Ukrainian soldiers describe their experiences battling Russia

WHEN HIS men attacked, they thought they were prepared for everything. They were wrong. “It was a black cloud,” says a platoon commander with the callsign Pole, earned after he worked in Warsaw for a decade before coming home to fight. “I don’t know if the beehives were destroyed in fighting or if the Russians opened them,” he says, but for a surreal moment thousands of enraged bees forced the men of the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade to run for it, while the Russians ran the other way, covering their retreat with rocket-propelled grenades.