Daniel 01 - Distant Contacts
As soldiers, we could handle matters just as well from a hole in the ground, a hotel suite or a bombed out building.
I was in the backseat of our shitty-looking, dark blue UAZ 4x4. Stan was driving, Ol was up front, Spiker was in the back with me. Spiker had a sat phone on the seat and a folding stock assault rifle in the footwell. We were in Marianna's estate and I was making my approach.
“Drop me at the back of Krivoshapka’s block then circle round to the extract point and make the clear call 5 minutes after I’m out the car.”
Stan pulled over outside an apartment block one away from Marianna’s block. Disguised as the drunkard, Gleba, who lived on this block’s second floor, I slid out and shambled into the block. Stan made for the extraction point. Spiker would make the “clear call” to Marianna on the sat phone as I watched the area.
The stairs were clear. At the second floor I headed quietly down the corridor where the smell of burnt everything still lingered. The blown apartment was only lit by the light in the corridor and whatever moonlight came in from the gaping, glassless windows. Anyone could have bedded down or been in there using, or waiting, or preying. I removed my spectacles and slipped them in to my trouser pocket. The broken glass sprinkled on the ground near the apartment doorway was undisturbed. I took a large step over the glass, peered into the doorway and listened for signs of another, inconvenient occupant.
The first time I recall facing fear from the threats of another, it was in a dilapidated house on my estate. I was about 6 years old. My brother and I were out playing and followed two other local boys we didn’t really know into the house. The lead boy had blonde hair. He wasn’t much older or bigger than us. As we entered the house he picked up some misshapen metal tubing and began to swing it a little. As we moved through to the back of the house, where the roof had given and the back had collapsed, he suddenly turned aggressive and threatened us for no reason. My brother, two years older, did nothing. At first, fearful and confused, I didn’t move. When the boy’s back was turned I grabbed my brother’s arm and ran back the way we’d come. Fright then flight had been my first responses to fear.
In the burned out window, I swept the scene with a multivision scope. Spiker had made the clear call and Marianna's window was lit. I could see the picture correctly positioned on her windowsill. If anything was amiss, that wouldn't have been there. Our rifle and ammo was still hidden beneath the burned carpet. The spectra escape line was in place with two descenders ready in case I needed a fast exit to the street.
Spiker joined me in the OP to watch while I was in with Marianna. I went to what was left of the apartment's bedroom where Krivoshapka’s crude disguise of overcoat, flat cap and stick was stashed among the worthless blackened junk, bits of broken furniture and charred memories. I bundled up my beanie hat, nylon windcheater, the spectacles and the false greying beard, for Spiker to take. I pulled on Krivoshapka’s outfit. It was adequate for crossing between blocks in the dark.
Marianna was on the first floor. A light knock at the door. No need for noise; she'd be near, waiting.
“Is that you, old friend?” she said through the door, as agreed.
“Krivoshapka is your oldest friend,” was the correct reply tonight.
We never sat in the front room, even though the curtains were closed. I was only in there for as long as it took to recover the monitoring gear and reset it.
Jammed behind the radiator under the lounge window was a full spectrum, multi-channel comms monitor - a snoop - that swept all cellular and radio frequencies and recorded whatever it could. It sucked intel off phones via its IMSI catcher and recorded ambient sound. A very thin line routed out the window, up the wall to the roof where we'd placed a better antenna. I recovered the intel by swapping out the memory card and then changed the batteries. There was a thermocouple device inside the snoop that took the heat from the radiator to extend battery life. The whole thing took 30 seconds to reset. Old music I didn't recognize played at slightly too loud a volume.
“How have you been?” I whispered, in the darkness of the bedroom.
“Fine enough. It’s getting harder to say nothing while these bastards do worse and worse. But they leave me alone because of Marko and what I let them believe.”
Business first. “Are the grandkids enjoying school?” I asked.
“Yes, that's going very well, thank you. They are up-to-date with their homework.” She was still receiving our payments direct to the right places.
At 78 years old, Marianna knew the game from her previous life, was motivated and tough. She was one of my most shrewd and professional sources. She had an acceptable Soviet record as a previous intel source who had not been overly political or intransigent. She was a Semite, although she kept her history quiet even within her own family. She lived in Dnipro, a target city. She maintained an independent network of “eyes” that Home had vetted and found acceptable in both background and the intel they all provided. Her grandson, Marko, was a Nazi in Aidar whose activities went beyond the ordinary foot soldier. Through him, she had a degree of indirect access to Aidar intel. It was up to her to extract whatever she could.
Since my last visit, increasing militia and para-militaries had arrived from the north and west. Their confidence was growing because external support had continued to flood in. Marko was childish enough to enjoy secretively boasting to his grandmother about some of his escapades and “the cause”. She was skilled at drawing him out and he had no idea of her past and her real sympathies because he was too self-interested to ever have really known her. He’d crossed a line well before she began to play the game with him. Marianna understood what Marko was and deep down she despised him. Grandson or not, she had other, better family. Marko wasn’t a sacrifice. He was a necessary cull and a means to her ends.
An administration building further into the city had been receiving unusual visits from a large farm van that had been there three times in 8 days, always after business hours. Marianna’s eyes didn’t see what the van did once it was inside the enclosed courtyard. Her eyes weren’t known to us to protect them in case I was compromised. She would round them up for extraction when the time came and all I needed to know were numbers to sort transport.
Her look pleaded with me to give her some knowledge in return but she knew the protocols hadn't changed that much. It was a one way street back then and it remained so now.
“Thank you for your humanity, your bravery and your decency.” I offered an appeasement. “You and your eyes are diamonds in this dirt. It is the wealth in your hearts that will rebuild this place. That is your legacy. This work is immortal, like the rest of the regiment.” Her eyes were on the verge of tearing, but they were often like that at her age.
“Beware, Krivoshapka.” She leaned back from me and her voice bore a fine edge. “You are a guest here and there is no need for overkill or patronisation.”
“I meant it. I’m sorry that I can't reciprocate beyond our arrangement.”
“You are too young to mean those words, and not experienced enough to know that of yourself. Your bosses would mark you down if they knew of your mistake with me.”
She might as well have stabbed me. The old shrew was sharp as a blade. Humility would get me out of this but her impossible test could not be passed.
“Forgive me, please. The sentiment was genuine, even if my words sound contrived. We all take risks for the same end and I am truly, personally grateful to you.”
I gently held her shoulders and kissed her head, imagining my own grandmother in her place; this place of grim misery and slow lives. To leave her there knowing that worse was to come, but imagining my flesh and blood in her place was at the edge of my comfort. She detected it in the twitch of my mouth and the way I swallowed my uncertainty.
“If you betray our house-moving, you will have another stain on your soul and you’ll run out of years to clean it before you are truly judged. Don’t forget that. This place will be unliveable in a month. You need to take us. They won't let us leave and you know it.”
“How many?” I asked.
She held up 4 fingers. Then she held up 4 followed by an oscillation of her flat hand to indicate maybes. Then she showed me 6 and lowered her hand as to say “small”. That was a lot of kids.
4, 4, 6. I looked her in the eyes as I repeated the numbers in my head to memorize them before leaving.
“Anything else you need?” I asked.
“This is a staging point. We’ve seen enough to know our value. We would like a pension bonus before we next see you.” She motioned “25” on her lap. She meant $25,000 for each of them. I nodded. The money didn't matter to me, it wasn't mine. She knew I cared about the outcome, less so the method. I’d pass on the request. She was shrewd enough to have doubled their target price - at least - without overplaying their hand.
Her test was over and I had not passed. But I had not failed, and that was the point. To have broken my own protocols by giving her any information would have meant that I could not be trusted anymore. To play my role and maintain my discipline - even if that made her uncomfortable - was the way to not fail, but how I did that betrayed something about my personality. I could live with being labelled “prone to overkill” and “patronising”. She had no idea of my real bent, let alone shortcomings.
She knew enough about my job and there was no reason to feel good about that until I had delivered her an ending. If she was lucky and circumstances favoured us, that ending could be the one she hoped for. If I had to make other transactions at her expense, I would and she knew it. Operators like us were not bound by the decorum of true spies or the accountability of diplomats. She didn’t know how many of us there were but she knew we represented power and violence shrouded by a thin veneer. This time I‘d shown her respect and gratitude. Next time it could be something else. As long as she fulfilled her role until events changed our arrangement, I was happy enough. Like most people’s relationships, ours boiled down to transactions.
On the way from our pick-ups around Dnipro to our hide in Pavlohrad I audited our intel. 90 gigs of data would take about 17 minutes to burst send. I had to know in case we were compromised and needed to fight to protect the burst. The traffic around us and their proximate signals weren’t dense enough to mask a mobile transmission so it would wait for the normal method in Pavlohrad.
We kept multiple vehicles with certain specs and load outs in a car park, “Stoyanka”, in Pavlohrad. Stoyanka was close to the river, which was a handy route option that could be used to get to our hide in the woods if we needed to get off the streets. The car park’s manager was on the payroll and thought Ol was a drug dealer. We achieved anonymous access by sending a known spam text from a burner to one phone that stayed in the car park gatehouse. The gateman would then blip off the relevant cameras. We could get out the main gate or by a back way hidden by dumpsters.
Stan dropped the three of us near Stoyanka then Ol and Spiker walked in at separate points on the perimeter. Stan parked the 4x4 on Dymytrova Street and then walked one route back to the hide apartment while I took another that let me shop for high class ingredients. We ate extremely well. It was one of my requirements. Splitting up on the last leg back to the hide disrupted tails.
Ol and Spiker took the usual car from the fleet together. As the first to arrive, they would begin the ritual. The ritual involved sweeping the perimeter of the apartment block, then the underground car park and vehicles, the stairwells, each floor’s main corridor, and our camera feeds. Arrivals were staggered to prevent us all being captured at once. The walkers might draw off other elements of a tail and detect it, then warn the others.
We all wore augmented civilian clothing with synthetic garrotte lines that were embedded in sleeve seams and waistbands. Composite belt buckles of various designs hid a two-finger knuckle knife with a super sharp triangular pointed blade. They were so well engineered that even x-ray machine operators couldn’t see the knife component in the buckle. Some of our civilian garments were stab, slash and fire resistant. There were other innocuous looking items that had fatal utility, but we carried the minimum for the task in hand. Avoiding detection was fundamental. Fighting out of this environment was failure.
The Pavlohrad hide apartment was owned by some property company and rented legitimately. It was all managed by Home and was one of many intel assets set up years in advance and constantly used for field work. Floor and ceiling soundproofing and steel plate drill protection was fitted when the place was done out. It was protected from laser mics by inner perspex window panes that were actually flat speakers that played any sound we wanted. Despite that protection, we only discussed operations in the windowless bathroom whose walls were all inner to the apartment. We watched the front door and corridor with cameras mounted in the front doorframe. The only bugs would come in from the floor or ceiling and we’d taken reasonable care of those pathways with the thick steel plates that could foil drill attempts while making detectable noise.
The hide was a defensive position and a fatal trap from which we could escape. C4 plastic explosive was hidden in the ceiling mouldings, skirting boards, under the kitchen units and beneath a propane gas bottle connected to the cooker. The C4 had small ball bearings pressed into the front face, like a claymore. Each room fitted out this way was a separate kill zone that would take out a variable number of people, possibly a whole team. We had an imitation House app on our phones that looked like heating, lighting etc, but also provided firing control for the explosives.
Spectra escape lines were disguised as curtain ties at each window and attached to a solid wall fastening. If we had to escape we could blow the frames with a line of detonation cord that ran around each window. Then we could descend via the spectra line to the street or the inner courtyard, depending upon which window we’d blown. The window to the courtyard was also our way to the roof. We’d installed a remote activated winch with a steel cable that looked like a TV aerial line. We could haul two of us at a time in 15 seconds, get across the rooves and descend with kit stashed up there. All of this while blowing the apartment and anyone in it bit-by-bit.
Urban hides served as a base for certain aspects of the job but we would spend as much time moving in the field on surveillance, planning, sabotage, infiltration and strikes as we would in any urban location. Sometimes we’d spend a stint with DPR or LPR units to support anything they were doing but the overt fighting was constrained to the lines of contact. We weren’t free to hunt elsewhere in the country.
Our strength was that we were not spies. As soldiers, we could handle whatever our intel turned up just as well from a hole in the ground, a hotel suite or a bombed out building.
“Send’s complete. 23 minutes due to connection variability but the coffee was good enough.” Stan had just returned from the centre of Pavlohrad and confirmed that all our intel data had been sent Home. He, Ol and I were all sat in the bathroom. Spiker was on the road back towards Dnipro.
We’d been busy assessing the administration building Marianna found. Ol found two local government job adverts there, in the kitchens and in IT but they weren’t within our remit. We let Home know immediately with a recommendation to use an appropriate local agent.
The layout of the admin building was in our database and we expected they were caching gear in the basement or a large room then shifting it on in the vans. Maybe this was a junction point for personnel movements. If it was a command node of some kind that would make it too risky a location for us to interfere with.
A dead giveaway of the importance of the admin building would be any overwatch. If there were observers on the rooves then we would elevate this to a priority one target. If there was nothing and no one permanently in the building, there would be no reason for overwatch to be there. Spiker was initiate observation with a quadcopter, checking for overwatch and any other points of interest. We’d follow and together pick up one of the farm vans making deliveries then tail it. Sure enough, Spiker found three men on overwatch: one on the admin building and two adjacents.
We tailed the van from the admin building in a short rotation through the city until Ol placed a white tracker on it as it waited in traffic at a busy junction, then we backed off. The tracker was a thin, domed disc about the size of a two euro coin. We just peeled off the layers of coloured tape to reveal the colour that most closely matched the target then attached it magnetically or with the sticky base. High on the side or thrown up on the roof worked well. We let the tech do the work for us and just waited for location data. The van’s first stop was in Mais’ke, a little agricultural village with the convenience of a sizeable grass airstrip with some hardstanding areas. Then it went to Nove, and stopped there. Mais’ke and Nove were both back south of our hide in Pavlohrad, which was good news for us and would make it easier to investigate.
“Electronic sweeps show mid level figures from Aidar there, plus some new contacts.” Stan was showing us the simple electromagnetic scans from our small drone flights over Mais’ke and Nove combined with our local database.
“Good stuff.” I was thinking out loud. “It’s not a serious enough airfield to have someone waste a cruise missile on it, and it’s part of civvy agricultural facilities. It’d be easy to miss a grass airstrip off a first round targeting plan. We need to know what’s there.”
We pinged Home with the intel and our actions for the next week. We got our black van from the Stoyanka car park. In there was the ZALA drone. The ZALA’s 5m wingspan meant we had to split it in half to keep it in the van. We found a quiet launch point just off the E50, a short drive west of the hide and not far north of Mais’ke and Nove, down an empty side road parallel to the train tracks. The ZALA’s autoflight and engine gave us an on-station endurance of nearly 20 hours. That let us do near constant multi-band electronic and detailed visual, infra-red and thermal surveillance over both Mais’ke and Nove. We moved out of the hide and into our spot in the woods to the south, away from the busy town.
A few kilometres south of Pavlohrad was a small woodland alongside the Vovcha river. We avoided the sparse village, Pryvovchans'ke. We had a field cache in the woodland and a semi-permanent field hide. We could literally run from the apartment in Pavlohrad to this location and be in full fighting gear within 20 minutes. The road that ran straight through the woods was fine for launching and landing the ZALA.
“The two sites are definitely caching weaps to distribute by air as well as surface,” said Ol. We’d been watching the sites with the ZALA for just over a day. “That grass strip is long enough for a C130 Hercules, so that gives them a lot of other choices in planes and choppers. There’s seven container trucks at Mais’ke, parked next to the cache, no doubt being slowly filled.”
“Options?” We needed to evaluate merits, risks and timeframes.
“If we blow this stuff soon, we’ve lost the onward trail and burn our presence. If we mark the containers and some of the other stuff, we can track it all and grow the picture.” Spiker was pragmatic as always. Tracking was the likely option but we explored others. Unless and until we received specific orders from Home, we decided how to proceed after our open discussion.
“So, we agree to watch with the ZALA while we track the gear.” Stan summarised our discussion and decisions. “We’ve got the phone numbers of known players now, plus these new ones. We listen to these cunts mouth off for the next week and work out what they’re up to. Then we'll be in a position to evaluate and maybe hunt them as well. The airfield tells us these weapons can be distributed widely. A Pilatus Porter could take about 1400kg of load, 700km and land anywhere there’s a farmer’s field. One plane could do runs anywhere along the eastern border.”
We prepped to sneak in the next night. The ZALA’s optics gave extremely good views of the entire area from different angles during a sneak. We used thermal and night vision to see patrols and people watching from windows while monitoring comms chatter provided it was unencrypted or running codes that were in our database.
Four of us sneaking into two separate locations from one drone was good fun. Each pair had a compact tablet with the drone’s command console. Stan and I made the approach to the northwest corner of the Mais’ke site where hedge lines gave cover most of the way. Then it was a 500m crawl to the cattle sheds. Ol and Spiker were hiding in a treeline 600m east of the Nove cache, providing us with tactical support from the drone.
Getting in was easy. We were a bit shocked. That meant they were either unthreatened, or amateur, or rushed somehow. There were some patrols but they were dodgeable. There seemed to be no cameras in our way that we could detect. The sheds were just basic dairy kit and cattle pens, half empty and being filled up with weapons. What surprised us was the size of the cache compared to the lack of decent security. Ol and Spiker made their own approach to Nove, along a stream line in cover then had a clear line to their stash inside a large polytunnel. It was nowhere near as big as Mais’ke and they had little problem getting to it. We originally thought that the vans were bringing stuff here from Dnipro, possibly with other mixed vehicles. That couldn’t have been the case. The site had over 15 tons of weapons plus miscellaneous gear so it was being flown in. The vans were either taking this kit to Dnipro or doing something else.
To track the kit we took 10 of our 20 trackers and spread them as best we could across three mixed pallets and all seven shipping containers. Two of them were locked and sealed. One was partially loaded and the others empty. We worked out where to set charges to blow the dump and whether we'd nick stuff for ourselves. The piles of boxes were so big the safest place for us to be was on top, above eye line, while we catalogued the gear section by section. Ol and Spiker did the same with theirs but they were finished in a quarter of the time it took us.
The kit was mixed NATO spec from a variety of countries. We knew the general supply set up was staging everything in Poland so this grass strip was taking direct deliveries. It didn’t really matter to us how this shit arrived, we were concerned about where it went and which flies it attracted. Watching the place over that week was likely to show us the aircraft arrivals.
There was too much stuff and too little security to leave it all for them. Stan and I stole an NLAW, three other RPG-type launchers, and filled our packs with plastic explosives and grenades. Instead of an NLAW, Ol and Spiker took a Barrett .50 cal sniper rifle and as much ammo as they could carry, along with some stuff that went bang. It was unlikely anyone would realise stuff was missing off a mixed pallet until they opened boxes at the delivery point. When it came to trying to identify the thief, they’d be spoiled for a choice of thieving cunts among their own ranks. Most likely the bosses. When shit is free, you don’t care about it anyway. When you steal free shit then sell it, your margin is infinite. Tons of this shit was never going to end up where it was meant to. The incentives for massive theft and the disincentive for security and accountability were perfectly aligned for a lot of business.
We spent the week constantly running the ZALA from our spot in the woods.
It was a crisp, bright afternoon when we got Home’s take on things. Stan’s turn to make lunch. I’d foraged some more mushrooms and herbs, and we still had a plenty of stuff in our pantry. The pantry was a deep, wide hole we’d dug where we could dump our packs and weapons, plus other gear or hold a prisoner. The simple act of filling it in turned it from a prison to a grave. It was fully disguised on top and you could walk on it and not even know. Even dogs wouldn’t detect it because of the shit spray we made that rubbed out human scent.
“Marianna’s done well with this place, Dani. Look at this.” We were in the dugout, huddled around the Voice - our secure computer that handled intel. Ol was about to show us Home’s analysis of our transmissions plus whatever else they had.
The extra contacts around the little airfield were a mixture of very interesting people. Low and mid level contacts from Aidar into Azov and Right Sector. Plus a link to financing from Ukrainian power players and externals. Marianna had been a very useful node. Her family connection to Marko gave us supporting info about what the network had been doing in general, then we added our snoop that caught the influx of people’s movements and what they said to each other, plus the expanding view of the weapons cache and distribution network. This was good stuff.
“Yeah, she did get lucky for herself and for us. Let's hope she stays cool and gets to stay awake,” I said. If things went OK with Marianna, we'd all have less cleaning to do.
“So what’s Home say about Marianna and her mates?” Stan asked. Ol flicked through the orders. An accountant must have had a look at our last burst of intel. They were going to give Marianna's eyes $15k per adult and an extraction could run in our last week of this stint in the field. Marianna would get her $25k. Relative to the others she was being paid her full overpriced whack, which would give her a sense of superiority while having delivered for her people. But I had to have her stay in place on the edge of Dnipro for the time being. Not for any intel gathering but to avoid alerting her grandson, Marko or forcing us to disappear him, which was just as big an alert to his unit and masters. The trick here was to avoid upsetting Marianna so that there was no compromise risk, otherwise she was just a liability instead of a loyal servant who deserved extraction. Once trust was compromised, closure was the simplest option that covered our backs and kept problems in the field. If she hadn’t put us onto the ammo dump and Marko hadn’t been connected to it, Marianna could have been extracted. But you can’t choose your family or what the fuckwits in it get up to.
“We can move her snoop somewhere else.” Stan was angling options and consequences. “Taking it away will make her feel low value. She might think we’re betraying her, or going to put her to sleep. What if we actually manufactured a legit move? Get her to family elsewhere? Once things kick off, we can get her over a border. Russia will take refugees anyway by that point. That means she needs to stay on the eastern-ish side to escape east. Send her to family in the west and she'll end up in the EU.”
“It’s pretty, but it’s fucked.” Ol said.
“Nothing you can’t get around our way if you look. More room to spread out as well.” said Spiker.
Although none of the others had ever met or spoken to Marianna, they had listened to her via plenty of recordings and live comms and knew what she was like. Marianna had done well by her eyes in getting them a bonus and she’d always done well by us. That showed how shrewd she was and told of her previous experience. The only way to play this with her was matter-of-factly because she knew enough of the game and its methods and consequences. Bullshitting her would be counterproductive. The truth would maintain trust.
“So you'll take my friends away, leave me alone with the crazies, and take your business elsewhere?” Marianna whispered. “The game really hasn’t changed, has it? How much protest can you tolerate before I have a fall or a heart attack?” She was being facetious, but it was totally justified.
“It's Marko. While he's in town, changes with you are alerts to him and others. Moving the snoop means there's nothing to find and you're just grandma. You can either go to family in the east for legitimate reasons or you stay here until Marko goes.” She didn't have a choice. I'd just removed her value by taking the snoop. She was now a limited liability by virtue of her connection to Marko and his network. She was old enough to have a heart attack and not trigger suspicion. There was no scrutiny of lonely old people here so heart attacks could be induced in any number of ways.
I could see her will to live was still there. That’s what having family does for you, even if you aren’t near them. The money wasn't for her but she used it as a tool and a way to evaluate her own skill and value in our game. This was not a negotiation and she knew it. I was forcing her and she - as my loose end - could choose to tie herself off or leave that to me.
“I’ve been through every option I can think of to keep you safe, get you out and meet my objectives. These are genuinely the best choices. Things are moving quickly.” I could say no more than that. She detected my hint that there was something on the horizon that would draw Marko away. “You’ve got your pension bonus, I’ve tidied up your apartment. We’ll get all your friends out. I can’t come back here again, so we’ll leave the instructions in your dead drop. You won’t have more than 24 hours’ notice. Check your drop every day from now on, please, after 8pm.” Her dead drop was under the sink in one of the toilets in a crappy café bar on the estate, about 3 minutes walk away, where she would take a drink and see local faces when she felt like it. One of the toilets was unisex and self-contained so we could go in and leave a message without much hassle. We used it sparingly so that our faces weren’t frequently seen. She could legitimately come and go from the café bar without attracting attention.
“I'll talk to Sergei and see about making a long visit with him.” She wasn’t too stubborn and she certainly wasn’t stupid. Our parting that night was normal.
An extraction was a day’s work with 24 hours lead time at most but having 14 people including kids just skip town at once could have a ripple effect so speed was of the essence. We needed to know who we might be extracting so we could assess potential risk and waited to hear from Home.
Weapon tracking was interesting and our major focus. It revealed more than anticipated. There were the greatest movements towards Donetsk, but not into it. There were two containers sent to Mariupol, one to Kharkiv, and Melitopol. Vans had taken stuff to Izyum. We’d seen the primary delivery to the airfield. It was an Airbus C-295 with no markings, so likely Polish. By our maths, this was probably the third or fourth delivery. Home would be tracking the flights by now and they probably knew all the Polish staging points. The aircraft was fair game as soon as it entered Ukrainian airspace but blowing the whole field with a missile when it was making a delivery was an act of war. Rigging the major cache to detonate as if it was a gear fuck up was deniable but didn’t take everything out and still betrayed our presence.
Home came back with more analysis by the end of our surveillance week. A significant flow of the Nazi groups who were now embedded in the wider army were moving east in expectation of reinforcing lines or positions in the DPR, which meant something big was coming and active orders were being issued. The weapons were moving in that direction as well, but not all at once. These militia groups could move freely because they didn't really obey normal military command. The formal army units were moving to different places, but more slowly because of numbers and bureaucracy. These far right battalions were equipped well but they were off-the-hook when it came to professionalism, discipline and proper soldiering. That's why it was they who were doing the shelling and nasty stuff in Donbass. Aidar was doing the logistics with all this hush-hush imported gear because it had the people in place at the right time. Right Sector was tagging along to get on-the-job training, for want of a better way of putting it. Aidar was effectively training Right Sector to take control of this and other caches and eventually take over these private proxy logistics, all with zero government or army intervention. Every fucker pulling rank in this set up would be making a killing from gear sales. It was a cunt’s wet dream.
When you stepped back and looked at it from distance, there was a sort of logic to it. If you looked at all the right-wing groups as proxies in uniform, they were an army unto themselves. With all this external supply of weapons, gear and training the proxies were a free floating layer of force. Underneath that was the Army, Air Force and Navy, doing roughly what one would expect in line with formal government orders. It was clear that there was totally separate control and financing of the proxies. It had been like this for years but now the scale and speed of their movements made it glaringly obvious. It was a powerful set up. Amazing that citizens in the EU were blind to it. They only had to read papers from last year where their own media was telling them about Nazis in the backyard. Dumb fucks didn’t give a shit. But they would eventually.
Thank you, fyi only: one little old lady in Australia very much enjoyed reading this. 😊