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

by Luke Harding

The plucky “fuck off” of the Snake Island defenders did nothing to alter the grim facts out in the Black Sea. The bombardment continued all day: from the Moskva and Vasily Bykov came thunderous booms. At around 6:00 p.m., two groups of Russian commandos stormed the island in darkness, Hotskiy said. Eighty enemy soldiers swarmed along the pier. A second party landed close to the lighthouse, shinning up the cliffs. He was reluctant to explain what happened next. Outnumbered and cut off, and with the situation hopeless, the garrison appears to have laid down its weapons. Hotskiy said his captors blindfolded him. He and other border service personnel were loaded into a service tugboat and brought to the naval base in Sevastopol—a journey of nearly twenty-four hours. “They didn’t say anything. We didn’t see anything,” he said. They spent the next two weeks in a barracks located somewhere in the port area. The conditions were tolerable. Hotskiy said he had no idea what was happening back home—if Kyiv had fallen, whether the Russians had steamrollered Ukrainian resistance. In early March, Hotskiy was blindfolded again, put on a plane, and taken to Stary Oskol, a Russian city in Belgorod Oblast. His colleagues were dispersed. He found himself in a prison, locked in a cell with “two guys from Kharkiv.” “It was a terrible place, worse than before. There were bars. I had no idea what had happened to my relatives, whether they were alive.” He assumed he would remain in Russia for a lo...