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First days of the war - thoughts, experiences, actions
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When asked ‘How are you?’, Eldar Sarakhman, a Ukrainian journalist, photographer and videographer, now usually responds: “Fine. Much better than I used to be four months ago, when I went into the military administration for the first time.” He regularly visited the ATO zone in 2015-17 and witnessed what was happening in the military, but nonetheless had little idea of what the army really was. In 2022, he finally decided to enlist in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Eldar completed an aerial reconnaissance course in July, even though he had already had six years of experience in quadcopter operations. He felt guilty for staying in the rear with such skills, but still, it proved to be difficult for him to leave his newspaper Ukrainska Pravda for the military. Yet his internal safeguard went off in the end.
“People often think that the army and the military are the same thing,” Eldar shares. “Actually, they are two different planets. Those who had previously gone through conscript service made it immediately to the military together with servicepeople of the Territorial Defense Forces. The military is defined by consent and well-coordinated interaction between soldiers, while the army, as one of my military acquaintances says, is like a zoo. Animal instincts show up there from day one: people are primarily driven to survive, to eat something, and then hide. For instance, I still keep a Snickers bar left over from the first parcel we managed to get while we were taking a training course in the woods four months ago.”
During that training course, Eldar and his friends in combat did not see any people for a month. They took a shower from a plastic bottle or went to the pond once a week, and then they were all treated for conjunctivitis. The rainwater had flooded their tents up to their knees. The army has united what Eldar calls ‘the human carnival’ into one whole. Looking at his friends in combat from the side, as a journalist, he saw the motivations of all those people, very different in origin, character, and education, to take up arms, and also noticed their illusions about military service. At the same time, Eldar could not but feel a mental gap, because only a minority of his fellow servicemen were media literate and had the habit of reading the Radio Liberty or Ukrainska Pravda websites.
“As a journalist and a serviceman, I have been trying to detangle this web and see each soldier’s tragedy,” says Eldar. “Someone has troubles in their family or difficulties in his relationship with his wife. Somebody else left their work in Poland, the Czech Republic or the UK to join the Ukrainian army. These guys have not lived in Ukraine for, like, five years, and they are simply outside of our mental context.”
The army breaks people and changes them. Unlike the Russian army, Ukraine’s is not that deeply rooted in the tradition of rigid relationships between soldiers and officers, hazing, and mass alcoholism. Ukraine’s servicepeople are united by a common faith of defending their country. Soldiers have their own authority and can appeal against the decisions of the command – within allowable limits, of course. The Ukrainian army is still in need of reform, and this is an issue to be discussed after the war. Yet it is truly a people’s army. It only stands thanks to people who care.
“Our main task is to survive, not to wipe the Russians out at whatever cost,” says Eldar. “We will still need to return to our families and develop our environment.”
Eldar serves in aerial reconnaissance. He operates the drones that determine the course of this war. This is a complicated specialty which requires a lot of training time, so Eldar could prepare adequately for what was waiting for him, and take difficult living conditions or instructions from the command more easily. Nevertheless he still began to hate his uniform, because at times he had no choice but to wear the same kit for weeks on end, with no chance to take a shower. He felt really happy when took his first trolleybus ride during his leave after the training course, and saw well-groomed people drinking coffee in restaurants. Eldar is very fond of coffee, but as he could not get a parcel from home, he could not taste it for a whole month.
“It’s a catastrophe for a serviceperson not to have a spouse or a family in the rear,” he says. “When you are at the front, you desperately need to feel loved and supported by your dearest ones, because that’s the only way to hold on there.”
Sarakhman’s publicity helped him to raise more than 200,000 hryvnia (just over $5000) to meet his unit’s needs in just a few days. This money was enough to buy good ammunition, uniforms and a mobile refueling tank, something which is in short supply now. With the help of Eldar’s colleagues from Ukrainska Pravda, Mykhailo Tkach and Dmytro Riasnyi, the air assault forces also got a pickup truck.
“It’s interesting to watch how an ordinary soldier gains more respect in the army when they manage to get a truck”, says Eldar. “Some people cannot grasp that an extensive communication network is important and helpful in different situations.”
His civilian journalistic specialty found expression in aerial reconnaissance as well, though now it’s not the artistic but technical side of his work that matters the most. Every task is trivial and clearly delineated: scenes to shoot, editing to do, streams to broadcast etc. In the army, Eldar makes reports on training fields and military equipment, particularly that which has been provided under the lend-lease program.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Sarakhman came to understand that joining the military was his personal obligation. On February 24, he was still a civilian journalist. First and foremost, he evacuated his wife to Lviv, then he tried to work remotely for some time while staying with her, but in April he returned to Kyiv. Eldar made reports from Irpin, Bucha, and places in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions. He saw the torture sites with his own eyes and met exhausted and traumatized people. He was permanently coming under greater and greater stress as a journalist, , whereas the army perceives the war much more tranquilly because a soldier simply has no time for reflection.
“We will all get older and be traumatized,” Eldar ponders. “Looking at journalists as a serviceman, I understood that many of them knew the historical context quite well. Some, however, still could not comprehend that Russians were capable of atrocities like that. Well, guys, where are you from, to begin with? Our northern neighbors have always brought us mass murders, tortures, and rapes. How on earth can you work in journalism without really knowing that Russia has always been our number one enemy? I was not shocked at all the tortures, all the exhumations in Irpin and Bucha, because history is repeating itself.”
There is no more Russian music or literature in Eldar’s private collections. Instead, he has discovered plenty of great Ukrainian cultural product. He is absolutely sure that a new war will knock on our door in twenty years if Ukrainians, especially journalists, continue to disseminate Russian content.
Sarakhman’s uncle mentored him on the Ukrainian mindset. Thanks to him, Eldar began to research the history of the Stalinist repressions in Ukraine in the archives, studying documents and photographs. “Today I’m breathing in Ukrainian,” he says.
As a videographer, Eldar sees Ukraine as something composed of different textures and landscapes – the way it is visible from the height of a drone’s flight. He particularly loves the Poltava region for its black soil spread out to the horizon, and the once warm landscape of Mariupol with its shallow slopes and the Sea of Azov. All the Ukrainian towns and cities that Eldar managed to visit are now living in war and undergoing their own metamorphoses. The Cossack past has awakened in the eastern, southern, and central parts of Ukraine. Dnipro breathes war too: this is clear in the amount of ambulances delivering wounded soldiers to hospitals across the city.
“Our fellow Ukrainians remain beautiful amidst the war,” says Eldar. “This is what distinguishes us from Russians. We are a nation of developers: we love life in its various manifestations, while they are nothing but necrophiles. Why did Russians, for instance, torture and slaughter so many people in hundreds of towns and villages? Because they had one guiding principle, that God was dead. No educated person will ever kill and abuse civilians. These primitive people stuck in the year 1997 invaded a country that lived in 2022.”
Servicepeople in the army mostly speak about serious matters while on duty near the line of fire. As they talk about their families, civilian business, or their plans for the future, they make sense of their life decisions. Three months ago, Eldar still regretted his choice to join the military: like many of his friends in combat, he was sure that nobody needed intelligent people in the army. It took some time for him to ascertain that he was in his proper place. Today, he is in the reserves. Eldar says that he is ready for anything: he knows a lot of things which could be of effective help at the front. He has acquired the practical skills of handling weapons, and got a driver’s license in May so he can drive a truck by himself. Now he dreams of taking his friends in combat on a trip across Ukraine: Eldar wants to show them a lot of cool places so that the guys get a better idea of their own country.
In the army, he has already seen quite a lot of different human characters, which has helped him to understand that each soldier, dead or alive, deserves to be respected and celebrated, no matter if they were a public figure or not.
“Each of us will carry a bullet of mental breakup with the Russian universe after the war,” Eldar claims. “So many of our best people have been killed, gone missing or been taken captives… All of them justify our heroic deeds. I have never seen a nation struggle as valiantly in their war as the Ukrainians are doing. No book would have ever told you about anything like that.”
While at war, Eldar learned to compromise, and realized how important his family was in his life. He is determined to fight for it and protect it.
“I don’t think I could stand it if not for my wife,” he admits. “She has been profoundly sharing my feelings since the very beginning of the full-scale invasion and giving me all support possible to the present day. It’s not even the chocolate she sends me that matters, but my feeling of being loved and wanted back home. Ukraine rests on the shoulders of women like her.”