Life in the trenches of Donbas is a terrifying, solitary experience which often ends in death or injury. Yet combatants are buoyed up by occasional moments of humour, even joy, as recounted to The Irish Times by an army machine gunner and author of popular history books.
He wants to remain anonymous, to retain the persona he created for himself of a grey-haired, mustachioed grandfather known by the penname “Grandpa Svyryd”.
So we’ll call the bubbly, boy scout-like 52 year old who is recovering from shrapnel wounds “Svyryd”, the traditional name he chose for himself.
While serving as a Ukrainian diplomat in Baghdad in the 2000s, Svyryd did weapons training with the US military as a hobby on weekends. “You live for years as a schoolteacher, successful writer and diplomat, and suddenly you understand that you were born to be a machine gunner!” he laughs. “You feel so powerful.”
Svyryd went to the recruitment centre on the first day of the full-scale Russians invasion in February last year. Weapons experience was at a premium.
“I waited a long time for a machine gun. Some girl with polished fingernails, around 30 years old, was fighting with me, shouting ‘I attended courses. Give it to me’. I am a polite gentleman, so I let her have it and I waited. I thought the Russians were stupid to invade a country where girls are fighting for machine guns!”
Svyryd spent the first two months of the war with the territorial defence forces in the Kyiv region. “In Bucha, I saw the faces of murdered men turn grey, then black. After what we saw in Bucha, the slogan was No Mercy.”
Svyryd joined the regular army and was dispatched to the open terrain outside Bakhmut, which Ukraine still controlled but later lost to Russia.
“We were very short of artillery shells,” he recalls. “Russian artillery fired day and night. We fired one shell an hour. I was in the first line, 400m from the Russians. You dig yourself a foxhole and you wait. It’s not like the first World War where everyone was lined up in one trench. The first order you receive is ‘Disperse!’
“It is difficult psychologically. In danger, humans want to be together. You’re 30m apart, except for the machine gunner because it takes a second man to load the ammo.”
Pilots and artillery gunners do not see the men they are killing. Machine gunners do, Svyryd says. “It causes us no psychological problems. We do not murder. We eliminate. We are not proud of it, but we don’t feel shame either. Normal people find it difficult to understand how you can kill even an animal. But the enemy threatens my wife, my stepson, my pet dog.”
‘You live for years as a schoolteacher, successful writer and diplomat, and suddenly you understand that you were born to be a machine gunner!’
In the summer of 2022, the battle for Bakhmut followed a tedious pattern, Syvryd recalls. “Russian infantry vehicles drove towards us. We’d fire and they’d stop. This happened over and over. We slept three or four hours in sitting position, but we were not tired. Once I was wounded, exhaustion swept over me like a wave.”
Svyryd offers a fine argument for the F16 and Gripen fighter aircraft that Ukraine hopes to receive soon from Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden.
“We saw two bombers flying low, at tree-top level, and we thought we had no chance to survive,” he says.
Then a soldier in a foxhole 50m away shouted, “They’re ours!”
“After three or four minutes we heard a huge explosion. They’d hit a munitions dump. I felt certain they’d be shot down,” Svyryd continues. “Five minutes later, we saw them fly back. The pilots tipped their wings to salute us. I could hear cheering from kilometres around, and I realised there were a lot of us. That is why it is so important to have air support, for morale, for the fighting spirit.”
Svyryd was wounded the day after the joyous sighting of the Ukrainian aircraft.
“It’s a lottery,” he says. “You can be a perfect soldier, but when the shrapnel is coming from every direction, you don’t have a chance. I heard the shell whistle. Shrapnel hit me in both legs, from behind.”
Medics are positioned 2.5km behind the first line, Svyryd says. “The rule is to help yourself, because if you ask someone else to help you, he has to stop fighting.” The machine gunner tied tourniquets around both legs and crawled 100m to a camouflaged command dugout where other wounded men were waiting. A fellow soldier dipped his finger in Svyryd’s blood and wrote 20.45 on his forehead – the deadline for doctors to remove the tourniquets if he was not to lose his legs.
While he lay waiting to be evacuated, Svyryd loaded bullets into machine gun belts. “I was trying not to think about pain,” he says. “It’s another world. You don’t think like a civilian. You want to help your guys because they are defending you.”
Svyryd was carried out on a stretcher in darkness. “They removed my flak jacket and helmet because I was too heavy. The Russians were firing mortars, so the stretcher-bearers left me on the ground and took cover. That’s the rule, to disperse, so that if a mortar hit us, it would not kill five people. When the ambulance came for me, I was lying on the ground in the dark and I thought they would run over me.
“If you are in the hands of one of our doctors, you will live,” Svyryd says. Swiss doctors who later treated him in Zurich expressed thanks to the Ukrainian medics who saved Svyryd’s sciatic nerve. He spent four months in a wheelchair and is now able to walk, though he has no feeling below his right knee or in his right foot.
‘I didn’t sleep for eight days and nights after I was wounded. You cannot imagine what kind of suffering that is’
“I didn’t sleep for eight days and nights after I was wounded. You cannot imagine what kind of suffering that is,” Svyryd says. The doctors in Zurich concocted a compound that enabled him to sleep. He feared being addicted for the rest of his life.
A friend in Kyiv sent Svyryd to Xenium, a clinic that uses a combination of xenon gas and oxygen in its rehabilitation programme. Olena Maryanchyk, the director of the centre, tried the treatment four years ago as a cure for her own panic attacks.
Dr Serhiy Kalynych, the anaesthesiologist who is treating Svyryd at the Xenium clinic, says the gas helps oxygenate the blood, improves memory and cardiac function and is effective in treating shock and pain. “It is almost equivalent to opium, but has no physical or psychological side-effects,” Kalynych says.
At $10,000 (€9,200) for a 2kg cannister of condensed gas, xenon is expensive. An anonymous donor, a Ukrainian businessman, has financed free treatment for about 30 wounded soldiers. Most require eight to 12 sessions of xenon gas inhalation.
I met Svyryd at his 10th session in the clinic. “You feel like you are dreaming or floating for just a few minutes, then you come completely back to your senses,” he says. “After my third treatment, I slept like a baby. I have slept normally, without pills, for months now. I am writing well – the fourth volume of my history of Ukraine.”
‘We have already won because Ukraine will remain a country. A terrorist state with a sadistic leader torments us’
Svyryd’s wife and stepson are refugees in England. He lives on a lake outside Kyiv with his German shepherd dog Marshal and says he is happy. His rehabilitation includes swimming and an exercise routine.
“You have to be cheerful and optimistic,” he says. “We have already won because Ukraine will remain a country. A terrorist state with a sadistic leader torments us. Putin tried to black out our electricity and freeze us last winter. We survived but we became more angry.”
Anger tinged with humour creates the best battlefield morale, Svyryd says.
One day he was watching enemy lines through a first World War-style periscope when he saw the Russians fire smoke grenades, usually a sign they are about to advance. “But the crazy commander forgot to test the wind, and the smoke blew back over the Russians. I started laughing and I could hear guys laughing all down the front line.”
