In the 65th Mechanized Brigade of Ukraine they call them “the Spaniards”. Taras Mikhalchuk is 57 years old and his code name is SpanishAnatolii Tsisik is 43 and his military nickname is SunflowerBoth hold the rank of major, are battalion deputy commanders and in 2022 they left their lives in Spain to enlist in the Ukrainian army. Both were civilians who sought a better future in our country. But they carried the war within them and did not hesitate to return home when Russia launched the invasion.
Mijalchuk moved to Spain in 2005 after a hectic youth. In 1985, at the age of 18, he was recruited to fight in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He remained there until the end of the occupation in 1987. He was then posted with the Soviet troops stationed in Nagorno Karabakh (a territory disputed between Azerbaijan and Armenia) and, finally, in Transnistria, between 1991 and 1992, where, as he admits, he participated in the conflict that Russia provoked so that this region would de facto separate from Moldova. Mijalchuk served in the Ukrainian army until 2000, when he retired with the rank of captain.
Mikhalchuk has his wife and two daughters in Badalona, a city he considers home. His family had already forged a special bond with Spain: his maternal grandfather was a brigadier during the Civil War fighting fascism. “He returned to the Soviet Union, they gave him a medal, but Stalin liquidated him,” says his grandson. “They accused him of being an enemy agent and one night in 1941, they put him in a black van and he disappeared forever.”
He SpanishHe speaks emotionally about his daughters, sitting in the kitchen of his barracks near Orijiv, on the Zaporizhia front. He does so by interspersing words in Spanish, Catalan and Ukrainian: the eldest, aged 36, is a partner in a pharmaceutical company and the youngest, aged 22, is a graphic designer. He explains with the same pride that he is an engineer in a company specialising in installing production lines, and lists some of the multinationals where he has worked: Estrella Damm, Celsa, Amazon, Seat… “My dream is to return to Barcelona today, home,” he says. “I miss my family. My body is responding less and less, I am 57 years old, I think I have already sacrificed enough for Ukraine.”
The new law on the mobilization of civilians came into force in Ukraine last spring. Thousands of men in the army had hoped that the legislation would include the return to civilian life of those who had been fighting for more than two years, but the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Armed Forces argued that this decision had to be postponed because of the need to have experienced troops.
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Tsisik says he will fight until the war is over. His home and family are in Ternopil province, but his second home is Murcia, where he has lived most of the year since 2005. When the war in Donbas broke out in 2014, Tsisik left Spain to fight pro-Russian separatists. He fought until 2019 and returned to Murcia, where he specialized in building swimming pools, until in 2022 the Russians again besieged Ukraine to make it disappear as a state.
“I have Spanish residency, I really like Murcia, but I couldn’t go back there now,” says Tsisik. “I couldn’t sleep, like I did in February 2022.” [cuando dio inicio la invasión]because I would be worried about my country every day.”
A hero without medals
Mikhalchuk is the better known of the two. He has appeared in many media outlets for his experience, his exploits on the battlefield and because he does not mince his words. He is considered by many a hero because in August 2022 he and a doctor, riding an all-terrain vehicle, managed to evacuate fifty soldiers besieged in the village of Nesteryanka, on the Zaporizhia front. On his phone he keeps dozens of photos of how the vehicle was left, destroyed by shrapnel. Mikhalchuk explains that he is not a hero in the eyes of the authorities, no one gave him a medal for it. “If you don’t have connections, you don’t get anywhere in this country; it’s a system inherited from the Soviet Union,” he says. Spanish“This country has great potential, but I always say that it is like a bird that cannot take flight because of corruption.”
Mikhalchuk and his other comrades were awarded the Order of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, second class, by President Volodymyr Zelensky for their participation in the counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, which allowed the Ukrainian Armed Forces to take the town of Robotine. The counteroffensive failed, it went no further, and Mikhalchuk repeats to journalists today what he warned his superiors at the time: “When they announced to me in June that we would attack in this sector of the front, I thought it would be a diversionary maneuver, but no, the main offensive would be here. Suicide! There was no place more mined and better defended by the Russians than this one.” Sources from the 65th Brigade indicate that very few of the more than five hundred men that Mikhalchuk’s battalion had two years ago remain in service: most of them were wounded or killed.
These two officers from the 65th Brigade do not know how many Ukrainians left Spain to fight Russia. They say they know three or four, although not personally. Morning Express visited the Chernihiv region where the borders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus meet in October 2002. He accompanied a patrol commanded by Denis Dubchak, a 23-year-old Ukrainian who was a cook in Spain. He left his wife and son in Madrid in February 2022. Dubchak died in the battle of Bakhmut in February 2023. “This is war, there is no more,” says Mikhalchuk upon hearing this story. “There are people who cannot get over it; I have no traumas, I have been through four wars, I cannot afford it either.” His weapons, which he proudly displays, are a Soviet pistol in his bandolier, which a Russian officer had, and a K-12 assault rifle. The pistol and the rifle are trophies of war, of enemies he himself killed.
Tsisik is the second in command of a tank battalion of the 65th Brigade. His tanks no longer carry out direct attack operations, he explains, because they would last only a few minutes against Russian drones and enemy anti-tank units. Now they are limited to using them as artillery guns. The soldier does not go into details about the counteroffensive: “Last year we were in a bad situation, this year we are in a bad situation and next year we will probably be in a bad situation as well.”
Neither of them wants to make predictions, but their words make it clear that the moment is difficult for optimism. Mikhalchuk prefers not to analyse the Ukrainian incursion into the Russian province of Kursk, which has been trying since last August to get the enemy to transfer resources there now to the fronts inside Ukraine. But he does add an assessment: his experience tells him that the less the front brigades are changed, the better. This is demonstrated by the containment of the enemy that brigades such as the 65th or the 1st Armoured Brigade are achieving in Robotine, which have been in the same sector for almost two years. “I know this front inside out; if they were to transfer me now to Kursk or Pokrovsk, I would be like a cat without eyes,” says Mikhalchuk with an expression common in Ukrainian and Russian.
The oldest army
Tsisik is 43, the average age in the Ukrainian military, making it the oldest in the world. David Petraeus, an American general and former CIA director, said at a conference in kyiv in September that Ukraine urgently needed to recruit younger troops, including those between the ages of 19 and 21. Petraeus warned that the transfer of Western weapons to Ukraine should go hand in hand with a rejuvenation of the military. The average age of American troops was 28 in 2022, and that of British troops 31. In 2018, the Spanish forces had an average age of 43 among their career soldiers and 32 among their troops.
Tsisik advises against forcing young men who do not want to fight to enlist, as is happening under the new mobilization law: “Anyone who wants to join the army has to go there,” he says. “Those who wanted to volunteer for the army, like me, have already done so,” explains Mikhalchuk. The way to reverse the situation, says this veteran officer, is economic motivation: “We must increase remuneration, from salaries to compensation for being wounded. That is the best solution.”
What has changed for the better in the Russian army compared to its experience in the Soviet Union? Mikhalchuk points to the salaries and the technology they use. And how has the invader evolved tactically? “Not at all,” he replies. Spanish“They keep throwing meat to die. The tactic is to attack one of our positions from five or six sides, each group has four or five soldiers, many will fall, but one group will reach the objective.”
The war in Afghanistan ended after a decade with strong popular discontent. Does the Spanishthat the same could happen with the invasion of Ukraine? “The Russians will not change, they have always been the same: they need to live with war. Their mentality needs it, and they enjoy it.”
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