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When the death of Corporal Artem Fedorov was announced on the social network of the local newspaper of the Russian federal district Mari El on the first day of the month, the woman left a complaint in the comments: “Anyone else left?”
She herself, Olga Burmistrova, mourns the death of her nephew, Fedorov’s comrade-in-arms in the unit transferred on the first day of the war. The 31st Air Assault Brigade has already survived Chechnya and Georgia. But in Ukraine, he suffered “great losses”, up to and including disappearance.
There are, according to reports, those who are still resisting: the brigade is one of the Russian military formations, will now provide almost complete control over Severodonetska city whose future will determine the fate of Donbass, said President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
But until you get there in the first days of the armed conflict, it was destroyed by the resistance. This is evidenced by the testimony of a Russian soldier of this brigade, who was held hostage by the Ukrainians. The stories became the motto for Moscow Times describe the movements of the Russians in the first 100 days of the war.
THE PUB • CONTINUE TO READ BELOW
On the morning of February 24, the first day of the war in Ukraine, paratrooper Nikita Ponomarev boarded a helicopter, thinking he was on his way to an exercise in Grodno, Belarus. Only it was when the brigade entered Ukrainian airspace that the commander informed them that they were heading to war.
In an interview which, according to Moscow Timesprovided to a Ukrainian blog, a Russian soldier echoes recordings of other soldiers sent to war — and taken prisoner — saying how they felt when they realized they were going into conflict: “The troops were shocked, the people turned gray.”
BUT the unit landed in Gostomel, Kyiv region. – 22 kilometers from the center of the Ukrainian capital and almost 550 kilometers from the city, where the 31st brigade was supposed to go. And it was at the airport that he witnessed the strength of the Ukrainian defense.
The battle that took place there had two consequences. On the one hand, the failure of the assault air attack on Gostomel became the first obstacle to the capture of Kyiv. On the other hand, without an airfield in their hands, the Russians had no direct route to deliver weapons and supplies to the ground forces.
Then the brigade decided to wait for this material, as well as other military units, to meet them in the vicinity of Kyiv. We waited for three days and all this material arrived by land transport in droppers.spread across northern Ukraine, but not enough to secure control of the capital.
Suddenly, Ukrainian artillery stormed the buildings that the Russians had taken over. The battle lasted two hours, the equipment was destroyed, dozens of soldiers died, – this is how Nikita Ponomarev describes: “There was nothing left, not even a revolver. Almost no one survived that day.”
According to military estimates, almost 60 soldiers died in this battle, according to some reports, at least 34 paratroopers from this brigade died between February 25 and March 7. One of them was 31-year-old sergeant Ilnur Sibgatullin. You the surviving commanders decided to withdraw troops after that.
The brigade did not take long to return to the field, notes Moscow Times. Only in Gostomel and according to reports from the Ukrainian special services, up to 50 paratroopers will die in combat. In fact, of the 1,351 Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine in the first 100 days of the war, 19% will be paratroopers.
The 31st brigade was one of the military forces the Kremlin withdrew from Ukraine on April 1, when Vladimir Putin’s regime changed tactics. Some of the soldiers returned to the village and were later sent to Izyum near Kharkov. Others were sent to cities around Kyiv. AS WELL AS part of the members of the 31st brigade will be in Severodonetsk from the end of Maywhich, according to the governor of the Lugansk region, Sergei Gaidai, will be almost completely controlled by the Russians.
None of this is a sign of the motivation of the military unit: according to the Ministry of Defense, there were soldiers who preferred to surrender to the enemy; while others will simply refuse to return to Ukraine. In that “The salary is not paid, there is no drinking water, bathrooms or electricity in the camp,” Denis Tokarev, a former military man, admitted in an interview. Moscow Times.
