May 29, 2023 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Luke Mogelson’s “Underworld,” a riveting, first-hand report from the eastern front of the Ukraine war. Mogelson describes being embedded with a team of Ukrainian soldiers posted on the Zero Line – “the trenches where infantrymen clash directly with Russian forces.” Mogelson writes,

During previous reporting trips to Ukraine, I had encountered the Russian military almost exclusively as a remote, invisible source of bombs that fell from the sky. It was eerie to look across such a short gap at an actual Russian position—and to know that an actual Russian might be looking back. 

The piece is about trench warfare. It begins and ends with digging. In the first scene, infantrymen dig a machine gun nest. In the last scene, four soldiers shovel earth into a fresh grave. Mogelson puts us squarely there, in the bunkers, dugouts, root cellars, observation posts, and trenches. For example:

The trench was still a work in progress: you had to crouch and hunch to hide from snipers. When I’d stopped by a couple of hours earlier, the men there had been busy digging. Now they were shooting. More high-pitched rounds were crossing overhead. The heavyset soldier was squatting near a machine gunner who was staring over the sunflower stalks while resting the barrel of his weapon on a horizontal log.

“Do you see them?” the soldier asked.

“No,” the machine gunner said. A voice came through his radio, announcing that a second drone had joined the first one.

“Copy.”

Both were circling straight above us: two black silhouettes against the blue, like a pair of buzzards. The machine gunner swivelled his muzzle almost vertically and unleashed a salvo, but the weapon was too unwieldy. I was grateful for the narrowness of the trench, which had initially struck me as a design flaw: the passage was so tight that when you met someone going the other way you had to flatten yourself against a side, briefly exposing your head. This was intentional. The wider the trench, the more likely it was that projectiles or their fragments would find their way into it.

A grenade detached from one of the drones. A small geyser of earth erupted a few yards away from us. Between the snug walls, I hardly felt the explosion.

The piece is also about Mogelson’s personal experiences on the Zero Line. He accompanies soldiers on their sorties. He goes out on a B.R.M. (Soviet-era combat vehicle with tracks and cannon). He accompanies medics on a M-133 (an American personnel carrier from the Vietnam War) to pick up a wounded soldier. He hitches a ride from the Zero Line on a B.M.P. (another Soviet-era armoured vehicle):

Student and I each hooked an arm around the cannon between us, and the B.M.P. sped across the fields, spitting red sparks and black exhaust, rising and dipping over the muddy craters and fallow rows like a ship plowing through choppy seas. In the distance, a bright incendiary munition was drifting slowly down; flames were dancing on a nearby ridge. 

Most of all, “Underworld” is about the infantrymen on the Zero Line – the various ways they cope with the ordeal of combat. Mogelson talks with more than a dozen of them, identifying them by their code names: Syava, Pavlo, Bison, Odesa, Artem, Tynda, Kaban, Cadet, Volynyaka, Darwin, Oper, Ivan, Kyrylo, Leonora, Student. Here’s his description of Darwin:

The first time I accompanied them on this sortie, I rode behind the gunner, who was surprisingly compact in stature and stood in an open hatch wearing a black sweatshirt, a black beanie, black cargo pants, black boots, black gloves, black sunglasses, and a black neck gaiter pulled over his face, printed with the white teeth and jaw of a skull. When we got back to Kostyantynivka, the gunner removed his gaiter. Code-named Darwin, he was a baby-faced youth about the same age as Cadet.

One of my takeaways from this great piece is a realization of how resourceful Ukrainian infantrymen are using old Soviet and American military equipment. Here, for example, is Mogelson’s description of a soldier, code-named Kaban, operating a Soviet-era anti-tank gun called an S.P.G.-9:

There wasn’t much to the weapon—a bazooka on a tripod—and it was in decrepit condition. The trigger mechanism was broken. To activate each warhead, Kaban had to pry open the rocket’s gunpowder-filled cartridge with a pocketknife, twist together two wires at its base, connect those wires to a household electrical cable, then hook the cable onto a loop of bare copper that was attached to the gun with masking tape. 

“Underworld” is a vivid portrait of Ukraine’s incredibly brave front-line soldiers.