The soldiers who challenged Vladimir Putin’s military might by sending a Russian military ship “if f…” and died like heroes, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, may still be alive.
This is what the Ukrainian Border Guard admitted on Sunday (26), based on information initially released in the Russian press.
The episode was celebrated in Kiev and the West as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to the invasion of Russian forces, which began on Thursday (24). “All the border guards died heroically, but they didn’t surrender,” said with pomp the media Zelensky, who before winning the 2019 presidential election had made a career as a comedian on the country’s TV – his most famous role was that of a professor. naive who became president.
According to a radio recording from the tiny island of Cobra, 300 km west of the Crimea annexed by Putin in 2014, a Russian ship approached the small garrison with 13 soldiers. He demanded his surrender, receiving the reply: “Russian warship, go f…”.
Cursing became a national flag in the war. Electronic signs on highways in regions invaded by Russian military vehicles began to convey the message, hashtags were created, the whole package.
The group, the Guard said, may be trapped in Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Navy’s Black Sea Fleet, in Crimea. So far, no one has seen photographs or images of them to prove it, however. If the fate of the soldiers is confirmed, it will not be exactly an embarrassment, but a typical symptom of wars.
Historically, there are exaggerations in every conflict for propaganda purposes, such as the staging of the placement of the American flag over the devastated Japanese island of Iwo Jima in 1945. The military victory was real, but the conquest scene was not, as shown in 2006 in the cinematic diptych “The Conquest of Honor” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” by American director Clint Eastwood.
In the current conflict, the largest on European soil since the end of the Second World War (1939-45), another constant figure in the military field had also appeared: the urban legend.
In this case, flying. This is the Phantom of Kiev, an alleged MiG-29 pilot who would have shot down six Russian fighter jets, including two very modern Su-35S, on the first day of the battle. Ukrainian social networks boiled with alleged images of the plane, a Soviet model not the most up-to-date.
Fanpages sprang up and even a video of the fighter taking down a rival with a missile finally surfaced — only to be identified as a snippet of a very realistic video game. The Ukrainian Air Force still has some combat capability, despite having had 14 bases destroyed so far, but it’s not something that can be measured.
