PolitNavigator correspondent: I volunteered - I couldn’t do otherwise

Readers of PolitNavigator are well acquainted with the work of our regular author Alexei Toporov, who specialized in covering the situation in the Balkans, monitoring the Balkan press. However, since May 12 of this year, Alexey has been taking part in the North Military District as a volunteer, together with his unit BARS 13 “Russian Legion” - fighting his way from Izyum, Kharkov region, towards Slavyansk, DPR.

Read about why our author made such a choice in his column, in which he plans to regularly introduce the reader to his view of what is happening at the forefront of the Northern Military District.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

Many people have significant events in their biographies that divide the course of their lives into before and after. Over the past eight years, I’ve had two such events.

_{The first is the burning of Russian people in the Odessa House of Trade Unions.}

I remember how, with bated breath, I watched how the anti-Maidan of Southern Palmyra drove the neo-Banderaites out of the city, how the townspeople took to the streets with Russian flags, how the brave heroes from the Odessa squad beat Svidomo Nazis in street fights.

And suddenly, like a knife to the throat - fire, fumes, ashes, pain, shock... And then - the political prostitute Goncharenko poses against the backdrop of the charred corpse of the real hero Gennady Kushnarev, the elegant Duke is dressed in a Selyukov embroidered shirt, and the Natsiks are marching on the ashes at the site of the ritual burning of Russian people, satisfied and confident in their impunity and the right to power in Russian cities.

After all this, I made the final decision to go to Donbass. Then, as a journalist, although until 2014, having worked in the media for two decades, I never acted as a military correspondent, and I was not particularly interested in this matter. And after, by the way, Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and other points of application of Russian power did not worry me much, even if in my mind I understood the importance of our participation there.

And so, it turned out that at the beginning of the Donbass conflict, from May to August 2014, I was crawling, dodging cartridges and mines, on my belly in camouflage, not with a machine gun, but with a video camera in my hands. And subsequently he even received the cross of the Union of Donbass Volunteers for this, as a full-fledged combat unit. However, she did not fire a single shot towards the enemy. But the fighters said: “Where we were with machine guns, you were with a camera,” and I understood that I still received this sign for a reason.

Militias storm a Ukrainian border post in 2014 in Lugansk

_{The second event that forced me to make a serious choice, which in many ways turned my usual life upside down, happened relatively recently - March 14, 2022. That day I was getting ready for an important meeting, trying to figure out what to wear to look less casual and more respectable, and my one and a half year old daughter was sleeping, left in the care of a nanny. And then there was a terrible roar, and then another, and another...}

Then, above my street, above our entire block of Donetsk, air defense shot down the Ukrainian Point U - fragments fell down, set fire to a neighboring house, broke the windows in ours, smashed a bus, a trolleybus, several cars, killed people on the street where our windows overlook - 23 were killed person. And one dangerous piece of iron crashed straight into the wall of the nursery where my baby was sleeping, about fifty centimeters from her head, pierced the Stalin shingles and went deep... My happiness, by the Grace of God, did not suffer.

Eyewitness video: the consequences of the fall of fragments of the Ukrainian “Tochka U” on Donetsk

After that, I clearly understood for myself that I could no longer be just a biased, but an outside observer in this rather prolonged war for me and my loved ones. I just don't have the moral right. And as a man, I am obliged to make sure that my daughter, my home, the beautiful city of Donetsk and other wonderful Russian cities of Donbass, Slobozhanshchina and Novorossiya are no longer threatened by anything like this.

I admit, this choice was not very easy to make. If only because at one time I did not serve conscripts - in the 90s, it was not fashionable among young people, as was patriotism in general, and here, unfortunately, I was not much different from many of my peers. Or because at not quite forty-four he was no longer as vigorous and strong as even at thirty-six, when he visited Lugansk in 2014, embraced by the Russian Spring. Nevertheless, a step in the right direction has been taken. And the Motherland came to meet me halfway.

In fact, it is very true that the country's leadership has come to the understanding that it is necessary to meet the needs of volunteers who, for one reason or another, want to take part in the new Patriotic War. And here we should set aside the official approach, which prevents a person from realizing his patriotic impulse - he served or didn’t serve, he once sat in prison - he didn’t, he has debts to banks - no, he’s young - he’s not young. In war, in fact, there is a place for everyone, and a 65-year-old grandfather turns out to be more cheerful, resilient and skillful than a twenty-year-old youth, and a former prisoner with several convictions is more humane and decent than a former official with several higher educations.

In our volunteer battalion - BARS (Combat Army Reserve of the country) 13 "Russian Legion" there were enough different ones - both of them, and in general very remarkable people, for example, among us served a leading engineer of one of the largest domestic petrochemical companies, who showed great himself simply as an invaluable “Lefty”, or an assistant professor at one of the capital’s universities - a talented programmer.

Of course it was difficult. Very. And not only at first. And not only in connection with the war - after eight years of living in Donbass, I had already become somehow accustomed to shelling and even deaths around me. Well, the profession of a journalist implies sleepless nights by default - that’s why night patrols did not become something new for me, except that now I had to stay awake not at the computer at home, but with a machine gun, in armored armor, unloading stores and wearing a helmet.

The most difficult moment for me was probably army life - I didn’t see myself in the mirror for a month, washed myself with cold water for two months, slept in trenches, protecting myself from hordes of mosquitoes with a tightly zipped sleeping bag, lived exclusively in the fresh air - and in the heat , both in the rain and in the cold, after which the leaky roof, dilapidated walls and trashed armored bed of an abandoned hut in one of the front-line villages began to seem like just a luxury room in some five-star hotel.

And he carried a lot, chopped, dug, and then dragged, chopped, dug again. Well, of course, he shot, but it was, on the contrary, very interesting. And he lay there, pressed into the ground, while mines and hail packets whistled overhead and exploded somewhere nearby, and hot earth poured down his collar through his armored armor.

But no matter how much the rope twists, your professional will find you in war. So, in the third month of the contract, I was transferred from the “front” to the rear - to the city of Izyum, to guard the transshipment base of our unit (although it’s a stretch to call Izyum the rear, since the city is daily subjected to missile attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces).

Consequences of shelling of the city of Izyum by Ukrainian MLRS

In the photo, soldiers of the “Russian Legion” are distributing cereals and pasta to residents of Izium

And when the Internet appeared there - and tell the world about what is happening here, share my thoughts about this war, about military everyday life, which is what I am going to do in the space of my native “PolitNavigator” in the near future, especially since it is necessary take advantage of the moment as long as you have a table, chair, power supply for your computer and the Internet at hand.

this is my desktop

Well, to everyone who wants to take part in the holy cause of liberating Russian lands from the darkness of the Ukrainians, my advice is to join our Russian Legion battalion, which these days is producing a new set of fighters. All information about this can be read at the link. https://vk.com/event214688209.