"Storm Z" - the Untold Story of the Kremlin's Penal Battalions

Part I: the battle for the Eye of Zelensky

I asked Dr. Livsci to provide us with a translation and a summary of “Storm Z” and the good doctor went ahead and delivered.

Before this, he covered, “Why the SMO?” which was a very in-depth analysis of why the SMO had failed and why the subsequent Not-War that followed was designed to fail as well. Take some time to read that series as well. Here:

It has always been the goal of my blog to provide dissident patriotic perspectives coming out from within Russia to patriots in the West. Most western Putin fans who believe in the Kremlin’s great moral humanitarian superstate and it’s 5D hyperdimensional chess war against the Satanic-Soros-Analic-Nazis of the West will be shocked to hear firsthand accounts of what this war really is after years of consuming propaganda slop churned out by the collective “ZAnon”. These big-name bloggers, almost all of them with spook backgrounds themselves, have crafted a kind of political-religious narrative around the savior Putin and sometimes also the governments of other BRICS countries. But this narrative is all nonsense that cannot stand up to any real scrutiny. I firmly believe that if people were to learn just how similar our respective occupation governments were, we’d be less inclined to keep massacring each other over nonsense. - RS

**

This here, fellow Stalkers, is my translation of two chapters of Daniel Tulenkov’s now-infamous book “Storm Z”. It received a strong recommendation from the late doomer-blogger Murz. The so-called Z-Stormers are the Moscow MoD’s hastily thrown together zek (penal colony) punitive shock troop battalions. These prisoners had fairly low to practically zero chances of surviving the SMO unscathed given the conditions that they were forced to fight in.

Our main character and author, Daniel, was imprisoned for some kind of financial tom-foolery, the details of which he doesn't elaborate on in the book save for claiming that the sentence he received was unjust. Take it for what it is worth. About a year into his term though, he had signed up for the Storm Z program to expunge his conviction and to get a chance to start over in society. He shares lots of anecdotal stories that are revealing about who exactly is sent to the front and how it all unfolds there.

This is the basic structure of the book.

But a few more observations first.

Right off the bat, we meet many contract soldiers well over 50 years-of-age. One gets the impression that this war is being fought for and by pensioners, at least on the Russian side, which would certainly explain the over-reliance on Soviet propaganda in the form of imagery and narratives. One of these old-timers makes his last stand and goes down fighting against the UAF soldiers that storm his position. We cover his story in the chapters that I've done my best to translate for you below.

Another contract soldier Daniel greatly respects, who isn't in these chapters, is pushing 60 and ended up signing a contact with MoD because he was drunkenly fleeing from the police and in the spur of the moment, he ran straight into the recruitment office to gain immunity from arrest. According to Daniel, this man won't last in civilian life long once the war is over, but for now he is right where he was always meant to be and has saved many lives.

Daniel himself is over 40 during the events that he is describing and I get the impression that the zeks being used as suicidal storm troops are actually slightly younger than the contraktniki guys on average.

The author of Z-Storm.

One not so surprising detail that Daniel mentions in regards to his deceased comrades is that the churkas [non-Whites from Central Asia] who work at headquarters at cushy desk jobs on the Russian taxpayer dime would steal the belongings and money of men recently killed at the front once they heard the news. Putin’s New Rossiyans always go above and beyond the call of duty to demonstrate their love for their adopted country as any Russian will be keen to tell you … once they’re sure that you’re not a fed that is.

Another interesting observation that he makes is that the MoD has a specific category of zek troops that they don't want coming home alive under any circumstances. He doesn't elaborate on who is put in this category but we can infer that incarcerated Russian Nationalists are the most obvious group being implied. Daniel is not one of these official nationalists himself, but he seems to have a basic sense of patriotism to his character. Said another way, Daniel is a basically a normie from the lower spectrum of Russian society.

Daniel also has a kind of eclectic writing style where he jumps around in his narrative from the present to the recent past constantly. Since I'm giving you two chapters in isolation, this can be very confusing, so I've added some clarifying text in-between segments. I picked these two chapters specifically because they are a great example of the absolutely brutal, chaotic slaughter fest that this war is. You will find no evidence of any brilliant planning, no "conserving lives" or anything of the sort on the Russian end either. It’s just pure merciless and relentless culling. And let nobody say "well sure it’s the Z-Stormers," as the old vet and his men that are killed early on in the narrative are contract troops, not zeks.

On the Ukrainian side, needless to say, it’s largely the same kind of cruelty on display as far as it concerns the cynical attitude of the higher-ups towards the lives of their own men.

I hope some of you find this firsthand account of the war to be as revealing as I did as far as getting a visceral, unpropagandized look at what is really happening at the front.

We start with Daniel’s account of surviving a Ukrainian assault on some village south of Rabotino during Ukraine’s big counter offensive last summer. He doesn't name the village for opsec reasons but the way he abbreviates it its pretty obvious he is talking about Novoprokopovka, which is the next little town south of Rabotino.

A few times in the story, Daniel mentions "the eye" and this is a reference to the “Eye of Zelensky” which is the high ground around Rabotino where some especially bloody and fruitless fighting had been going on for awhile. With all that information in mind, off we go into the narrative!

**

“Boy” was the very first to die. No matter how scared we are for ourselves, first of all his quick death shocked us. The whole house was shrouded in dust from the crumbling wall, snaking into the long room where I was located like demonic smoke. I had just woke up into a literal fiery hell. Guns firing everywhere, explosions in the yard, dust, something's burning somewhere, someone's yelling something somewhere. And like always no matter how many or few of us there is, someone is required to verbalize the obvious: "we're all fucked".

Let's see. Maybe yes. Maybe no.

I throw on my armor and helmet. From the yard and through the broken window something comes flying painfully and burning into my hip. No blood though and my pants are whole, apparently just a shrapnel burn. I recognise the characteristic impacts on the wall of the house, well whats left of it. "Bradley" just like I said.

In life we have all had a situation where we can rightfully say "I told you so". But hand to God, they usually seem justified only after the fact. But not in my case right here and right now. I was just a little off with the timing. I said they would come at 5 and they came at 3:30. The Bradley cockily flies up and offloads the assault team and their support advances at us from the tree line.

Here Daniel breaks from the narrative and takes us back two days.

The Boy and us stood on the “Eye of Zelensky” burning the hohols out the day before yesterday. We hit them with 2 barrels of artillery and shot up the hedgerows where they would gather up at different spots. Our team leader comes running up yelling, "where are you shooting theres nobody there"!

Well of course now there is nobody there anymore.

The next day it all repeats the same way. They own the tree line and come and go along it as they please. Crawling around in their dugouts past my dead comrades, those two who had been in the rear. They dumped their bodies on the road and now they lay there, maybe face down or maybe face to the sky.

Daniel is referring here to a previous incident described in the book where a stupid commander got two of his comrades killed when he mistook Ukrainians for Russians and opened fire on his own men.

Here they pass by on that road on which we ran away to the South.

In front of the sign "N-ka", they are dispersing and spreading. They are always near us. They hold everything under control therefore we are exposed in the Eye not only in the homes at the edge of the town, but right here under the entrance sign.

We are exposed at night and during the day cassets and drones are pissing on our heads.

There isn't anywhere to hide, people literally hide under bushes.

In the evening before it was fully dark I observed an appalling scene through a hole in the fence. A kamikaze drone marked one of our guys crawling under a tree. He desperately shot from a half prone position at the rotating drone which picked its trajectory and attacked with an ear cutting screech. Bright flash, explosion, but the impact was somewhere in the tree branches.

Maybe our man lived.

Now Daniel picks up again on the evening right before the attack he began the chapter with.

All night something we don't understand is going on. We haven't got any information or clear understanding of the overall picture. Our artillery is working on the field to our right. What or who is there, we simply don't know. One of the explosions throws a person up in the air about 3 stories, tumbling and flapping his arms like wings.

Who's that? We don't know.

How did someone end up in that field? What if it’s our 2nd group from the second BTR? They broke into the Ukrainian fortifications and sat there for a day. Than when no one came to support them, maybe they started crawling back through the hohols lines through that field and now our artillery is assuming they are hohols.

It could be anything.

Daniel is again referring back to a previous attack on the Ukrainians of which he never describes the outcome in the book, presumably because it wouldn’t get published with the details left intact. However his wondering here about whether their own artillery is hitting the second team of survivors trying to crawl back to their own lines through the Ukrainians reveals enough for us to know that their previous attacks did not go well.

When darkness fully falls things calm down, but from the treeline controlled by the UAF, someone is crying out in clean Russian for help.

Like wolves on the loose at the edges of the village hunting for a bitch in heat. The lust-crazed males rush to where only robbers are waiting. That’s how the hohols lure us in with clean Ryazan (a town in Russia) speech. But it doesn't trick me at all. I know what’s there by the sign — only death. That is, death for my new comrades who lie there now, but not for me. I came back from there, ran from there actually. Whats ours over there is probably a burned and knocked out BTR and the Lord of Hades consuming two of my friends before that sign.

Over there is the enemy. Over there is death.

And from there, at around midnight, rounds from a tank come flying in at us. A shot and an instant impact. You can recognize tank shots by their speed and the feeling of power with which they tear up the earth. Now they are plowing the outskirts of the village. Very thoroughly. Rounds are plowing directly next to our house. Through every gap, dust billows and dirt flys in through the windows. I just manage to flop down at my observation point, cuddling up to it and pray to make it through this barrage because our house wont withstand a direct hit.

With me in the room are two Dagestanis and Boy.

The Dagestanis piss on the tank and basically get their piss everywhere. They sleep cuddled up to their rifles.

I took pity on Boy and sent him off to sleep too, leaving me on watch alone.

The tank is reloading so i’ll have a brief brake to unwind a little. I smoke and look at my watch. 2 AM. I need to stay on watch until 4, but my internal voice is saying I have to switch out at 3. I have no rationale explanation, I just know I have to do it. Unexpectedly the room becomes bright, I lift my head and look outside. Somewhere far off greenish fireworks are going off in the middle of the sky and slowly floating to the ground. I guess it must be phosphor, its the first time I've seen anything like it and it’s impressive. I wouldn't want to be located where those greenish lights meet the earth.

Pretty soon it’s going to be lively here.

I know for certain with all my humble familiarity with the tactics of the VSU that all the activities of the past two days weren’t for nothing. In the morning at dawn they will attack with Bradley support. Right here, at the entrance to the village stands our incinerated BMP. Right here they'll role in and smash our whole house into rubble and deploy their assault team.

And the dead who lie there in the dark before our eyes loom closer.

At the Eye, ten people are posted along both sides of the road. Their fate is unenviable. They will end up in the fiercest mess — under fire from two sides. It’s unlikely anyone will make it out of there.

I’ve already shared my thoughts with the team leader that evening. He waves his hands as if to ward off my nagging. Between the lines I read "you worry about yourself quite a bit but you’re in the Storm now, you’re supposed to be fucked".

Nevertheless I do everything how I feel compelled to. At 3, I wake up the team leader and say that I’m exhausted and that I really need to sleep a little. He, with understanding, agrees. After all, he himself said that the tired will be changed out. He offers me a spot in the same room but I decline and go back to the room I slept in before. I need to sleep an hour or two before the guests arrive but only manage to sleep a half hour that night.

Here Daniel fast forwards 30 minutes to when the Bradley shows up interrupting his nap.

We held off the hohols’ initial rush.

From the South our armor is approaching, a tank with a BMP behind.

I can barely hear the clattering of the Bradley’s treads as it takes off and speeds away back in the direction of Rabotino. The infantry break up into groups, half crawling in the dark toward the houses to the left and right of us. But not to ours. The Bradley worked on our house, demolishing the outside fence but the infantry don't come in here.

Before that, from midnight to two, their tank ploughed up everything around our house but made no direct hit. Apparently, the hohols had marked our position as occupied and ready for defense so they were planning on taking the rest of the houses from the flanks or rear. And that’s how it played out. They managed to take a few neighboring houses, but they chased themselves into a trap. It all ended with them being blocked and cleared out of the houses they occupied or simply being blown away with artillery along with the homes. The prisoners we took cleared up the strange strategy, explaining that they were told nobody was even here. That is, by their calculations, our house was the only one occupied on the edge of the village and the rest were empty, with our main strength further on in the town. Thus we had given up the outskirts without a serious fight. But it wasn't to be and the attack met a very hot reception.

We sit at openings in the walls covering all four directions now.

I observe the yard ready to shoot whatever slithers in the darkness. In the street behind us, our tank manuvers and the BMP comes flying directly to our house at a wild speed. If one views vehicles like animals, it would be like an angry bear rushing from its lair as a jackal skedaddles away from him with its tail tucked between its legs.

On the move, our BMP opens fire on the retreating Bradley, the bang of her cannon is like beautiful music to our ears. The rev of her motor, the clattering of her treads, the bright flashes of her muzzle, the power of our native armor reinvigorates our spirits and snuffs out our fear.

When sitting in a house of shit and branches (and everything in Ukraine is shit, the people, the culture, the history and, of course, the houses) and 30 meters away an American Bradley is snarling, one begins to feel acute discomfort. I could of course try and slither out of the house and take a shot at it with the Satan’s Tube [anti-tank rocket] but I don't have the courage for that right now. And it turns out that besides me nobody even knows how to shoot the Satan’s Tube.

And here you sit with a rifle in a carton house and behind the ruined fence is a clattering, snarling, scary iron beast. So of course when it vanishes at the mad approach of our BMP firing while on the move our spirits are lifted straight into the stars. But the BMP cant be detained here for long. It is a bomb magnet and it’s soon making its way back into the interior of the town. Meanwhile we continue sitting at our positions observing everything going on but not giving away our position. All around us a wild fire fight is going down but we haven't fired a single shot. We'll only shoot if they come at us directly, but so far they aren't coming.

The battle dissipates to a couple of cross fires.

There’s heavy fire from our neighbors house where the old man is located. The old man is a contract soldier between 50-55 years old and a heavy drinker so he looks even older.

There’s shooting along the whole road and apparently part of the assault is moving in the field beyond the yard. We’re trying to figure out whats happening and where but we don’t have a clear picture. There’s no clear picture because while tripping in a cloud of dust in a ruined house, our team leader lost our walkie talkie when he carried out the dead body of Boy. We look for some trace of it in the dark but no luck just yet. Therefore, we sit like blind kittens in the half-ruined crumbling house and can only guess if ours are finishing off the hohols or if the hohols are finishing off ours or even worse, if ours are shooting at each other.

Meanwhile our house is occasionally fired upon but by whom isn't clear.

We don't fire back and wait on the sunrise. We need to find the damn walkie talkie because the situation is becoming seriously dangerous. The neighbors house is obviously being shot up by friendlies meaning that command thinks it's been taken by the enemy already when it’s actually still holding out against the hohols. If this continues then we are next to be shot at.

We really need that walkie talkie.

It’s just becoming light when an RPG round comes flying at our house. Half of the back wall crumples into dust and now, not only is our front open to the enemy but the rear as well. The RPG was from our own side. Apparently, command thinks the hohols have taken our position as well. Me and the two Dagestanis run into the ruined room and crawling on all fours to avoid being seen from outside try and dig out the cursed walkie talkie. Found it! We call command and ask them to stop shooting at us.

Squawks from the walkie talkie:

"What? It’s you there? Fuck, fuck you in the mouth, why the fuck were you keeping silent before, you were about to be in a fucking little box."

Box here has a duel meaning as it references the remains of Daniel’s team fitting in a shoe box, but also the artillery was about to start working on the box of grid coordinates where the house was located.

The box was really zeroing in along the neighbouring road and aiming for the Old Mans house. "Who do you have to your left?" asks the voice from the walkie talkie.

—"Grandpas there".

— "Looks like hohols to us!”.

— "No it's ours, it’s the Old Man.".

—"No it can't be ours, the box is going to deal with that house, be careful over there!".

The team leader yells back at them, begging for time, trying to convince command that the house is ours. The walkie talkie is silent. Then from the walkie talkie "we're sending a drone up now, you've got 5 minutes to exit the house and wave your hand. If nobody exits we are fucking the house up".

We try and scream to the Old Man, he hears us but doesn't understand what we are saying.

One of ours yells back, "yeah its me, you hear me?". They again yell his nickname with rasping voices. We yell one after another. Gotta get someone to exit the house and wave their hand to the drone. The Old Man yells back the nicknames of our team, saying he doesn't understand. Unexpectedly the volume of small arms fire concentrated on the Old Man’s position thickens. There’s an intense fire fight in progress. From my position I see our drone flying towards us from the middle of the village. Again the walkie talkie:

— "Well whose there blyat, wheres your Old Man, he coming out"?

—"Theres a fight there".

— "We know, we see it, but since he isn't coming out the hohols are beating him down. Now they are definitely going for the house".

Yeah, now the hohols were definitely in the house. The hohols were storming the position and now the Old Man was no more. And in a minute, the hohols would be no more, along with the whole house. There wouldn’t be anyone or anything left there because the box was opening fire right on the spot. The box buried everything, turning the house into a trash dump for broken construction material. The walkie talkie hisses:

— "Get ready for extraction, how many of you are there"?

—"Copy"

—"Relocate along the road to House D, three minutes to extraction".

Ours were pulling back from the edge of the town, that meant tanks and artillery would level everything left behind and then we would re-clear the area. As we left, I looked back, there at the entrance lay Boy’s body. Now he died a second time in this burning and crumbling house. His body would always remain in this ruin. He wouldn't even go home in a zinc coffin.

A fucked up situation, but we have to run to House D.

The house we need to go around to is next door. We can see it from the entrance. A short sprint and we are in place. But this small distance turns into a difficult and maddening piece of real estate because right on the approach to the house we start taking fire from a two-story building on the other side of the road. Someone falls and someone like me speeds up to cover the distance to the door. We will never work out who shot us but it was probably our own side. Some of us run all the way to the house and throw ourselves inside.

I don't, I run to the closest brick outhouse and hide there.

The shooting dies down. From a window in the house an unfamiliar guy with a rifle appears. It’s understood that we are friendlies, but all the same we don't know each other and I'm on someone else's position. I say where I came from and give my nickname. He asks the guys I came with who made it to the house to confirm my story. Everything checks out but the hohols start working on us with indirect fire. Cassets don't scare me, but before that they usually drop mines. The first lands far from me but it's a matter of time before one lands somewhere not so far.

I yell to the house for them to let me in.

The door opens and in three bounds I end up inside. Lots of people are in here, lots of wounded laying and sitting on the floor. From my group, everyone is wounded except me. Everyone is waiting on evacuation. Accordingly, I plan on evacuating with them. My epic in N-ke is coming to an end and its time for me to get out of here and return to my own people. It’s not like this is a simple task in itself, a convincing concise explanation of where Ive been, what I’ve been doing the past 3 days cut off from my group and why didn't I leave N-ke earlier needs to be thought up.

Daniel ended up in this battle due to being cut off from his usual team 3 days earlier, an event described at the very beginning of the book. Another Z-Stormer team arrives at the house at the edge of N-ke where Daniel took cover and he stays with them due to the likelihood of being maimed or killed trying to find his way back alone. But everyone in this team he fought with is now dead or wounded, so nobody can confirm his story upon evacuation.

I counted on the local commander confirming that I didn't desert off into the treeline somewhere and that I was directly on the front the whole time. That I couldn't leave the town earlier because of heavy fighting which I took direct part in. But here and now it wasn't clear how this could all be arranged. Whatever. Deal with it later. It’s time to actually get out of here for real first.

The evacuation point is a kilometer south from the town main street and covering that kilometer is no trivial matter.

As soon as the hohols understood that their assault has failed, they start pounding the village with everything they have on hand. The fate of their own troops sitting in the local houses doesn't worry them in the slightest. They are expendable resources and already written off. This cynical calculation of the Ukrainian command is entirely understandable. Their men are already dead, they were on a one way trip here. Evacuating them is entirely impossible. It’s only a short matter of time until we re-clear the outskirts and why would the Ukrainian command waste that time? The Ukrainians don't waste that time.

This is an especially revealing passage about the nature of the fighting in Ukraine. If the attacking side does not dig in in a timely manner they are dead men. In this battle the Ukrainians were dispersed and took prohibitive losses on the assault and were accordingly vulnerable to the Russian’s counterattack which would reach them much faster than any support from their own side could. Essentially, a failed attack equals death, because there is no organized retreat in good order possible for the attacker. Now imagine that, very often, especially after the Ukrainians’ failed counter offensive which this book is covering, it has been the Russian side making these absolutely suicidal attacks over and over and over again on heavily defended positions.

Also, remember that the Russian command had no qualms about dropping artillery on the Old Man’s position when it looked like he was surrounded. The cynical attitude Daniel is describing makes sense and it applies to both sides. This is what attrition warfare really looks like — taking as many of the enemy out with you as possible. The Ukrainians started pounding the village outskirts without wasting time because the Russians were still there and theres no point in giving the enemy an easy time to evacuate their wounded.

Your own men are as good as dead anyway, so why hold back?

The northern outskirts of N-ke are covered by fire from two sides. The house where we are located is covered by our side since the remnants of the enemies assault team could try and take cover here and a second line which also includes our house is also covered by the hohols.

Not to insult anyones intelligence but he means that both sides are firing close to the house. The Russians want to prevent the remnants of the Ukrainian assault team from digging in anywhere and the Ukrainians want to complicate the Russian evacuation.

Prisoners we already have and command doesn't need any more of them, so orders on that account are very clear. Zero them out [kill the Ukrainian prisoners].

Sitting on a box against the wall, I listen intently to radio chatter between Azart, the overall Russian commander in N-ke, and our group moving to re-clear the Northern outskirts. It suddenly comes to mind that this is the first time I’ve ever observed the hohols being butchered like this. Usually, it’s always us running away from somewhere, losing comrades and vehicles, failing our tasks. Well, two can play at this game it seems. A prisoner reported that they were all of 18 of them on the assault. How many were in the support group in the treeline he doesn't know. But this doesn't interest anyone. They were beaten back already in the morning and most are buried in the Old Man’s house. Now, what is interesting is the 17 who made it into the village and who are dispersed among a few houses.

The whole event now becomes a sort of safari.

The hohols are now divided, blocked and destroyed by Azart’s fire. There is no trace of the kind and hospital Russian spirit here. The hohols are hounded absolutely without mercy like dangerous animals accompanied by our very unhypocritical comments. They resist sluggishly without any desperate fatalism. The clever hohol brian doesn't lose hope in finding a window pane from which to jump and crawl away.

In the most desperate situation he will surrender. Russians are kind. They will take you somewhere warm, feed you and give you cigarettes. Sympathize, listen to some sugary verbal vomit and send you somewhere safe in the rear. Than they will exchange you full and healthy for one of our half corpses with crushed testicals and smashed faces. The clever hohol reasons like this. But today isn’t his day. Not one managed to slither away from N-ke. All the carcasses were tagged by the evening.

Meanwhile we needed to move to the evacuation point.

That someone was pissing on the hohols somewhere on the outskirts is one thing but the the heavy fire on our position was another level of problem. A mine landed right in front of the door and shrapnel punches right through the Chinese plastic door and lands a few centimetres from my face, opening up the bicep muscles of the senior enlisted soldier in the house in two places.

Thankfully the bone is untouched. The seniors wound added urgency to the evacuation. Someone applies a tourniquet and injects him with morphine. Three more wounded are selected and sent with the first group. They had just left the house when they came flying back inside. From the two-story building we are again taking fire. We needed to clear up who is shooting at us and why.

With curses and threats into the radio, the situation is resolved. And once more repeated with the evacuation team flying back inside the door.

—"What the fuck! You assholes are fucking shooting us again!".

—"We aren't doing shit!" .

— "Who the fucks is shooting?".

— "Who the fuck knows.".

It ended up being a group of hohols who had settled on the second floor when the guys we were cursing were on the first floor. For that whole time, nobody even suspected the existence of this group of hohols even though they weren’t even hiding and shot at everything that entered their field of view. Fire which after the morning circus everyone wrote off as coming from friendlies with curses and responded by yelling like idiots at them instead of suppressing it.

Of course accounting for the hohols and destroying them was a matter of time and this group eventually was found and cleared.

We could have just sprinted to the evacuation point under hohol artillery fire but the chaos from the hohols who had made it into the village stubbornly refused to abate. Panting and pale, the troops who play the role of runners from headquarters come gasping up. "Listen guys, behind the wall there.. along the second half of the house there have been two hohols sitting there since the morning the prisoners say".

Well we are walking around scrambling from the fire from the two-story building and, apparently, the bastards are sitting right next door and could have laid us out at anytime, for example when we ran from house to house. Alright, we send two riflemen and a machine-gunner to sort things out. The rest of us perch by the windows in case the hohols make a dash for the back yard. The guys move out where the squatters are supposed to be and wild shooting pops off. The guys come back.

There was nobody there.

— "Where were you shooting"?

—"We shot up the room incase they were there".

Ahhh, it all becomes clear. They were hunting for ghosts.

Well at least its all clear that there are no lurking reptiles right under our noses. Now we can finally go. And it would have been all fine, but then a tank starts working on the neighboring house. Not a mortar or artillery, but a tank. A tank is serious, a tank is nerve-wracking. Find a corner sit down and pray while listening to tiles fly off the roof from the approaching explosions. Mixed in with the tank are cassettes. That’s also a classic tactic of the VSU. Suppress the enemies psyche with the tank (and a tank will seriously suppress the psyche, much more efficiently than mortars or artillery) drive him from cover and mow him down with cassettes. And cassettes were ripping up our whole perimeter as well as the neighboring house. I could hear the platoon commander from the neighboring house speaking to Azart on the radio asking for artillery help.

— "Theres apparently a tank working on us, distance one and half to two kilometres, smother it!".

That is do something, anything. We couldn't really take any measures, we hadn't seen or heard a single exit to the south but meanwhile the tank is energetically and determinedly leveling our house. The neighbors house is already missing the roof and ours it seems is about to buckle. In the sky, we have enemy strike drones and mines raining down and if a hole should appear in the roof ...

This was a bit hard for me to translate goodly, the salient point that is lost here due to my limited translation abilities is that the tank is apparently shooting from the south which is well within the Russian controlled part of town and nobody saw or heard of a Ukrainian tank breaking in that far. But there are Russian tanks in that part of town.

Azart rasps and hisses through the radio "listen, what kind of vehicles do you have with you over there?".

Yeah, right in the middle of all this noise and racket let’s figure out what kind of caterpillars are clanking somewhere over by the neighbors house, sounds good. From the radio come a nervous, "fuck, where did it come from, north or south?".

North is Rabotino and the Ukrainian side. The South is ours.

The tank tracks sound closer but it's still not possible to determine from which direction. We have nothing besides small arms on us. We tossed away all our Satan’s Tubes when we left our house on the outskirts. We didn't take anything with us. Some kind of tracked vehicle is now rumbling next to the house and Azart is hysterical:

— "where the fuck did it come from, north or south?".

He calls up the artillery crew: — "Destroy it!".

I cant even convey properly my shock at those words. Damn it, you're the commander! You have comms with headquarters. What are you saying? You don't know what kind of vehicles are rolling around your own town in broad daylight? And if you don't know, how can you categorically demand their destruction? I kind of doubt some hohols jumped into a Bradley and drove here from Rabotino in broad daylight. In the morning while it's dark sure but not at 2 in the afternoon.

Then from the radio sounds the code for an air alert.

Thats a huge rarity, the first time I've ever heard it actually. They aren't supposed to have many helicopters here. Happily the helicopter didn't show up, maybe it flew off somewhere else. But the tank starts working again. The neighbours house can no longer cover their hysteria. "Destroy! That! Beast!". The beast throws rounds closer and closer. With sadness I think of what a pity it is to live through such a morning just to croak under this ruined house.

I’m in the kitchen now where the only free corner is to be found.

Now I unsuccessfully try and find something to eat. On the other hand I find a nice hat. I have no hat at all and here’s one that is like new. "Whose hat?" I ask the guys around me and they all shrug their shoulders disinterestedly. Everyone is exhausted waiting for the damn tank to level the house. And it will level the house eventually. It seems like they have seriously decided to finish us off. Maybe revenge for the guys they lost in the morning. Or maybe they spotted our prisoners (who are in the neighbors house) and want to finish them so they won't say anything.

But what can they say?

It’s classic mental retardation. I already saw the interrogation filmed on a cell phone. The Ragul [derogatory term for Ukrainian hicks or bumpkins] mumble something, moan something, pretend they don’t understand Russian. In the end they remember after some physical impacts but mumble and groan and cover their noses until the cajoling stops.

From above orders have already arrived to not zero these prisoners out and instead carry them back to the rear. In order to get them to the rear we need to move some of our wounded and arrange a convoy. Someone offers to zero out the prisoners and claim they just died in an accident. Some headquarters mole shoots down the idea, the FSB has personally instructed him to deliver the mumbling Ragul to the rear. So the hohols are spectacularly lucky, our Chekha will never zero them out, that’s for damn sure.

Well, let them live I guess.

That is, if their brothers in the Leopard don't bury them with along with us in this house. And to not end up buried, we need to exfil somehow. We try to come up with a plan on how to exfil under this much fire when someone remembers a metal drainage tube covered in asphalt under the main road. We start sprinting there in small groups while the tank is reloading.

Amongst the wounded, we have a blind guy. Moving him requires a lot of fuss and time and we don't especially have a surplus of time. Cassettes continue raining and drones keep flying and soon the tank will join in shooting with them. We barely finish exfiltration with all the blind twisting and squirming when the tank starts firing. Over there they have already been informed we have moved and the tank starts clearly beating on our culvert. The tube buzzes, bangs and jumps but nothing can touch us here. Not the tank, not the kamikaze drones, not the cassettes. Nervous tension drains from my body and I realize how exhausted I am.

I decide to try and take a nap.

We leave Daniel and his men here, hiding out in a drainage pipe underground, taking cover from the drones and the tank shelling.

**

Sci-fi fans will no doubt notice parallels between the zek battalions and the Death Korps of Krieg. Many Russian-speakers on the Runet already have, leading to the meme that the unfortunate denizens of the Slavlands are already living in the grimdark Warhammer 40K setting.

Stay tuned for Part II.