Ukraine war: ‘There is only us and them – enemies’ – Ukrainians dug in trenches on Belarus and Russia frontline
They tell us to run, and so we run. Through the scrub, the mud and the undergrowth until we stop under the shelter of trees. Out of breath, out of sight and, for now, out of danger.
This is a place of mud, weapons and nervous energy. We are in the area where the borders of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia converge. What was once a novelty on a map is now a tangible military pinch point and Russia’s next assault on Ukraine might well come through this terrain.
We are with the Ukrainian Border Force, who monitor and guard the frontier. A year ago, these people worried about customs checks on the hundreds of lorries that came through every day, en route between Turkey and Russia. It was, says a smiling, broad-shouldered man guard called Barack, “good work – interesting, not too hard”.
Now, there are no lorries and the guards have become the first line of defence. If Russian troops do pour through this border once more – and there is a growing feeling that they will – then these men and women will be the ones to greet them; to try to repel the Russian army. And so, the border guards have adapted to a new and vastly more perilous world.
“I don’t want to do this,” one of them says to me. “But I do it because I love my land and my country. If I need to fight, I will do this without thinking. It’s just work.”
But of course, it isn’t really “just work”. Through the sights of a heavy machine gun, you can see Belarus, just a few kilometres away. The Russian border is not much further away, and shells are fired over regularly. We can hear the regular booms as they land.
Many people around here have left. Those who remain have become accustomed to violence raining down on them – they use bicycles instead of cars, because bikes don’t attract drones.
Barack is a border guard stationed at the triple frontier between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine
Bonhomie, determination and adrenaline
Not far away is a small village that stands right on the border, cut off from the world. It was once home to 100 people but has been almost completely demolished. Maybe ten people remain, and they are almost unreachable.
We are the first foreign journalists to come here and spend time with these guards. What we find is a blend of bonhomie, determination and adrenaline. They’ve already seen one Russian invasion here and they fear another.
Thousands of newly mobilised Russian troops have been sent to Belarus this month to create a so-called “regional force” to defend the border.
A man in a balaclava readies a British-made NLAW missile launcher
In theory, it is a collaboration between the two countries, but few, beyond the Kremlin or Minsk, take that at face value. Just about everyone else sees it as a device for strengthening the Russian presence ahead of a possible attack, designed to stretch Ukrainian resources by opening up another offensive.
There is a precedent, of course. Back in February, Russian troops came over this border and took over the area. They formed a long convoy of vehicles that set off in the direction of Kyiv, before eventually withdrawing in April.
Since then, the border guards have been preparing. They have dug long trenches, where you walk through mud in near darkness with thoughts of World War One in your mind. And yet, in one of these underground rooms, we see computer terminals linked to the Starlink satellite systems.
Oleksander and Olga’s ceiling fell in on them after an explosion rocked their home
I talk to Barack in a room carved out from the trench. There are wooden boards on the floor and a crude bunk bed in the corner. He laughs when I say it feels like we’ve gone back a century, but agrees. I ask him about the Russian troop build-up a short distance away.
“They are becoming more aggressive, but our Ukrainian forces give them a bloody nose!” he laughs again.
‘We need more weapons’
They have a variety of weaponry – heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, rifles, ammunition and so on. There are minefields around us and a variety of concealed look-out posts. The job of preparing to resist a huge invading army is an intimidating one. It’s not one that they’re really trained for, but it’s one they’ve embraced.
The trouble is that while the spirit is boundless, the resources are not.
“We need more weapons because we don’t know the intensity of the possible attack. We do not know how long we will need to maintain the defence on the border,” says Halyna, the spokesperson for the Chernihiv border guard unit.
“We are reacting to the raising of the risk by the invasion with more preparation, more fortification – we want to stop them at the border.
“We need heavy weapons. If they send infantry, you can use assault rifles and machine guns and it will all be contained. The problem begins when tanks and their armoured personnel carriers come from their side.”
What, I ask, were the lessons they learned from the February attack?
“That they are unpredictable. This is the first lesson. And they are not our friends.”
Much of the infrastructure around Horodnia hasn’t been repaired since the last assault by Russian troops
It is a lesson that came as a brutal shock to many people in this region, where Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians have mixed for so many years. The nearest town to this border is Horodnia, which was the first to be taken by the Russians and the last to be relinquished.
They have rebuilt and repainted, but you can still see scars. A little out of town, we came down a rough road and found burnt out trucks, craters, shell casing and even an unexplored rocket lying in the woods.
‘No more brotherly Belarus, no more good Russia’
The houses bear witness to the violence. Oleksander and Olga remember it well. An explosion shook their house so violently that the ceiling fell in on their heads. “There are relatives of ours in Russia and everywhere but now the situation is such that we cheer exclusively for our country,” says Oleksander.
“There is no longer a friendly, brotherly Belarus, or a good Russia. There is only us and them – enemies. This is it.”
It is tempting to be intoxicated by this bravado. Certainly, Ukraine is a nation where resilience is armoured by a sense of grievance and the support of so much of the world. But it is also a nation whose heart has broken.
Nadia lives not far from the triple frontier between Belarus-Russia-Ukraine. She is Belarusian but lives in Ukraine
There is a house at the end of the street that is burnt out. It was bombed, caught fire and was remorselessly wrecked. Nadia watched all this happen from over the road, terrified. She raised the alarm, brought as much water as she could and then cried.
Not long after, her mother died.
Nadia is Belarusian but came here many years ago. Now she is fragile and scared, prepared to hide from another Russian invasion in the outside cellar where she keeps potatoes for the winter. But she fears it would simply collapse and seal her in.
“There is no rest for us here. My nerves are completely gone. What has Ukraine done to them? We have such great people here. They are peaceful people.
“So many people were killed. So many kids. So much grief.” And she weeps.
World
Israeli soldiers ‘psychologically broken’ after ‘confronting the reality’ in Gaza, UN expert says
A UN expert has said some young soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are being left “psychologically broken” after “confront[ing] the reality among the rubble” when serving in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was responding to a Sky News interview with an Israeli solider who described arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza.
She told The World with Yalda Hakim that “many” of the young people fighting in Gaza are “haunted by what they have seen, what they have done”.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms Albanese said. “This is not a war, this is an assault against civilians and this is producing a fracture in many of them.
“As that soldier’s testimony reveals, especially the youngest among the soldiers have been convinced this is a form of patriotism, of defending Israel and Israeli society against this opaque but very hard felt enemy, which is Hamas.
“But the thing is that they’ve come to confront the reality among the rubble of Gaza.”
An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Pic: AP
Being in Gaza is “probably this is the first time the Israeli soldiers are awakening to this,” she added. “And they don’t make sense of this because their attachment to being part of the IDF, which is embedded in their national ideology, is too strong.
“This is why they are psychologically broken.”
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said he believes the Sky News interview with the former IDF solider “reflects one part of how ugly, difficult and horrible fighting in a densely populated, urban terrain is”.
“I think [the ex-soldier] is reflecting on how difficult it is to fight in such an area and what the challenges are on the battlefield,” he said.
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Ex-IDF spokesperson: ‘No distinction between military and civilians’
‘An economy of genocide’
Ms Albanese, one of dozens of independent UN-mandated experts, also said her most recent report for the human rights council has identified “an economy of genocide” in Israel.
The system, she told Hakim, is made up of more than 60 private sector companies “that have become enmeshed in the economy of occupation […] that have Israel displace the Palestinians and replace them with settlers, settlements and infrastructure Israel runs.”
Israel has rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza, citing its right to defend itself after Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.
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‘Israel has shifted towards economy of genocide’
The companies named in Ms Albanese’s report are in, but not limited to, the financial sector, big tech and the military industry.
“These companies can be held responsible for being directed linked to, or contributing, or causing human rights impacts,” she said. “We’re not talking of human rights violations, we are talking of crimes.”
“Some of the companies have engaged in good faith, others have not,” Ms Albanese said.
Read more:
Israeli soldier describes arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza
British surgeons on life in Gaza
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The companies she has named include American technology giant Palantir, which has issued a statement to Sky News.
It said it is “not true” that Palantir “is the (or a) developer of the ‘Gospel’ – the AI-assisted targeting software allegedly used by the IDF in Gaza, and that we are involved with the ‘Lavender’ database used by the IDF for targeting cross-referencing”.
“Both capabilities are independent of and pre-ate Palantir’s announced partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry,” the statement added.
An Israeli reservist who served three tours of duty in Gaza has told Sky News in a rare on-camera interview that his unit was often ordered to shoot anyone entering areas soldiers defined as no-go zones, regardless of whether they posed a threat, a practice he says left civilians dead where they fell.
“We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die,” he said. “If they’re inside, they’re dangerous you need to kill them. No matter who it is,” he said.
Speaking anonymously, the soldier said troops killed civilians arbitrarily. He described the rules of engagement as unclear, with orders to open fire shifting constantly depending on the commander.
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division. He was posted twice to the Netzarim corridor; a narrow strip of land cut through central Gaza early in the war, running from the sea to the Israeli border. It was designed to split the territory and allow Israeli forces to have greater control from inside the Strip.
He said that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.
“In one of the houses that we had been in, we had the big territory. This was the closest to the citizens’ neighbourhood, with people inside. And there’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know it, and that they know they are not allowed to pass it,” he said. “But how can they know?”
People who crossed into this area were most often shot, he said.
“It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle,” he said.
The soldier is seen in Gaza. Photos are courtesy of the interviewed soldier, who requested anonymity
The soldier described a prevailing belief among troops that all Gazans were terrorists, even when they were clearly unarmed civilians. This perception, he said, was not challenged and was often endorsed by commanders.
“They don’t really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road, and they say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn’t be there, and if he still comes, it means he’s a terrorist,” he said.
“This is what they tell you. But I don’t really think it’s true. It’s just poor people, civilians that don’t really have too many choices.”
He said the rules of engagement shifted constantly, leaving civilians at the mercy of commanders’ discretion.
“They might be shot, they might be captured,” he said. “It really depends on the day, the mood of the commander.”
He recalled an occasion of a man crossing the boundary and being shot. When another man came later to the body, he too was shot.
Later the soldiers decided to capture people who approached the body. Hours after that, the order changed again, shoot everyone on sight who crosses the “imaginary line”.
The Israeli soldier during his on-camera interview with Sky News
At another time, his unit was positioned near the Shujaiya area of Gaza City. He described Palestinians scavenging scrap metal and solar panels from a building inside the so-called no-go zone.
“For sure, no terrorists there,” he said. “Every commander can choose for himself what he does. So it’s kind of like the Wild West. So, some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don’t face the consequences of that.”
The soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza, citing the Hamas-led 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Dozens of hostages have since been freed or rescued by Israeli forces, while about 50 remain in captivity, including roughly 30 Israel believes are dead.
He recalled soldiers openly discussing the killings.
“They’d say: ‘Yeah, but these people didn’t do anything to prevent October 7, and they probably had fun when this was happening to us. So they deserve to die’.”
He added: “People don’t feel mercy for them.”
“I think a lot of them really felt like they were doing something good,” he said. “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren’t innocent.”
The IDF soldier during one of his three tours in Gaza
In Israel, it is rare for soldiers to publicly criticise the IDF, which is seen as a unifying institution and a rite of passage for Jewish Israelis. Military service shapes identity and social standing, and those who speak out risk being ostracised.
The soldier said he did not want to be identified because he feared being branded a traitor or shunned by his community.
Still, he felt compelled to speak out.
“I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country,” he said
“I think the war is… a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over,” he said.
He added: “I think in Israeli community, it’s very hard to criticise itself and its army. A lot of people don’t understand what they are agreeing to. They think the war needs to happen, and we need to bring the hostages back, but they don’t understand the consequences.
“I think a lot of people, if they knew exactly what’s happening, it wouldn’t go down very well for them, and they wouldn’t agree with it. I hope that by speaking of it, it can change how things are being done.”
The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division
We put the allegations of arbitrary killings in the Netzarim corridor to the Israeli military.
In a statement, the IDF said it “operates in strict accordance with its rules of engagement and international law, taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.
“The IDF operates against military targets and objectives, and does not target civilians or civilian objects,” the statement continued.
The Israeli military added that “reports and complaints regarding the violation of international law by the IDF are transferred to the relevant authorities responsible for examining exceptional incidents that occurred during the war”.
On the specific allegations raised by the soldier interviewed, the IDF said it could not address them directly because “the necessary details were not provided to address the case mentioned in the query. Should additional information be received, it will be thoroughly examined.”
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Two security workers injured at Gaza aid site, group says
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The statement also mentioned the steps the military says it takes to minimise civilian casualties, including issuing evacuation warnings and advising people to temporarily leave areas of intense fighting.
“The areas designated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip are updated as needed. The IDF continuously informs the civilian population of any changes,” it said.
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