Ukraine war: Bakhmut defender remembered by comrades
Senior lieutenant Pavel Kuzin took his position at the machine gun - the only soldier still able to fight. Everyone else in his troop lay dead or injured.
Suffering from shell-shock and with one arm bandaged, the 37-year-old fired at the waves of Russian soldiers trying to storm his position. They didn't even try to take cover, but simply walked towards him across the open field.
It was clear Pavel wouldn't be able to hold the position for long, but he needed to buy time for a rescue team to arrive. His final action in life was to ensure his wounded comrades got to safety.
The Ukrainian military says Bakhmut is now the scene of many "unprecedentedly bloody" battles like this, where they now have to repel up to 50 attacks on their positions every day. Russia has concentrated massive forces in this area, and their brutal strategy of launching human wave attacks helps them to advance slowly - but at a very high cost.
Pavel was in charge of a forward observation group that consisted of six Ukrainian soldiers. On 17 February, shortly after the start of their watch, they came under heavy fire. A tank began hammering their position.
Unlike relentless mortar rounds, the tank's aiming was chillingly accurate. Shells were landing a few metres from their trenches. Two soldiers were wounded and Pavel told them to go into a dugout. A combat medic went down to tend to their injuries and prepare them for an evacuation. Moments later, the wooden shelter was directly hit by a shell.
"There was a bright flash," one of the wounded soldiers with a callsign Tsygan told the BBC. "I was thrown onto the logs with such force that it nearly crushed me. I couldn't understand whether I was dead or alive. Someone was shouting, it seemed the sound was coming from 100m away."
It was Pavel's voice who was checking on them. The other soldier was half-buried under dirt and logs. He was dead.
Tsygan could barely move and Pavel had to drag him up over the splintered logs that blocked the way. It was painfully slow to move Tsygan just a few metres away into a nearby trench. When the shelling paused briefly, Pavel went back trying to find others.
Two minesweepers arrived to clear the logs and find the bodies. But yet another shell hit the dug out, killing one of the men and injuring the other. The tank kept firing.
At that moment, Russian troops started storming their position. Pavel called for a support group to evacuate the wounded and rushed back to his Browning machine gun to stop the Russian infantry.
The 206th Battalion in which Pavel served had fought in the southern Kherson and north-eastern Kharkiv regions. But the battles over Bakhmut were very different from what they had seen before.
"The intensity of fighting to break through our positions was shocking," says Mykola Hlabets, platoon commander. "Sometimes, [Russian soldiers] would get as close as 20 metres from us, crawling and moving under a treeline or across an open field. This is where we had our first gunfights at such proximity."
"They would just stand and walk towards our positions without any cover. We wiped out one group after another, but they kept coming."
Hlabets described them as a suicide squad. Others call them cannon fodder.
A number of videos have been shared on telegram channels recently where newly mobilized Russian soldiers appealed to President Vladimir Putin and the authorities to stop what they called "illegal orders" to send them "to be slaughtered".
Last month mobilised soldiers from Belgorod posted a video saying that they were sent for an assault mission without proper training. After suffering heavy losses, they said they refused to carry out their orders.
Often these poorly trained soldiers are reportedly forced to keep pushing forward. The assault group Storm of the 5th Brigade of the Russian army said in a video appeal that they couldn't leave their position because of zagryad otryad, or blocking troops - detachments that open fire at their own men who try to retreat.
These wave attacks are similar to World War One tactics, when troops charged the enemy and engaged in close combat. And despite their lack of training and experience, sending newly recruited soldiers to such assaults are bringing some results for Russia, albeit at a very high cost.
Ukrainians expose their positions when they open fire to stop those attacks. That allows Russian artillery to identify the target and destroy it, as happened with Pavel's post.
Also, soldiers at forward positions run out of ammunition while trying to repel numerous wave attacks. They then become an easy target.
That was the risk Pavel knew he faced as he rushed to his Browning machine gun. But as long as he kept firing, his wounded brothers-in-arms had a chance to be rescued.
Tsygan was bleeding in the trench where Pavel had left him. Shrapnel had smashed his pelvis. Another piece had gone through his thigh, and a third had hit his abdomen, "turning the internal organs upside down", he said. He was barely conscious.
"I didn't see much, it was all white," he said. "I lay on the snowy ground for two hours and I didn't feel cold or anything."
Next to him was another wounded soldier. The rescue team on an armoured personnel carrier hastily picked them up as shelling resumed. They didn't even have time to close the hatch, Tsygan says.
By that time, Pavel's machine gun had fallen silent. He died from a head wound: a piece of shrapnel had pierced his helmet.
Commanders of the 206th battalion decided to send a group to retrieve the bodies of Pavel and the other soldiers.
The next day in the evening, three groups of two soldiers each set off to bring the bodies back.
"The plan looked good on paper, but things quickly went wrong," junior sergeant Vasyl Palamarchuk, who was in the lead group, remembers. They got lost and nearly ran into Russian positions in the dark. When they got close to the dugout, Russians spotted them and opened fire from a tank.
Russian tanks and artillery had continuously shelled that post in those days, but the Ukrainian big guns had largely stayed quiet. The reason was a massive shortage of shells.
"Once we counted that the Russians had fired up to 60 shells a day, whereas we could allow only two," Palamarchuk explains. "They destroyed trees and everything else and you had no place to hide."
Ukraine is struggling to find ammunition for its Soviet-era artillery. Getting shells for weapons donated by Ukraine's western partners has its own limits. As the secretary general of the Nato military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, said recently: "The current rate of Ukraine's ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production."
Palamarchuk's group eventually picked up Pavel's body just a few hours before Russian troops seized the area. Heavy snow turned into a freezing rain. After numerous breaks on the way back, crawling through craters left by shells, they finally arrived. The whole operation over just a kilometre's distance lasted for six hours.
It was past midnight but the entire battalion gathered at the evacuation point to pay their respects to Pavel, who is survived by his daughter and wife.
"It was a huge loss for our unit," Palamarchuk says. "He saved two people but died himself."
Ukraine war: Bakhmut defender remembered by comrades - BBC News
Putin Is Flooding Ukraine With Russian Citizens: ISW
Quote:
They have been doing this in Ukraine since 2014, but it has been something that they have been doing for decades in an attempt to spread their cancerous diaspora.
Moscow has been accused of trying to destroy Ukrainian identity by repopulating territories it occupies with Russian citizens.Ukraine's deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, said on Wednesday that Moscow was involved in the large-scale resettlement of people from poorer and remote regions of Russia into Ukraine, most significantly in the occupied eastern Luhansk region. She also said that Russia was deporting Ukrainian citizens and forcibly resettling them in Russia.
She wrote on Telegram that Russian settlers in occupied parts of Ukraine were given financial help, accommodation, and employment, while local residents, often accused of following pro-Ukrainian positions, were deported.
Kyiv has been adamant that it would only consider peace talks once Russian troops have vacated the entirety of Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow annexed in 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin has, in various declarations, denied Ukraine's national identity as well as its legitimacy as a sovereign nation.
"In this way, the enemy seeks to destroy Ukrainian statehood and the national self-identity of society in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories," she said, according to a translation. "The aggressor country is trying to influence the change in the ethnic composition of the population," of the areas Russia occupies.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a U.S.-based think tank, said on Wednesday that Moscow's intentions may be to deepen Russia's social, political, and economic integration in occupied land "thereby complicating conditions for the reintegration of these territories into Ukraine."
The ISW had previously described such a depopulation and repopulation campaign as part of "a deliberate ethnic cleansing effort" that would violate the Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The think tank had also reported how Russian authorities had overseen the depopulation and repopulation of occupied Ukraine, particularly in the southern Kherson region in 2022. Russian troops withdrew from the city of Kherson in November 2022 but still occupy much of the region.
Ukrainian sources said in October 2022 that Russian authorities in then-occupied parts of the Kherson region deported many Ukrainian residents to Russia under the guise of humanitarian evacuations and then repopulated their homes with Russian soldiers. Newsweek has contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry for comment.
Meanwhile, British defense officials said this week that Russian troops were forcing residents in occupied areas to accept Russian Federation passports.
The U.K. Ministry of Defense said on Monday that Moscow's authorities in occupied areas of Ukraine, including Kherson, were coercing locals to accept a Russian passport by June or be deported and have their property seized. This was part of a "Russification" process it employed in the easter regions of Donetsk and Luhansk before the start of the full-scale invasion, the ministry added.
This comes amid a widely anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive and recent reports that Kyiv's troops have crossed the Dnieper River in the Kherson region.
The ISW said on Wednesday that comments made by Russian officials and prominent voices in the Russian information space, including from Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, show a "pervasive anxiety" over Ukraine's next move.
One Russian military blogger suggested that Kyiv's counteroffensive could be timed to ruin Victory Day celebrations on May 9, marking the end of World War II.
Putin Is Flooding Ukraine With Russian Citizens: ISW
Putin Fires 'Butcher of Mariupol' Russian General, Mikhail Mizintsev
he Russian commander known as "the Butcher of Mariupol" has been removed from his position, according to a Russian war correspondent.Colonel-General Mikhail Mizintsev has garnered a reputation for ruthless brutality in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He is particularly associated with the bombardment of the southern port city of Mariupol, which Moscow claimed in May 2022.
Mizintsev was appointed deputy defense minister for logistics in late September 2022, state media reported. The "butcher will build a new slaughterhouse," Ukraine's defense ministry tweeted as the news broke.
He has now been "fired" from his position, according to a Telegram post from Alexander Sladkov, a correspondent for the state-run newspaper Izvestia.
"Mikhail Mizintsev has had an interesting fate this year," Sladkov wrote on Thursday, describing the commander as a "friend."
He added that Mizintsev had "had no direct relation to the storming of the city" of Mariupol.
In a follow-up post, Sladkov said Alexei Kuzmenkov, reportedly the deputy head of Russia's National Guard, would replace Mizintsev in the logistics role.
The Russian military blogger, WarGonzo, also posted on Telegram about Mizintsev's dismissal.
Before taking the defense ministry role, Mizintsev had been head of the National Defense Management Center since December 2014.
On March 31, 2022, he was sanctioned by the British government for his "reprehensible" actions in Syria and Ukraine.
"Mizintsev is the Chief of the National Defence Command and Control Centre, where all Russian military operations are planned and controlled worldwide," the U.K. government said at the time.
"Mizintsev is known for using reprehensible tactics, including shelling civilian centres in both Aleppo in 2015-16 and now in Mariupol—where atrocities are being perpetuated against Ukrainian people."
Mizintsev was born in 1962, according to the Kremlin-backed Tass news agency, and graduated from the Kalinin Suvorov Military School in 1980.
Back in April 2022, Mizintsev was a little-known figure who was largely "obscure" and limited to "effectively administrative" roles in Russia's military, The Washington Post reported at the time. In the initial months of all-out war in Ukraine, the city of Mariupol, from which Mizintsev earned his nickname, endured heavy bombardment and fatal strikes such as on a theater and a maternity hospital in the now-captured city.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian defense ministry for comment via email.
Putin Fires 'Butcher of Mariupol' Russian General, Mikhail Mizintsev
