By: Chris Allbritton, William Glover Weiss, Ross Pelekh, and Tim Mak
Editor’s note: This week we posted a story highlighting a trans activist in Ukraine; Russia cited LGBTQ+ rights as a reason for the war. We didn’t anticipate the negative reaction: more than 1,000 readers unsubscribed, and we lost paid subscribers as well.
For a publication that is just two months old, it was devastating. We work seven days a week to grow our audience. However, we believe that subscriber numbers don’t mean anything if we don’t hold true to our values. We will continue to highlight marginalized communities and the people you don’t hear about in other outlets.
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When the world outside is full of killing, grief and fear, Tasha Dashkyevich could be forgiven for engaging in a little daydreaming and escapism.
Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are often considered the pastime of nerdy basement-dwellers in suburban homes, not by displaced people seeking a respite from war. But Dashkyevich says that her community has thrived since the Russian invasion began – a small interlude from the trauma and realities of the war.
When she held her first online session open to anyone who wanted to join, she was surprised at who showed up. “Some of them were IDPs [internally displaced persons] and some of them were [military] veterans,” she said “I do not know how it worked because it was some stupid slasher sort of a game. There was tons of blood and shit, but everybody was laughing… If it helps to escape reality and somehow switch to those horrors which are more simple and easier to understand than what we have in our actual real-life lifestyle, then that's great.”
These games have found renewed relevance for Ukrainian gamers during the invasion. Amid the shattering warfare, these games are a beacon of hope – and a conduit for community.
Ukrainian gamers are harnessing the power of these games to heal scars of trauma, build fortitude, foster communities, and preserve their unique cultural identity. For gamers like Dashkyevich, these are not "just games”; they are anchors to a sense of normalcy, reminders of brighter yesterdays, and hope for a new future.
Dashkyevich is 37, and from Simferopol in Russian-occupied Crimea. She started playing sometime in 2008 after moving to Kyiv, she said, with a “crazy homebrew” hodge-podge of paper and imagination, because official Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks and figurines are expensive in Ukraine, thanks to regional licenses that tend lump all all post-Soviet countries into a single, Russian-dominated region.
“We were not aware that there are [formal] books,” she said. They didn’t have the basic dice sets because they weren’t available. “There was one guy who traveled to Kyiv and bought the original dice set, but we were only allowed to look at it, not actually roll it because it was super expensive.”
Today, she is an accomplished Game Master with her own YouTube channel, Idearoll, started in 2019. Her favorite game is Call of Cthulhu, based on H.P. Lovecraft’s dark tales of cosmic horror. In many of the games, the characters die or go insane—in line with Lovecraft’s stories—which seems like it would be depressing but like any good horror story, the fun is in getting the shivers.
The stories of war and empire became real, however, on Feb, 24, 2022, when Russian tanks rolled across the border. Death, bombs, and existential threats became facts of life.
The night before the invasion, she and her friends recorded a session, but held off on posting it for several weeks after the start of the invasion because Dashkyevich’s native language is Russian and her games had all been conducted in Russian. She didn’t think too much about that before, as she always identified as Ukrainian who happened to speak Russian. In 2014 she had even bought an apartment in Crimea to be closer to her grandmother who refused to leave, but canceled those plans when Russia annexed it in March that year.
The invasion changed her life. Overnight, she switched to speaking only Ukrainian, even with her Russian-speaking family. She and her friends eventually posted the invasion-eve episode with an introduction stating that this would be the last episode in Russian. She had always been Ukrainian, but now she felt the need to express it more strongly than ever.
The reaction among her audience was disheartening. Most of the hundreds of Russian-speaking viewers were silent. Some wrote to her and said just wait: In two months, she would be able to speak Russian again. Others attempted to gaslight her by questioning whether the reality she was living was real. “How do you know the tanks in the pictures are Russian?” they taunted, as she recalled. “You’re too emotional. You don’t understand the reality.”
Only one Russian wrote to her apologizing and expressing remorse for the invasion.
She didn’t play for several months after the war because she felt it was inappropriate, but after a while she started again. The games and her YouTube channel provided connection with friends, a sense of purpose, and an outlet for expressing her Ukrainian identity. Her online audience is now more than twice what it was before the invasion, and she says her Ukrainian audience is forgiving when she sometimes slips back into a Russian accent.
“At least you’re trying,” she says they tell her.
We’ll have more about Dashkyevich and others in our upcoming feature on tabletop RPGs in Ukraine. Be sure to subscribe for access.
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Good morning, readers: Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands. But, last night the city endured its first air raid in 12 days.
Around 2:30 am, Shahed drones and Kalibr missiles attacked the capital while air defense responded. The Counteroffensive’s writers were also awakened by another air raid siren around 7:20 am. It was an eventful night and morning.
The ISW reports the Ukrainian counteroffensive is advancing slowly. With the eyes of the world watching intently and the armchair generals quick to cast their opinion, Ukraine braces for a tough fight in the coming months.
"War on paper and real war are different,” U.S. General Mark Milley said. “In real war, real people die… Real people are on those front lines and real people are in those vehicles. Real bodies are being shredded by high explosives. What I had said was this is going to take six, eight, 10 weeks, it's going to be very difficult. It's going to be very long, and it's going to be very, very bloody. And no-one should have any illusions about any of that."
It’s been one week since the attempted Wagner coup, and their leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has not been heard from in several days. Satellite imagery shows a camp being built in Belarus and Russian state media is rewriting the history of the Wagner group in front of Russia's eyes.
The Russian state channel, Rossiya-1, has started questioning the efficacy of the Wagner Group, casting doubts on their efficacy as a fighting force, why the regular Russian forces are better, and whether the Russian mercenary group could even be called a private military company. This sudden reversal of Wagner's public image could mean the bones from Prigozhin's attempted coup are finally being kicked out from under the rug.
This does not seem to be a very popular take amongst Russians. “This is such a vile agenda that they began to work out through the state channel in relation to the fighters of PMC Wagner… to conduct such campaigning against PMCs is the most disgusting thing," states a popular telegram channel, known for crowdfunding military equipment for Russian personnel.
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Hi there – Chris here from Kyiv.
There’s been a fair amount of breathless coverage of the risks of an explosion at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) this week. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russians had mined the plant, and Ukrainian intelligence officials say that Russian troops are leaving the area and telling Ukrainian civilian workers to clear out by July 5.
"There is a serious threat because Russia is technically ready to provoke a local explosion at the station, which could lead to a (radiation) release," Zelenskyy said on Saturday at a news conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.
The Russians have said any damage to the plant would be the work of Ukrainian saboteurs, but then, they would say that wouldn’t they? At the same time, the Ukrainians have every incentive to paint the Russians as nuclear terrorists, hoping to further rally the world against the invader. Notably, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on June 30 that it saw no visible evidence of mines at the plant, but admitted it did not have access to the entire facility.
Five of the ZNPP’s six reactors were put into so-called “cold shutdown” in September last year, while the sixth was left in “hot shutdown” to supply power to the plant itself. Cold shutdown is normally used for maintenance purposes. In this case, fuel rods have almost completely cooled off and the chance of the fissile material going into a catastrophic chain reaction is drastically reduced. It’s. After the Kakhovka dam was destroyed — likely by Russian sabotage, according to American and Ukrainian intelligence assessments — the sixth reactor was also placed in cold shutdown on June 8, according to the state nuclear company, Energoatom.
However, Ukraine’s State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine said the Russians had prevented the No. 5 reactor from being put in cold shutdown mode (in Ukrainian).
There’s no doubt that an explosion, one powerful enough to breach the almost 4-foot (1.2 meters) thick containment walls, would be damaging to the immediate environment around the plant. But how bad would it actually be? The Counteroffensive spoke with our friend Oleksandr Selyverstov, a former nuclear engineer at the nuclear power plant in question.
His analysis is heart-stopping.
If an explosion caused the cooling pools to vaporize, the fuel rods in the plant could melt down in seven to eight days for reactors on cold shutdown, Selyverstov said. A hydrogen explosion could cause further structural damage. “Then the nuclear fuel will start to drop further down into the soil contaminating it, contaminating underground waters,” Selyverstov said.
If, however, one of the reactors is in a “hot shutdown” mode—as Selyverstov and Ukrainian media say No. 5 is—we could see a meltdown in 72 hours. An explosion could send a cloud of radioactive material drifting across Ukraine and large parts of Europe, including Poland and the Baltic states, depending on prevailing winds.
So what’s going on? The Russians could be planning either an area-denial attack with a limited contamination zone that will then tie up personnel, resources, and money—and take the ZNPP offline, perhaps indefinitely—in a scorched earth retreat. Assuming you don’t have the cataclysmic scenario Selvyerstov described with the fuel rods destroyed and dispersed in an explosion, the area of effect would be smaller, but the damage would render the area uninhabitable for a very long time.
Ukrainian officials conducted radiation contamination drills earlier this week. Emergency workers practiced hosing down contaminated vehicles and civilians in Zaporizhzhia. When the power plant first came under Russian attack last year, Ukraine distributed radiation tablets to residents in a 30-mile radius around the plant, so the occupants of the area have been prepared for some time.
The Counteroffensive staff are based in Kyiv and if the plant suffers a catastrophic explosion, we have a few options:
First, we’ll follow standard safety protocols which we have established, which call for sheltering in place, sealing up the bureau’s windows and doors with duct tape, turning off external ventilation systems like air conditioning, and following decontamination procedures.
Secondly, we will gather our safety equipment and determine how to best use it. Last month, we put out a call for paid subscribers to help us get nuclear safety equipment: sets of CBRN gear; gas masks; a geiger counter – everything we needed to be safe. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT! This is what a Counteroffensive subscription goes towards!
Thirdly, depending on the severity of the event, we’d have to make a decision to stay in Ukraine or evacuate. The safety of our staff is paramount.
This was a devilish choice I often had to make when covering past conflicts. It’s never easy and there’s no simple answer, but we will continue to do what we can, for as long as we can.
Until then, please keep reading.
Today’s Dog of War is this skeptical beagle who Tim spotted at a refugee center for displaced Ukrainians, in Warsaw.
Stay safe out there.
Best,
The Counteroffensive Team
This story was written by The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak, which publishes regular intimate stories on the war in Ukraine, live from Kyiv. You can keep up with The Counteroffensive by subscribing free or paid here.