An excerpt:
He knows most of these men will be on the front lines in a matter of days or weeks. As the soldiers run through their drills, Kondratenko paces back and forth with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his shoulder, shouting commands in a booming voice one would more likely expect from a U.S. Marine Corps drill instructor than a civilian doctor.
Every so often he smacks a soldier’s head with his canteen. But in between his shouted commands, he frequently leans down close to his low-crawling pupils, almost whispering advice and instruction in their ears.
“I could be home relaxing, but I have to be here,” he says. “I know the things I’m teaching them will save their lives.”
Kondratenko comes across as being hard on the soldiers. But it’s a role he must play for the sake of the men’s training. Before teaching soldiers how to apply a tourniquet, he puts them through a series of physical exercises, pushing them to exhaustion. Physical exercise simulates the physiological responses to combat, and Kondratenko knows that if the soldiers ever need to use the skills he is teaching them today, they will have to do so under extreme stress.
“I make the training very hard,” Kondratenko says. “I’m tough, but the price of a mistake in combat is death. We have lost a lot of really good people, and we’re tired of burying our boys.”
An excerpt:
The Russian-occupied Donbass enclave in eastern Ukraine is on the verge of economic and social collapse. That grave fact casts the Russo-Ukrainian war in a different light. Normally, wars are fought over prize territory: winners gain it, losers lose it.
In this case, the implosion of the Donbass means that whoever controls the enclave is, in fact, the loser.
In this case, the implosion of the Donbass means that whoever controls the enclave is, in fact, the loser. As the man who owns the enclave and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future, Vladimir Putin is thus the loser. And both Russia and Ukraine know it.