'Putin will not stop and ... so neither will the killing'
The Independent|January 20, 2025
Sam Kiley speaks to a former Ukrainian resistance fighter about his operations and why he is sceptical of peace talks
Sam Kiley
'Putin will not stop and ... so neither will the killing'

Serge in his blue anorak, Olena in her black faux fur jacket - an inconspicuous couple on a trip in Kyiv to show their daughter the capital they did so much to save three years ago.

Their clandestine work as part of self-starting groups of volunteers, heroic by the standards of any war, turned back two invading Russian convoys as they converged on Kyiv in 2022. Serge and a small group of comrades, veterans of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, took on Putin’s invaders in hit-and-run raids using pickup trucks and weapons they found in a warehouse in Sumy province.

Now Donald Trump is threatening to turn the course of history against Ukraine, by cutting US military support to the embattled nation. This could ultimately allow Vladimir Putin to hang on to the 20 per cent of the country Russia has already taken as part of a future peace deal forced on Kyiv.

“We can’t have a peace deal of any kind with Russia,” Serge said on Saturday, two days before Mr Trump’s inauguration. “If we freeze the front lines then Putin will just re-arm and invade again. And now Russia is better equipped, has better tactics, knows how the weapons we’ve had from Nato work. He won’t stop and so neither will the killing.”

He should know. He volunteered in 2014 to fight the Russians, re-enlisting in early 2022 to join a small band of bandit-like resistance fighters who reinvented the kind of dare-to-win tactics which made Britain’s SAS the model unit for special forces around the world.

Serge, as a native of Sumy, was key to the success of the unit of about eight men. Olena, his wife, perhaps more so.

Thick snow muffled the crack and crunch of the movements of Serge and a comrade as they crept through Russian lines, using the forest as cover to meet up with Olena in early March, just a couple of weeks after Putin’s full-scale invasion threatened to topple Kyiv in a lightening strike.

This story is from the January 20, 2025 edition of The Independent.

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This story is from the January 20, 2025 edition of The Independent.

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