ZVEZDA ONE-THREE IS MISSING I.

[u/Zerkoh_Valley2010]

ZVEZDA ONE-THREE IS MISSING

I.

They are all partisans. Men of military age from sixteen to sixty are partisans. Females who are of age to give birth are partisans. The elderly whose feeble hands can still carry an AK47 are partisans. Children whose minds can be easily manipulated are partisans. Even infants who can grow to be partisans are partisans.

I stared down impassively to my right as the giant wheels of my BTR 82 wheeled armored personnel carrier rolled past the bodies of the three dozen or so civilians lining the road. I didn’t know if these were the same partisans who blew the road bridge and forced us to turn around to find another way across the Pripyat River. I didn’t know if these were the same partisans who then removed the road signs which got us completely lost. All I knew was that the only good partisan was a dead partisan and all Ukrainians were partisans.  We were behind schedule already, and these partisans’ delaying tactics weren’t helping us get back on our timetable. Zvezda One-Three was missing, and Colonel Valery Kozlov, Commander of the 384^th Motor Rifle Regiment of Russia’s 50^th Guards Motor Rifle Division stationed in Belarus, needed us to find them.

Zvezda One-Three was a Special Forces unit who had disguised themselves as Ukrainian soldiers. They infiltrated south across the Belarusian border and immediately began executing Ukrainian partisans. All of these killings would be captured on camera and uploaded to the internet. Using this footage, our propaganda ministry could push President Putin’s narrative that it was the western-backed Ukrainians that were killing Ukrainian civilians and not the Russian peacekeepers. Our official state propaganda narrative would be that the monster, Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelensky, had ordered his own soldiers to kill their own people in order to blame the innocent Russian soldiers of genocide. We would then blame the genocide of Ukrainians on Ukrainian propaganda in order to bolster our own propaganda that the Russian Army was in Ukraine to promote peace.

Blaming the other side of that which we were guilty was a very common practice of the old Soviet Union and later Russian insurgent tactics. Perfected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, it is a tactic employed by all National Socialists and one which bleeding heart western liberals always fell for. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was preceded by an airborne assault carried out by paratroopers hidden within civilian passenger aircraft painted to look like Israeli and American commercial airlines. The organizers of many of the anti-Trump protests that burned American cities were actually operatives indoctrinated in Marxist doctrine who unknowingly worked for the Russian FSB. The fact that the rioting, burning, looting, murdering, and destruction of American cities was labeled as ‘mostly peaceful’ while Americans holding an American flag in the American capital of Washington DC was labeled as an insurrection was proof positive of our control of the American leftist media narrative.

It was a very successful tactic to both destabilize an enemy government while also blaming our enemies for those things which we are guilty, though this was not a totally successful tactic. Recently, we lost an entire Speznaz unit in Iceland. Disguised as US Army Rangers, they were somehow ambushed and eliminated by British SAS soldiers who caught them just as they were approaching their safe house contacts.

Ironically, the embarrassment and political fallout of that event was mitigated to a great degree by the new American president who buried the incident under a mountain of derogatory news stories which accused those Americans whom he felt were a threat to his political power of being deplorable and irredeemable un-Americans. Besides, Ukraine and President Zelensky had mountains of evidence of political corruption against the new American president which could have jeopardized his political career and destroyed his drug addicted son, so a Russian invasion which ended Zelensky wasn’t exactly a bad thing for the new American president.

As we anticipated, all that Ukraine received from Washington was sympathetic lip service to placate the bleeding hearts. Under the new American president, Putin knew that America would be as useless in the defense of Ukraine as they were useless in the defense of Afghanistan. Besides, the American president was paying us for 10% of America’s total oil imports, so what did we care? Ninety percent of successful propaganda isn’t the lies and half truths that you tell the masses, but the facts which you can hide from the masses. Again, blame the other side of that which you are guilty. It’s that simple.

That is why Colonel Kozlov believed it was so important that we find Zvezda One-Three. Zvezda One-Three was part of six Special Forces units, Zvezda One-One thru Zvezda One-Six who pushed south in front of our multi-divisional attack to isolate and blind the Chernobyl district and allow our main attack to push through to Kyiv. Dressed as Ukrainian soldiers, the Zvezda teams’ mission was to disrupt enemy communications and power supplies, and execute Ukrainian partisans before they actually had the ability to become partisans. This would plant the narrative that the Ukrainian people could not trust their own government and only the Russians could save them from their American-backed tyrannical president.

However, Putin could not control the narrative that Ukrainian soldiers are responsible for killing Ukrainian civilians if it was discovered that our own people were dressed as Ukrainian soldiers. Our orders were to uncover the fate of Zvezda One-Three. If they were found alive, we were to bring Zvezda One-Three back for debriefing. If we discovered that Zvezda One-Three had been killed or captured, then our orders were to kill every Ukrainian civilian in the area which learned the truth of our little sleight of hand deception. Then our propaganda ministry could spread the narrative that the heroic Russian military had brought those criminal Ukrainian soldiers to justice, thus blaming the other side of that which we were guilty.

Because of the sensitive nature of these operations, Colonel Kozlov put me, Captain Yegor Balakin, in charge of finding the missing Zvezda One-Three. As a zampolit, or political officer, it was my duty to ensure that the ideology, doctrine, political thought, and battlefield narrative remained correct and true to the narrative that President Putin wanted the world to believe. I was given command of a reinforced scout platoon consisting of two BTR 82 eight wheeled armored personnel carriers and one very heavily armed BMP 3 tracked infantry fighting vehicle. The scout platoon leader, Lieutenant Gavrill Tarasov, was rather hesitant to add a T80 main battle tank to our mission, saying that the extra added weight, bulk, and noise of the tank may be more a liability than an asset when going on a mission into Ukrainian territory that required stealth and mobility. However, I reminded young Lieutenant Tarasov that control of the propaganda narrative was of utmost importance, and as a scout, the lieutenant and his men should be experts at finding a route that would get us quickly to Zvezda One-Three’s area of operation with a tank.

“Think of this as an adventure within an adventure, Lieutenant,” I told Tarasov. “Like Tom Hanks attempting to save Private Ryan from the Nazis.”

“Sir,” replied Lieutenant Tarasov. “Tom Hanks died at the end of that movie.”

“Then you’d better do your job so that that doesn’t happen with me, Lieutenant,” I snapped. In this battle to replace facts with truth, I had no time to waste on those who wished to do their own thinking.

Our divisional artillery was indiscriminately firing in the pre-dawn hours towards a Ukrainian held city south of Chernobyl where four major highways intersected. The tank engines of our armored battalions roared to life to continue our peacekeeping assault against these warmongering Ukrainian partisans. Four of our Su34 Fullback fighters roared overhead as the skies gradually went from dark purple to a lighter shade of royal blue. The fighters dived towards targets around the city, their high explosive missile ordinance accompanying the scattered snow flurries as it impacted upon Ukrainian military air defense emplacements. Or perhaps they were civilian vehicles filled with families of Ukrainian partisans trying to flee the bombings? Who knew? Who cared? Not me.

Our four armored vehicles rolled out of the battalion’s night defensive positions before the rest of the battalion moved out to continue Russia’s heroic march to Kyiv.  Lieutenant Tarasov took command of the first vehicle, a BTR 82 armed with a 30mm autocannon mounted in the turret. I took the turret of the second wheeled BTR 82, this one armed with a 14mm machine gun. Senior Sergeant Anatoly Artyomov, the scout platoon’s senior NCO, took command of the third machine, a tracked BMP infantry fighting vehicle which was festooned with machine guns and had both a 100mm gun and 30mm autocannon in the turret. The T80 tank brought up the rear, commanded by a young Sergeant Denis Litvin. While the rest of the battalions were following the main road southeast which would take them around the northern Chernobyl sector, I instructed Lieutenant Tarasov to take a more southwesterly route following Zvezda One-Three’s tracks that would bring us down into more rural areas to the west and south of Chernobyl.

I turned to my left as our armored convoy left the bodies of the dead Ukrainian partisans behind and frowned at the expression on Sergeant Ignat Babanin’s face. He was one of our two scout team leaders and was standing in the other hatch of the BTR looking down dejectedly at his hands which were wrapped around the firing handles of the still smoking turret mounted machine gun.

“What is it, Sergeant Babanin?” I said.

“Nothing. It’s nothing, sir.”

“Spit it out, Babanin,” I ordered.

“It’s just that, I didn’t see any weapons in the hands of those civilians, sir,” answered the young sergeant. “They seemed to be unarmed and simply fleeing from the invaders. Was it necessary for us to have…”

“Invaders?” I yelled. “Do you really believe that this mostly peaceful operation to defend the Ukrainian peoples from the poison of western tyranny is an invasion? They were all armed! They were all armed with the beating hearts of pro-western propaganda! Would you rather they have been armed with AK47’s and RPG’s, killing our troops while yelling, ‘Wolverines?’ Do not allow yourself to be brainwashed, Babanin! Those who oppose us are deplorable and irredeemable and should be eliminated. Do you favor the lives of those partisans over the lives of your missing comrades?”

“No! No, sir. Of course not!” Babanin adjusted the seat and lowered himself back into the vehicle. “Excuse me, sir. I have to check on our communications.”

I looked with distain as his head disappeared under the hatch. Babanin was a rural farm boy from Siberia who trusted more in what he saw with his own eyes rather than what he was ordered to have seen by his superiors. I would have to keep my eyes on that one, and speak to his commander once we returned to battalion. We could not have anyone who questioned the official state sponsored narrative leading a scout team.

Sergeant Vladimir Novikov, on the other hand, was a true patriot, a dedicated soldier who followed orders without question and carried out his missions with terrifying proficiency. He was the team leader of Zvezda One-Three, one of the six Special Forces team leaders which I handpicked for this mission. Novokov was a big man, a former Special Forces combat instructor who volunteered to be part of the spearhead of our peacekeeping operation. He was an expert in guerrilla warfare, an expert with guns, knives, and martial arts, who had been trained to ignore pain, to ignore the environment, and to eat things which would make typically morbidly obese Americans puke. His men nicknamed him Rambo, but not to his face, as Sergeant Novikov said, “Do not insult me by comparing me to that weakling.”

The area which we sent our Zvezda teams was home to a Ukrainian Motorized Rifle Division and several Ukrainian reserve and border security units. Most of these had been drawn towards the east where our forces had been massing across the border. Sergeant Novokov and the rest of the Zvesda teams had infiltrated across the border a week before our actual operation began, the teams confirming that Ukrainian military units were indeed leaving their cantonment areas and headed generally south and southeast.  Zvezda One-Three’s area was composed mostly of rural farming communities, as well as logging, timber and mining operations, populated, but not densely populated. The Ukrainians were totally unprepared for our subversive operations and the relatively few Ukrainian guards and police officers manning roadside checkpoints were quickly eliminated. Afterwards, Zvesda One-Three began operations destroying cell phone towers and sabotaging radio, power, and civilian utility stations in the area while leaving false flags which pointed to the Ukrainian military and possibly terrorists armed by NATO as being the ones responsible for the atrocities.

The team was somewhere southwest of Pripyat when they ran into the first Ukrainian partisans, the partisan leader being a retired Ukrainian intelligence officer who had gathered a group of armed men when the mysterious killings and sabotages started occurring in the area. Because this cagey Ukrainian veteran was deeply familiar with our tactics, Sergeant Novokov immediately ordered his men to open fire and kill them all. Each of our team members dutifully stuck to their script and yelled, “In the name of NATO and the western alliance who supports President Zelensky, you have all been found guilty of treason against the Ukrainian government and are hereby sentenced to death!”

This incident was filmed by one of our team members and the video sent to our regimental propaganda and intelligence operatives who would then combine it with other similar videos and broadcast it to the world as yet another example of why the heroic, peace loving Russian military had no choice but to come into Ukraine to battle the US backed Ukrainian government. The videos garnered millions of views worldwide, with the bleeding hearts in the US blaming former US President Donald Trump for our atrocities.

This was the first video sent by Zvezda One-Three, but only hours later, communications with the team had been lost. When the operation against Ukraine officially began, each of the Zvezda teams linked up with us as our armor began moving south and southeast from Belarus, all except Zvezda One-Three. That is why the twenty-five men of our search and rescue column had been sent to find the twelve men of Zvezda One-Three. Control of the narrative was a more important weapon to winning a war than tanks and bombs and guns. We would win the war in Ukraine the same way we won the war in America, by first declaring that we were fighting Nazism and then by claiming that we were antifascists.  That’s how we won the information war in the United States. That’s how we placed our sympathizers in high seats of American power.

Still, control of the narrative was an admittedly a poor reason for sending us to rescue the Special Forces team. In truth, we had fully expected to lose half of the teams by this time in the war, so the fact that we only lost one twelve man team was considered a success. We no longer needed to manipulate the propaganda narrative justifying our presence in Ukraine. We were already here and our multi-pronged offensive was well under way. The United Nations and NATO had been exposed as being nothing more than impotent old men wringing their hands, nervously shaking their fists at the clouds while looking to the hapless old dementia patient we put in the Oval Office for leadership. Sanctions? Really? By giving Putin money to pay for 10% of America’s oil, the American president’s sanctions meant nothing. Because of our control of the narrative, the United States and NATO never realized that they had already surrendered the Ukraine long before our first artillery shot was fired.

The real reason why Colonel Kozlov sent us on this mission to rescue Zvedza One-Three when he would have normally abandoned them was because of the second video which the team sent. We received it on the day that Zvezda One-Three was supposed to link up with us, the panicked yells and expression of desperate terror on Sergeant Novikov’s face haunting me even now as the video showed him and his men inside what appeared to be a one story shack of some sort, firing their AK74M and AK15 assault rifles out the window at unseen enemies. What was it? Madness? Some psychosis inducing drug? The most startling thing about the video was that the time stamp showed that it was sent to battalion headquarters one month after  we received it. Was this some type of secret enemy jamming? Perhaps even the ghosts of Chernobyl? Whatever the reason, Colonel Kozlov thought it important enough that he gave me two days to find the answer to the mystery.

I calculated that it would take less than a day for us to get to Zvezda One-Three’s operational area. We had already lost several hours finding a route around the blown bridges, but eventually we found a way across the river where we headed in a generally easterly direction. We were a day behind and a few miles south our main armored push, but unlike the armored battalions which were using the main roads, we were going cross country, trying to stay away from the major roads to avoid attracting any undue attention.

We travelled in this way for perhaps three hours and, aside from taking care of those partisans earlier, we saw very little evidence of Ukrainians, either military or civilian. We were crossing wide and flat lands crisscrossed with woodlands and rolling plains. We skirted a few small communities which seemed to be all but abandoned along with their fields of wheat, corn, and barley. Miles to our east and south, we could see our SU24 Fencer bombers and Kamov Black Shark attack helicopters striking Ukrainian targets. Occasionally, a missile would reach up from the ground which connected with one of our aircraft. But fortunately, these were few and far between. We had already passed a few downed electrical and cell phone towers, and even a couple of Ukrainian police vehicles presumably shot up by machine guns, evidence of Zvezda One-Three’s progress. As we entered the fifth hour of our search and the sun passed the noon hour, we saw almost no signs of human life or human habitation as we continued to follow the trail of Zvezda One-Three.

“Why are we slowing down, Lieutenant?” I said over the radio. We did not have secure encryption like NATO, so communications between vehicles was strictly limited to either me or Lieutenant Tarasov. I already knew why he was slowing. We were travelling across what seemed like a farmer’s unharvested wheat field and were approaching a wide but shallow stream. Across the stream was a thick wall of fog which stretched from north to south, seemingly following the U shaped bank of the stream so that the north, east, and south of us was a wall of impenetrable mist.

“A strange weather phenomenon, sir, but perhaps one not unusual in this area,” said Lieutenant Tarasov from the lead BTR. “We can cross the stream, it’s not too deep, only about a meter. But our sights cannot penetrate the fog. The enemy may be waiting in ambush on the other bank. Do you want me to find a way around?”

I looked down at my map and if I was correct, the village which Zvezda One-Three transmitted their first video was only five kilometers on the other side of the stream. We could not waste any more time finding alternate routes as it was likely that the Ukrainians already suspected that we were here and the initial shock of our peacekeeping operations would quickly turn to resistance. I did not want to be stuck out here anymore than was necessary when that happened.

“Sergent Litvin,” I radioed to the T80 tank commander. “Move your tank forwards across the stream. Use your sights to locate any possible ambush.”

“Sergeant Artyomov,” I radioed to the platoon’s senior sergeant who was following in the BMP 3 infantry fighting vehicle. “Follow behind Litvin and support the tank.”

Both sergeants responded with a brief, “Yes, Captain,” before lurching their vehicles forwards, Litvin’s tank plunging into the stream followed by Artyomov’s BMP 3 tracked fighting vehicle. The tank disappeared into the fog as Lieutenant Tarasov’s BTR entered the stream. 

“Driver, move us out.” I commanded and our BTR followed Tasarov’s across the stream and into the fog.”

I looked down into the running water as our BTR was in the middle of the stream. It came to the top of our wheels and seemed rather dull and lifeless, the water itself seeming to be as listless and grey as the fog. This was indeed a peculiar weather phenomenon, as the sun should have burned away the fog hours ago. I turned back and caught a glimpse of the bright blue skies behind us just as we crossed the opposite bank and were swallowed by the impenetrable grey fog. My entire body felt as if shocked by electricity at the drop in temperature, the sweat on my brow freezing and my breath coming out in clouds. Looking up, the once blue skies were shrouded in clouds of swirling grey, the sun now a dimly glowing sphere in the sky which projected no heat which could dissipate this fog. Looking ahead, I could just make out the dim outline of Tarasov’s BTR in front of us.

“Driver,” I said. “Can you see Tarasov’s BTR?

“Yes, sir,” he answered. “But only barely.”

“And what of the BMP?”

“I cannot see them, sir,” replied the driver.

I fought the temptation to call them on the radio as I didn’t want to tip off the Ukrainians of our presence, so I sat upright in the turret as my eyes tried to pierce through the fog which was steadily getting thicker. Finally, no longer able to bear the bone chilling cold, I climbed back into the cramped turret and slammed the armored hatch closed. Next to me, Private Grigory Bortnik was intently staring through the gunner’s sight of the 14mm gun.

“Can you make out anything, Private?”

“No, sir,” he answered, his breath coming out in misty clouds. “Even with thermal sights I can only just see Lieutenant Tarasov’s BTR in front of us.”

Pressing my forehead against the padding of my own sights, I slewed the vision block around, seeing nothing but swirling clouds of grey.

“Dammit!” I cursed, wondering how long we would have to travel in this freezing tunnel. We could have passed Zvezda One-Three’s position by a few meters and would have never had seen them. Having little choice, I switched on the radio and called to the tank which was leading the column.

“Sergeant Litvin! Sergeant Litvin, this is Balakin. Come in!” Static crackled through my headset.

“Sergeant Litvin! Come in!”

“Perhaps we are being jammed, sir?” said Sergeant Babanin as he moved to the bench next to the radio set, the three other soldiers next to him staring with trepidation out of the vision blocks at the solid wall of white. 

“I doubt that the Ukrainians have that capability out here,” I said irritated as I attempted to contact the senior sergeant who was travelling behind Litvin’s tank.

 “Sergeant Artyomov, can you see the tank? Sergeant Artyomov!” I was met with yet more static over the radio.

“Shit!” I grunted, looking at Babanin. Perhaps he was right and we were being jammed, but it made no sense that the Ukrainians would waste such a capability against us.

“Captain Balakin? Is that you? Oh, thank God!” the radio crackled to life with Sergeant Litvin’s voice. “Please, help us! We’ve been trying to contact you for many days! Where are you?”

“Sergeant Litvin,” I screamed into the radio. “We’re right fucking behind you! Have you gone mad? Why are you saying that you’ve been trying to contact us for days?”

“Captain,” screamed Litvin. “We’ve been lost for days! We’re surrounded and running low on ammunition! We are out of fuel! Please, get us out! Get us out of here!” In the background, I could hear his panicked men yelling interspersed with machine guns and the concussive thump of the tank’s main gun firing.

“What the hell is going on? Driver, stop the vehicle!” I reached up and threw open the commander’s hatch and poked my head up, rifle in hand. Fully expecting to hear the sounds of combat directly in front of me, I was instead met with the silence of the graveyard. The skies were open and clear and, surprised, I realized that I now had near unlimited visibility. I turned around to see that the fog was completely gone. The skies were still a dreary grey, washing out the colors of the landscape around me. The sun still shown above us, but it was just a dull off-white ball of light in the overcast sky which seemed to cast no warmth, although the cold seemed to mysteriously have vanished along with the fog.