Even Ukraine’s fiercest soldiers want the war to stop, that’s what we learn with Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko.
A new biography about her is due out this week: ‘How Good It Is I have No Fear of Dying: Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko’s Fight for Ukraine’.
The book by Lara Marlowe, describing Mykytenko’s decade-long war, will be released October 24th.
The Telegraph reported:
“’I know that I am tired. I’m really tired. I know that my people are also tired. A lot of them I took from assault units, so they are, like, extremely tired’, the 29-year-old philology graduate says. ‘And we are also sort of ready for negotiations, but we are just asking that the West insists on our interests’.”
She is the commander of a 25-man strong drone reconnaissance platoon in Ukraine’s 54th mechanized brigade.
For the last two-and-a-half years she has reportedly been deployed to on the Donbas front, and this is her first break in nearly a year.
Also in London is General Valery Zaluzhny.
The current Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain is the former commander-in-chief of its armed forces.
He has indicated this week that Kiev could accept a peace deal that recognized the territorial losses to Russia.
“Asked in London on Thursday if he could imagine a victory without getting all the lost territory back, he said: ‘I didn’t mention territories. I mentioned safety, security, and the feeling of being in one’s own home. For me personally, as Valery Zaluzhny, if I lived in my house and was aware my neighbour took a part of my garden, I’d say we need to resolve this. If not now, then your sons would have to resolve the issue’.”
Mykytenko thinks that past opportunities to win the war were squandered.
“’I knew that the war wouldn’t end in a few weeks, and we wouldn’t be in Crimea in a few months, as our government used to say. I completely understood that. But I was hoping for much more help from the Western world’, she said. ‘I was hoping to get F16s at the end of 2022. I was hoping to get Patriots and Abrams at the end of 2022, when we really needed them, when we had a really motivated army, when we had a lot of warriors who were ready to fight’.”
If the West had sent enough help on time, or if the 2023 offensive had been put into Kursk, instead of the heavily fortified Russian lines in occupied Zaporizhzhya… If… she wonders.
She states that now, ‘a lot of warriors are dead, missing and injured’.
“’Our motivation, let’s be honest, is much lower than it was even one year ago. So yeah, we had a great chance to end it up to 2023, if we had got everything that we asked for, and now it’s almost impossible. We won’t recover the strengths which we had in 2022 for at least 10 years’.”
The lieutenant is also a veteran of the eight-year Donbas war, in which her husband was killed in action. Her father, who also fought against the Russians , later killed himself
With the unrelenting advances by the Russian Federation forces across the frontline negotiations have become a major topic for reflection.
“’If the agreement is just to give Ukrainian territory to Russia with no consequences for Russia, then Russia will mobilize all the people who are on occupied territories and try to attack Ukraine again’, she said. ‘It’s going to be like a pause to prepare for a new war, and Russia will do it more quickly than we do’.”
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