‘Something was wrong:’ Ukrainians lament deaths during medal ceremony

Major Serhiy Kuznyev’s family felt that something was wrong. He didn’t answer his phone. Officers from his unit declined to provide information about him.

It was only by scrolling online that his daughter, Anna Kuznyeva, 19, found confirmation that her father had died, in a photo of his body lying among a dozen others in a village in southern Ukraine.

He had always told his family that he was deployed far from the front. “He always said to us, ‘Everything is fine,’” Anna said in a telephone interview. “He wanted to save us from worries.”

It took two days, she said, for the Ukrainian military to formally inform Major Kuznyev’s family that he had been killed in a Russian missile attack on Friday, an event that has sparked anger and criticism as a regrettable and avoidable tragedy .

The attack killed him and 18 other officers and soldiers of the 128th Separate Mountain Infantry Brigade, downing them as they gathered to receive medals while standing in plain sight.

The incident has led to rare criticism of Ukraine’s armed forces from soldiers and Ukraine’s civilian leadership as a blunder with deadly consequences. The Ukrainian government is investigating the deaths and the brigade commander has been suspended pending the results of the investigation.

Critics have pointed to a hidden mentality among officers who staged a ceremony straight out of a Soviet-era military manual, with soldiers standing at attention in front of a table of medals and removing their helmets. Many appeared to have died from head injuries.

The meeting stood out for its transparency. Although fighting as a national army, and despite many successes, the Ukrainian armed forces have had to maneuver almost like partisans behind their own lines, always in secret, trying to avoid large formations.

But as the army expanded after the Russian invasion by drawing in reserves, many older officers – trained in the regimented, Soviet traditions of military affairs – entered the service. Medal ceremonies have long been a traditional part of the Soviet and Russian systems.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, in an address to the nation on Sunday on the missile attack, suggested it signaled the need for reforms within the military, lamenting the role continued Soviet habits played in the Ukrainian military.

“It is a tragedy that could have been prevented,” Mr. Zelensky said. Ukraine, he said, would seek changes to “the Soviet legacy and the terrible bureaucracy that keeps Ukraine and many in our armed forces from realizing their potential.”

The militaries of Russia and Ukraine are linked by ties, including the use of the same artillery and other weapons systems. And despite efforts by the Kiev government to adopt NATO norms, these ties persist in important ways, analysts say.

Monuments in town squares in both countries commemorating those killed in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan testify to relatively recent military experience fighting for the same cause.

Until 2014, when Russian-backed proxy forces occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, troops on both sides were often friends. The militaries of both countries depend on railways for their logistics.

“They were all brothers in arms until the fall of the Soviet Union, and even after that they remained quite close,” said Samantha de Bendern, an expert on Russia and Ukraine and fellow at Chatham House, a think tank based in London. , said. Common traditions survived.

It was unclear how the Russians identified the meeting as a target. The unit held the ceremony on a leftover Soviet military holiday, Artillery and Missile Forces Day, which Ukrainians have continued to celebrate; that could have warned the Russians of converging soldiers.

A soldier familiar with the ceremony said word had spread within the unit that a ceremony was planned and the top soldiers would receive medals, raising the possibility that a spy might betray fellow soldiers.

It is also possible that Russian drones simply spotted the meeting.

With such a prominent event planned, the soldier said, it would have been difficult for the Russians to miss it. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the strike.

However the Russians learned, the missiles and explosions they produced were devastating, killing some of Ukraine’s best soldiers. Unverified photos from the scene showed bodies strewn everywhere.

Many Ukrainians echoed Zelensky’s lament in online posts about Soviet-era practices that contributed to the deaths.

“A small Soviet army will not defeat a large Soviet army,” Yuri Hudimenko, head of a political party, Democratic Ax, and a soldier in the Ukrainian army, wrote on Facebook. “We have no choice. We must change or die.”

Another soldier who said he had served in a unit in southern Ukraine posted a video condemning the commanders of the 128th Brigade for recklessness, but said the problems of overly strict adherence to military regiments and traditions are broader.

“Such problems can happen to any brigade,” the soldier said in the video posted on Instagram under his nickname Casper.

“I have a question for such officers,” said the soldier. “Have you achieved victory here yet? Is the war over?”

That the attack killed some of Ukraine’s most experienced soldiers, after so many have already been lost in the fighting.

Major Kuznyev, for example, had fought in the war in eastern Ukraine for years and survived one of the fiercest battles of that conflict: the encirclement of a Ukrainian unit in the battle for the city of Debaltseve in 2015. Between his stints in the army, according to his daughter he worked in a non-governmental group that helped veterans, and was a published landscape photographer.

Major Kuznyev had volunteered on February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded. That morning, his wife packed his medical kit and he left, Anna Kuznyev said.

He had not told his family much about the war, often saying that he had been deployed in central Ukraine, far from the front, having fought in battles in the Kherson region last fall and in Bakhmut last winter.

“I even complained to him about some minor problems in my life, without realizing that he was in Bakhmut’s trenches,” Anna Kuznyev said. “I sent him pictures of our cat, and he joked about it.”

Major Kuznyev’s wife worried all day Friday because he didn’t answer his phone. “She felt something was wrong,” Anna Kuznyev said. An officer who reached the family said he would call back with information, but he never did. Both daughter and wife suspected that the major had died.

The daughter eventually found the photo of her father online, with part of his head missing, she said. “It was clearly him,” she said. “I woke up completely and started crying.”

“He was full of life and very active, always looking for different scholarships and opportunities for me,” she said. Her father, she said, had been “big and tall.”

Matthew Mpoke Bigg reported from London.