The Delegates Lounge

A Canadian Officer Resigns to Join Belarusians Fighting for Ukraine, Part 2

• The Delegates Lounge LLC • Season 1 • Episode 9

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Join Dave Smith, a former major in the Canadian Armed Forces, fighting alongside Belarusian Partisans for Ukraine. From the intense battlegrounds North of Kharkiv to the life-saving professional efforts within its hospitals, Dave offers a raw and authentic soldier's viewpoint of what it is to fight up close on the line of engagement - the Zero Line.

The conversation sheds light on the grim realities of capturing Russian conscripts and subsequent efforts at prisoner exchanges, exploring the stark differences in how Ukrainian and Russian forces handle detainees.  Dave provides insights on how compromised platforms like Telegram play a crucial role in the information war. He offers a fascinating look at the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), an internet meme movement that supports Ukraine. Dave's candid reflections, paint a vivid picture of the way in which humor enables both young and old to cope with the stresses of war.

J. Alex Tarquinio and Frank Radford, our hosts in The Delegates Lounge, spoke from New York, while Dave spoke from Ukraine via web conference. Part 1 of this conversation began in July with Dave's account of his journey and his insights into the war up until that point. This took place before his regiment was deployed to fight North of Kharkiv. For Part 2, we spoke with Dave in October, after intense combat with Russian conscripts on the Zero Line and his recent stay in a hospital in Kharkiv. He also described how soldiers use social media on the frontlines. As he relates his battlefield experiences, listeners will catch a rare glimpse into how international policies directly impact those on the front lines.

References: 

Alex mentioned an essay that she wrote for Foreign Policy about soft power which included the NAFO fellas Internet meme.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/08/06/russia-ukraine-soft-power-culture-diplomacy-fellas-nafo/

Dave related a story about standing in a trench and watching a video of that same position being hit two days earlier in a social media video. He graciously shared a video of that experience with us, and here are the links on Instagram and X.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DCKDdJLJql4/

https://x.com/alextarquinio/status/1855287497288266063

Dave joined the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment of Belarusian volunteers fighting in support of Ukraine.

https://kalinouski.org/en/

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Welcome to the Delegates Lounge. Pull up a chair. I'm Alex Tarquinio, a journalist based at the United Nations here in New York City and your emcee for this podcast featuring some of the most influential minds in the world today. Settle in for some riveting tete-a-tete, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome back to the second part of our extended interview with Dave Smith, a former major in the Canadian Armed Forces who resigned to fight for Ukraine in a battalion of foreign fighters, primarily from Belarus, known as the Kalinowski Regiment.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

We introduced you to Dave in part one, which you can find in our playlist For that episode. We spoke with him in July when he was rotating back into the battle for eastern Ukraine this summer. He talked with us again in October and gave a first-hand account from the Zero Line, or the point of contact between the Ukrainian and Russian forces in northern Kharkiv, very close to where Ukrainian troops took Russian territory in Kursk. That was before some consequential geopolitical developments Confirmation that North Korean troops have come to fight Ukrainians for Russia and Trump's political comeback. So although we originally planned to finish with the second episode about Dave's impression after the battle, we now plan to publish a third episode that focuses more on the battlefield developments and brings listeners up to date.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

In this episode, dave focuses on the human aspects of warfare. He spent some time in hospital in Kharkiv and relates what life is like for the doctors, nurses and patients in, as he calls it, the last stop before Mordor. He talks about the treatment of POWs and conscripts on both sides and he explains how social media is used at the front. He described watching a video of the trench that he was in being hit by Russians two days earlier on the social media app Telegram. He graciously shared that video with us and we added that to our Instagram and X accounts. We'll share those links with you in the show notes.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Also in the show notes you'll find a link to an essay that I wrote for Foreign Policy about soft power that mentions the North Atlantic Fela Organization, an internet meme that bases its name on NATO. They call themselves Felas and identify their accounts with cartoon avatars of Shiba Inu, dogs or, occasionally, cats. Dave sheds light on how the NAFO fellas are viewed on the front lines. So, without further ado, here's Dave. Dave, we're so glad to be able to hear that you are safe and to be able to speak with you again at the end of your latest tour on the eastern front of Ukraine and hear how things are going.

Dave Smith:

Thank you so much. I'm honored to be on.

Frank Radford:

It's awesome that you've deigned to be on our our program, considering what you've been through.

Dave Smith:

okay, I'm just, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna stop it right there because you're making me blush here, uh. But as long as we're, uh, having the mutual appreciation society right now, I will tell you, you guys are the only ones that have, like really reached out and consistently asked me for my thoughts and observations of what's going on here. So credit to the Delegates Lounge for, you know, trying to get to the truth of what's actually happening on the battlefield and what all of these big picture, you know, geopolitical developments mean for the guys that are actually fighting on the front. Wars are not won on the battlefield, they're won in the information environment. And just the fact that you saw this time to have a podcast like this where you talk about these issues, like it is super important. It's just as important as running around like an idiot in the woods and getting blown up.

Frank Radford:

No it's not.

Dave Smith:

If I could have explained this to my chain of command back in the Canadian military or, more importantly, the Minister of Defense and the politicians, if they listened, I wouldn't be here. I would be doing that work. But after the first year of the war where I was deployed, working with the Ukrainians and trying to just plead with the decision makers in Ottawa, DC, London, guys, we got to take this seriously. After a year of it I just gave up. I was like you know what? I'll go around, run around in the woods.

Dave Smith:

Maybe I can do more good that way.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

We know that you were in hospital. Can you tell us a little bit about how you were injured and in the hospital this tour.

Dave Smith:

It was not a horrible injury.

Dave Smith:

I actually had complete imposter syndrome because I was in the hospital room with five Ukrainians who were like legitimately injured, and I was just lying there, you know, getting monitored for a concussion.

Dave Smith:

So I don't want to make it sound like it was super serious, but what happened was imagine that you know a big long tree line that is running kind of north-south and it's about a kilometer wide. I was on the far east side of it when there was some M113s doing casualty evacuations all day, because we were taking a lot of casualties that day and all that happened was that the M113 was like racing in, racing out. There was one with a Ukrainian driver, one with a Belarusian driver and these guys are like absolute unsung heroes of the war. Anyone that is an M113 driver in eastern Ukraine is just crazy Like they're crazy and heroic, and they were racing up and down the side of the tree line that I was on taking out injured guys, and the Russians, you know, after they made a few trips, were just like pummeling that track that they were on with. Uh, I believe it was artillery rounds and they were just hoping to either disrupt the the m113s, maybe hit an m113 maybe injure people getting in and out and for our listeners.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Can you define an m113?

Dave Smith:

sorry, it's a. Sorry, I was just saying it because you guys are Americans. It's a. It's an American armored vehicle that was donated to Ukraine.

Dave Smith:

It's generally, I think, for evacuations they use them for all kinds of things. Where I was that particular day, they had two of them that were being used for medical evacuations because we had we, we were taking casualties. Yeah, they, like these guys were just, you know, like these drivers or as soon as someone was injured at the, at the zero line where I was, a vehicle showed up within minutes and they were getting these guys out of here. So I really want to make the story kind of about them and what they were doing.

Dave Smith:

I just happened to be on the side of the tree line where the Russians were bombing them and we were in like little slit trenches me and one of my Belarusian comrades and a round landed like right outside of it and I was actually in the trench. I was lying down. It was like we call them shell scrapes. It's like maybe a couple feet deep. It's not like a trench system, it's more like a little fighting trench, and we knew the rounds were coming.

Dave Smith:

It had been happening all day and one landed. It was extremely close because it rolled me out, like the force of it rolled my body over and they classified it as a shrapnel wound, but I didn't actually get hit by any shrapnel from the round. What happened was there were these little trees in between each of the trenches that were actually holding up the overhead, uh, cover that I was talking about, and those trees exploded from the force of the, of the blast, and a whole bunch of uh you know wood chunks just flew at me so I basically got like giant splinters in my neck and

J. Alex Tarquinio:

But it is classified as a shrapnel wound to the neck

Dave Smith:

yeah, yeah but don't tell my mom, I haven't, I haven't used those words, uh, to my mom or my wife or anybody.

Dave Smith:

yeah, that's like how they classify, but

J. Alex Tarquinio:

anything to the neck is potentially life-threatening, so it was potentially very dangerous and it sounds like the kind of wound you were lucky to walk away from.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I did literally walk away from it, Because what happened was after that round landed. You know my my fire team partner and I were like Okay, we can't stay here. This is obviously untenable. So he was looking at me and I was like Dude, am I bleeding? And he's like, yeah, man, I think under your beard you're bleeding. So I actually walked myself back about 300 meters. There was a medic behind us. She's a Ukrainian medic that is with one of the units that we were working with. She's very identifiable, she has blue hair and a bunch of tattoos. And I can't believe how close she had her casualty collection point to where we were, because literally we packed our stuff up and walked not even like not even 300 meters behind us, uh, and to the ukrainian control point where they were running their show, and she was standing right there and she saw that you know, I was holding my neck and there was blood coming down my glove and, uh, she just immediately threw me into the trench, uh, and started doing a whole assessment and then, in true like, uh I don't know how much you guys have talked to ukrainians, especially ukrainian women.

Dave Smith:

They don't tend to overreact to stuff. So she, basically it was just like, yeah, it's an injury, you got shrapnel in your neck but you're probably going to be fine. Uh, just take your gear off. And so she did the whole inspection on me and then was like, okay, be honest, do you need to be evacuated right now because these m113s are drawing a lot of fire? And I was like, no, I can probably wait till tomorrow. I'm okay, because it was nighttime at this point. So they just kept me there until the next morning.

Dave Smith:

And then at like five or six am the next morning, we walked to uh, a safer route out of the, uh, the zero line, because I'm in a belarus in a unit. Our own medics picked me up and I was in an ambulance and they did it was like being in an actual ambulance with paramedics who did like a full assessment, everything on the road. And then I got to the hospital in Kharkiv and then I chilled there for a week and the doctor your doctors, because I saw a whole bunch of them they weren't really panicking about my injury at all. They did one real assessment and sent me for some diagnostics. They were mostly concerned about concussions because we've had so many we, the whole force here, the foreigners, the Ukrainians, everybody.

Dave Smith:

We've had a lot of incidents this summer where guys were coming back from these blast injuries. But the thing about blast injuries is like we have so much, like our gear is so good now, like our helmets are level four, our ear pro are even the, the straps on your helmet, everything like protect you from stuff that they're looking at dudes and being like hey, his injuries aren't actually that bad and he seems to be okay. You just gave him a week off, he'd recover and everything.

Dave Smith:

But then they have like delayed concussion syndromes you know I mean so from what you're describing with the gear.

Dave Smith:

The neck is probably one of the few vulnerable yeah, there are guys wearing neck protection too, like if they know they're going to be in an area where you were not.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Why were you not wearing neck protection?

Dave Smith:

You can only wear so much kevlar, right, like eventually you're so heavy you can't move. Drivers are a perfect example, right, who are wearing more protection on their arms, legs, neck, uh, face guards and stuff like that, and they know they're more exposed to those kind of wounds. I'm out like running around in the woods, so every ounce of kevlar that you put on you means you're moving slower and then the drones find you faster. I would say my, the, the, my gear really did protect me quite a bit like I had my helmet and ear pro on, and even I wish I had taken a picture of it hadn't occurred to me at the time. But there was little. There was even little splinter, you know, pieces of wood sticking out of the chin strap of my helmet, blocking stuff from penetrating my

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Yeah yeah, yeah.

Frank Radford:

Dave, presumably you understood the mission and what your purpose was. You're defending, presumably, a tree line.

Dave Smith:

Sorry, I should clarify number one we weren't defending we were on the offensive for that one. I know to the average person that doesn't mean much, but it's dramatically different. Like offensive is way harder. Like Klausowitz said, defense is the stronger form of warfare and I agree with that guy because offense sucks. So that's why that particular situation was so dangerous. What I would say is we definitely were taking it to them and they felt it. And I should contextualize a little bit.

Dave Smith:

It was about a month after Kursk started and in that time the Russians were really panicking. Where we were, we were the portion of the front closest to Kursk, obviously north of Kharkiv. We took a whole schwack of prisoners this summer and captured a bunch of radios and we were listening to them freak out after Kursk started. Every week that went by you could tell the Russian chain of command was really putting the pressure on them to take back territory from us that we had taken right Because we were having a pretty successful summer. We took huge swaths of this particular wooded area, so they were quite panicky.

Frank Radford:

Was your unit identified by them.

Dave Smith:

I'm sure we're identified. I'm sure they know who we are. Everybody knows everybody once you're at the front. We know which Russian units are there and they know who it is they're fighting against.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

So the doctors and nurses? Do they seem just pure professionalism? Do they seem a little burnt out at this stage of the war? Have most of them been there for the last two and a half years?

Dave Smith:

No, it was very professional. I do think they're resource strapped. You definitely feel like they're doing what they can with what they got. There's not a lot of amenities in the hospital. You know what I mean. You would have to hunt around to find a washroom with toilet paper and soap and stuff like that.

Dave Smith:

So first of all, I will say the level of care is really impressive, like when I, if you show up and you're an injured soldier coming from the front, I had MRIs, fmri, every scan. They really do take care of the guys that are coming from the front. But I did kind of feel like if you were to go open like the storage rooms and whatever, I don't think they're like bursting with resources because, like kharkiv is is it's the last stop before mordor. You get to kharkiv, it's like the last outpost of civilization. After that it's fighting. So you're in like the last real hospitals, like the, like these hospitals were real hospitals before the war. The staff I definitely got the impression like all the doctors, nurses, everybody worked there. It's obvious that they've been there the whole time.

Dave Smith:

Like you can you can even just tell, by the way they, the way they talk, that like day-to-day like they, they see a soldier with third-degree burns on one-third of his body and they're like, yeah, this is pretty normal.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And you mentioned this was a hospital before the full-scale war. No, no, no, it's just a straight-up.

Dave Smith:

The first I went to the Kharkiv Regional Hospital, which is like in the downtown, in the middle of the city.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And that's with civilians, you mean.

Dave Smith:

They like in the downtown in the middle of the city and that's with civilians. You mean, they're both. I was. Neither of them was a military hospital now. Granted, it's mostly military dudes walking around with serious injuries, but it's the real hospital you would go to if you phone 9-1-1. And then they sent me to a hospital, had more specialists it's where they had the machine, the one where they monitor everybody for concussions and my head doctor I don't know what you call them. I'm sorry, but the guy that worries about concussions, he spoke perfect English. He was clearly an expert in his field. He could tell that I was like hey, yeah, I got blown up and we had six other dudes evacuated that day for injuries.

Dave Smith:

But I think I'm okay, and he's like okay, I think you're okay too. But every time somebody says somebody, they're okay, and then five days later they fall asleep at the wheel and get a car accident because they had a concussion and we didn't diagnose it correctly, I get in trouble. So you're staying here for a week. So I stayed there for a week.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Can you describe just a little bit more about the people you met in hospital? So you said you were being observed for about a week, and who did you meet during that week and what kinds of injuries did you see there?

Dave Smith:

So the dude in the bed right across from me had like third degree burns on probably about like 20 or 30% of his body.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

How did he get those? Do you know?

Dave Smith:

I'm not really sure. He did not speak a word of English. Well, for the first couple of days we didn't talk at all. He was just lying there in a big pile of pain and then over time he got a lot better. People were coming and going. There was another guy from one of the more elite units in the Ukrainian special forces world who I had worked with his unit in the past and when he found out that I was in the Legion you know Gore Legion he like made a deliberate effort to take his phone out and we tried to Google Translate some conversations at least once or twice a day. He had just come from Chasseviard and I don't know if you guys have been tracking what's going on in Chasseviard all summer, but that is the worst fight. It's like the way Bachmut was a year and a half ago. It is just just absolute nightmare.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

And he Is, he able to share anything with doing. via Google Translate on what he's doing.

Dave Smith:

We talked quite a bit. And then you got to remember you're in a hospital, not everybody is feeling conversational. The nurse would come in and that would kind of rile everybody up and there would be a lot of conversations that I didn't understand, because you know, everybody wants to talk about food or medicine or something and then they all start changing stories or whatever.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Um, what language were they mostly? I don't know if you could tell the difference, but where they're mostly speaking Ukrainian, russian, uh it's kind of a mixture of languages.

Dave Smith:

I would definitely say the hospital staff who are older generally speak Russian or Sergik, which is like a Sergik, it's like a pidgin language.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

It's a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing about language and navigating these kind of like Byzantine institutions when you're an English speaker it's not like it's new to anybody else, right? There's a lot of foreign fighters walking around. There's Chechens, georgians, russians, like there's a lot of Russian fighters here, and there's a lot of Westerners from many different countries and languages. So if you show up and you speak French or Italian or Spanish or something, it's not like it is a huge stumbling block to the nurses, to the average person. If you said, hey, you got concussed in a foreign country where you don't speak the language. It's a fairly frightening experience to go into a hospital like that. But I would say here you're just another one that doesn't speak the language, another one that doesn't speak the language.

Dave Smith:

The younger Ukrainians can really switch back and forth between Russian and Ukrainian quite easily. It's noticeable too. I've listened to so much of it. You can tell when they're doing one or the other. The further west you go, the more the language becomes a part of Ukrainian identity. A good friend of mine is a stand-up comedian. He's Belarusian in my unit, but he was a stand-up comedian before the war and he said he could not get work in Kyiv because his Ukrainian just wasn't good enough and they didn't want to hear him speaking Russian.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

I'm wondering what you're hearing about videos circulating, and some of them. It's difficult for us, certainly sitting here in New York, to gauge the accuracy because so much of it is circulating in online media, allegedly depicting Russians hunting civilians in Kherson. It's being dubbed as almost safari style. There have been a few videos circulating, I think, on Telegram.

Dave Smith:

I mean, yeah, I've heard that it's happening, but mostly just through the news as well. Like, are they hunting civilians in Kherson? I wouldn't put it past them. I wouldn't put it past them.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Another thing is the videos of captured Ukrainian POWs being killed, you know, after being disarmed. What are you hearing there in eastern Ukraine?

Dave Smith:

Murdering Ukrainian POWs. Yeah, I'm sure that's happening. I'm sure it's happened in sectors of the front that I was on. I know guys, ukrainian dudes in their units, who have just straight up said that that happened. Their colleagues got captured and were murdered, and they know because they tried to arrange a prisoner exchange to get them back and the russians were like nah, they're dead, you're not gonna get those guys, we got other guys but, those guys are dead, um, but I would say the Ukrainians treat the detainees that they take very well, for a bunch of reasons.

Dave Smith:

Number one they are a huge source of intelligence. Like I can't tell you how much information we get from actionable stuff that we use right away. Number two they really do want to exchange them back for their own guys. Right, so they don't. I don't want to say they treat them nicely or whatever, but like I've definitely seen, like they on the line, they question them right away, they have a whole process to take them off the line, they give them medical attention right away, they give them tea, they give them food, they make sure like they're they're not freaking out and they're like, hey, we're not going to torture you, we're not going to kill you. Like we you know what I mean Like we're going to treat you well because we really, really they call it the exchange fund, like on the radio they actually say, hey, we got two more for the exchange fund, cause they really do want to exchange them back for their own guys.

Dave Smith:

And I would like to think, based on the amount of these prisoner exchanges that go on, I don't think the Russians are as hospitable as the Ukrainians, but I do think they have a strong deterrent to murder POWs and I do think the crazy, bloodthirsty, horrible people that did shit like Bucha and, you know, wagner with the sledgehammers a lot of them are dead right, like we've killed a lot of those guys, like the really generally the more horrific, psychopathic dudes they're not actually good fighters Like we they're. A lot of them are dead. So I think you have a lot more rational calculators at the tactical level who are like we need our troops back just for pragmatic purposes, like we can't send these meat waves out if they keep getting captured. So I do think the exchange fund not to say that it makes the Russians more humane or whatever but I do think it makes them a lot more calculating about preserving human life. And you know, and I've met, you know I've met Ukrainians that were in captivity, like I've met guys that were captured for months and then, you know, exchanged back and they're and they're still in the military fighting.

Dave Smith:

So I think there's a whole world of that stuff that we don't hear about in the news, westerners know nothing about, because when those negotiations go on, man, it's like literally a Ukrainian talking to a Russian on a radio at the that we don't hear about in the news, westerners know nothing about, because when those negotiations go on, man, it's like literally a Ukrainian talking to a Russian on a radio at the front where they're like, hey, we got 17 dudes, how many you got? They organize an exchange point, they secure the roads and everything and they go do a drop-off.

Dave Smith:

So, the goal is to exchange them as quickly as possible. No, I wouldn't say it's quickly. I mean I don't know, I'm not sure how it works, but it's not always quick, Like some of these dudes are in captivity for weeks or months, because I think there's like a lot of. When I say negotiation, I mean it's like a pressure cooker of a negotiation.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Right, it sounded casual on a video but yeah Now, but getting back to these videos, I mean they're obviously horrible videos and images of allegedly of POWs who've either been killed or starved and they circulate on telegram channels. We can't gauge the accuracy. Does this impact morale on the battlefield?

Dave Smith:

It really, really impacts the Ukrainian morale when guys get captured. I would actually say it impacts it more than when they get killed. When dudes get detained, because for someone to get detained they have to be severed from their unit right, which means either people fell back when they shouldn't have fallen back or a position got overrun or something. Uh, so like it is absolutely horrible and the unit you know I've been attached to units that lost guys in the sector that we were at and like their mission in life is not to win the war, their mission in life is to get their friends back. Literally when they go out on the offensive right like they're going to take back that russian position because they want their friends back.

Dave Smith:

So they negatively influences the morale is is the fact that their buddies have been detained and they have to get them back yeah but the social media around the pows on telegram, the social media itself is is not affecting the battlefield morale the thing to remember is to westerners, right like when you're what you're watching social media almost like a grad student, right like you're doing research and looking at stuff and and you're kind of like consuming this content and that's very other to you. That content, on the other end, is very from a. It's from a completely different world right like these guys, just message each other.

Dave Smith:

You know. I mean, like when the ukrainians figure out which unit, which russian unit, is in their sector, they will go on their telegram channel and trash talk them or be like, hey, you captured my friend, I want him back. It's not this one-way consumption of social media no, you're right outside of the conflict.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

It is a grad student is a perfect example. You no, you're right Outside of the conflict. It is a grad student is a perfect example. You're studying it. You're wondering what to believe when you're there. First of all, they probably have a very good idea on what to believe and what's propaganda.

Dave Smith:

I have stood in a trench while a Ukrainian sergeant or whatever whoever was the commander at that particular position showed me video of that trench being hit by mortars the day before on a Russian telegram channel, Like they filmed it with their drone and put it on telegram. And he was like look, this is where we're standing now, two days ago. It's not just out there in the expansive internet to them. The same way, like I look up stuff on YouTube, they're like it's you, you know and they knew which unit it was you could say that much better what's real and what's not in in real time, on a day-to-day basis, because you're actually there I definitely feel like if you asked around for a day or two, you could find out like yeah, that was yeah, that happened or no, that's complete russian propaganda.

Dave Smith:

That didn't happen. I saw in your email you had a question about Telegram or whatever. Like Telegram to mine. I can't. I couldn't believe how much it was still used here in Eastern Europe when I when it got here, because it's well known to be penetrated by the FSB Back in the in the Canadian military, like when I was working with some of the three letter agencies from the US and stuff. They even said like Telegram is the FSB's app.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

You mentioned that the Russian POWs many of the POWs that you were taking were conscripts. Is that right, because that's somewhat controversial inside Russia. By that do you mean a lot of them were 18 or 19-year-olds with no military experience. That sounds a little bit like trying to pull out of the stops has just accepted they're at permanent war now.

Dave Smith:

And that's how it is. Nato is pretending they're not at war. Russians have psychologically accepted they are at permanent war. That is the problem.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

I understand the different psychology. I'm just curious can you describe a little bit about the russian uh pw's? You said were conscripts?

Dave Smith:

I can say I only personally saw like single digits of them, but they were all like they're not super young, they're not kids. Uh, they were like 20s, 30s and the dead bodies were all older. Because there's there's dead bodies everywhere now like the whole front smells because this fighting, especially in the areas where it's been going back and forth for two and a half years now, there's just bodies everywhere. They're older. It's not like a Hollywood movie where everybody looks like they're Lawrence Fishburne in Apocalypse. Now you know what I mean. They're not that young. You can tell they're conscripts because they don't know what the hell they're doing. They shoot at you and then you shoot back and they run away. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They shoot at you and then you shoot back and they run away.

Dave Smith:

A lot of times we just send a Russian speaker up to their trench and in Russian he just says, hey, what unit are you from? And they tell him the unit and he's like okay, you're captured. Now they're noobs. It doesn't necessarily mean they're 17 years old. They could be 25, 30, 35. But I will say on average they're younger than a lot of the Ukrainians you see at the front. The Ukrainian line units. There's a lot of old dudes walking around, because a lot of them are like I got to go fight for my country, I have to go do it. So, even though they are also not as professional and trained, they're more motivated. They want to be professional on the Ukrainian side, whereas on the Russian side, sometimes when they took the prisoner because we always hand them over to the Ukrainians, the foreign fighters it's their war. We're always like, as soon as we have a detainee, it's like over to Ukraine to handle it. When you hand them to Ukrainians, it's almost like they're joking.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

You're saying some of the conscripts are actually glad to get out of the fight.

Dave Smith:

You can tell, dude, I've seen their faces. A lot of them are like I am just so glad the shooting's over. They're not happy about being caught, but being caught is way better than being shot in the face. So, yeah, I would say many of them are obviously relieved.

Dave Smith:

When you take a detainee, the first thing you want to know is how many more of you guys are there here? Are we about to get swarmed? What's going on? So you immediately sit them down and be like what unit are you from? How big is your team? How many casualties have you taken? Are there more people coming?

Dave Smith:

It's not like an interrogation where you're trying to figure out higher level intelligence. You're trying to figure out the stuff that's going on. Right then and there and I've been there when they're being questioned in this way and it is so obvious that they don't know what's going on. They have. They don't even know how to use their radios. They don't know what the passwords are. They're just they're fodder Meat wave is is almost a compliment for them, because it implies that they have some sort of agency like they could run at us as a wave.

Dave Smith:

They don't know what they're doing. It's very different than when I got to Ukraine is when Bakhmut was falling and we were in Donbass and it's way different than fighting there. You know when it was 3rd Assault Brigade fighting Wagner, you knew that the guys on the other side of the battlefield knew what they were doing. You know when you're fighting Wagner or VDV or one of the more elite guards units, you can tell by the weight of the fire shooting at you like they try maneuvers, like you can tell they're trying to flank you. It's very obvious that you are fighting professionals. If you stopped paying attention for a second they were going to get the upper hand on you, and it does not feel that way when you're fighting conscripts.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

So it's not that the conscripts are especially young, they're just inexperienced in the ways of war.

Dave Smith:

And you know, sorry, I'm just going to sidetrack here for a second, because there is this documentary called Russians at War that I think might have played at the Toronto International Film Festival.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

That was a huge controversy on social media.

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, you as a.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Canadian and then you're actually, I think, a native of Toronto, Is that right?

Dave Smith:

Yeah, yeah, that's where I'm from. Yeah,

J. Alex Tarquinio:

you feel about that being scheduled with the Toronto Film Festival?

Dave Smith:

Well, I mean, I didn't really have any feelings about that, although now that you've said it I am thinking about it more but it's a huge mistake to censor or silence or protest or boycott that, because I think you can't do defensive psychological operations. So if you are suppressing someone else's free speech in Canada, you're playing right into Putin's hands. And what I would say is, after having done this rotation here this summer, I would say you could absolutely make a good documentary about Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, and I would say you know filmmakers in the West should make the same movies about Ukrainians. I mean, like, get a stronger narrative out there. Don't suppress free speech in free countries, like that's, that's the mistake. One day I will watch that movie when I get the chance to sit down and see it.

Dave Smith:

Because, you know, if you want to show a movie about a bunch of ignorant Russian conscripts that don't know what the hell they gotten themselves into, I like I'm there for that I would believe it. I would like to see it.

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Last year I wrote an essay on soft power where I wrote about the day for fellas. They were seen as a little bit of an instrument of soft power and social media and that they are supporters of Ukraine. But the mood has certainly darkened since then. How are the NAFO fellas viewed by actual fighters in eastern Ukraine, or is it sort of too trivial for them to think?

Dave Smith:

about. No, it's's quite positive. There's stickers and posters everywhere. The ukrainians have them on their trucks. They have nafo patches. Like nafo is, I would say, generally positively viewed. I don't think they're viewed as diminishing what's going on here. I think they're viewed as kind of um, it's also very western. I would just say NAFO is a very Western thing. It's not super well understood in Ukraine. The young English speakers from Western Ukraine get it, but it's not widespread. But they have their own hilarious stuff too, you know a few times. They're well known for being what we in the west would call casualty tolerant. They basically have a recruiting campaign going on right now. If you understand who they are and if you understand ukrainians, it's actually quite funny. It's basically like a bunch of hot women on billboards being like oh, he's in third assault brigade that's,

J. Alex Tarquinio:

Oh

Dave Smith:

Yeah, um, than the posters. Other than the fact if you can't read ukrainian, you wouldn't even know it's a military recruiting poster. It is basically like a beer commercial from the 90s. He's in third assault brigade hot, and it's all these beautiful women and's like. If you've ever met anyone from 3rd Assault Brigade, it is hilarious. I think I've seen some articles in Western English language outlets that take huge offense to it and I could see how you would be offended if you didn't understand what was going on here.

Dave Smith:

3rd Assault Brigade they are so highly regarded. They were fighting Wagner and Bachmut before. It was cool. They just have this kind of real ironic sense of humor about themselves. When you're around it, you're like that is funny. You've almost found a way to make a joke out of how serious the situation is because they're constantly getting killed, because they're constantly doing the most dangerous stuff, because they're constantly trying to be the the best unit in in ukraine and they can also somehow turn it into a joke

J. Alex Tarquinio:

The use of humor and definitely the the pin-up girls and actually frank talks sometimes about how the opposite also was done in world war one in britain, shaming men who weren't there

Dave Smith:

that's a

Frank Radford:

My grandmother used to walk around handing out white feathers in Australia

Dave Smith:

I was at. I was at a dinner party or not dinner party, but I was like having dinner at a friend's house once where I was with one of my Belarusian friends. He's dating a Ukrainian girl and we were having dinner at her family's house. I don't know if it was her brother or uncle, I'm not sure who it was. He didn't speak any English, but he was talking to my Belarusian friend and he was basically saying why are you here doing this? And my Belarusian friend was saying hey, man, we're fighting the same enemy the Soviet religion is occupying my country. We got to save your country so that I can go back and free Belarus.

Dave Smith:

And then the Ukrainian guy was like why are you fighting here? Like, pointing at me, he was like why is this Canadian fighting here? And the girl's dad, who was like well into his 60s, just launched on this dude, he, he was like he's fighting because you're not. He's at the front line defending our country because you won't go do it. So that that issue of conscription and the guys not volunteering and these squads that are going around basically forcing people to register for conscription, it's getting really tense. It's getting a lot more tense than when I got here a year and a half ago. You can see the cops stopping people. I saw it today. The cops are stopping men on the street. They're just literally cornering them and they can't get away and saying why haven't you registered?

Frank Radford:

It also begs the question, too, about the number of Ukrainian young men who are terrified of going into something that they are not at all able to adjust to, have absolutely no idea,

Dave Smith:

and I so I would say sorry. I think that a lot of these guys don't want to go fight because they're like dude, we don't even have weapons. Like we don't have ammunition. You know, like, if you want to, if you want to increase ukrainian recruitment, give them, attack them and let them strike targets in russia, like recruitment will go through the roof

Frank Radford:

Nevertheless, there is a pessimism.

Frank Radford:

How do do Ukrainians overcome that?

Dave Smith:

Ukrainians have, like there's an appreciation for humor here that is unique to them and there is like this weird sort of cult of humor that goes on in Ukraine. You can feel it when you're around them, especially when you're around their soldiers and their old people. The old people have this kind of gruff exterior that once you go to dinner with them you realize like, oh, they're just making jokes all the time. You can't sense it until you're sort of in the middle of it. I think that it is serious and dark here and horrible. But there is an angle to this war that it's really hard to explain but it's absolutely hilarious.

Dave Smith:

The internet generation people you know slightly younger than me, that have grown up with the internet. They don't really take anything that seriously and they are quite funny about everything, and everything is a potential meme to them, and that's true in Ukraine as it is anywhere else. Some of the young Belarusian guys that I work with that are like 25, 26 years old. They almost get killed and then they send you a gif of them almost getting killed. They almost get killed and then they send you a gif of them almost getting killed. There's just kind of a gallows humor to this war. That I think is underappreciated and it's definitely palpable.

Frank Radford:

And that's it from the Delegates Lounge. We'd like to thank our esteemed guests, who graciously allowed us to share their hard-earned insights into what really matters. And then there's you, our listeners, who we hope are sufficiently edified to clamor for more of the same. Do drop in for a weekly episode on Thursday, or from time to time if we're on the road, for special events, in which case there'll be a bonus episode. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you've heard, please take a moment to rate or review the show, as it helps others who share your abiding interest in world affairs to find their way to the Delegates Lounge. You can connect with us on many popular social media platforms or reach out to us directly at infothedelicatesloungecom. We're a small team so we can't respond to every message, but we will read them. Our show this week was written and produced by the host and by yours truly executive producer, frank Radford. Until next time, keep calm and curious.