I could hear the take-off detonation being filmed live and broadcast around the world in my earpiece, along with my TV colleague’s report of the Russian attack. It was the morning that Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Standing in the pre-dawn freeze on a terrace overlooking Kharkiv’s Freedom Square four years ago, it was less than a minute before I was reporting on those rockets when they exploded on impact.
The skyline bulged orange, then came the concussive thump, then the cracks of the rockets exploding. They’d been fired from Russia into Ukraine’s second-biggest city.
The BM-30 Smerch were among the worst. They scattered cluster bombs, spattering the city with deadly golden balls. BM-212 Grads, the old-fashioned Stalin’s Organ multiple rocket launchers, were terrifying too.
They screeched from the sky in swarms, landing like spears on residential areas, killing and burning ahead of the advancing Russian infantry.
Over the next couple of days, Russian troops stormed north from Crimea towards Kherson, and soon beyond. They blasted out of Donetsk and turned up on the streets of Kharkiv.
I could hear the sounds of firefights, machine guns screaming like chainsaws, and the crash of rocket-propelled grenades. The assumption was that the Russians would capture this city – and the capital – in a few days. That assumption got a lot of Russians killed.
We heard of a reconnaissance group that had wandered closer to Freedom Square and been ambushed by local police with RPGs and rifles. A Russian soldier fell from his vehicle on fire. A group of babushkas (grannies), almost certainly Russian-speakers, rushed up to the burning man. They beat him to death with broomsticks.
That was a metaphor for Ukraine’s defence of itself.
Having first been invaded by Putin in 2014, Crimea was captured. Back then, Ukraine’s allies reneged on security guarantees that had been afforded to the young democracy, and many, like the UK and the US, banned Kyiv from buying lethal weapons.
British and US intelligence knew that the Kremlin’s ambitions involved the conquest of all of Ukraine in 2022. They warned Volodymyr Zelensky that the Russians were coming. He didn’t seem to listen, and his armed forces were very relaxed on the border just north of Kharkiv.
“I don’t see many preparations to defend against an invasion,” I said to a colonel I met two days before the Russians launched into Ukraine. “You’re not supposed to,” he replied. But there were no signs of defences being raised at all. Because there were none.
Ukraine was sent reeling. But its population recovered its country’s balance. Some military units scrambled to put up fights that Western advisers thought incredible – such as the punishing defence of Hostomel airbase against mass airborne attacks by paratroopers and Spetznatz forces, just northwest of Kyiv.
Elsewhere, young veterans from the earlier years of combat reformed themselves into small teams in pickup trucks, organised their own families inside occupied territory to spy on the invaders, and took on Russia’s massed columns of armour and infantry.
