Of mice and mines (and dehydration): two territorial defence soldiers hold their position for 165 consecutive days
Ten whole sausages, two kilos of sweets, a pack of water, assorted useful bits and pieces, power banks and clothes – that's what Oleksandr Aliksieienko has packed to take with him, not counting his weapon, ammunition, grenades and body armour. His fellow soldier, another Oleksandr – Oleksandr Tishaiev – sets off with almost exactly the same load.
They aren't going far – only about 4 km (2½ miles) – but the usual way of measuring distances feels meaningless here. They aren't hikers following a marked trail, but soldiers inching towards the line of contact, skirting minefields and keeping out of sight of drones.
Grenadier Aliksieienko is 43. He was nicknamed Kuzen ("Cousin") at school, for reasons he can no longer recall, and it has since become his alias. Platoon commander Tishaiev is a little older, at 48, and his callsign, Tishka, clearly stems from his surname. It sounds almost gentle. "I'm not a very angry person," Tishka says. "I'm relaxed and easy-going."
In May this year, Tishka and Kuzen were ordered to relieve soldiers who had spent over a month at an observation post near the villages of Verbove, Mala Tokmachka and Orikhiv in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. One foggy morning, a vehicle drops them at a relatively safe point, and from there they continue on foot, crossing fields and picking their way through battered strips of forest.
Their calculations are simple: their supplies have to last for ten days of living on their own. Why ten? If the Russians spot any movement and pound the position from the air, the resupply drops from drones will have to stop for a while. Ten days, they reckon, should be long enough for the enemy to lose interest in what looks like a "dead" position.
The two soldiers expect to spend about a month at the observation post, six weeks at most, with everything they need being dropped in by drone.
What they don't know yet is that they'll be there for 165 days – the end of spring, the whole of summer and most of autumn.
The first few days
A very ordinary observation post on a hill by a crossroads. A dugout, warm and lived-in, with bunks. A small camping gas stove. A generator by the entrance.
The very next day, the ground around Kuzen and Tishka's dugout comes under fire from mortars and munitions dropped by drones. Maybe they were spotted during the rotation, or a Russian drone operator picked up their tracks in the soil, or they were betrayed by a supply package they haven't retrieved yet. Whatever the reason, the Russians have worked out that there are Ukrainian infantrymen hiding somewhere around here and started lobbing munitions into the area at random.
For that reason, Tishka and Kuzen decide not to touch the generator, fearing the Russians might be close enough to hear the noise and uncover their hideout. They use power banks to charge the radio and lamp instead.
Keeping watch on the enemy becomes, for the most part, an exercise in listening. Occasionally, when it feels safe enough, they steal a glance outside. At night, they rely on a night-vision device.
"Our daily routine was always the same. A shift on duty, some rest, some work on the position," Tishka recalls. "But throughout that whole rotation we never really managed to rest properly or improve anything. Mostly we just kept what was there going. We tried to shore up whatever the drone munitions had smashed."
They only tidied up what could not be seen from above. There has never been a war in which the front line is as exposed to both sides as this one. The enemy can compare yesterday's image of a position with today's, and a single branch lying in a different place can betray a human presence. It was imperative that the men at the observation post remained invisible to the enemy.
"So we tried not to change anything on the outside. If something was smashed, it stayed smashed. We couldn't even move rubbish or clear away rubble, down to a stick lying there – you didn't touch it. It was about safety," Tishaiev explains.
They decided to forgo supply drops for a while so as not to attract enemy attention – "better to stay hungry but alive". They stopped going outside at night or in the half-light. Even so, the Russians kept saturating their grid square with mortar fire, sometimes using incendiary ammunition. Sometimes gas grenades were dropped, and only gas masks could save them, providing they didn't end up in the centre of the cloud.
One day the dugout nearly took a direct hit. The blast was so powerful that both soldiers were concussed.
Tishka was the first to come round. He grabbed the radio: they were supposed to check in every hour. When he asked how many calls they had missed, the answer was three: he'd been unconscious for three hours. Kuzen had taken an even heavier hit, and Tishka spent almost an hour trying to bring him round.
When Kuzen finally regained consciousness, he felt nauseous, his legs refused to work, and worst of all, he couldn't see.
As he describes his last stint at the position, Kuzen uses the word "fear" only once – when he talks about that day. In that dark dugout somewhere out in the fields of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, he became convinced he had gone blind.
It wasn't until the third day that his sight began to return. For another week, Kuzen was unable to stand and could only crawl around the dugout on all fours.
Thirst, vermin and a flash of blinding light
They'd planned to live off their own supplies for ten days. They somehow stretched them to twenty-two. Calling for resupply drops was often too risky: every package from a drone could signal to the enemy that they were still there, still alive.
Water was what they missed most. They were ruthless about rationing it. Not every bottle that was dropped from the sky survived impact with the ground, and if an enemy drone spotted a package before they did, a round of mortar fire would certainly follow.
They drank water on a strict schedule: one sip every three hours. Then it was every six. There were days when it was once every twelve hours.
In the summer heat, hauling sandbags and reinforcing a position wearing body armour, thirst comes even quicker.
At their lowest ebb, they drank liquid squeezed from sachets meant for dry washing and tried to wring a few drops from wet wipes.
They ate only dry rations – after all, what can you cook without water? They washed, freshened up and even did the dishes using only wipes. Tishka can laugh about it now: he jokes that every soldier at a position smells the same – of wet wipes.
When he recalls the day they finally got their hands on a bottle of water dropped by an FPV drone, Kuzen automatically closes his eyes and smiles. "It was so-o-o delicious," he drawls. "We stretched that litre and a half out over a whole day."
Another constant of life in the field is the mice.
"There's no way to fight them. We tried poison, but you can't wipe them out in an open field. They get everywhere – under your clothes, into your rucksacks, they ruin your food. It's a nightmare," Tishaiev says. "But a rat is good – it strangles the mice. Our rat was almost tame; we used to feed it."
Some soldiers keep cats at their positions to deal with the mice and boost morale. But Kuzen and Tishka would chase away any cats or dogs that wandered into their dugout – not out of dislike, but for safety reasons. A Russian drone operator might notice a cat running to the same hole day after day and realise that there were people there. A dog could give away the position, or even trigger the tripwires the soldiers had set around the approaches to the dugout.
Their only link to the outside world was the radio. But sometimes the speaker transmitted more than just soldiers' voices. At times their comrades would record voice messages from Tishka and Kuzen over the air and forward them to their wives. Their wives' replies would be sent back the same way through the radio.
In those six months of darkness, there were also moments of blinding light. On the day of Pokrova, the Feast of the Intercession of the Mother of God, one of the packages contained letters from their wives.
"That hit hard. I even shed a small, manly tear," Kuzen admits.
During their time in the dugout, Tishka's two children finished first grade and moved up to second. Before, his wife used to send him photos of them every time he came back from the position. This time his deployment had dragged on for a long while. But in the next package, there was an old smartphone for Tishka.
He wouldn't have been able to make calls on it. But that wasn't what it was for. His wife had filled the phone with videos and photos of the children.
Firefight
There were more than 30 occasions when Tishaiev and Aliksieienko were due to be pulled out of their position. This was stated in a 3 November announcement from the President's Office that they were to be awarded the Cross of Military Merit. The soldiers themselves lost count of how many times they were offered evacuation.
"We deliberately refused," Tishka says. "The command isn't sitting right next to us, so they might have different weather from us. It might be raining there but not here. They might have a strong wind, while the wind is light where we are and there are drones all over the place. To avoid going out under shelling and munitions being dropped from FPV drones, we waited for better weather conditions."
Because of the constant attacks, the beams in their dugout began to crack and the ceiling started to sag. The corridor was so badly smashed, an opening had formed that was large enough for an FPV drone to fly in. It was clear that they needed to find new cover.
In early September, the soldiers moved into a hideout they'd previously used for storage. It was smaller and lower. They had to fortify it as well, putting up a barricade that could stop a Russian FPV.
They held out there for almost a month. When the overhead cover finally failed, they had to move further down the trench to look for a new place to survive in.
During that move, a drone spotted them. The mine exploded closer to Kuzen, and the main blast was absorbed by his electronic warfare set. When he reached the new shelter, he felt something foreign in his shoulder. It turned out to be two large pieces of shrapnel and several small ones. He dressed the wound and started taking antibiotics.
A few days later, the shrapnel still lodged in his shoulder, he had to fight a small-arms battle. One October day they heard the rumble of heavy vehicles and reported it to headquarters. The Russians had apparently assumed that no one was controlling the crossroads and launched an assault. Soon the unit came under drone attack.
"Then we heard footsteps. Everything happened so fast, you can't put it into words. Tishka said: 'Now!' I fired a burst – as much as I could. One of them was crawling right towards us – Tishka wiped him out. We wounded two others and the guys finished them off with drones," Kuzen recalls.
It was their final engagement of that operation. A few days later Tishaiev went to retrieve another package – and returned with the news they had been waiting for so long.
Home
"We'd ordered a package. And it had been raining day and night. The package had been dropped by drone a little further away. Tishka went out to get it, then he came back and said: 'Fog.'" Kuzen pronounces the word so gently, as if it were not a weather phenomenon but the name of a small child. "Foggy."
They were granted permission to leave immediately. The group that was to replace them was already waiting at another position a kilometre and a half away.
"Kuzen, can you manage?"
"I can."
"Home, then?"
"Home."
At half past five in the morning, Tishka and Kuzen slung their packs over their shoulders, picked up their weapons, and while the thick fog still hung low over the field, they set off through the mud.
Halfway there Kuzen, wounded, realised he could carry his backpack no further. He abandoned it. Walking was hard. For six months they had lived confined within a space of only a few metres, and now they had to cover 12 km (7½ miles) – three times further than in spring. But now walking was safer than driving.
It was a day of small dreams coming true. When a car eventually picked the soldiers up, they were finally able to drink as much water as they wanted. At the stabilisation point they were treated to an americano and – bliss! – some sweet treats. And then, a true miracle that Kuzen had been dreaming of for months: an ice-cold can of cola.
That evening, when the soldiers reached the hospital and were sent to their ward, they got to experience the true apotheosis of human ingenuity, the pinnacle of civilisation's achievements, the very quintessence of all desires – a hot shower.
***
After half a year in a dugout, Kuzen's eyes still cannot tolerate bright light, and he has to wear photochromic glasses.
"It was one long night," he says of the 165 days he spent at the position.
As a civilian, Kuzen had worked as a boilerman at a school. Last year he was sitting with some friends drinking beer when some servicemen from the military enlistment office approached them. The others did a runner, but Kuzen stayed.
Tishka worked in construction before he joined the army. He received his call-up notice when he went to the enlistment office to update his details.
Until last year, when they went through training and joined the 115th Brigade of the Territorial Defence Forces, neither of them had ever held a rifle.
Territory remains yours only as long as at least one infantryman holds it. For nearly half a year, Kuzen and Tishka lived under constant explosions, hiding in dugouts and trenches, suffering from thirst and mouse invasions, and reporting to headquarters every hour.
On a tiny stretch of the vast front line, they remained, for 165 days, an immovable point that allowed one simple truth to hold: this territory is still ours.
Author: Rustem Khalilov, UP
Translation: Ganna (Anna) Bryedova and Anastasiia Yankina
Editing: Teresa Pearce