Everything must go according to plan for the orcs to be destroyed - politician and soldier Ilyenko

On July 5, 2022, 36-year-old deputy chairman of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, Andriy Ilyenko, joined the National Guard of Ukraine. He is currently fighting in the Svoboda battalion of the Rubizh brigade. Espreso correspondent Artem Lagutenko spoke with him in Donetsk region.

Please tell us about the battalion and the situation at the front line.

The battalion has a very rich combat history. It started from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion as a purely volunteer unit. That is, it was formed at the beginning on the basis of our Svoboda party organization in Kyiv. From activists and supporters. Later, a lot of people started joining us, just literally from the street. Acquaintances and so on. And the battalion then took part in the defense of Kyiv, in the battles in Irpin, in the battles on the Baryshevka direction on the left bank. In the liberation of Bucha and Gostomel, and so on. After the defense of Kyiv was over, after the Russians were driven away from Kyiv, the battalion became part of the National Guard, namely the 4th Operational Brigade of the National Guard "Rubizh" and went to combat work in Rubizhne. The city of Rubizhne, Luhansk region, where he fought extremely difficult battles. Then there were also extremely difficult battles in Severodonetsk, in Lysychansk. Then, last summer, in the second half of the summer, there was an extremely difficult combat campaign in the village of Zaitseve, Bakhmut region.

Now the initiative in this area is with the Ukrainian forces. And everything should go according to plan to destroy the orcs. But let's not jump the gun, because this is a war, a difficult war. And I don't like to give any preliminary forecasts, to somehow overestimate expectations and so on. The area where our battalion is stationed is very difficult to fight in. And there have been several attempts by the enemy to attack our positions using tanks, other armored vehicles, aircraft, helicopters. I'm not talking about artillery of all kinds. It goes without saying. But the guys held their positions, the guys destroyed enemy military equipment. They did not allow the enemy to advance.

Now here we are, the guys who have just come out of combat, from the front line, are undergoing a certain internal rotation. And those guys who have worked, they are now in the reserve. And even here, in the reserve, not far from the front line, they continue to undergo training, exercises, and improve their skills. And they are ready at any time to go to the front line to perform combat missions.

Mr. Vadym, given the area where your guys are stationed, I understand that you have had to face enemy units not only from the regular army of the Russian Federation. But it was probably also Wagner and terrorists of the so-called DNR and LNR. Can you somehow differentiate the effectiveness of these enemy units?

"Wagner - yes. Because Wagner was the main force in the Bakhmut direction when we worked in the winter of this year and last year. What can I say about Wagner? "Wagner has achieved a certain level of efficiency, I must admit, thanks to two things.The first is the cannibalistic internal policy, so to speak. I mean, there are actual executions for any disagreement. Executions for not following orders, executions for anything. And this works in their Russian coordinate system.That is, they really go on the attack, because they realize that as soon as he "snaps," he will be shot immediately. That is, it is a kind of super repression. And secondly, it is absolute indifference to losses. I mean, I understand that in the regular Russian army, in principle, no one cares about losses. But still, there is a minimal understanding that they can probably punish a commander if he has any abnormal losses. By their standards. Or, relatively speaking, someone will ask for these soldiers. There are some relatives who will ask where they are, what they are doing, and so on. But from Wagner's point of view, they don't care at all. They recruited prisoners, they drove them into these meat assaults. Tens of thousands of them went down there. And they didn't care at all. Yes, they have not only prisoners there. They also had professional mercenaries, so to speak. But they went in the second and third waves. That is, the first wave was always these massacres by prisoners. As for the DNR and LNR, they are used by the Russian command as cannon fodder. As absolute cannon fodder. I mean, they use everyone as cannon fodder, but they use them especially. That is, they do not feel sorry for them at all.

While the West was deciding how much and when to give us aid, the Russians were building several lines of defense and mining everything. In your opinion, could the Western world have given us help earlier and would it have helped us with the counteroffensive today?

Absolutely. In fact, let's start with the fact that if we look back to the 1990s and 2000s, Ukraine was disarming. We gave up nuclear weapons, we gave up a lot of other weapons. We destroyed our own strategic aviation. And a lot of other types of weapons that we could really use now. And let's not be disingenuous, the West also supported this disarmament. So they are partially indebted to us, in fact. And if, of course, they had helped us since '14 the way they are helping us now, I think everything would have gone completely differently. And the war would have been completely different since '14. But let's not go into the debate. After all, let's not forget that we had a lot of problems too. We had different people as presidents, such as Yanukovych, who sold Ukraine to the Russians. And so on. Our policy led to the fact that we were losing our combat capability, our defense capability. And there is no one to blame here. The people who held positions in Ukraine and made these decisions are to blame. As for today, of course, I would like to see this aid given to us in a more measured way. It should be given immediately and in the amounts needed. But again, I understand how complicated this political process is. I understand that our diplomacy is working and doing everything possible to get these supplies. And of course, if we had had the same F-16s, for example, from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, I'm not talking about the 14th year, it would be much easier to break through the enemy's defenses today.

Especially after the Kharkiv counteroffensive, the Russian Federation became one of the main suppliers of weapons to Ukraine, leaving behind an extremely large amount of ammunition and equipment. Does your battalion, for example, still have it and do you use it against the Russians now?

Of course we do. There is trophy equipment, there is trophy ammunition. There are trophy weapons. This is absolutely normal. And it all works for the Ukrainian victory today. We also need to understand that, let's just say, it really sounds paradoxical, but the Russian Federation has supplied the Ukrainian army with the most weapons in a strange way. There was even a trophy truck. It's real. When the Russian Guard was advancing on Kyiv, they were actually driving in the trucks. And in the vehicles there were these shields, batons, and ceremonial uniforms. That is, they really thought that they would come to Kyiv, use batons to disperse everyone, put them in the cars, and then parade on Khreshchatyk in their uniforms. So one of those paddy wagons is probably still being used in the interests of the Ukrainian army.