kilometer zone since the beginning of the month. Young men in Kiev, Minsk, and Tallinn had been summoned from their workplaces—or roused by a knock on the door in the middle of the night—and taken to be issued uniforms, sworn under oath, and told they should consider themselves to be at war. They learned their final destination only once they arrived in the zone. Now Marshal Sokolov, who had sent the Soviet armed forces across the border into Afghanistan in 1979, had come to lead his men on one more heroic military campaign to protect the motherland, which would become formally known as “the
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