Vasyl Talaylo, 35, can still remember the heady day last August when his unit was among the first Ukrainian troops to cross the Russian border into the Kursk region, spearheading a daring gamble to divert the enemy from the all-but stalemated fighting on Ukraine’s eastern front. An elite company, mostly engineers tasked with electronic warfare—jamming and spoofing Russia’s radio signals to confuse its drones and artillery operators—Talaylo’s unit is often among the first to enter contested territory and the last to leave, an essential shield for the rest of the army.
Seven months later, the excitement of the Kursk incursion has evaporated. The last Ukrainian troops are retreating from the region as I interview Talaylo in a hospital in Kyiv. “Yes,” the wounded fighter recalls, his face twisted with emotion, “it seemed promising then. But we left a lot of young lives on that narrow strip of land. We didn’t achieve much, and we paid a heavy price.”
Talaylo’s wife holds his hand—the arm that isn’t in a sling—as we talk in a nurses’ staging area outside his dingy hospital room. A crude gauze patch covers his left eye; under the sling, a tangle of metal rods holds what’s left of his left hand together. It’s not clear if he will recover use of either hand or eye. A soft-spoken, gentle man in mismatched black sweats, he’s not complaining, just eager to see the kids—a daughter, 10, and a son, 6—he left at home in a village in western Ukraine, where he worked as a driver before enlisting a year ago. But his weeks in the hospital have given him time to reflect on the war and the U.S.-brokered ceasefire taking shape as he lies in bed, and like several soldiers I’ve spoken to in recent weeks, he’s not optimistic.
