My wife didnʼt want me to be involved with the army. But she probably understood that she couldnʼt hold me.
She fought until the last moment for me to stay with her. At the moment when I was (so to speak) running away from home — even physically. But she didnʼt succeed.
Frankly, I thought she would leave me. That this would be the last stage in our relationship. Well, just imagine.
We met at university, got married. We lived in Lviv. We didnʼt like it because we didnʼt have our own place to live. We had a child. We moved to my hometown of Berezhany, I dragged her with me. We live in Berezhany, everything was okay. Then I go to Denmark to work. She moves after me. We only do get our daily life and work organized, we only do make plans for the future, and I suddenly cross everything out and in February 2022 and rush back home.
Thank God, time passed and we reconciled.
At the beginning of the counteroffensive, in the summer of 2023, I was an ordinary operator in a reconnaissance calculation.
I did not see the things that were happening at the level of headquarters, planning, interaction. But the fact that the interaction was extremely bad, I saw at my level one hundred percent. Units of another brigade deployed in battle formation behind us, fired at our positions, fired at each other.
At first I was shocked. But everything was happening so fast that if I had been distracted by this shock, I simply wouldn’t have been able to do anything. I had to work. There was a mix of units in the counteroffensive.
For example, there were some engineering units that went first to make passages. There was insufficient communication — and ours were already working on them. Or something like this — they go in to make a passage in a minefield, don’t complete the task, and return. The technician is supposed to go there tomorrow to storm — and they have no connection with their commander, and now the information that they can’t go there needs to be pushed up.
I can already see, with my experience and the example of more organized units, what a problem there is with interaction. And then, frankly... I think it could have been organized better.
As a commander of a drone battalion, I really like stability.
My department head tells me: “Are you kidding? You like stability, but you chose the UAV department, which is the most unstable in the army?” And so it is. Everything in it is unstable, starting with supplies.
Iʼm not saying that the supply is bad. There are many resources at the battalion and brigade level, there are volunteer gatherings — all this accumulates and gives results. The state does not provide us with one hundred percent, but this is impossible. The problem is that it is unstable.
Today there is one number of drones, tomorrow another. You are unlucky, your warehouse was destroyed, or the manufacturer did not have the components, and they did not deliver the batch. If you have a drawdown in supply, and at the same time the enemy is storming, and your stock is depleted.
And if you donʼt consider the economy of war, if you donʼt consider the cost of one defeat, if you donʼt introduce limits, if you donʼt plan ahead, you wonʼt be able to fight effectively.
As for me, I really donʼt like looking in “Excel”, itʼs not my thing. But I have to. Because resource allocation is very important. All these killings of one enemy with ten FPVs, when itʼs already clear that heʼs the khan, are unacceptable. If you want to fight good, you have to overcome this.
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