the 72nd Brigade is at risk of being killed in bare landings near Vuhledar
4 October 2024 12:21
Ihor Lutsenko, a serviceman who served in the 72nd separate mechanised brigade of the Black Cossacks, aerial reconnaissance man, civil activist, former MP of Ukraine
the 72nd had a hard time leaving Vuhledar, with heavy losses. Before that, the Russians had already appeared near the fallen power transmission tower on the road from Bohoyavlenka and even set up firing positions in the garages behind the cemetery.
Everything there is dear to me, every square metre. We used to hide one of our cars in those garages, and once we even got caught in a pickup truck near the garages – there were steel wires lying on the road, broken by a recent arrival.
the 72nd had a hard, bloody exit. A lot of equipment was burned. Several days of agony in the besieged city had exhausted the defenders, and when the morning dawn came, not everyone had the strength to leave.
Suicide bombers remained in some positions to cover the retreat of others.
According to the strange law of life, in those days when my native brigade was pulling itself out of Vuhledar with meat, people across the country were sitting in coffee shops and cinemas, passers-by were dancing to the music of street musicians in pedestrian zones; there were both sincere and ritualistic greetings to the defenders – and they were dying at that time, left, as they would say later, to their fate.
And I don’t know the knowledge, I don’t have the power, how to connect these two worlds, each of which is constantly going its own way.
While we were there, we were reborn. We were born here, in Kyiv, but we became born in the fields and basements of Vuhledar; now those iron-riddled hollows are our homeland, and we are strangers and visitors on the streets of the capital.
Some unknown people have grown up over the past three years, filled the sidewalks and subways, and their faces have new grimaces.
They are somehow light, translucent; we are dirty and dark, and baths and barbershops will not drive this darkness out of us.
Now the 72nd is a beast that has been driven out of its lair, at risk of finally dying in bare landings under the blows of artillery and fpv drones. The Russians’ radio control horizon from the Vuhledar skyscrapers now extends for 15 kilometres, almost to Kurakhove itself.
Pray to everyone you know how to pray that the 72nd Brigade, my first in this war and forever my native brigade (although I have long been out of it), is not wiped into dust in the deadly spaces beyond Vuhledar, that the remnants of the once mighty fighting organism are not destroyed completely, that it has a chance to be reborn, to save all its accumulated experience and pain for future victories.
