Before long, he was assigned to a communications unit and deployed to a closed city near the Chechen town of Mozdok. This was the height of the First Chechen War, and Babchenko would fight in it. I served in the signal corps. I did what they said. I went where they ordered.
I carried what they handed me. I rode where they sat me. I shot where they pointed. But none of it did any good. I came back without any injuries or medals. In , when the Second Chechen War started, he returned to the army as a contract soldier. Then I said screw it and joined the riflemen, who sold me for two cans of stew to a grenadier unit, where I became the head of an AGS grenade launcher team. At the same time, he also started converting his military experience into a literary career.
Babchenko subsequently released a collection of stories under the same title, which was later translated into several languages and awarded multiple literary honors. Babchenko was called a pioneer of a new Russian military prose. That was, after all, why he fled Russia and settled in Ukraine last year: he was facing physical threats and the constant risk of being detained on one of the charges the Kremlin uses to lock up its critics, like the infamous catchall — Article Extremism.
Besides, it was not far-fetched to believe that the Kremlin had dispatched assassins to Ukraine. The British authorities have publicly accused Russia of doing just that in the murder of the ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in But as Babchenko must have known from his years of reporting, the SBU was not an entirely reliable source.
Since the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out, its officers have been accused of human rights violations, including torture, kidnapping and attempts to silence independent journalists, according to a series of damning reports from the United Nations , Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
There were also deeper concerns, related to his duties as a journalist. But for Babchenko, the most painful of these condemnations came from his own colleagues at Novaya Gazeta in Moscow. It took Babchenko many weeks, he says, to recover from the shock of that rejection, which came on top of the trauma of his self-styled resurrection.
I was just coming to my senses. It has taken him even longer to adjust to the realities of his new life. Because the Ukrainian authorities believe he is still at risk of assassination, at least two bodyguards from the SBU follow him wherever he goes.
He is forbidden from going out to eat or to take a walk in the park with his family. When he returned to Moscow, he started writing, working as a war correspondent for a succession of Moscow publications.
He covered the Russian wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and, eventually, Ukraine. He also wrote fiction about the war in Chechnya. He began identifying as a pacifist, and swore never to pick up a gun again. He also covered natural disasters in Russia and uprisings abroad. In , he was detained and beaten by Turkish police while filming protests in Istanbul.
During the mass demonstrations against falsified elections in Russia in and , Babchenko, who was an active and vocal participant, wrote a blog post in which he called on protesters to resist police and to set up camp instead of dispersing. For this post, he faced charges of attempting to incite a riot, but they were eventually dropped. During the political crackdown that began after Vladimir Putin officially took the office of President for the third time, in May, , many of the activists affiliated with the protests were forced to leave the country, while several others were jailed, and one— Boris Nemtsov —was killed.
Babchenko complained that he no longer had anyone to talk to or any publications in which to publish his articles, but he stayed in Moscow.
A small crowd of similarly new arrivals gathered there every night, and Babchenko was always among them, chain-smoking, sometimes reporting back on his fruitless negotiations with the local authorities. Like many people in that crowd, he seemed shell-shocked and uncertain of who he was, or where. His journalism was now confined to his blog. Every post was accompanied by information on how to make a contribution.
We later learned that he had decided to move to Kyiv, where he continued to write about Russian politics and, especially, the Russian war against Ukraine, making it clear in every post that his sympathies, and now his loyalty, were with Ukraine. Sometimes he mentioned getting death threats, which he believed were linked directly to the Putin administration. On Tuesday, Babchenko posted a photo of a helicopter on his blog.
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