The Ukrainian war hero couple who helped push back the Russians from Kyiv warn against Trump’s peace plan
Serge in his blue anorak, Olena in her black faux fur jacket – an inconspicuous couple on a trip in Kyiv to show their daughter the capital they did so much to save three years ago.
The Kravchenkos’ clandestine work as part of self-starting groups of volunteers, heroic by the standards of any war, turned back two invading Russian convoys as they converged on Kyiv in 2022. Serge and a small group of comrades, veterans of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, took on Putin’s invaders in hit-and-run raids using pickup trucks, weapons they found in a warehouse in Sumy province.
Now Donald Trump is threatening to turn the course of history against Ukraine, by cutting US military support to the embattled nation. This could ultimately allow Vladimir Putin to hang on to the 20 per cent of the country it has already taken as part of a future peace deal forced on Kyiv.
“We can’t have a peace deal of any kind with Russia,” Serge said on Saturday, two days before Mr Trump’s inauguration. “If we freeze the front lines then Putin will just re-arm and invade again. And now Russia is better equipped, has better tactics, knows how the weapons we’ve had from Nato work. He won’t stop and so neither will the killing.”
He should know. He volunteered in 2014 to fight the Russians, re-enlisting in early 2022 to join a small band of bandit-like resistance fighters who reinvented the kind of dare-to-win tactics which made Britain’s SAS the model unit for special forces around the world.
Serge, as a native of Sumy, was key to the success of the unit of about eight men. Olena, his wife, perhaps more so.
Thick snow muffled the crack and crunch of the movements of Serge and a comrade as they crept through Russian lines, using the forest as cover to meet up with Olena in early March, just a couple of weeks after Putin’s full-scale invasion threatened to topple Kyiv in a lightening strike.
They appeared at Olena’s kitchen window at dawn after a 12-hour infiltration in civilian clothes, armed only with 9mm pistols. They were wet, cold and smiling a few days after the Russians had overrun her village.
With enemy patrols of infantry outside and as Russian tanks tore up the mud and snow around their homes, the Kravchenkos set her up as the centre of a spy network.
For the next month or so, Olena and her female neighbours, sat in the front rooms of their homes texting details of Russian troop movements, locations of headquarters, logistics concentrations and, above all, coordinates of enemy positions to Serge and his team. The gang managed to get hold of some NLAW and Javelin anti-tank missiles from the UK and US. They taught themselves how to use the bazookas in real-life ambushes against Russian columns.
They were relentless – hitting convoys and camps every day, sometimes several times a day by leaving their vehicles hidden, sneaking, on foot, through miles of woodland and across snow-covered fields at night, then attacking targets found by Olena’s network.
On one occasion they returned from a successful ambush to find their pickups, which they’d hidden in abandoned farm buildings, burned out and “nearly panicked”.
“We thought we’d been caught by Russian spetznatz (special forces),.” Serge said. “We had been stupid and left our anti-tank missiles and ammunition in the cars for the Russians to take and we thought we were about to die”.
Then a babushka (granny) emerged from a building.
