How I went to war in Novorossiya
22 years ago I served in the Soviet army and rose to the high rank of major. The last 4 years of my service were spent in logistics support units, but I also had to deal with logistics support.
In January-February 2014, I had to provide humanitarian assistance to employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine on Grushevsky, who were repelling crowd attacks from the Maidan. In general, for the month my Facebook group “We are against the civil war, for peace in Ukraine!” spent about 156 thousand hryvnia. I recorded all purchases and deliveries of goods “to the front” in photos and videos.
Last Monday, a friend from Odnoklassniki called me, someone Ewgen B, (later it turned out that he was Evgeniy Ivanovich Bandura, a forty-year-old architect by training, a failed entrepreneur, a captain in the reserve, an Orthodox Cossack upbringing, a volunteer of the “Ghost” militia brigade of Alexei Borisovich Mozgovoy). Zhenya has been doing her noble work for about 3 months now. As a result, he fell into debt (about 100 thousand rubles), which was attacked by all the Kamen-Shakhtinsky bailiffs (but this could be a separate article or a whole story).
Evgeniy asked me to do an interview with Mozgov, because all the Russian media that he approached denied him this, and even called him various bad words. I agreed, and on the morning of October 14.10.2014, XNUMX. We left Rostov in a loaded car towards the Gukovo checkpoint.
Neither Russian border guards nor customs prevented a man in overalls from transporting food products in original packaging (cereals, soups, sugar, pasta, other small items) beyond customs control without filing a cargo customs declaration. On the Ukraine-LPR side, border and customs service was carried out by militias under the flag of Novorossiya, who, upon hearing the word “humanitarian aid to Mozgovoy,” opened all the gates and parted in different directions.
Ukraine greeted us with the brick buildings of the former women’s colony bombed to smithereens, which left a depressing impression and shock (how is this possible? It’s one thing to watch all this on TV, another thing to actually see the traces of a real war!).
In the same way, we passed multiple checkpoints along the highway past Sverdlovsk-Krasnodon-Lugansk and arrived in Alchevsk in the afternoon. At none of the checkpoints did I see not only heavy armored vehicles, but even a light armored personnel carrier! Naturally, I didn’t even take out my camera, having been warned in advance by my new travel companion that this was very fraught and could end badly for the paparazzi photographer.
Having taken our turn at the door of the reception room of the commander of the motorized brigade “Ghost” for about 2 hours, we ended up in Mozgovoy’s office, already known to many. I didn’t undergo any special checks or tests, no one talked to me with passion, I didn’t take a lie detector test, my pockets, bag and camera weren’t checked.
Having met the owner of the office and exchanged a few phrases, I immediately took out my camera and turned it on for video. Since I’m a cunning resident of Kiev and don’t like to work, I didn’t even have to ask questions - I asked the editor for questions the day before, and all I had to do was print them out. I gave this printout to the interviewee, who read them and immediately responded to them. All I had to do was hold the camera steady in my hands and zoom a little during my insertions and answers, depending on the topic of the questions, and also so that a copy of the Victory Banner would fall into the camera. In total, there were three banners in the office, one of them was black with a skull and crossbones (I don’t insist on bones, but I remember the skull for sure).
All my work took no more than 20 minutes, and this is what came out of it.
After that, I made a commercial in the presence of two people: Mozgovoy and Bandura. The day before, Evgeniy Ivanovich told me a horrifying story of how his native tax office heated him up for 50 thousand rubles from the pension fund after he handed over his individual entrepreneur certificate and application for closure. The tax office drags out the closure of the individual entrepreneur for six months, and then through the fairest Russian courts (without even notifying or inviting him to a court hearing, they do not hand over copies of court decisions to the victim for months) and bailiffs, they quickly robbed the failed entrepreneur of 50 thousand rubles and repaid him in half disability pension from 14 to 7 thousand per month. Therefore, if we take into account non-payment of bank loans and many lost trials, our hero will face prison. But, despite such a disastrous financial situation, Evgeniy Ivanovich every week brings humanitarian aid in the form of food worth about 10 thousand rubles to Alchevsk. I promised to provide support, for which I invited a Brain volunteer to the office and made this video in his presence.
However, during the filming it turned out that the activist-assistant had forgotten his RF Security Council card in the car, and did not remember the card number as a keepsake.
The next day I was allowed to inspect the state of the logistics of the mechanized “Ghost” brigade for press coverage. Let me note right away that the logistics support of this partisan detachment fully corresponds to its name, since the so-called rear is only a ghost, a chimera, an imitation, an imagination. First, I visited the food and clothing warehouses, which are located right next to the hotel. Both women warehouse managers have the same name - Elena, so I won’t confuse them, but the warehouses turned out to be practically empty: there were about 200 kg of potatoes left at the food store, a dozen kilograms of cabbage and a couple of kg of pasta, which Evgeniy had brought the day before.
Almost everything was given to the canteen and even ends up with local residents, who constantly come to the warehouse to buy food for their hungry grandchildren. No one ever turns away local residents; in addition, they can always visit the humanitarian battalion in the former maternity hospital. There, residents of Alchevsk can be fed a hot lunch and provided with truly free medical care.
But not only militiamen and penniless townspeople are on payroll in the GB; a guardhouse has also been organized where curfew violators and other drunkards and rowdies like Denis, who has already served 12 days out of his thirty days, are kept, but by the contents, and, most importantly, by the work , satisfied.
No more rear facilities were found: no vehicle fleet, no fuel and lubricants warehouse, no bathhouse, no medical unit or hospital department, especially no accounting services, reporting or control. There is only one principle - war will write off everything! From the stories of the leaders of the militia, volunteers (meaning no one) are involved in logistics and supplies, and “Voentorg” handles weapons and ammunition. This is what the militias call trophies of war taken from the enemy in battle. And if earlier guns, tanks, planes and armored personnel carriers were captured in battle, now the task is to take away warm clothes and shoes from the Nazis! After all, winter is no big deal, it will soon get cold!
In addition to logistics and household support, we had to listen to and summarize other information in passing. Perhaps it cannot be published without the consent of the commander, but no matter how bitter it may be, it is true, and the enemy still will not believe it, because the Ukropov media declare to the whole world that a highly professional Russian army is fighting against them. Yes, I saw a little Russians, or rather Russians, there, but they were volunteer militias.
But they were not armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, but had only one magazine with cartridges for AKM, and they were dressed in whatever they wanted, because they buy clothes and shoes with their own money, and no one here outfits them. I also met foreign citizens from Europe—Mozgovoy’s international brigade—Serbs.
However, apart from drill and physical training, they are not given any training, they don’t even have small arms, and all the other partisan militias have only one magazine of ammunition. The guard service walks with walkie-talkies, and the rest have mobile phones. But mobile phones don’t work, the Ukrainian provider MTS, like Kyivstar, turned off their stations here, but didn’t turn on the Russian ones. Personally, I was without mobile communications for two days, believe me, it was very uncomfortable.
On October 15, I finished transferring photo and video materials to the editor (thanks to the guys from the brigade press service and the commander’s press secretary), but we couldn’t leave in the evening, there was no gasoline. By the time they found and bought gasoline on hand, it got dark and the curfew began. After 20 o'clock the light suddenly went out throughout the city, and rumors spread that in connection with the appointment of a new Minister of Defense of Ukraine, the dill had broken through the front and were advancing on Lugansk. The feeling was not pleasant. True, after an hour and a half the light appeared, and the few hotel residents began to watch TV, which showed only one Moscow news program, News. The TV did not broadcast any military news, and we, covered with two blankets and without undressing, survived until the morning.
In the morning there was no water, but they fed us a free breakfast and wished us a good trip with an invitation to come visit again.
Before leaving, we hung out around the city and bazaars. I noticed a characteristic feature - pensioners have no money, they have not been paid pensions for more than 4 months, and in order to cash out a pension card they need to go to “mainland Ukraine”. Salaries are paid at AMK, which is half owned by a Russian oligarch. The workers of the plant do not like militias and plot various intrigues against them, such as the Ukrainian flag on the chimney of the boiler room. But the director of the plant, a certain Shevchenko, collects from the workers a so-called military tax of 1,5% for the war - it turns out that the residents of Alchevsk themselves hand over the money for their murder. And whoever does not agree is deprived of his entire salary or fired.
At the market I had to look at the prices, and a paradox emerged - while the price of gasoline is 3 times more expensive than in Russia, in Novorossiya food and essential goods are 3 times cheaper than in Russia! Dozens of heavy tanks with gasoline come from Russia every day through the customs border of the Izvarino checkpoint, but the Novorossiya militia has almost NO gasoline! Before the signing of the Minsk Peace Agreements, dozens of green Kamaz trucks with military personnel were walking from the border with the Russian Federation, but now they are not there at all, when, like Ukropov’s army, they are pulled to the borders of Novorossiya. There is a misunderstanding, as if something had happened, to put it mildly, to put it roughly.
After praying at St. Nicholas Cathedral, we headed back.
I didn’t see any Ukrainian symbols other than painted yellow-blue fences, only the flags of Novorossiya and Russian tricolors. Along the way, we came across patriotic inscriptions on walls and fences, which were more capacious than many newspaper articles.
All along the route from Alchevsk to Izvarino, traces of barbaric destruction and bombing of peaceful objects are visible. Broken shops, broken tram and trolleybus wires, blown up main rails from Lugansk to Likhaya, destroyed gas stations and residential buildings - a real war swept through the Lugansk region, the population of large cities decreased threefold, as in the Second World War. There are many stray dogs, and the highways are strewn with the corpses of cats. People behave as if after the plague, everyone is sad and silent, the eyes of old people are filled with intense tears, children do not scream or frolic (you can’t hear children’s laughter at all), everyone walks around hungry and tired. You drive along the highway and through populated areas - like in horror films before some monster appears.
But public utilities work, garbage is collected and removed, there is no trash in the cities.
From Novorossiya, at the Izvarino checkpoint, there is a large line of cars - some are refugees, some are hucksters. Zhenya, in the uniform of a militia, asked permission to skip the line from the militia - they immediately gave the command for unhindered passage. The Russian border guards did not object, but advised me to ask permission from the queue. The first muzzle in the jeep, having heard the request, immediately sent three cheerful letters, the next citizen expressed his displeasure with the very existence of such an institution as the “militia”. Apparently these pathetic people did not live in Slavyansk when it was stormed and “liberated” by Ukrainian punitive forces. But that’s not what my story is about. The woman in the pickup truck let us through, and we passed.
But then I saw the OSCE car and went up for an interview, asking only one question - what claims does the mission have against the Russian side after the signing of the Minsk Peace Treaty, which was signed by Russian Ambassador Mikhail Zurabov on the Russian side. How the official representative reacted to my question can be seen from the video. If you look closely, you will see that in the trunk there are several packages of Russian army dry rations. It turns out that these scoundrels, who themselves do not bring any benefit, feed at the expense of Russia, and also spoil it for themselves. And they spoil things by simply openly spying by placing video recording equipment inside their cars. This is not visible in the video, since the windows are darkened, but it is visible up close. In addition, the EU has supplied Ukraine with many modern flying drones, with the help of which dill monitor the state of affairs in Novorossiya.
And in Novorossiya they persistently say that recently, on command from Donetsk, supporters of Igor Strelkov are being caught, they are arrested, tortured and they are trying to obtain incriminating evidence on Strelok. Likewise, four of Mozgovoy’s men are already being interrogated. And then the story with Gubarev gave rise to rumors whether it was an accident or just a beating.
And finally, only on Russian territory in Donetsk, Rostov region, I saw a Russian feeding a mongrel with sausage.
After all this, I made a promotional video for donors to Mozgovoy’s militia.
And I remind you of the card number of the Security Council of the Russian Federation: 6761 9600 0392 7182 28 Evgeniy Ivanovich B.
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Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.