Alberto Rojas is a historian, photographer, and journalist. A reporter in the international section of the newspaper El Mundo since 2011, Rojas has specialised in Africa and global armed conflicts. Since April 2022, he has covered the Russian invasion of Ukraine and narrated his experiences in Vivir la guerra (Living the war), published on 17 October.
The discovery of mass graves in the occupied areas of Ukraine is evidence of one of the most terrible crimes committed by Russia. In your book you talk about one of the graves.
The mass grave that I mention in the book was in Liman, in the Donbas, but we have examples in all of the liberated occupation areas, such as Kherson, or in Izium, where 478 bodies were found shot in the head, and their hands tied. In Liman, there were 72 bodies, and most of them were executed in this way. The Russians enter the occupied areas with blacklists to eliminate those who they know have fought with the Ukrainian army since 2014 or who are Ukrainian state officials. When we ask ourselves whether Ukrainians have combat morale or fatigue, that’s actually something that affects us, not them, because they have to defend themselves against an army that is going to commit war crimes as soon as it occupies new territory. It’s a question of survival.
You have also witnessed the bombing of civilian populations, which, however much it has been justified as collateral damage, is part of Russia’s war strategy.
It is exactly that, and I have been in cities that have been bombed every night. The Russians have all kinds of weaponry and calibres, and their capacity for destruction is hardly matched by other armies. When they bombard a city near the front with S300 missiles, which are anti-aircraft missiles, they use a very destructive weapon in a way for which it is not intended and it loses all its accuracy, but Russia doesn’t care about that. It’s a missile that can take down an eight-storey building and break it in two. I have seen eleven or twelve of these missiles launched in one night over a city, destroying buildings and causing real carnage with more than a score of people killed. If the Russians wanted to be precise they could use the Iskander, which they do use against military targets, but it is a strategy of terror that seeks to empty cities and make them uninhabitable. We see it also with the attacks on electricity and energy infrastructure, because the aim is to make Ukraine uninhabitable.
This Russian strategy is not new.
No, of course not, we have seen it before. What happened in Syria or Chechnya? It was very similar.
On social networks, what is happening in Ukraine is being denied again and again.
The book is a reaction against that. I remember, one day in Sloviansk, in the winter of 2023, when eleven missiles fell during the day. They hit buildings, courtyards, and squares; and I remember how they pulled two dead babies out of the rubble of a building. It was a terrible sight, seeing them being pulled and looking like two lifeless dolls. They were taken to a hospital, but there was nothing they could do for them. Later, when I arrived at the hotel, I found that there were people telling me that what I had seen was a lie. Not only that, but Lavrov made the typical statement that evening that “Russia does not attack civilians.” You can imagine what I would have done if he had been in front of me.
Most of those who deny what is happening in this war do so out of stupidity, ignorance, fanaticism, or sectarianism. Of course, there are also those who are paid by Russia, and I am not just talking about the Russia Today officials who wage information war on the West and do not hide it, but also those whose job it is to deny reality. This is a war and Russia knows that information is a weapon, and it spends mountains of money to refute what is seen on the ground. For Russia, the free and independent press is a big problem.
This propaganda effort seems to have no counterweight in the West, and voices on the ground are often buried by propaganda on social media.
It is frustrating and also a humiliation for the victims and the country suffering from this war. The Bucha crime is, along with the downing of MH-17, one of the most documented crimes in Europe. There is plenty of evidence about what happened in Bucha, but there are still people who try to prove the unprovable. Why do they do it? Because they get paid to do it, that’s all. Getting to Bucha is easy. Fly to Poland and from there to Ukraine by train. Once in the capital, take an Uber and Bucha is only €12. Go to Yablonska Street and talk to the neighbours, see what they have on their mobiles, see what images they recorded. I have been there and talked to the neighbours and to Father Andriy. It was very easy for me to collect what had happened by going from house to house in Yablonska Street or in the streets near the train station, and seeing what the inhabitants of Bucha have on their mobile phones. People can lie about a thousand things, but this is very clear.
Another example of this propaganda is the account of the ‘second best army in the world.’ In the book, you talk about the poor quality of the Russian soldiers’ medical equipment.
Yes, I have brought bandages from Russian medical kits and they are from 1972, so one can imagine how effective they are. Or helmets, from a more modern regular model, to the World War II steel helmet given to the militias of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. That gives an idea of how Putin treats his soldiers. Now we are seeing that there is a lack of cannon fodder and soldiers are going to come from North Korea or wherever to continue to support this idea of an invincible Russia or infinite resources. The thing is that they are not infinite, and that’s why they have to turn to North Korea.
It is frequently repeated that Russia is winning the war.
The war that Russia was proposing on 24 February 2022 was lost in a few weeks because of poor planning. The Russian army that entered from the north of Ukraine was heavily and humiliatingly defeated at the gates of Kyiv, at Chernihiv, and at Kharkiv. These Russian troops were then withdrawn to the Donbas, and the second Ukrainian war began. That is to say, the invasion of Ukraine failed and, from that moment on, the objective was to take the Donbas. After almost three years of war, they still haven’t achieved that goal, at a brutal cost in material and human lives.
The Russian army was defeated in the first days of the war. What Ukraine is now facing is the Soviet army—the army that was prepared to face the United States and NATO in the ’80s, and that is now being launched against Ukraine: thousands and thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles that were stored in camps in Siberia and that are going to be finished at some point, because the loss rates are higher than the replacement rates. This leads to a negative trend for Russia and therefore, even if the Ukrainian trend is not much better, to say that Russia is ‘winning the war’ is a misrepresentation of reality.
You give a tremendous figure: 20 Russian casualties for every metre advanced. Is Ukraine’s strategy to maintain that casualty ratio?
Sure, because they can have four times the population (which is what Russia has over Ukraine), but if they use armoured columns in broad daylight and they do it over and over again, they going to have a lot of casualties. And when they don’t do that, they put the troops on motorbikes or golf carts and throw them in waves. They eventually take the positions, at enormous cost, when the Ukrainians run out of ammunition. A Ukrainian commander defending the Pokrovsk area told me that this is what they see; and that they are convinced that, sooner or later, the city will be lost, but the aim is to inflict as many casualties as possible on the enemy. There will come a time when Russia will have to make a second mobilisation: that is what Putin does not want to do, and that is what Ukraine wants.
This is not the only bad trend for Russia; for example, the artillery fire ratio was 10 to 1 in Russia’s favour months ago, now it is only 2.5 to 1. There is also a negative trend in volunteer enlistment, with Russia paying more and recruiting less. There are several aspects that do not bode well for Russia’s quick victory or even that it is winning the war, because it is advancing very slowly and at a very great cost. The fact that it cannot drive the Ukrainians out of Kursk, and advances in the Donbas are so slow, indicates that it does not have the strength to do so.
What about mobilisation on the Ukrainian side?
I think Zelensky made a big mistake by delaying mobilisation until after the summer of 2023, instead of doing it at a moment of euphoria—like when territories were liberated in Kharkiv or Kherson—when it probably would have been much more successful. Doing so after the failed counteroffensive was very demotivating for the population. Nevertheless, it seems that the mobilisation goals are being met to a greater or lesser extent, considering that the Ukrainian army has 800,000 troops. What is needed is young people on the front line, because I have met soldiers in their forties and even fifties in the trenches in conditions reminiscent of the First World War: flooded trenches, hours without being able to rotate, under constant stress from artillery and drones, and so on. There are even many cases of soldiers who leave the army for a week or two, because they can’t find any other way to rest; but then they come back and their own commanders don’t report them because they know they will come back. This is something I have seen several times on the front.
There are also people who flee the country—there are thousands—but they will never come close to the 2.4 million Russians who left their country, because the Russians are much more unmotivated to fight in that war. Nevertheless, Russians often fight to the death because they have bought into the propaganda that Ukrainians are Nazis and will kill them if they surrender. I have spoken to Russian prisoners, and they were convinced that they were going to be executed when they surrendered. It is a very big manipulation on the part of the Russian army.
Once in Ukrainian hands, do these soldiers realise this manipulation?
Some do, and they feel disappointed and used, and say so openly; others don’t even want to think about it. To think that they are there because of a gigantic lie is so hard that they prefer to deny what they are seeing and keep repeating that, in Ukraine, they put Russian-speaking people in concentration camps, and it is a kind of Fourth Reich.
I have been many times with the soldiers of the famous ‘Azov battalion,’ now the Third Assault Brigade, and I saw that many of them speak Russian. How is it possible that in one of the units that Russia considers most fanatical, they speak Russian? Well, they reply that how can they not speak Russian if they are from Donetsk, Mariupol, Kharkiv? All of Russian-speaking Ukraine is also fighting against the Russians.
Everyone was surprised by the Ukrainians’ resistance to the invasion. Do you think a Western European country like Spain would be up to the task in a similar situation?
We don’t have the level of threat that they have had for decades. The Ukrainian population, or a good part of it, has been fed up with Russia for a long time and in some ways they have experienced it as an intergenerational war in which they now have to finish the job their grandparents started. One Ukrainian Marine volunteer told me that her great-grandfather had suffered from the Holodomor; her grandparents from Soviet oppression; and her parents from the collapse of the USSR and Moscow’s subsequent attempt to control Ukraine in an absolutely mafia-like manner. For her, the time had come for her generation to finish the job and free Ukraine from the Russian yoke. There is also a pro-Russian minority, but most of those who did not leave for Russian-controlled areas have ceased to be pro-Russian as a result of the invasion. Even many Russian speakers have started to learn and speak Ukrainian.
