"Patriotism is when they TORTURE YOU WITH ELECTRIC CURRENT but you don’t give away your soldiers location…”

“One family helped us for a very long time, about six months. In the end, the whole family was simply taken away to Nova Kakhovka, where they were tortured with electric current. Although that family knew where we were, our location, even under torture they still did not give us away,” a soldier shares the cruelties of war and the enemy, but all I could think was that he was telling stories from old films, since such horror in the middle of Europe in our erashould be unimaginable.

“What is that, if not patriotism?” Mikola asked me rhetorically. “When your wife and your daughter are tortured with electric current, when you, yourself are tortured with electric current, and yet for some reason you still don't give away the location of your soldiers.” Mikola and I both fall silent for a moment.

“Patriotism comes in all forms,” the soldier continues telling me about a local lad, a diver, who worked at the local diving station. “He supplied us with food underwater,” he says. “He'd dive from his bank, surface at ours, and that was how he delivered food to us, there was no other way to do it. To help us, people were willing to do anything, because we, in turn, we were truly working effectively, as best we could.

Everyone talked about us constantly: on the islands they talked about us, on both banks, left and right, says Mikola. They, I mean – enemy, would say, that there was ‘some kind of’ group of soldiers, operating there. At some point, the russians began to say among themselves, that they no longer wanted to 'go in' to those islands, because apparently, everything was bad there. It was simply easier for them to stay on one bank, or the other. And only later, after we had already left, the locals told us of a moment, that allowed me to clearly understand, what I was actually doing. Because throughout the entire period, we were there, we were always tracking the Deepstate maps, which showed the left bank marked as occupied, the right bank marked as occupied, and between them, there sometimes appeared like a grey zone, a kind of 'Ukrainian hat.' We used to joke at the time, thinking: well, well, could it really be ,that this is because of our presence here? Even later, the locals told us, that during some russian excessive drinking partys, they would apparently say: the left bank - that's russia; the right bank - also Russia; but on the islands, that's where the Ukrainian soldiers are; we won't go there; that's Ukraine.”

That is why the moral of this story is very simple: if you are truly prepared to resist, if you are resolved to fight for your land, if you are resolved to die for your land, then even a small group of people, who know their land, can do a great deal - because you are fighting on your own land. Among us, there were also locals, who knew every path there. You hold that piece of land and you keep holding it, and that piece of land remains Ukrainian,” Vegas reflects, not moralising, yet allowing us to draw exceptionally valuable lessons, not only for ourselves, but for generations to come.

I thank the Media Support Fund (MRF) for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”