Interview

I am now an Afghan who defends his country – veteran reconnaissance man Mykhailenko

Entrepreneur Serhii Mykhailenko began his military career as a cadet at the Kyiv Combined Arms School in the early eighties. He served in the intelligence service of the Soviet Army and later the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He was a successful businessman. And when Russian troops approached Kyiv, he went to work as a partisan behind enemy lines in the Kyiv region. Kommersant Ukrayinsky met with Mr Mykhaylenko on the eve of his discharge from the army – the veteran turned 60. The intelligence officer spoke about how his perception of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan changed, how he crossed paths with former colleagues in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and about his plans for this war.

Kommersant Ukrainian : How do you feel about the war at the age of 60?

Sergei Mikhailenko: I entered college when I was 17, and graduated when I was 25. Now I am about 45. During these two years (of the Great War), I was not ill with anything. On adrenaline…. I was undergoing a preliminary medical check-up, and the doctor said: ‘Do you have blood pressure? What is pressure? How do you feel? I get tired, sometimes my ears ring. I know for sure that this is not applause. “What medication do you take?” Round pills from a jar, I don’t know what they are called…. The doctor says: “You’re a jerk”. I know… (laughs)

My wife is in France with my daughter. My son is at war. I worry about him, but not about myself, thank God. I have a lot of plans that I have to do. They ruined my life. Now I would be having fun, coming to the factory once a week, making a profit, big or not, going to France, skiing and swimming in the sea. And me, a 6-year-old, running around like a fool in bulletproof vests, do I need it?

Kommersant Ukrainian : After graduating from the military school, you fought in Afghanistan for the USSR, is it true?

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: Yes… But put on my boots. I graduated from the school. I am 21 years old. And I was given a “prescription”. I am to report to the Turkestan Military District, military unit such and such, on such and such a date. I arrive. I was told: that’s it, boy, go take a picture, in a week you are going to the fortieth army. I went to take a picture, and in a week they gave me a passport – here’s the plane, fly away…. I had no choice. There was one guy in the whole class who said “I’m not going to Afghanistan”. His whole service went downhill. He was one of the best among us, he studied very well, he was strong, very athletic. He came from a military family. He said, “I’m not going”. He was from a military family, he was from Chernihiv, his name was Vova Petrov, the nephew of the famous “Major Vihri”.

Kommersant Ukrainian : What was his motivation?

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: I don’t know… Do you know what a man’s happiness is? There is a template… Physical and mental health. Work as money and as self-realisation. Friends. For any man, it is important what his classmates, fellow students, those with whom you serve, work, and the male team think of him. And women, mothers, wives, daughters who did not marry because they did not meet anyone like their father…

It is very important not to lose face in front of your colleagues. And even if you are a rebel who is ready to say that you will not go to Afghanistan for any reason: fear, awareness of the criminality of war, it is incredibly difficult to break out of the rut, especially when you have not yet developed into an adult man. So I had neither the strength nor the authority to rebel. Only later, after two years of service, with a chest full of orders, you can impose your opinion, say: guys, there is a war, and we are officers, we are being trained for it! You sharpen your brain like a file, and you become a combat robot.

Kommersant Ukrainian : Was there an understanding then that this war was unjust, unnecessary? You were a conscious adult in the 80s. My parents, who were born in the forties, were aware. Did you, your generation, understand this?

Serhii Mykhailenko: Until I got to Afghanistan, I didn’t understand anything at all. And when I got there, I started to understand. I saw how the local population lives, they are hardworking, they grow hard bread on this infertile land, they live in poverty. They have a different faith, which we could hardly understand. And they are fighting for their land, fighting well. We respected them as soldiers very much. We were one of the few who fought with them with an open forehead… We walked 100-200 km away from our troops, performed tasks on the borders with Pakistan and Iran. A group of our scouts, 15-20 men, were walking in isolation, without tanks, without anything, and we suffered quite heavy losses. But we fought them fairly. It was not for us to go in and clear out a village and shoot people – God forbid. We had respect for these people. When we took them prisoner, we never used excessive cruelty, there was no cutting off heads or killing them.

They say: “How did you serve in the Soviet Army?”. I tell them. They say: “This is impossible! You did not serve in the Soviet Army”. All our soldiers had secondary, secondary specialised and higher education. The selection of soldiers was on the level of astronauts. In addition to the fact that there was a competition for 22 people for a place in the school, ready-made lieutenants were selected so that one out of ten got there. That is, one out of twenty could serve there, in the GRU special forces. Fans served there. I was the commander of a special forces group for six years. I was the lowest ranking officer for 6 years.

I approach this page of my life from the point of view of a professional military man. When this war started, I was running around the Kyiv forests, I was in charge of a small spontaneous unit there, I hadn’t served in the army yet… I said: guys, let’s imitate tripwires here, put the inscription “mines” and no infection will get here. Because I remembered how I felt in Afghanistan, when I saw a village and saw some tripwires…. I was afraid of everything, I didn’t know who was in this house, where to go. If you can think like the enemy, that’s half the battle. I could think like them, I could see myself driving an APC through an Afghan village with frightened eyes, and I could see them driving through the forest, passing Ukrainian villages and waiting to be beaten. This is an experience, a very interesting experience….

I now realise what pigs we were there. We came to a foreign country. I am now an Afghan defending my country. Why the fuck did you come here and ruin my life?

Kommersant Ukrainian : Did the current war come as a surprise to you?

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: We were taught about what is happening now in Soviet times. What is hybrid warfare? It is the impact on the civilian population. The impact on infrastructure and politics, the impact on the economy, the interaction with the enemies of your enemies. And Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, has put this together and written a whole “Gerasimov Doctrine” on hybrid warfare. We read it, studied it, it was available. And we understood how the events would unfold.

Frankly speaking, I did not believe that there would be a war until 23 February 2022. What they did was idiotic. It makes no sense whatsoever. From a military point of view, it’s suicide. The fact that they went to Kyiv and seized Chernobyl was nonsense, you can’t think of anything stupider. It is interesting that the general who led the Russians in the capture of Chernobyl is a former student of mine. He was my platoon commander in Kirovohrad. He came from the military school as a lieutenant, I was a company commander, a captain. He lived in Kyiv opposite the Combined Arms School, he had an apartment. His parents lived there…

How it happened… I can even give you a reprise in person…. Shoigu comes to Putin, and he says: “We are going to fight Ukraine.”…. He realises that the army is weak, a lot of money has been stolen, and a lot of weapons drawn in pictures have not been made. Their missiles are on combat duty and have not been serviced for ten years. Missiles that are made in Dnipro. Take the hottest water and pour it into a thermos, and it will cool down in a few days. The uranium charge releases energy into space. And this weapon becomes irrelevant. Take Korean weapons: out of ten shells, 5 do not explode.

Kommersant Ukrainian : But five do explode…

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: Yes. The military always choose the worst-case scenario. That they will explode, they will arrive, we will not shoot them down, they will explode…. But we are already at war! We have to say to our Western partners: “What are you afraid of?”….We are already in a fight! When a boxer is before a fight, his hands and feet tremble, he has a jitters. And when the fight starts, he just does his job. When the shells start exploding, you just do your job, take the wounded or the shells. You run somewhere, do your job. And the whole country is in this process.

They stretched the communications. They came in columns, it was useless. One tank consumes 1 tonne of diesel fuel. They had to carry a lot of diesel fuel and food, and it was useless. We cut off their supply routes, but they couldn’t refuel with us because we didn’t have that much diesel. If a tank has less than 200 litres of fuel, it won’t start at all.

I understood since 2013 that there would be a war. But that they would attack Kyiv from Belarus…. If they had left Crimea and Donbas, there would have been no Ukraine… If they had said: we want to conquer Ukraine not in three days, but in three months, they would have left Crimea, bypassed Mykolaiv, Kherson… The stupid thing was that they decided to take Mykolaiv… Why did they need it? They should have gone to Odesa, Transnistria, and cut us off from the sea. And why did they go to Sumy? They stormed the unfortunate Chernihiv, got stuck in the swamps, destroyed the city, killed a lot of people, and severed communications… We ran through Chernihiv’s forests, cut their communications, hunted down their soldiers, and they died of fear more than of war. It was our good fortune that they went to Gostomel, to Bucha, otherwise there would be no Ukraine anymore.

Kommersant Ukrainian : When you have such an army on your doorstep, on the border, for a year, and then suddenly they end up in Gostomel, at the airfield with a plane that everyone admires, was the war a surprise for us? Or was it a tactic to let the enemy get close to the capital?

Serhii Mykhailenko: What did they actually do? We withdrew our units from their permanent locations. And when the first volleys were fired at the airfields, we suffered almost no losses. In other words, the troops were quietly dispersed, moved to reserve areas, and there were few losses on the first day. In the novel Spartacus, there is a description of the first battle of the main character, the gladiator Spartacus, in the Colosseum arena. When he entered the arena against seven opponents. He started to run away, stretched them out and won single-handedly. And if he had taken on all of them at once…

They came by helicopter. They acted according to the template they used when they entered Czechoslovakia. They requested an emergency landing, seized the airport, and called in the troops. They had the same plan for Hostmel. The burning of our plane was mismanagement, or perhaps there was a plan to bring the keys to Kyiv on the Mriya plane. Maybe… And we had a lot of people who were waiting for the “Russian world”. My business partner said: “Where are you going, you fool? You will be killed, and I will be in charge of Vyshhorod district when the Russians take over”… Our business was connected to Russia.

Kommersant Ukrainian : After 2014, too?

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: All the time we were working… Oleksandr, my partner, was the deputy chairman of Naftogaz of Ukraine. We have known each other since the time when I, as the owner of the company, made equipment that he bought from me and installed at Naftogaz facilities. Of course, the oil and gas industry in Russia is much more advanced than ours. And the money paid there for our unique products was much higher than in Ukraine. My income was 90% from the Russian market and 10% from the Ukrainian market. I did not sell a single nut to Europe because they have different standards. That’s why my partner was focused on cooperation with Russia. I have not spoken to him for two years now, and I have no idea how we will divide the business. It is still to come.

Kommersant Ukrainian : Do you have any friends on the other side of the front? Do you keep in touch with anyone?

Sergey Mikhailenko: This is a painful topic. We were friends, close friends. But after the war started, almost no one got in touch, except for one. Oleksandr Musienko, from Bila Tserkva, whose parents live there. He advises Dugin. He is a charismatic, intelligent, very professional military man, he fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Africa, Tajikistan, a high-level professional. We communicate with him, and I communicate with him for intelligence purposes. When we were studying, I was physically stronger. He was… when I was around, no one touched him. Another student, the commander of the 45th Airborne Special Forces Brigade, Vadik Pankov, graduated from our school. My Afghan cousins, I served with one of them in Transbaikalia, another’s brother was killed defending Sievierodonetsk, and he himself has a completely bruised head, pro-Russian. The general who took Chornobyl was my student, he was a lieutenant, and I was a captain, I taught him, Serhiy Burakov.

I was killed by Bucha… I have a factory in Demydiv (Kyiv region)… The 24th Russian Special Forces Brigade, where I served after Afghanistan, fought there. When I saw the documents, I was shocked. My old officer’s documents bear the stamps of the 24th Brigade. I look and realise that this is the unit I served in for four years. That is, they actually destroyed my plant in Demidov.

Kommersant Ukrainian : What mistakes and miscalculations did you see on our part during the war?

Sergiy Mikhailenko: What was our mistake, the Ukrainian one: we turned brigades into regiments. I could have been a group commander, a captain. But officers have ambitions and a desire to be promoted. This is partly due to money, to self-esteem and to the assessment of others: when you are forty years old and a senior lieutenant, you are a failure. In the Special Forces, all positions were one step higher. A platoon commander was a captain, a company commander was a major, and so on. You could be a platoon commander for 6 years and not have any problems, you received your ranks on time. In the Ukrainian army, a senior lieutenant served as a group commander. And the guys, not having gained proper experience, are trying to find a new job. Although, in fact, the work of a reconnaissance group commander is very difficult and interesting. It is difficult. And it is difficult to master it in two or three years. Therefore, we need to keep people in these positions as long as possible.

And only fans who say I can do everything, I’m so interested in being a reconnaissance group commander, I don’t want to leave. You can keep people up to 35 years old for their physical condition. When you can run and jump. But our group commander was promoted to starlieutenant and he is already looking for a captain. He wants to get out of this position, and the professionalism of group commanders is falling. Now we are recruiting for intelligence …. This is a disaster – the level of knowledge of officers, soldiers, NCOs… In 2023, I worked as the chief of intelligence of a mechanised brigade… Kapets… Ground Forces, Army Intelligence: Incompetence is blatant… A very specific job and a very specific mindset are required… Training an intelligence officer is a psychology, a philosophy. The mindset of an intelligence officer is very specific.

Here we have a very wide front and few troops. I think about how to make sure that the enemy does not touch me. My task is to hold the front. I don’t care about what’s happening to the right or left. I am the head of intelligence of this unit. We need inflatable tanks, but where to get them from. We order wooden models… We have four tanks… Where do I get information about the enemy? From radio intelligence reports… I have chats that work all the time, 24-7, and a radio party: 26 messages…

The results of the interception are given. They are listening to us. We need to give them information that we are there… I give a technical task to my technically competent sergeant. He is a technician, but he is a useless scout, he does not understand anything. I say: we need to make sure that 20-25 digital radio stations and 4-5 starlink routers work in our area. We need to be able to identify the enemy’s reconnaissance aircraft. I give the technical task to make an electronic trace of the unit’s presence on the ground. I look for volunteers, they make this complex, and we install it on the ground. The enemy begins to reconnoiter, then shoot at this complex… and it’s empty… There are only two boxes, two generators and two soldiers sitting 500 metres away, controlling the complex on a radio station. As a result, they (the enemy) spent 200 shells, 100 of which did not explode. We found them and turned them into landmines. We put them in front of the defence line. I’m having fun with this, none of the neighbouring intelligence commanders have thought of this, because they lack experience. I don’t know how to solder it all together, but I found men who did…

The same Afghans, the same PVEO guys. I have this complex, I want to make 10 of them. But they say that no one can operate it. There is a servo that turns a light bulb at the command of a radio station, and the enemy gets the impression that a column of vehicles is passing. Ten times in one direction, as if ten vehicles had passed, and two hours later, the “column” returned in the other direction. The enemy thinks that they are carrying ammunition, and they start looking for it. We are fooling them.

We also need to get information. There are radio conversations. The key word, the phone number, was removed from the layer of Wi-Fi routers, they were tied to phones, and phone numbers to social networks. They calculated the regions. For example, Moscow. Naturally, they take photos, post them on Odnoklassniki and Facebook. We looked at their chevrons and found out which units they belonged to. The Kantemyr Division is standing in front of us.

Kommersant Ukrainian : The Ukrainian secret services are descended from the Soviet secret services. Is this true of the service you are directly involved with?

Serhiy Mykhaylenko: There is intelligence and there is the SBU. Until the year 22, it was saturated with “KGB juices”. Many SBU officers were pro-Russian. I can’t even call it the Security Service of Ukraine. For some time, many of our officers moved from intelligence to counterintelligence. From 1991 to 1994, I served in the Kirovohrad Brigade, was a commander of a special forces company, a deputy commander. And many of my officers who had served as group commanders for 3-5-7 years in order to get major positions, they moved to the SSU, to Alpha, to operational units. They had very good operational training, tactical training, they were good shooters, physically fit, and they were sorted into units. The ‘buyers’ came and asked me: who can you give away? What are the conditions? To Simferopol, Alfa, a colonel’s position, an apartment in Miskhor. I asked: “Who wants it?” “Я!” A lieutenant is sent, he goes with his family, lives there… Someone goes to Kyiv, Donetsk… They were ordinary army officers. Three or four years later, I come back, and his brain is working completely differently… As a commander and friend, I was told interesting things… “Russians come here, we communicate with them, we guard the facilities, they give interesting gifts, buy up businesses.”

Kommersant Ukrainian : Your service in the army is coming to an end, but your experience today is invaluable. What do you plan for yourself after you leave the army?

Sergiy Mykhailenko: I have a desire to run several military projects. I understand what the army needs. Drones are being made, nets are being made, and funds are being used irrationally. Victory in the war means the most rational use of human resources, ammunition, weapons, money, fuel… The more we save our own and destroy the enemy, the faster we will win. There are trenches on the contact line. There are infantry in them. There is no equipment there at all. Drones are knocking out all equipment for 10 kilometres. The artillery jumped up, fired, and fled. The tanks drove out, fired, and fled. As soon as the column is detected, that’s it! I have drones hovering 24/7. I won’t miss a fly in my zone. 5 km – Mavicas, 10 km – Furies, 20 km – Storks. Everything is monitored, radio intelligence is listening.

Try lining up ten civilian cars and driving from Kyiv to Chernihiv. You will make 150 calls to gather at the same time in Lisova. And try to gather 20 cars… that’s another 150 calls… As soon as you start assembling the convoy, you are on the radio. I send my small aircraft and we immediately find out where you are. As soon as we find you, FPV drones arrive. You start manoeuvring, there’s a 5 minute delay and the artillery blows everything away.

There are combat vehicles and volunteer vehicles: “Navaros, various jeeps…. But there are no frontline vehicles. And I want to start producing buggies as frontline vehicles. Everything is thought out. I want to be given money to start this venture. I’ll make five vehicles and give them to the Northern intelligence. If they say they are suitable, I will learn how to do it.

Interview with Oksana Shcherbak and Anvar Derkach

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