the guns go silent, his attempt to reverse Ukraine’s westward drift and assert Russia’s new power and greatness has proved a catastrophic failure. Decades of careful economic planning have been destroyed, sympathetic allies all over the world alienated, hundreds of thousands of Russia’s brightest and best have fled into self-imposed exile, the country’s strategic independence profoundly compromised by a forced economic and political dependence on China. Putin has poisoned Russia’s future in the root. His self-declared victory will be one of the uneducated over the educated, of the provinces over the metropolis, of the old over the young, of the past over the future.

Putin’s invasion also precisely created the very things it was intended to avert. It united Ukraine and gave the country a true sense of nationhood. The war also reinvigorated NATO with new purpose, money and members, and also reminded the European Union of the post-war anti-totalitarian values on which European integration was first founded. On a more profound level, Putin reminded the democracies of the world that freedom does not just happen – the determinist conclusion that many in the West came to after the collapse of communism – but has to be fought for and defended.

This book was mostly written in Moscow and Kyiv during the course of the first year of the war. It’s not, therefore, the story of the war but a first draft of the history of how the war began – and how the conflict moved from Russia’s blitzkrieg through stalemate to Ukrainian counter-offensive. My focus is on the most compelling mystery at the heart of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: how did the idea of violently carving out a Greater Russia, backed up by mystical Orthodox nationalism, travel from the marginal fringes of Russian politics to become official Kremlin policy? How and why did Putin decide to throw decades of carefully constructed macroeconomics and diplomacy out of the window and launch a war so reckless and risky that the full details were kept even from the majority of his most senior ministers right up until the very moment of the invasion? Who were the dogs fighting under the carpet – as Churchill memorably once described Kremlin infighting – who battled for and won Putin’s ear, heart and mind? And most importantly, what was the true reason that Putin decided to go to war?

Moscow, 24 February 2023

PROLOGUE

The Brink

Moscow

Presidential residence of Novo-Ogarevo, Moscow region, 23 February 2022

Shortly after 11 a.m. Vladimir Putin boarded one of the three Mi-8 helicopters of the Presidential Flight at the helipad of his official residence at Novo-Ogarevo, 30 kilometres northwest of central Moscow. For security reasons two identical Soviet-designed Mi-8s took off with him, turned in formation and accelerated eastwards towards the Kremlin.

The air crews, like all other staff at Novo-Ogarevo, had been living in strict Covid isolation before coming into close physical proximity to Russia’s Pervoe Litso – literally ‘First Person’, as the president is referred to inside his administration. For nearly two years since the beginning of the pandemic all visitors to Novo-Ogarevo and to the presidential residences near Lake Valdai and Sochi where Putin had spent most of lockdown had been required to spend a week of quarantine and daily tests in specially converted hotel blocks on the grounds of each residence. Always intensely private, Putin’s personal contact had for years been limited to a small group of no more than three dozen insiders. During Covid that bubble had shrunk far tighter still.

Fifteen minutes after take-off, Putin’s chopper landed at the helipad by the Beklemishevskaya Tower in the Kremlin’s south-east corner. He stepped into his ZiL limousine for the short ride to the Great Palace of the Moscow Kremlin. During the pandemic, Putin had barely visited Moscow, much less been seen in public. But this was his third visit to central Moscow in as many days.

The first visit, in the early afternoon of 21 February, had been for an extraordinary – in more ways than one – session of Russia’s Security Council. The venue was the soaring Hall of the Order of St Catherine in the Great Kremlin Palace, a vast colonnaded space usually used for official receptions, rather than the usual, much smaller room in the Senate Palace where the Council usually convened. There had been no time for the 12 permanent members of the Council to quarantine for the required week. The enormous space allowed for Putin, seated alone behind a large desk, to keep six metres’ social distance from Russia’s most highly placed – though not necessarily most powerful – men (and one woman). The choice of venue was also highly symbolic for a made-for-television event intended to signal a new phase of Russian assertiveness.

The ostensible reason for the Security Council meeting was a discussion of plans tabled in the Duma and its upper house, the Federation Council, to recognise the statehood of two breakaway republics in Ukraine’s Donbas. According to a source close to Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, all the participants in the Security Council meeting had been told that the proceedings were being televised live. That was not true. The evidence of the watches of the participants showed that it was in fact aired some five hours later. Peskov told the same source that only four people in the room apart from Putin himself knew the full extent of Putin’s military plans to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine some 72 hours later. One was Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, another was Nikolai Patrushev, chairman of the Security Council and Putin’s KGB colleague since 1975, the third was Putin’s old St Petersburg University classmate and FSB head Aleksandr Bortnikov and the fourth another KGB colleague, foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin.

One by one, the Security Council’s members stood to agree with the Duma’s proposal to recognise the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics – collectively known as the LDNR – as independent nations. Naryshkin fluffed his lines and was publicly humiliated by Putin.1

The following day, 22 February, the Duma duly formalised the recognition. Putin travelled once more to the Kremlin for a rare press conference with a group of hand-picked journalists from the Kremlin press pool. According to one of the people in the room Putin looked ‘pale and puffy but energised … unusually emphatic and aggressive’.2 Asked by veteran Kremlin correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov of the Kommersant daily whether he thought that ‘anything in this modern world can be resolved by force’, Putin reacted sharply. ‘Why do you think that good should never be backed by force?’ He also denied that Russian forces would ‘deploy right away’ to Donbas.3

Putin was lying. Russian forces were already mobilised. The first units – the vehicles of the army group based in the Southern Military District marked with a distinctive ‘Z’ to distinguish them from identical Ukrainian armoured vehicles – crossed the effectively non-existent border between Russia and the LDNR hours after the press conference. By mid-morning on 23 February Russian forces had deployed all along the line of control that rebel fighters had established with Kyiv’s forces in 2015 after two brutal summers’ fighting that had left 14,000 dead.

23 February – Defenders of the Fatherland Day – is an important Soviet-era holiday. It’s a day for drinking with buddies, congratulating men for being men (the counterpart to the 8 March Women’s Day) and watching patriotic war films on TV. More formally, it’s a day to celebrate Russian armed forces past and present. Victory Day – celebrated on 9 May and traditionally marked by a major military parade on Red Square – is a more triumphalist celebration of the USSR’s defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War. But over the last decade of Putin’s rule both 23 February and 9 May have become key parts of a Kremlin-fostered cult that has co-opted the memory of the Second World War to serve the glory and legitimacy of the current regime. The high point of both celebrations is a laying of a wreath by the president at the Eternal Flame that burns in front of the Kremlin.

Putin’s motorcade emerged from the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower gate, drove across Red Square and up to the elaborate wrought iron gates of the Aleksandr Gardens. Putin walked past an honour guard – all keeping their distance – and laid a wreath at the Eternal Flame. It was the first recorded occasion since the same day in 2021 that Putin had walked on a Moscow pavement.

A pre-recorded message from Putin celebrating the Defenders of the Fatherland holiday was broadcast nationwide. ‘Respected comrades!’ Putin began, a deliberate throwback to communist-era usage. He made only one oblique reference to Russia’s occupation of the LDNR that had taken place that morning. ‘Our country is always open to honest and direct dialogue … but I will repeat: the interests of Russia and the security of our people are, for us, non-negotiable.’4

Back at Novo-Ogarevo by 5 p.m, Putin took a scheduled telephone call from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the official readout of the conversation, Putin ‘expressed disappointment that the USA and NATO have ignored Russia’s legal and reasonable concerns and demands’.5 Though Putin and Erdogan had known each other for over two decades and described each other as ‘friends’, there was no mention in the conversation of any imminent full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to a senior source in Turkey’s Foreign Ministry who has worked with Erdogan since 2003, ‘there was no indication or warning whatsoever of what Putin was planning’.6

At some point on the evening of 23 February, Putin sat down in the television studio at Novo-Ogarevo to record another message to his people, the second in as many days. This one announced that he had given orders to begin a ‘limited military special operation’ against Ukraine. It was broadcast at 6 a.m. the following morning. All along the 2,000-kilometre-long border between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine a force of at least 71 battalion battle groups totalling some 160,000–190,000 men – the biggest deployment of Russian troops on European soil since 1945 – rolled to war.7

Kyiv

Presidential Palace, Kyiv, Bankova Street, 23 February 2022

Since November 2021, US intelligence had been warning Volodymyr Zelensky with increasing urgency and in remarkable detail that Putin was planning a full-scale, multi-front invasion of Ukraine that would involve a direct assault on Kyiv. Zelensky and his national security team had been ‘not exactly dismissive, but sceptical’ of the warnings, said one adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak. ‘We were in no doubt that Putin would be capable of an invasion, that was not the question. We have been at war [with Russia] for eight years.’8 But since the previous spring Russian military build-ups on Ukraine’s borders – and warnings of a possible invasion – had become something of a regular occurrence. Putin had boosted troop numbers threateningly in March–April 2021, and again in September–October, only to stand them down again. The first build-up had been explained away as a test of the incoming US President Joe Biden’s resolve, the second as a protest against Ukraine’s participation in NATO land and sea exercises over the summer. With even very highly placed security sources and top government officials in Moscow confidently predicting that there would be no war, it was by no means clear that this, third, build-up would be the big one.

‘There was always a question of whether this was just another Putin psychological operation … to disrupt Ukraine,’ said the adviser. ‘On the one hand, there was concern, of course, each time that this would lead to war. On the other, there was the idea that we cannot let Putin send us into a panic every time he sends his troops on manoeuvres near our borders.’ When the US and British Embassies pulled out of Kyiv on 12 February, Zelensky had said that ‘right now, the people’s biggest enemy is panic.’ If Western powers had ‘any firm evidence of an impending invasion’, he had ‘yet to see it’. So deep was the scepticism about a possible coming war that senior members of Ukraine’s parliament and SBU intelligence service had taken to retweeting humorous memes of Mr Bean standing by a roadside, dubbed ‘Waiting for the Russian invasion’.9

By 23 February, however, it was clear that this time it really was different. The previous night Russian troops had crossed into the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russian troops had been operating more or less covertly inside the LDNR in force for years. But now that the Russian Duma had voted to recognise their independence, the occupation was now official. Yet the question remained: would Putin stop at the LDNR, or go further?

At midday on 23 February Zelensky convened a session of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council (NSDC). Around the table sat the country’s most senior military and intelligence chiefs, as well as civilian ministers. Some were lifetime soldiers and intelligence officers. Others were old friends whom Zelensky had known from childhood and worked with in show business for years.

Ivan Bakanov, a youthful 47-year-old who habitually wore blue glasses and fashionably tight suits, had grown up with Zelensky in the tough industrial town of Kryvyi Rih and had later headed the television production company they named Kvartal 95 Studio after their old neighbourhood. Zelensky had appointed his old friend, colleague and former campaign manager to head Ukraine’s SBU security service in August 2019. Bakanov – by training a lawyer who had spent his career as an entertainment executive – had no background in intelligence or secret police work, but was totally loyal to Zelensky. That was the point. Bakanov’s job was to reform and to tame a secret service that had several times in recent history tried to undermine the government – and which was believed still to harbour thousands of pro-Russian sympathisers.

In manner and background Lieutenant-General Valeriy Zaluzhny, 49, came from an utterly different world from Bakanov. Yet the career officer was also a Zelensky-appointed new broom. Too young to have served in the Soviet army, Zaluzhny was one of the first generation of Ukrainian officers to train with Ukraine’s NATO partners, including a stint in the UK. Stocky, round faced and tough, Zaluzhny had distinguished himself in action as a divisional commander during the heavy fighting in Debaltseve in Donbas in 2015. Zelensky appointed Zaluzhny chief of the Ukrainian General Staff in 2021 with a brief to bring the army up to NATO standards and put an end to the thievery, bullying and stifling top-down command structures that had plagued the Soviet and Russian armies.

The third key attendee was Ukraine’s foreign intelligence chief, Oleksandr Lytvynenko. A graduate of both the FSB’s Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications and Computer Science in Moscow and the Royal College of Defence Studies in London, Lytvynenko’s appointment as head of Ukraine’s spy service the previous July had been controversial. In 2015 Lytvynenko had been one of thousands of officials who had been suspended from serving in the government because of their previous work in the administration of disgraced, pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovych. Nonetheless, Zelensky judged that he needed a lifelong intelligence officer like Lytvynenko in charge of answering the single most pressing security question facing their country: was Putin serious about an invasion or not?

At the Security Council meeting, ‘three basic points of view emerged,’ recalled Serhiy Leshchenko, a prominent journalist and lawmaker who is a senior adviser to Zelensky’s chief of staff. ‘One was that Putin would stay in the [breakaway republics of] Donbas. Another was that he would try to create a corridor linking Crimea to Donbas and expand [the LDNRs’ territory]. The third was that he would go ahead and launch a full invasion of Ukraine, including from Belarus,’ which would mean an attack on Kyiv. All three versions were based on various conflicting pieces of intelligence and analysis. The NSDC’s meeting was ‘inconclusive’, said Leshchenko.

Zelensky spent the rest of the day speaking to ambassadors and reading intelligence reports from his own services as well as those of NATO allies. He also penned a speech aimed directly at the Russian people. In the early evening, still convinced that Putin was undecided about moving further than the borders of the LDNR, Zelensky recorded his speech in a single take.

‘I want to appeal today to all the citizens of Russia,’ Zelensky said in Russian – his native language, but rarely used for public addresses, which he usually made in Ukrainian. ‘Not as president. I am appealing to Russian citizens as a citizen of Ukraine … Today, your forces stand along that border, almost 200,000 soldiers and thousands of military vehicles. [This] could become the beginning of a major war on the European continent. Any spark could set it off … You are told that we are Nazis. But how can a people who gave more than eight million lives for the victory over Nazism support Nazism? How could I be a Nazi? Tell that to my grandfather, who went through the entire war in the infantry of the Soviet Army and died as a colonel in independent Ukraine.’

Zelensky did not mention his own Jewish roots. But he did speak of visiting his best friend in Donetsk before the war, cheering on the Ukrainian national football team in a match there and drinking beer in a park with a crowd of locals, united as fellow Ukrainians. He concluded with an emotional appeal to Russians to ‘remember that Ukrainians and Russians are different. But that is not a reason that we should be enemies … Many of you have been to Ukraine. Many of you have relatives in Ukraine. Some of you studied in Ukrainian universities, befriended Ukrainian people. You know our character. You know our people. You know our principles. You are aware of what we cherish. So please listen to yourselves. To the voice of reason. To common sense. Hear us. The people of Ukraine want peace.’

Many of Zelensky’s aides ‘were almost moved to tears’ as Zelensky recorded his speech. ‘It came straight from the heart,’ remembered one adviser. ‘He wrote every word himself … it was the best speech he had ever made.’10

In the evening Zelensky joined his wife Olena and children Oleksandra, 17, and Kirilo, 9, at the presidential residence in the suburb of Koncha-Zaspa, on the right bank of the Dniepr 15 kilometres south of central Kyiv. Ukraine’s president had ‘no forewarning’ of the coming Russian attack, confirmed Leshchenko. Zelensky went to bed in the hope that the ‘common sense’ of which he had spoken earlier that evening would prevail. Within hours that hope would be spectacularly disappointed.

Belgorod

Belgorod Province, Russia, 23 February 2022

For the officers and men of the Kantemirovskaya Tank Division, Defenders of the Fatherland Day would usually be an important and much-anticipated holiday. Based in Naro-Fominsk, 70 kilometres outside Moscow, the division – formally known as the Yuri Andropov 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Order of Lenin Red Banner Tank Division – had been one of the Russian army’s elite units since its original formation during the Battle of Stalingrad. But on 23 February 2022 nobody had time for celebrations. Orders had just come down for the division to mobilise for action.

A month before, the Kantemirovskaya had been deployed to Belgorod province, close to the northeastern border of Ukraine. Officially, they were on exercises. But it was clear enough to most of the men that they were there to invade Ukraine.

‘Mom, my phone won’t work for a week. I’m handing it over,’ 21-year-old Sergeant Vadim Shishimarin had told his mother Lyubov on 22 February. ‘Someone might tell you that I have left for Ukraine. Don’t believe it.’ Comrades of her son would later tell her that the unit’s commanders had assured them that ‘they would go in and out [of Ukraine] and that’s it’.11

Shishimarin did not look like much of a military man. He was skinny and short, with an almost childish face. ‘He doesn’t give the impression of a professional soldier, let alone a member of an elite tank division,’ Shishimarin’s lawyer Viktor Ovsyannikov would later tell the press. He was born on 17 October 2000 in Ust-Ilimsk, an industrial town of 86,000 people about 700 kilometres up the Angara river from Irkutsk in eastern Siberia. Vadim was the eldest of five children – he had two brothers and two sisters, the youngest four years old – and was brought up by his mother and stepfather.

Like many of the troops deployed to Ukraine, Shishimarin was from one of Russia’s most remote and impoverished provinces. Ust-Ilimsk was known for its hydro-electric dam, a timber mill and the remains of a notorious 1930s-era Gulag. A quarter of the population had moved away since the fall of the USSR. Vadim graduated from school aged 17, then trained as a mechanic in a vocational school. When later interviewed by journalists, neither of Shishimarin’s parents could name any of their son’s interests or hobbies. ‘What would he be fond of?’ said his father, Evgeny Shishimarin, who left his family when Vadim was small. ‘He lived. He’s a hard worker.’12

According to his mother, Shishimarin decided to travel to Moscow after leaving technical college because ‘there are more opportunities there for work and education’. He worked in a tyre repair shop in the Moscow region and found a girlfriend. Then, like hundreds of thousands of young Russian men not in full-time education, Shishimarin was summoned for compulsory military service in 2019’s annual spring call-up. His local Moscow region voyenkomat, or conscription office, assigned him to the nearby Kantemirovskaya Division. ‘He was fit. The time had come to join the army,’ said his mother. ‘What of it? Everyone serves.’

In January 2020, nine months into Shishimarin’s year-long term of conscription, his stepfather – a crane operator – was killed in Ust-Ilimsk. He was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’, explained Shishimarin’s mother Lyubov. ‘He was accidentally shot and killed. We don’t know the full name of the person who did it.’ Lyubov and her children were left without any reliable source of income. Shishimarin decided to join the Russian army as a full-time kontraktnik, or professional soldier, because there was ‘no need to worry about housing’ and that he wanted to ‘help my mother and younger brothers and sisters’. To a 20-year-old man from Ust-Ilimsk, the army salary of 40,000 rubles – then around £400 a month – sounded like a good career proposition. ‘He decided that there was nothing for him to do here [in Ust-Ilimsk],’ said his mother. ‘There really is nothing to do here.’13

By February 2022 Vadim Shishimarin had been promoted to the rank of sergeant – which unlike its apparent equivalent in the British or US militaries is a very junior rank in the Russian army. The equivalent role of Western long-serving non-commissioned officers is fulfilled in the Russian military by praporshiki, or warrant officers. Nonetheless, Shishimarin led a ten-man section in a platoon commanded by a Senior Lieutenant Kalinin.

On the evening of 23 February, Kalinin collected all the phones from the privates and non-commissioned officers in his unit as a security precaution. The men were also issued three days’ sukhoi paiok – dry rations – which the commanders considered sufficient for what they expected to be a short mission. The Kantemirovskaya Division’s estimated two hundred T-80U and T-80BV main battle tanks and approximately three hundred BTR-2 infantry fighting vehicles were armed and fuelled.

At dawn the following day the squad commanded by Shishimarin – Military Unit No. 32010 of the 13th Guards Tank Regiment of the Kantemirovskaya Division – moved forward from their positions outside Belgorod and joined a vast column of armoured vehicles heading westward towards the Ukrainian border, some 20 kilometres distant. At around 9 a.m. Shishimarin’s unit crossed the border between Sumy province and Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.

Moscow

RIA Novosti Building, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, 23 February 2022

Anna Bondarenko, 40, a senior producer at a major state-run Russian news channel, had had a nightmare day. Just a couple of days before, the station’s editorial line – agreed by her boss during detailed weekly planning sessions with the Kremlin’s top communications team – had been that Russia had no intention of attacking Ukraine and that Putin’s diplomatic efforts were proceeding well.14 Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was the great peacemaker, and despite NATO’s implacable aggression Russia was committed to peace. A lot of work had gone into planning news coverage, assigning news teams, and booking satellite link-ups to Washington and London. Bondarenko’s channel had for years been signalling that the Ukrainian government was full of fascists, who were aggressively targeting the peaceful Russian-speaking people of Donbas. But there had been no specific propaganda preparation for a coming occupation of the LDNR, let alone a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Then, on 21 February, the official line had changed abruptly. Peace was suddenly off. Instead the new top line on the rolling news service, handed down from on high, was that the Donbas republics were under active attack from Ukrainian ‘fascists’. Civilians were being evacuated. Russian wire services were suddenly full of video feeds of the evacuation – as well as of supposed Ukrainian car-bomb attacks on border crossings featuring dead attackers in Ukrainian uniform. The alleged upsurge of violence from the Ukrainian side was to be presented as an unfolding ‘genocidal’ aggression by Kyiv against the people of the LDNR.

Bondarenko, whose family were ancestrally Ukrainian, was personally ‘furious when I saw those images’, she recalled. ‘How could the Ukrainians allow themselves to be taken over by ultra-nationalists?’ What was their problem with Russian-speaking people like herself? Bondarenko had spent 20 years working in Russian TV news. She was not naive about the workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine. But she saw no reason whatever to doubt the evidence of her own eyes as she watched the raw video coming in. NATO was on the march. Russian people were being attacked, and the Kremlin had mobilised the army to save them. ‘Where were you the last eight years?’ was the new slogan for the operation to relieve the LDNR – along with ‘We don’t abandon our own.’ The new editorial line was that Russia’s troops had embarked not on a war of imperial aggression but on an urgent humanitarian mission to save their close kin from genocide.

As she handed over the news desk for the night shift on the evening of 23 February, Bondarenko had a ten-minute briefing with the incoming producer. They went through a list of expected newsfeeds from various RIA Novosti, TASS and other Russian state TV agency correspondents in Donbas, and the assignments and reports for their own correspondents on the ground in south Russia, Crimea and Donbas, as well