Eyebrows were raised. The assembled officers murmured. A strike against pro-Russian and possibly actual Russian forces seemed crazy to the volunteer soldiers. Also, three weeks was more than they could reasonably expect after having already exercised for over two weeks in winter. Serving for thirty days per year was their duty and the ‘leave of absence’ they had negotiated with their wives and girlfriends.
The murmur quickly stopped when the colonel, a professional soldier, called the room to order. “I know this is an unpleasant surprise for you volunteers, and believe me, I understand. We cut into the eleven-twelfths of your life that are your family and your job. However, you pledged to defend your country in times of conflict, and I trust you will do just that. You will brief your men and women in the afternoon accordingly. They may take the day tomorrow to inform their spouses and employers and make arrangements. We will arrange for extra landlines here in the staff building for them to use. Any other communication is strictly forbidden. Do remind our soldiers of this!” The colonel looked around the room.
Everyone nodded in hesitant agreement.
“In the evening the Archbishop of Poznań will hold a mass for the brigade and together we will pray for a quick, successful mission and the safe return of our comrades in arms.”
The battalion commander then explained the 121st Light Infantry’s role which was basically exercising and being ready to defend their designated district in the Greater Poland province around the city of Poznań.
“Well, at least we’ll be doing the thing we actually signed up for,” Michał whispered with a slightly ironic smile.
The irony was lost entirely on the pale looking captain to his right. The thought of briefing their volunteer troops and telling them they would not see their families for at least three weeks made all company COs in the room visibly unhappy.
Other than the duration, nothing in this exercise would be different from a regular exercise. The soldiers would be taken to their limits physically, take their MSBS 5.56K assault rifles to the shooting range, and get acquainted with some newly issued equipment like the revolver-type grenade launcher RGP-40.
And of course, a lot of time would be filled with the tedious chores that make up the majority of a soldier’s life, cleaning guns, cleaning the barracks, cleaning and servicing the Polish-made Star trucks and the few tracked personnel carriers. Watch duties would be even less exciting, here in the western Greater Poland province.
✽✽✽
The sun had just set over Dovzhansk in the Luhansk Oblast. East of the town that once used to have a population of over 65,000, wide fields currently lay fallow.
A column of six olive-painted flatbed trucks moved east on a rural road toward Gukovo in Russia. There was no border, no customs office, nothing but a small sign telling travelers on road T1311 that from this point onward they were driving on a road of the Russian Federation.
The KamAZ trucks bore no markings and had no license plates. The drivers were all skinny twenty-year-olds with shaved heads wearing olive fatigues.
The soldiers had been ordered to paint over the markings designating their unit, the 2nd Automobile Battalion of the 69th Separate Logistics Brigade. They had also been ordered to remove the license plates, their rank insignia, and wear unmarked caps instead of their berets.
They had been told what was happening. They were not transporting heavy military ordnance from a Ukrainian field to a depot of the Russian 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade near Kursk. Whatever was on their trailers were not Buk-M2 surface-to-air missile launchers. The guys they had seen were not Russians.
Five years earlier, other conscripts had been tasked with a similar mission after a Buk-SAM had downed Malaysian Airlines MH17 over East Ukraine. They had posted their heroic deeds on social media, and for this, they had been shot without a court-martial.
Unlike their late comrades, the men of the 2nd Automobile had understood, they were not there, and they were not doing anything.
Nine
“I’ll be damned,” Mark Sanders nearly spilled his coffee over his white shirt when he read the morning news.
The lead story of DIE WELT was titled ‘WAR IN EUROPE - Poland and Ukraine launch joint attack on pro-Russian territories’.
Mark kept the video stream of the news site on while doing some work. Most of the airtime was filled with pictures of Polish troops gearing up, choppers lifting off, and fighter aircraft doing victory rolls. All stock footage from past events like NATO maneuvers, airshows, and the like. The corresponding pictures of Ukrainian troops with their lively blue-and-yellow flag waving overhead followed and also a short segment on the very nationalist, actually fascist militias from West Ukraine that had played quite a role in the conflict.
The Polish and Ukrainian public cheered the initiative, and even the Polish opposition supported a tough stance against Russia. Damn, this could turn ugly, Mark thought.
He actually wanted this weird conflict ended. He did, however, also believe that if you poke the bear, you need to be able to kill it, too. And that was for damn sure, the Poles and Ukrainians were nowhere near well enough equipped to deal with the Red Army. It’s still the Red Army, even if they call it differently now! he thought.
He stopped working when the live stream turned to a press conference in Brussels. The NATO general secretary declared that the Western military alliance would have no part in the operations. Furthermore, he announced to transfer the Rapid Response Joint Task Force into the Baltic States and stop the rotations into Poland. Mark sat in his home office completely dumbfounded.
“Now that’s a great signal. NATO chickens out even at the thought of confrontation,” he said to the screen.
Mark hated the thought that history might actually repeat itself. Before Hitler and Stalin conquered and divided Poland in 1939, the United Kingdom and France both had signed mutual defense pacts with the Central European country. They had declared war a few days after the invasion and then had done nothing.
✽✽✽
The allied forces of Poland and Ukraine had a clear objective, re-establish Ukrainian rule in the eastern provinces. To do this, the allies would have to seal the border to the east, then capture or kill all combatants, seize all military equipment, and take the leaders into custody.
According to latest intelligence reports, the tiny Luhansk and Donetsk Peoples’ Republics had over 45,000 troops and modern Russian weapons systems, mostly surface-to-air missiles and artillery. Looking at the numbers and the quality of the materiel this was not two grown-up bullies taking on two kindergarten kids. The conflict could instead be described as a battle of equals.
What the international public did not know was that in less than a week, the Russian defense ministry had pulled out all ‘patriotic volunteers’, ‘soldiers on leave’, and the mercenaries of the Volking Group. Volking is a private military contractor, basically the Russian answer to Blackwater.
Thus, the mighty military of the tiny republics shrank to less than 20,000 men, mostly ex-conscripts and contract soldiers from all over the former Soviet Union. Most of them had found employment nowhere else but here. The re-enlisted and sloppily re-trained thirty- and forty-somethings were essentially a Category-C army with little over a tenth of its nominal outlay of equipment.
They all had AK-74s, and the officers had Makarov pistols. They had ample ammunition for these light weapons, trucks, and armored personnel carriers to move around, but heavy equipment was in short supply. All the Russians had left them with were twenty Soviet-made 120 mm mortars, fifteen T-64 main battle tanks, and five 9K35 Strela-10 surface-to-air missile system. This was all that was still in working order out of the hundreds of tracked infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled howitzers, and battle tanks they had captured from the Ukrainian Land Forces during the early months of the conflict.
✽✽✽
Ukraine’s Armed Forces had been on their version of DEFCON 2 for years. The Poles had been similarly jumpy and had hastily moderniz
ed their military since the Russians had started their hostile policies toward their former satellite states.
While the Ukrainian forces resembled the late Red Army with their Soviet and early post-Soviet equipment, the Wojsko Polskie resembled a veritable patchwork of weaponry. They were equipped with Polish-made frigates and trucks, German Leopard 2 main battle tanks and Mercedes-Benz G-class utility vehicles, Soviet artillery and surface-to-air missile systems, American F-16 fighter-bombers and S-70i Black Hawk assault helicopters. The youngest piece of heavy equipment was ten months old, the oldest almost fifty years.
✽✽✽
Operation Eagle Strike was a go. The Bydgoszcz-based PsyOps Group were the first in the theater. They hijacked all civilian and government radio frequencies using a high-powered SOMS-B mobile radio transmission unit. Unmanned aerial vehicles and weather balloons amplified the signal to cover a two-hundred-mile radius around Luhansk.
Popular Russian and international music was interlaced with warnings to the civilian population to stay inside and away from the borderline. The messages could be heard all over East Ukraine and West Russia, in Kharkiv, Mariupol, Rostov-on-Don and all the small towns in the Rostov Oblast. In addition, over twenty million leaflets were dropped from planes and UAVs. They tried to coerce the armed rebels to stand down and surrender and also told civilians to stay out of the line of fire.
The shooting war began with massive airstrikes on rebel radar, SAM missile, and artillery positions across the region. Polish F-16 and Ukrainian SU-24 fighter-bombers sortied and more often than not returned to base without a kill. Closing in on their target coordinates, they had to realize that their assigned targets were not where they had been just two days earlier. Neither Poland nor Ukraine had their own AWACS aircraft to direct attacks with live radar and SIGINT, signals intelligence, data.
The next task was to secure the border and block possible supply routes from Russia into rebel territory. The Polish Chief of General Staff, emphasized to his Ukrainian allies that with most opposition materiel moved to unknown locations, it would become even more vital to stifle resupply into rebel territory.
The northern part of the border, about 55 miles long, would protect itself as it primarily consisted of the river Siwerskyj Donez. Really problematic would be the 170 miles from the village Popivka in the north to the Black Sea in the south. The Allied Joint Chiefs decided to rather destroy than take the highways and train tracks crossing the border.
Even though the primary ways to bring in heavy weapons in large numbers could be effectively destroyed, the border would still remain wide open. It could be crossed by tracked vehicles at any point. This is agricultural country, often enough the national border and the border of a farmer’s field do not coincide. Plowing their fields in Spring, some farmers actually cross the border dozens of times a day without even thinking about it. And yet, tanks running on their own tracks are slower than transported on flatbed trucks or rail cars. Also, they drink up Diesel like crazy and need road-bound trucks or stationary depots to refill. Killing the roads and rail tracks would severely impede any Russian counteroffensive if it would happen at all.
Rural road T1311 and dozens of similar roads with absolutely no border office or gate were plowed on stretches of a hundred yards or more by CBU-87 cluster bomb units. Most of the world’s countries had ratified a ban on the use of CBUs. Not Poland, not Ukraine, and neither had Russia.
An especially economical use of Polish smart bombs could be observed near the Russian town of Avilo-Uspenka. An F-16 fighter-bomber armed with two AGM-65 Maverick air-to-surface missiles destroyed a bridge crossing the railroad tracks. The first missile took out both the road and railroad toward Donetsk. With one Maverick to spare the same jet was directed toward the Ukrainian customs station near Maksimov on E58. Another precision strike with the guided missile tore through the ensemble of small buildings just four-hundred yards outside the village on the Russian side.
The villagers were shocked when they heard the massive explosion. Maksimov actually had more gas stations than street crossings and one stray bomb might have blown the whole community to bits.
The inhabitants of a small village across the border from Izvaryne in Ukraine were less fortunate. A Ukrainian SS-21 battlefield short range ballistic missile was aimed at the Ukrainian part of the border crossing on highway A260. The Soviet BSRBM was not a smart weapon, but it rarely strayed from its pre-programmed course.
This thirty-year-old missile did. A malfunction of its inertial guidance system was detected too late. Its five-minute flight ended on Ulitsa Tsvetkova right in front of the village schoolhouse. The one-thousand-pound conventional warhead razed three private residences. Its massive blast tore a dump truck-sized hole into the western wall of Elementary School No. 3.
The twenty-two second graders were waiting for the bell to announce first recess when shards of glass and the yellow bricks of the outer wall shot through their classroom. Fourteen died on the spot, and the rest were injured. They screamed for their mothers.
Their teacher had just closed a window and was on her way back to her desk. What was left of her now lay in the principal’s office one floor below. Both the principal and the school secretary lay dead under pieces of concrete and wrecked miniature desks and chairs. Singed papers of different colors sailed over the bodies and softly landed on the rubble.
Ten
Another day, another bench. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon. While Ofelia was at home enjoying some alone-time, Mark read the fat Saturday edition of his favorite newspaper. Alexander was fast asleep in the stroller. A freshly opened bottle of Bitburger waited in the cup holder.
The German press reported much and commented even more. Fear of a nuclear war erupting out of this ‘skirmish’ transpired from every page. The far left wing, as well as the far right wing politicians, heftily criticized the Polish aggression and the breach of international law. The lack of UN backing for them has always been a big red flag to wave in such cases.
They were comfortably forgetting that with Russia vetoing everything, the UN was out of play by design. Idiots, Luhansk and Donetsk are Ukrainian territories. If they invite the Poles to help in an internal conflict, they can do so, right? Mark thought, shook his head and continued reading.
✽✽✽
The Russian propaganda machine ran red hot over the dead children and school staff. The destroyed private residences had all been empty but one. Tragically, the mother and father of one of the dead second graders had both been at home when the missile hit. The whole family had been annihilated.
A Russian truck driver had been killed, too. He had driven off a bombed bridge near Avilo-Uspenka. The media conceded that he probably had been drunk.
The life stories of the grown-ups were fleshed out on all Russian media, also the state-owned RN network operating in western Europe. Pictures of the dead children and the now-closed schoolhouse were shown. The Russian government slandered the Poles as fascist aggressors and the Ukrainian government as a rogue regime that bombarded its own people.
The Russian president gave an interview on the evening news which he only did when he had something profoundly important to announce. He said he was not wholly convinced that the missile went off course. He, the former KGB officer, knew how the strategies of testing an opponent worked and hypothesized that the missile incident might have been a calculated provocation to pull Russia into a war. To the news anchor’s visible relief he quickly added, that this would not work.
Residents of the border provinces flocked to the site. The pictures of the flower piles and the sea of candles they left behind went around the world on social networks. The hundreds of thousands of calls for revenge by private citizens could not be overheard, they got hundreds of likes and retweets each.
✽✽✽
Mark had avoided the story of the stray missile for about an hour. It was on the front page below the fold and continued on two full pages in the politics section. He found it hard to
look at. He was a father and could not imagine losing his child, especially not in such a horrible accident. His stomach turned when he finally forced himself to read at least the main facts.
When Mark went on to the commentaries about the incident, he also learned about the Russian president’s TV interview. Calculated provocation? You’ve got to know, that always was your specialty, he thought.
He also noted the citations from Russian media that called the Ukrainian government a rogue regime. “Okay, and when Assad turned Syria into a slaughterhouse that was something completely different. When the Russian air force bombed Grozny that was something completely different. Where were you back then, you fucking bigots?” he cursed out loud.
A group of older women walked by and gave him an annoyed look.
Mark did not care much for their opinions. He shuffled the paper into a somewhat coherent shape and put it on the bench. He slammed a stone on top of it to weigh it down, for the next guy to read.
✽✽✽
The airstrikes and missile attacks had effectively sealed the border. On the second day of the offensive, the Polish 11th Armored Cavalry Division moved into Luhansk with their Leopard 2 and T-72 battle tanks.
Light infantry accompanied the effort to take and secure the city. The Polish commander and his Ukrainian liaison officer had expected fierce resistance. They were hit with RPG fire in the outskirts, and some skirmishes erupted. Compared to their expectations, however, this was nothing. Within the day, they had made a few dozen prisoners, put checkpoints on every major street into town, and patrolled the city center mostly unmolested.
The governor of the Luhansk Oblast stood on the steps of the main administrative building on Heroiv Velykoi Vitchyznyanoi Viiny, the Square of the Heroes of the Great Patriotic War. He waved for the cameras of the few reporters on the scene. He wore body armor over his pinstripe shirt and an old-looking steel helmet, but he seemed confident that this marked the end of his exile in Severodonezk.
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