Olga Andrianova, 31, rarely speaks to her 26-year-old husband, Sergei. “He is wounded,” she said. “He told me they were out of medicine. The boys die because they do not have the necessary medical care. Their wounds are starting to rot more and more. ” Sergei was lucky. His legs were hit, but one of the medics managed to save them. “They didn’t have to amputate, thank God,” says Olga. But there are no painkillers. “They just lie there, using their own inner will. That’s how they behave. “
In a modern, high-tech conflict characterized by intelligence-led drone strikes, their field is a battlefield of history textbooks. “This is strange. This is not a war,” says Hannah. “There are a few direct clashes in the Azovstal labyrinth with enemy troops. Instead, Azov’s fighters are hungry and shelled. This is a siege,” Hannah said. that it’s just murder. “
Of course, no one knows better than the Russians, on whose psyche the Nazi blockade of Leningrad remains, the terrible realities of the siege war. Now they are inflicting on their desperate enemies the same ruthless distress they once visited.
Azov is a hardcore group of ultranationalist fighters, originally assembled in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and then legalized. The women insist that every legacy of far-right extremism has been cleared up.
“Our husbands are ordinary people, patriots, not neo-Nazis,” says Julia. “They love their country and fight for our common values.
And yet, in describing their husbands, these women turn out to miss not common values, but how different they are from the people of their country. They themselves are different, youthful in appearance, but aged in a way hardened by a war that, they say, has been going on for eight years, not eight weeks, but eight years since the Crimean attack.
“For many Ukrainians, the war was wow,” says Julia. “But we have been waging this war since 2014. That is why, like Putin, they are not talking about the February invasion as a war. They simply see it as an “escalation.”
And if they criticize some Ukrainians for complacency, they accuse others of outright betrayal.
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