Elena Ivanenko fights at the spearhead of the Ukrainian troops. Their unit achieved the greatest triumph of the summer offensive, driving the Russians out of Robotyne. Her cry of pain over the losses is one of the most honest testimonies of the war.
“War is hell!” said none other than William Tecumseh Sherman, a general in the US Army in the American Civil War. Sherman was ready to unleash this mischief. He is considered a mastermind of “total war”, but warned everyone against entering his hell. Elena Ivanenko experienced it. Ivanenko is a volunteer fighting in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In a short video clip, the shocked woman suffers a nervous breakdown. In the few seconds of her video, the 42-year-old woman gives some of the most honest information about the nature of war and is mocked for it by couch warriors online.
Through tears, she says: “I thought I would never experience a moment like that, record a video like that. But I hate this war. I hate it! We lost so many brothers in a few hours. I lost that many in four Not lost for months!”
No PR interview
Videos like this are rare. Most interviews are handpicked. The soldiers appear composed, patriotic and willing to go into battle again. Here the Ukrainian side hardly differs from the Russian one. The military leadership has no interest in showing the ugly horror of war when it affects its own people.
Ivanenko is being made fun of online. Not necessarily from triumphant Russians, as one might assume. The trolls are bothered by their dyed hair – Ivanenko’s callsign reads “Redhead” – or the funny patch in the Pippi Longstocking look. There’s nothing to laugh about. Ivanenko is not a fashion nerd who accidentally stumbled into war.
Trained in Germany
The restaurateur joined the armed forces in the summer of 2022. Because the regular army didn’t want the inexperienced woman, she joined a volunteer unit – today’s 47th Independent Mechanized Brigade. Their motto: Semper audentes! – Always brave! When the battalion expanded into a brigade in the winter, she and her comrades were trained as infantrymen in Latvia. She then came to Germany to train on the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle in Grafenwöhr, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The 47th Brigade then took part in the summer offensive. The unit bore the brunt of attacks in August in the Robotyne area, where Ukrainian forces made their deepest inroads. James Marson documented her company’s battle for the newspaper. The failure of the practiced NATO tactics and the switch to fighting by small groups of foot soldiers.
Fight on the front lines
The “WSJ” described the fight of Ivanenko and her comrades: “This is what the Ukrainian counteroffensive looks like after two months: a slow and bloody advance on foot.” The newspaper described, among other things, an operation by Ivanenko’s group. After a whole day of heavy fighting, the soldiers broke away from the Russians in the evening.
“The withdrawing soldiers included Sad, Redhead and Eiry, the nickname for Kuznetsova, the teacher from Bucha. They fought their way more than a mile up a slope to the Ukrainian positions, exhausted, dehydrated and carrying the weapons of the wounded.
Barely 20 meters from their target, a Russian tank appeared and fired a grenade, killing three of them and seriously wounding four. Shrapnel hit Redhead in the calf and Eiry in the arm. Sad suffered a severe concussion and went into cardiac arrest. Doctors revived him.”
Dead zone in front of Werbowe
Ivanenko knows the war far better than the commentators. She’s not an Insta-warrior, not a model posing behind the scenes with camouflage makeup. Ivanenko was in the front line, in the fiercest fighting of the summer. The “WSJ” shows her at the grave of a comrade. At the beginning of August, their unit suffered heavy losses in the battle for Robotyne, but at the end of the month the brigade was able to liberate the village and hoist the Ukrainian flag over the rubble. The video is said to be related to the fighting in the neighboring town of Werbowe. There the Ukrainians were able to break through the Russians’ first main line of defense, but then remained in front of Werbowe. A Russian counterattack combined with an artillery attack is said to have caused the renewed heavy losses.
Ivanenko is not ashamed of her tears, she commented on the video on Instagram:
During the fight we focus on our purpose and the survival of ourselves and our brothers and sisters.
And when we return to a safe place, we are overwhelmed by all the emotions we experienced there.
Tears, anger, withdrawal. Every person lives differently.
It was the first time I had a seizure. I cried and couldn’t breathe. Loss is the worst thing, something that tears you apart inside.
Now you need time to process it, to understand it and move on.
I’m sure we have no way to retreat. For what happened to our brothers will happen to each of us.
With our families and children.
If we want to live and preserve ourselves as a nation, we must stand up and fight until victory.
The cheap hate of the internet
According to the video, the brigade was said to have been withdrawn from the area and taken to Avdiivka to strengthen the defense there. Pro-Russian commentators claim that the unit lost over half its manpower in the fighting. However, Ivanenko’s comments are unlikely to apply to the entire brigade. She is probably talking about her own, much smaller unit, the 2nd Company of the 1st Battalion, 47th Separate Mechanized Brigade.
The caustic mockery is not limited to Ivanenko; the same treatment was given to a Russian medic who collapsed in the face of Russian losses in the storming of Avdiivka a week earlier.
Source: WSJ, WikiWarriors. Instagram olena_ivanenko_rij