Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

by Luke Harding

In the days after February 24, the Russians came close to capturing Mykolaiv. Some of their convoys bypassed Kherson and raced to cut off the city. At the time, Kostenko was in Kyiv. He swapped a politician’s suit and tie for a uniform and drove south. By the time he reached Mykolaiv, Russian troops were camped nearby. They had struck Kulbakino air base in the southeast and were advancing from the north. “I was the last car in,” Kostenko said. Citizens were preparing for bloody street-to-street fighting. They had piled up tires and were making homemade bombs. The Ukrainian army withstood the assault and pushed the invaders back. Kostenko showed me a video he took of a Russian position on Mykolaiv’s outskirts. It showed him walking through a hellish brown field. There were abandoned field guns, mangled trucks, an engine, and the bodies of enemy soldiers, scattered amid debris and shells—victims of a Ukrainian aerial barrage. “They didn’t retrieve their dead. We buried them,” Kostenko said of the Russians. The victorious Ukrainians seized the Russians’ cannons and pointed them toward their former owners. Since this unsuccessful pincer attack, fighting in the south had turned into a battle of rockets and artillery. There were fewer direct encounters. “It’s like the Second World War with modernized tanks and weapons,” Kostenko told me. The Russians had plenty of everything, he added—tanks, ammunition, reserves, Smerch and older S-300 rockets. He was confident Ukraine could win...