Lucky is a sniper with Ukraine’s Rapid Operational Response Unit. He tells liz_cookman why he‘s optimistic about the counter-offensive
t just 21, Lucky has already lost more friends than he can count. His phone is full of defunct numbers. “Many of my contacts are either dead or unreachable. Perhaps those ones are also dead,” he said, opening a can of Non Stop, a Ukrainian energy drink. His boyish looks belie his experience of war: since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Lucky has fought at Mariupol and Bakhmut, two of the conflict’s deadliest battles. In Mariupol he endured the siege of the Azovstal steel works.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive, believed to have started in early June, has been slow to make gains, but Lucky’s team has already helped to liberate Neskuchne, a village in Donetsk. When Ukrainian soldiers hoisted a blue-and-yellow flag over the ruins of a supermarket, Lucky and his colleagues were right behind them. Their job, as he put it, was to “clean up”.
Injured by a grenade, he had to run the gauntlet past Russian snipers to get help – “luckily, they kind of sucked.” When the order came to surrender, Lucky, who was ready to keep fighting, felt disappointed and scared. “We knew how Russians treat prisoners-of-war,” he said. A commander from Mariupol’s Azov Battalion had received a photo from one of his men’s phones, showing the soldier dead with his eyes gouged out. The message underneath read: “You’re next”.
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