A fortnight has already passed since Ukrainian veteran Stanislav Asseyev publicly announced his departure from the army. It is therefore in “free man”, in his words, that the renowned journalist and writer sits in a small cafe in the Podil district of kyiv on Saturday, October 19, late in the afternoon. The 35-year-old man with a pale complexion and deep gaze is getting a taste of civilian life after having fought for seven months in a territorial defense battalion, whose dissolution was inevitable since the summer, due to the significant number of losses. and desertions. Wounded twice in Donbass, he would have liked to join the Ukrainian military intelligence service, the HUR. But his request, directly supported by the powerful head of the service, Kyrylo Boudanov, remained a dead letter to his former command.
Stanislav Asseyev ultimately preferred to request his demobilization, a right for all former captives of Russian forces. While he was a journalist, he was detained and tortured between 2017 and 2019 in Isolatsia prison, supervised by the Russian security service, the FSB, in Donetsk. He doesn’t yet know exactly what he will do, but he will likely continue his work with the Justice Initiative Fund, an organization he created to gather information on Russian war crimes. Perhaps he will continue to work on a book retracing his military experience, begun in the trenches… What is certain, after less than a year of combat observing a deterioration of the situation on the front, is that Stanislav Asseyev will do everything to tell the daily life of his former brothers in arms and alert people to the immense problems of the army.
Referring to the case of the men of the territorial defense, these units present in all regions of the country, which tens of thousands of civilians had courageously joined in the first days of the invasion, he asserts that“there is almost no motivation left”. However, in his eyes, the problem is not limited to this specific military body, but concerns the infantry as a whole. “There is a big crisis in the infantry which is explained by a lack of personnel, training and communication between unitshe says. This is an internal problem in Ukraine that no Western country can change. We can have as many drones or munitions as we want, if there are no soldiers in the trenches, nothing will change. »
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