Apr 23: Romanyuk & Popakyuk, Reconstruction on February 24. Part 1: Preparation for the invasion
As published by Ukrainska Pravda on February 24, 2023
Reconstruction on February 24
Part 1: Preparation for the invasion
By Roman Romanyuk & Fedir Popadyuk, Ukrainska Pravda, Feb 24, 2023
It was some endless day - February 23, 2022.
For several weeks now, intelligence agencies of all kinds and stripes have been practicing trying to convey to President Volodymyr Zelensky a new date when a major Russian attack will "definitely" take place.
Ukraine has already experienced the "invasion" of February 16, 19, 22. The next one was supposed to start this very night - from the 23rd to the 24th.
But will it be? And if there will be, which one, from where, with what forces? Will the Russians go openly or will they continue, as they have done for the past 8 years, to act under a foreign flag of their puppet regimes?
More and more questions piled up. But they did not want questions from the president, but answers.
The team and Zelensky himself chose the tactics of hidden preparations of the army and maximum public appeasement. Perhaps the loudest act of such appeasement took place just now, on the evening of February 23 , when for the first time in history, almost all oligarchs and big businessmen gathered at Bankova to get the answer - "to be or not to be a big war."
When the expensive motorcades calmly drove away from the President's Office and the last smiling businessmen went home, instead of rushing to storm the airports, it became obvious that Zelenskyi did not promise them any invasion, at least for this night.
However, when the president himself gathered the speechwriters in his office around 9 p.m. and began, as usual, to outline theses for another address, he did not appear to be a calm person at all.
According to the people present in the room, at that moment the president was focused "like a driver driving a car at night."
Zelensky's appeal was supposed to be atypical. While waiting for the invasion of Putin's troops, the Ukrainian president decided to address the Russian people.
And in this appeal to the aggressor, perhaps even unexpectedly for himself, Zelensky was more frank than during numerous speeches and meetings of those days.
"I am addressing Russian citizens as a citizen of Ukraine.
We are separated from you by more than two thousand kilometers of the common border. Today, your troops are standing along it, almost two hundred thousand soldiers. Thousands of combat vehicles.
Your leadership approved their step forward. To the territory of another country. And this step could be the beginning of a big war on the European continent...
We do not need war: neither "cold", nor "hot", nor hybrid. But if the army attacks us, if they try to take away our country, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children - we will defend ourselves! They will not attack - they will defend themselves. Coming forward, you will see our faces, not our backs - our faces," the president said in his address.
Around midnight, it appeared on Zelenskyi's official channels, and the president himself and key members of his team went home.
And somewhere there, along all two thousand kilometers of the border, a monster with hundreds of thousands of faces stirred imperceptibly and ominously.
Later, after being captured , the owner of one of those faces described the moment before the invasion as follows:
"On the evening of February 23, the commander of the unit called us and said: "You will return home in 4 days. Ukrainians will not fight for their oligarchs. As everyone says, they wanted to take Kyiv in three days. We stand on the threshold of the third world war."
"Something is beginning": a premonition of a blow
"I came home very late, I remember. Because until that day we had meetings, and it seems that the NSDC was there. We also discussed these issues together. All the documents and the structure of what we were going to do were prepared. We understood that , if it starts, the state must work as one organism. Where should everyone be. In order to ensure the financial structure, the National Bank and we did some things in advance, related to the state reserve, etc. Everything was safe, let's put it this way," - Zelensky recalls his coming home on the last peaceful day of 2022.
On the morning of February 24, intelligence once again predicted a Russian invasion. And although Zelensky had been convincing the country all day that the situation was under control, that evening for the first time the state of affairs seemed really threatening. The enemy began preparations for an attack, which had to be hidden.
The head of the President's Office, Andriy Yermak, in a conversation with UP, recalls one telling detail that struck him that night already at home:
"I left the office at half past two in the morning. The president also left somewhere around one. Meetings were taking place all this time.
I just got home and I remember that Reznikov picked me up somewhere around two or three in the morning. He says that the Minister of Defense of Belarus called him and said that "it seems to me that you need to urgently contact your Russian colleague." Reznikov says that I have no relations with him, and why would I call him, what is going on? "Well, I can't tell you." It was already clear that it was beginning."
Something was starting. But no one had final certainty about what exactly would happen. The majority of the military and political command agreed that a major escalation in Donbas was undoubtedly being prepared. The main Ukrainian forces were directed there.
Disputes began when it came to other directions.
Is it possible to attack Russian equipment from Belarus? Is it possible for Belarus to participate in such an attack? Will Russia launch an open attack from Crimea? Will he continue to hide behind his friends like 8 years ago?
Putin and his "window of opportunity"
However, the war was destined to be large and open. Many analysts believe that Putin saw the only window of opportunity for himself and Russia, when he could seize Ukraine.
The whole world is struggling with the consequences of covid, the US has shown weakness in Afghanistan; German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the de facto main European leader, has left her post. With half of Europe dependent on Russian gas and oil, Moscow has accumulated several hundred billion dollars in reserves to survive the sanctions.
Putin's own army seemed "second in the world", especially after the successes in Crimea, Donbas, and Syria.
In an interview with the Time publication , the head of the Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny said that the Russians had been accumulating their resources for a long time:
"According to my calculations, they intensively increased the number of people, equipment, and ammunition for three and a half to four years. I think they had a three-month reserve of resources to achieve their goals."
For Putin and Russia, this long-term escalation with the accumulation of people and equipment near the borders of Ukraine could not last forever. In the Kremlin's logic, the choice was between withdrawing the troops back to their Khabarovsk and Ussuri districts, and trying to "go to the end."
There was also the option of limited escalation, which looked more likely. According to the head of the Ukrainian HUR Kyryll Budanov , such a scenario could have become much worse for Ukraine:
"The point is simple. He (Putin – UP) sharply raises the level in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. He enters the negotiation process. During the negotiation process, he raises the level even more, strikes several precision weapons against certain objects in Ukraine and creates an atmosphere of chaos inside countries. And under this he forces to sign the necessary conditions. It was all much more logical.
And everyone told him that there were good options for them. And there is a not very good option - it is direct aggression. And he chose direct aggression."
The British publication The Times notes that the principled decision on war was made at the end of the summer of 2021.
According to the publication, a limited circle of people knew about Putin's plans:
"Four people - three of whom were former or current heads of the FSB - are the key people who pushed Russia to war: firstly, Putin himself, secondly, the secretary of the Russian Security Council and Putin's colleague in the KGB since 1975, Mykola Patrushev, Putin's fellow student, FSB director Oleksandr Bortnikov, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Patrushev and Bortnikov were the biggest supporters of the armed invasion of Ukraine. Shoigu was also aware of the plans to attack, but he is said to have played the role not of an ideologue but of an executor who sometimes showed doubts ".
Neither members of the State Duma, nor ministers, nor heads of state corporations, nor oligarch friends could say for sure whether there would be a war or whether it was a bluff.
War or bluff?
As of mid-February, Russia had prepared all the elements necessary for a full-scale war.
Ruslan Leviev, the founder of the Conflict Intelligence Team, an analytical center that has been actively following the movements of the Russian army since November 2021, told in one of his February interviews how they gradually became convinced that Russia was preparing for a full-scale war.
"Since November 2021, we have had red flags by which we were oriented. For example, the troops were withdrawn to the Pogonovo training ground near Voronezh, they were withdrawn to the Smolensk region to the training ground in Yelna, they were quartered near Kursk. But there are no paratroopers. Obviously, the infantry will not be the first to go to battle - the paratroopers are always the first to go into battle, and there are none. But then the paratroopers arrived."
Russia has paratroopers, but no anti-aircraft defense forces - some time passes, they also appear. There was a question with field hospitals - if this is training, then where are they? Hospitals are appearing. And so on the list - automated command posts, engineering units, tankers, fuel stations, wagons with weapons and shells.
Finally, 6 days before the invasion, Leviev summarized:
"The last point, which was optional for us, but even it was fulfilled, is the potential occupation forces, which were supposed to perform the functions of the military police - the forces of the Russian Guard. Which were not in the conditional and formal number, for good, but they were collected in a huge amount
It was incredible, and even I was shocked that in the convoys of the Roshvardiya, which were moving towards the border, we met cars with water cannons, cars necessary for clearing barricades and fences. It's as if they were fully preparing to conduct anti-partisan work, to fight protests in the occupied territory."
On February 23, information appeared from Roman Dudin, head of the SBU department of the Kharkiv region, about the purchase by Russians of 45,000 cellophane bags for the transportation of corpses .
There was almost no difference between such a "bluff" and reality.
Warning and preparation of Ukraine
Starting from the fall of 2021, the invasion was talked about mainly by representatives of the American power bloc. In Ukraine, officials watched such rhetoric with confusion and irritation. All but one.
In November 2021, the American publication Military Times published a long interview with Kyryll Budanov, in which he directly stated that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine at the end of January-beginning of February 2022.
The newspaper even published a map of the GUR, where possible attack options were marked with arrows - on the image, Russia was striking from Belarus in the direction of Kyiv and Lviv, from the east in Kharkiv and Donbass, and two breakthroughs were predicted from Crimea: in the direction of Odesa and Mariupol.
This news did not cause a great stir in Ukraine. The spokesman of the President of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Peskov, reacted to the information of the Ukrainian and Western special services about the preparation of the invasion of Ukraine, calling it hysteria.
In December 2022, the German tabloid Bild published another map with similar directions of attack and plans to seize Ukraine. At that time, many made fun of Mapa - they said that Bild was not a serious publication, but an ordinary tabloid. Lviv is marked there as Lemberg, which has long since ceased to exist. Military experts said that such plans are too complicated and more reminiscent of large-scale operations of the Second World War, and if Russia has enough strength, then to start a new operation in Donbas.
Most of the military and experts were really preparing for that option. As, for example, the head of the State Border Service, Major General Serhiy Deineko :
"I didn't believe until the last that there could be an invasion from Crimea. We know Putin and his weakness for using foreign flags, "miners"... We clearly understood that the invasion would come from the territory of Belarus. And we clearly understood what would happen on the borders of the Kharkiv and Luhansk regions - where the enemy could surround our group.
From Donbas, along the contact line - all this is clear. They could leave the territory of Belarus not as the Russian army, but with the flags of Belarus. And to leave Crimea - there are only Russians there."
The head of the GUR Budanov in an interview with UP convinced that the option of direct open aggression was chosen by Putin personally:
"Putin made the final decision to start hostilities around 3:00 p.m. on the 23rd. There were still some hesitations and preparations going on until noon on the 23rd. He could have used any option before that date.
He made decisions personally, I want to emphasize that. No one had a particular influence on this decision.
I will tell you even more: on the day the war began, he personally contacted the commanders of all groups, listened to a formal report on readiness for the start, and formally personally gave the command to start military aggression."
"But no one fully knew what was happening," Zelensky assured in one of the interviews : "It's all untrue. No matter what the intelligence told us, no one knew the details. Everyone was preparing for various events. We have had their own preparation. Different intelligence agencies, different states, our partners, had their own preparation. And their own warnings. And more details than we knew and than we had, no one had... Nothing more came out than that about what they told us".
The armed forces of Ukraine as of the beginning of 2022 were very different from the Ukrainian army of 2014.
However, compared to the endless Russian army, Ukraine still had rather limited resources. The difference was especially striking in the number of missiles, aviation and heavy military equipment.
Thanks to the dominance in the sky and multiple numerical superiority on the ground, Russia wanted to achieve a sudden, undeniable, quick victory.
Only the Ukrainian command really knew about the Russian forces in detail, if not everything, then definitely enough to knock out the enemy's main trump card of any blitzkrieg - the factor of surprise.
While the political leadership of the country hesitated, the military commanders not only saw the approach of war, but, as they say, felt it in their guts.
Perhaps this feeling was most accurately described in an interview with Time by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhnyi:
"You can't confuse the smell of war with anything. And this smell was already in the air."
That is why, as Reporters found out , even a month before the invasion, Zaluzhnyi gathered the closest circle of commanders and said: "The Russians will climb... so get ready to fight."
The head of the State Border Service Deineko assures that the intelligence of his structure also had accurate data that the invasion would take place.
"Yes, Western intelligence warned. And we were very attentive to this information. We have our own border intelligence, which works very effectively in neighboring countries, primarily Russia and Belarus.
The border service informed the higher military and political leadership of the state. I made a report to the president two weeks before the start of the invasion that there would be a war, that Russia would attack from the territory of Belarus through the Chernobyl zone. We had the opportunity to fully control individual representatives of the Russian military and political leadership.
The date of the full-scale offensive was postponed. First it was February 19, then the 22nd. The enemy was waiting. He was ready. We recorded that the employees of the Russian troops who were in Belarus "on training" began calling their relatives and saying goodbye to them as early as February 12. We intercepted these conversations."
Ukrainian forces were not just waiting for Putin to attack. Training and preparation have begun in all key directions of a possible invasion. Apparently, the biggest ones are along the northern border of "Zametil-2022", which Zelensky also visited.
As Major General Viktor Nikoliuk, the commander of the operational command "North", mentioned in an interview with "Suspilno", it was these exercises that became a factor that made the military believe in the reality of war.
"The absurdity of this attack, the very use of rockets, aviation, artillery in the 21st century, all this raised doubts. But when our training began, I was more inclined to the fact that the invasion would happen. During the training, we practiced the movement of units during marches on long distances, more than 300 kilometers".
No less intensive work was carried out on the other side of the country by the commander of the operational command "South", Major General Andrii Kovalchuk. In an interview with Glavkom, he mentions:
"For the last two weeks until February 24, I slept in my office, that is, I was on duty around the clock.
We conducted training, brought groups to the shore of the Black Sea, dug in, took positions, mined the sea coast, carried out engineering equipment of available areas against amphibious landings. At that time, I was under my command of the 28th brigade, which had come out of the Joint Forces Operation and had practically not yet recovered its combat capability. So for two weeks before the invasion, she was training.
Our artillery went to the areas of firing positions, units went ashore. In short, we were preparing. Those military units that were under my command, and with them warehouses with weapons, were dispersing."
The commander of the Ground Forces, Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, has already taken the first steps to prepare the defense of Kyiv.
The Air Force prepared reserve airfields for combat aircraft, moved anti-aircraft defense equipment. Much was done even without the knowledge of the country's political leadership, which saw everything as "provocation of the Russians" and "incitement."
The head of the GUR Budanov recalls that his special forces received weapons on February 23:
"On the 23rd, our special purpose unit was armed and dispersed. The strike unit went to Gostomel airfield, because we had clear plans for how this operation should begin, and the main element of this operation was Gostomel to make a quick approach to Kyiv.
In principle, this plan was based on raising the Russian flag over the Presidential Administration no later than at the end of the third day.
We understood: if we delay this landing and allow the armed forces to deploy, then in principle the whole plan is destroyed from the very beginning."
The day after Russia recognized the independence of its puppets in the Donbas within the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, on February 23, the Verkhovna Rada imposed a state of emergency throughout the country.
During the debates in the parliament that day, the Secretary of the National Security Council Oleksiy Danilov said an unexpectedly prophetic phrase:
"I remember when they gathered in the office of the head of the Verkhovna Rada for the first time, the deputies took the decision of the National Security Council. They said: "Well, there will be certain restrictions here. We don't like it." I was sitting there thinking, "God, people, what are you thinking? About what restrictions? We will have a war tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. We will make completely different decisions with you tomorrow."
"It's started!"
At 4:30 a.m. Kyiv time on February 24, Russian TV channels broadcast Putin's emergency speech in which he announced the start of a "special military operation" and, if we ignore this idiom, then announced the start of a war with Ukraine .
"...The further expansion of NATO and the military occupation of the territory of Ukraine that has begun is unacceptable for us. The issue, of course, is not with NATO itself, it is only an instrument of US foreign policy. The problem is that in the territories adjacent to us, our historical territories, "Anti-Russia", hostile to us, which is placed under complete external control, is intensively supported by the armed forces of NATO countries and is pumped with the most modern weapons...
...The entire course of events and the analysis of incoming information show that Russia's collision with these forces is inevitable. It's only a matter of time. They are preparing and waiting for a convenient time. Now they also claim nuclear weapons. We will not allow this.
...Russia cannot feel safe, develop, exist with the constant threat emanating from the territory of modern Ukraine.
Circumstances require decisive and immediate action from us.
The People's Republics of Donbass appealed to Russia for help...
...I decided to carry out a special military operation...
...We will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. And those who have committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation, will also be brought to justice.
In this regard, I am also addressing the citizens of Ukraine.
No matter how hard it is, please understand this. And I call for cooperation in order to turn this tragic page as soon as possible and move forward together...
I should also address the servicemen of the armed forces of Ukraine. I urge you to immediately lay down your arms and go home..."
While Putin's address was being prepared for broadcast, the first shelling and the first battles were already taking place on the border. Serhiy Deineko, head of the Border Service, recalls:
"Everyone believes that the invasion began at 4:00 a.m., but this is not very correct, because the invasion began at 3:40 a.m. at the site of the Luhansk border detachment. This is the Milovsky District. Russian forces attacked the detachment, a battle ensued, and immediately we had the first of the deceased in this full-scale war.
At around four in the morning, I reported (to the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - UP) that my subordinates were already fighting in three directions, that the columns were approaching. I understood that he was reporting to the president. I sent an SMS to the president at 5:17:
"Good morning, dear Mr. President. Allow me to report. This is a full-scale military aggression on the part of the Russian Federation. A number of checkpoints have been fired upon. "Hrads" are firing from their territory. Jet aircraft can be heard flying over the Chernobyl zone. "Hrads" are also striking from Crimea ".
At the same time, in all corners of the country, people began to wake up to the first massive missile attack by Russia. A few hours later, an eerie and unfamiliar howl rang out over the sleepy cities - the first air warning signal in many decades.
"We could hear the guys. I was already ready, I was almost leaving," recalls President Zelenskyi: "I received calls to the "guys" that we heard. I received the signal a little earlier, before the shots started. We were ready for this, so the intelligence and the military were watching, we understood where the risk of an attack could come from. Therefore, as soon as the preparations started there, shots were fired for the invasion, I received a call."
First Lady Olena Zelenska remembers that it was those explosions that woke her up.
"I remember that I woke up from strange noises outside the window. Like everyone else, I guess. It was dark, it was night then. And I see that Volodymyr is not around. I went to the next room, found him. He was already dressed, in a suit but no tie. I asked what was going on. And all he said was, 'It's started.'