KHARKIV – The dead Russian soldier’s body was still lying there in the snow where it had been on Friday. The Ukrainian soldiers hadn’t moved it, because of sloth or rage or simple preoccupation with the enemy army doing its best to put them in the same pose, spread-eagled on their backs surrounded by an aura of blood.
This afternoon the fighting was still all outside of the city. We came across the body at a four-way junction with Kharkiv’s ring road on Saturday, arriving at a Ukrainian army position with very little warning shortly after passing a line of civilians waiting to buy food at a grocery store. The road is littered with destroyed vehicles — three burnt-out Russian BTR troop transports, a scuttled Ukrainian KOZAK, the decapitated turret of a tank. The body is of a Russian soldier who tried to break through the Ukrainian lines outside of the city of Kharkiv…
