Reply of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks

By Hugh Barnes

The village of Robotyne stands on the high Zaporizhzhian steppe, a remote area that Ukrainians call the ‘wild fields’. Its wildness has only increased since the Russian invasion in February 2022. On the frontline in the war against Russia, halfway between Crimea and Donetsk, 150 miles in either direction, this battlefield with its wide horizon and rugged terrain has an atmosphere that is somehow reminiscent of a Hollywood western.

In early March 2022, Russian forces seized control of the village but the following year it was one of the few places on the southern battlefield to be liberated by a Ukrainian counteroffensive that ultimately failed to make a real breakthrough, and so it has remained on the frontline ever since. Now, as the Russians try to capture more territory ahead of ‘peace’ talks between the Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, Moscow’s troops have renewed their attack on the parts of Zaporizhzhia region they failed to capture at the beginning of the war. While I was visiting Robotyne recently, the abandoned village came under a battering from glide bombs that were released from warplanes tens of miles away. The attack was beyond the reach – equally – of air defence and rational understanding.

Three years into Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is not defeated, but nor is Russia victorious. Both the Ukrainian army and the population as a whole are exhausted, and Trump’s return to the White House has injected an extra dose of uncertainty into the bloodstream of the country’s war effort. Morale has plummeted. However, one reason for the prevailing gloom – and this is again a knock-on effect of the Trump factor – is that significant but unknown numbers of men are dodging conscription, either through bribery or simply hiding or deserting when they get to the front. Desertion is clearly a problem for the Russians, too, but Moscow has recruited tens of thousands of North Koreans and Chinese to make up for it, and there are over three times more ‘Russian’ soldiers than Ukrainians anyway. So, mathematically speaking, Russia has more staying power.

In the meantime, Robotyne is deserted. Life has stopped here. Every building has been damaged or destroyed, and it feels like a ghost village in a landscape, the vast open expanse of the Ukrainian steppe, that is particularly challenging for warfare under any circumstances. The sound of shelling can be heard up to 25 miles away. Some of the noise is generated by Kh-101 cruise missiles which are carried by hulking Russian bombers. Or by Kinzhal ballistic missiles fired from Russian jets. And at least one of the warheads pointed out to me by Vladyslav Voloshyn, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military’s Southern Command, belonged to a new intermediate range hypersonic missile known as Oreshnik. He added that it travelled at more than 10 times the speed of sound and could not be intercepted.

Long-range rocket and artillery systems have transformed the battlefield, but, as a result of waning US support, the Ukrainians are desperately short of munitions, especially shells. They are also in an arms race with the Russians when it comes to electronic warfare, drones, and the drone-jamming technology of modern trench fighting.

Voloshyn was speaking from ‘Position X’ which provides a viewpoint overlooking the burnt trees and hills and minefields of Zaporizhzhia’s frontline, which will also be at the forefront of any peace talks because, along with Crimea and Donetsk region, it is the key disputed territory.

Beyond the trees I saw rows of barbed wire, minefields, trenches, vehicle ditches, and concrete anti-tank traps known as dragon’s teeth, stretching far into the distance across the wild fields.

Snow was falling, and the steppe was littered with the bodies of the invaders. A truck with the Z symbol used by Russian forces sat nearby riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes.

But it was hard to tell where the Ukrainian troops were actually positioned. Perhaps that is why it was called Position X?  Close to a hollowed-out, nearly destroyed building, I heard the hum of a generator. There were some Ukrainian soldiers in the basement, and they looked exhausted. Some of them had been serving for more than a thousand days, with only the odd week off to see their family. You could sense their frustration as another salvo of Grad rockets rained down on the position.

‘You can’t hide anywhere,’ said a battalion commander with the call-sign Bulba. ‘But I guess that’s just the way the war here is now. It’s a long-range war. Shots are fired at a distance by long-range artillery and drones. You can’t see them but they can see you. They are watching your every movement from afar.’

In the dugout, Bulba watched live feeds from no-man’s-land on a large screen. He explained to me the two major categories of drones, the surveillance drones and the attack drones used to drop bombs.

His call-sign was derived from the hero of Nikolai Gogol’s novella Taras Bulba about a Ukrainian Cossack whose story – like Gogol’s own – is a reminder of lost possibilities in this very complicated part of the world. Gogol himself, one of Russia’s greatest writers, was born nearby in the Ukrainian city of Poltava.

Bulba explained that the Russians were trying to outflank and surround the Ukrainian trenches, dropping smoke grenades to create a smokescreen that would confuse anti-tank weapons. Russian storm-troops, he said, were constantly probing to find weak points in Ukrainian lines.

‘We are always getting trapped in these kinds of difficult situations,’ he added, showing me some footage of new trenches the Russians had dug just outside Robotyne. The village itself dated back to Gogol’s time when it was founded by Cossack farmers who were descendants of the Zaporizhzhian Sich. The area was still mainly farmland until three years ago. Before the war just over a thousand people lived in Robotyne, and almost every house kept pigs. The village also boasted four cows and some horses. Now there are almost no pigs left and only one cow. The animals that were there before the war have been killed for meat or died.

The Zaporizhzhian Sich was a proto-state of Cossacks that existed from the 16th to the 18th century. The word ‘Zaporizhzhia’ itself means ‘beyond the rapids’ of the Dnipro River, roughly the same area that was flooded in 2023 by the Russian bombing of the Kakhovka Dam. And these wild fields have been the setting of centuries of battles between Zaporizhzhian Cossacks and the Crimean Khanate and then the Russian Empire and then the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War. In the summer of 1920, the Soviet commander Kuzma Apatov died fighting against the Whites in Robotyne, where he was buried  – and where a monument in his honour towered over the village square until it was decapitated by Russian soldiers during the recent occupation.

In the first weeks of the war Moscow’s troops rolled into cities like Melitopol and Berdiansk without major fighting and took control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. The frontline eventually settled about 20 miles south of Zaporizhzhia city, and has hardly shifted from Robotyne.

In an attempt to entrench its rule, Russia conducted sham referendums in 2022 in the occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk, a move denounced by Ukraine and the international community.

Russian troops now occupy almost 70% of Zaporizhzhia region, so its capital, with nearly half of the region’s population and much of its industry, is definitely in Putin’s sights.

It doesn’t matter that almost nobody in Zaporizhzhia city, say, wants to become a Russian citizen. Because this is an occupation, not a secession. ‘These people are outsiders, invaders,’ Bulba told me. For instance, the Russian-installed FSB head in the Zaporizhzhia region, Alexander Gaglazov, was transferred from a role heading the regional security services in Russia’s Tambov region, while the head of Russia’s powerful investigative committee, Alexander Tsarakayev, came all the way from a job on Sakhalin island, eight time zones away in the far east of Russia.

By now, all of Robotyne’s population have left voluntarily, in addition to those killed, deported or kidnapped. Many have resettled in Zaporizhzhia city, but others are scattered elsewhere in Ukraine and across Europe. However, as I was inspecting the Apatov’s headless trunk in the village square – a grim metaphor for the Russian invasion Ukraine, an old Cossack in a flak jacket and pantaloons rode bareback out of the mist, his trousers flapping in the wind as his horse hurdled a trench.

Now in his sixties, Ivan Petrovych (‘Vanya’ for short) had lived in Robotyne all his life, and his local accent was barbed with a Scythian twang. ‘When the Russian tanks entered the village and the Grads started pounding, they not only destroyed my house but they hit my barn and ripped a cow apart. Only this horse survived,’ he said.

He was a grandfather, and claimed to be descended from the actual Zaporizhzhian Cossacks. But ever since his house was blown up, he had been operating behind Russian lines as part of a group called Atesh – a word that means ‘fire’ in Crimean Tatar. A week before I visited Robotyne, Atesh partisans had sabotaged a key railway in occupied Zaporizhzhia, disabling electrical equipment and causing disruptions to Russia’s military supply chain, Vanya said.

‘I am a native Cossack, I was brought up here since childhood,’ he added. ‘My own grandfather used to say that the steppe plus freedom equals the Cossack soul. Sure, we may have not enough ammunition or fuel, no helmets or vests, but our sabotage operations can still give the Russian a headache by undermining their combat readiness. That’s all we’re trying to do.’

In the 19th century, the historical Zaporizhzhian Cossacks were often the subject of picaresque tales illustrating their contemptuous disregard for authoritarian rulers. In 1882, for instance, Ilya Repin, a Russian painter born in Ukraine, was commissioned by Tsar Alexander III to depict the ‘Reply of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks’ based on the legend that these inhabitants of the wild fields had once sent an insulting letter to Sultan Mehmed IV refusing to submit to Ottoman rule. And Vanya too seemed to me to be a colourful example of the continuity of that spirit of independence, with the Cossack’s insults now flying in the direction of the authoritarian Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Unfortunately replies to authoritarianism don’t always get a fair hearing  – and wars seldom end satisfactorily. The Trump-Putin ‘peace’ plan is redolent of the post-Ottoman carve-up at Versailles in 1919, or at Potsdam in 1945, which divided Europe into west and east.

Ukraine’s own peace plan proposes a full ceasefire on the frontline first, then a full discussion of territory later. It is not really a conversation that the United States or Russia wants to have, but perhaps it’s desirable that peace should be rooted in international law rather than in capitulation.

The difficulty for Kyiv is that Trump, a disrespecter of the law international and otherwise, is proposing to give ‘de jure recognition of Russian control of Crimea’. Meanwhile Russia is launching a series of increasingly aggressive punishment bombings aimed at Ukrainian civilians. Nineteen were killed when a children’s playground in Kryvy Rih was bombed on 4th April. Ten days later, on Palm Sunday, 35 died in a missile attack on Sumy as families were watching a parade. Three more died in Pavlohrad when a drone hit an apartment block.

These are war crimes, of course, but they also indicate Putin’s growing confidence that Russia will not be punished for starting a war, even though Trump tweeted ‘Vladimir, STOP!’ after a dozen people were killed by another Russian bomb in Kyiv.

Yet a last-ditch effort to find a way to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine took place recently at the most unlikely event: the funeral of Pope Francis. The image of Presidents Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump huddled together under Carlo Maratta’s late-17th-century painting, The Baptism of Christ, kindled hopes that, on this occasion, the Sultan of Washington might actually listen to the Ukrainians’ reply.

However, Trump has already validated Putin’s fabricated narrative that the war was provoked by the west, and that Ukraine is not its victim but a culprit Trump’s willingness to recognise the annexation of Crimea is a telling blow that was delivered to the Ukrainians, at the end of April, as part of a seven-point peace plan.

‘Of course we’re worried,’ Vanya said of the US-Russian peace talks that had formulated the plan. ‘We’re worried because we don’t even have a seat at the table.

‘It’s not a good feeling when your biggest supporter suddenly turns round and stabs you in the back. After that kind of betrayal you can sometimes lose the will to fight. But that won’t happen to us, never! Because Cossacks always fight until the end.’