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Inside the battle on the Eastern Front
[UnHerd] Barbed wire knots together sky and earth. Burned-out vehicles, modern-day carcasses of industrial warfare, dot the landscape. The ground is strafed and cratered: Eastern Ukraine has been disembowelled by shelling. The war here is fought with 21st-century drone technology, but it flies over soldiers who carry 50-year-old Kalashnikovs. The black snouts and brown handles of these guns line the eastern front, which is a frieze cast in metal and wood, and is where, in the late afternoon of a warm spring day, I see Jesus.He is about a foot tall and half as wide, and is being carried by a man with a ponytail and scraggly black beard. Dressed in jeans and a tracksuit top, he cradles the icon in his arms. "Is this the way to Mariupol?" he asks the group of us standing by the road: me, Dima, the soldier taking me to the front, and my friend the journalist, Vladislav Davidzon. Mariupol — which has been almost destroyed by the Russian army — is almost 300km south. "Um, not really," Dima replies. "Who are you?" "I am a pilgrim," he replies. "I’m going to get people out of the city." He shows me what appears to be the business card of a UNHCR official — a psychologist it appears. I look at him. He has the glazed, trembling look of a pilgrim; of a smaller, scrawnier Rasputin (and, disconcertingly, Harry Kane). We talk for a few minutes before I watch him walk off into the distance, a lone madman clutching his Christ amidst the destruction. "Well," says Dima as we get back into the car. "If he makes it to Mariupol, it really will be divine fucking intervention." Posted by: Besoeker 2022-05-14 |
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