When Russian troops approached the small farming town of Voznesensk, they were not expecting a battle. A week earlier, Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had begun. An armoured column trundled insouciantly across a landscape of southern fields and villages. The goal was to capture a crossing point between two rivers. From there the Russians would roll to Odesa, the twinkling Black Sea port.
Standing in the way of this mighty army was a motley group of Ukrainian defenders. They included a few soldiers and 30 home guard volunteers. Most had never held a gun before. Some were pensioners. Their weapons were a box of grenades, AK-47s and NLAW anti-armour missiles, supplied by the British. The odds looked hopeless. The enemy arrived with helicopters and armoured personnel carriers.
Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town tells the remarkable story of what happened next. Harding is a veteran BBC foreign correspondent, based for two decades in Africa (and no relation). His slim 135-page book is a riveting and vividly written account of how Voznesensk fought back against Russia’s war machine – and won. It spans just a few dramatic days in early March 2022, with a dozen or so characters.
This gripping story is the literary equivalent of a superb miniature painting. Each street-level detail illuminates a bigger truth: why Ukraine succeeded in resisting Russia’s shock and awe onslaught last year, and how Moscow’s brazen attempt to subjugate an independent nation failed. Putin assumed that ordinary Ukrainians would welcome his expeditionary force. He was wrong and deluded.
At first it went according to the Kremlin’s script. On the town’s outskirts, Russian paratroopers overwhelmed a defensive trench. One of them shouted to the Ukrainian volunteers sitting in it and out of ammunition: “Guys, we’re with you.” It was, as Harding relates, a “call to comradeship”. The Russians believed the “propaganda” and “lies” they had been fed: that their Ukrainian “Slav brothers” wanted to be “liberated from fascism”.
In fact, almost all of Voznesensk’s citizens worked against the invaders. Old ladies filled sandbags; men gathered hunting rifles and made molotov cocktails. These were useless against a tank, they acknowledged, but a symbol of defiance nonetheless. The town, led by a 32-year-old mayor, organised itself. The community was plucky and ready to improvise in dark times, like Ukrainian society as a whole.
One hero was Svetlana Martsynkovska, a 59-year-old who once worked in a Soviet meat factory. On the morning of Wednesday 2 March 2022, an armoured personnel carrier clattered into her yard, knocking over her favourite pear tree. A Chechen soldier jumped out and threatened to shoot her. Informed she was being freed from “Nazis”, she replied: “That’s nonsense. You’re just destroying everything.”
The Ukrainians prevailed because of superior military tactics. And local knowledge. They blew up a bridge over the town’s Dead Water River, stymying the Russian advance. Kyiv’s 80th Brigade called in artillery strikes. One shell hit a Russian helicopter as it tried to evacuate wounded people. Eventually the Russians pulled out, abandoning many armoured vehicles, “supplies spilling out of them like the guts of gored animals”.
They also left their dead. After the shootout, Voznesensk’s funeral director drove his van around the surrounding hills and woods, picking up the bodies of Russians and stuffing them into transparent bags. About 100 were killed. Several Ukrainian civilians died too. In a poignant scene, a Ukrainian mother, Anna, collected what was left of her 21-year-old son Serhii, torn apart by a tank shell. “It takes hours,” Harding writes.
Since spring 2022, Russia has retreated from the right bank of the southern Kherson region. Earlier this month, its troops blew up the Kakhovka dam, flooding settlements and towns on either side of the Dnipro River. Ukraine has launched a counteroffensive and reclaimed villages around Zaporizhzhia. But the Russians have dug in, and are determined to defend a chunk of occupied southern territory. The war’s outcome is grimly uncertain.
Harding’s fine book points to why Ukraine has outperformed expectations in Washington and London, continues to fight on, and may just win this 21st-century David v Goliath struggle. Its people are indomitable and unyielding, brave and determined, savvy and funny when the chips are down. Unlike their hapless Russian counterparts, they know exactly why they are fighting.
Luke Harding’s Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell prize, is now available in paperback (Guardian Faber)
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A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine by Andrew Harding is published by Ithaka (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
