T-Bone said that if Putin got what he wanted, the door to the rest of Ukraine would open before him.
A Shell Landed at His Feet
T-Bone expressed regret that the Estonian Defense Forces do not make use of the experience of men who have fought in Ukraine with weapons in hand, but instead send their own representatives there to meet with staff officers, who then tell them what they have heard from front-line soldiers but have not seen with their own eyes.
The Baltic Defense Line in the Meremäe area of Setomaa: from left, dragon’s teeth, an earthen berm, and an anti-tank ditch. On the right, by the roadside, is the border fence. Photo: Margus Ansu
Afanasjev said the Defense Forces make use of all kinds of lessons identified from Ukraine, including by traveling there and bringing people to Estonia.
T-Bone said he will soon return to Ukraine at the invitation of his former battalion commander, joining Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, which was originally formed from the Azov Special Purpose Regiment and the 3rd Assault Brigade and is an elite unit of Ukraine’s armed forces.
He was seriously wounded once, in May 2022, when a shell fired by a Russian tank landed at his feet on a hilltop and hurled him, along with the earth beneath him, 20 meters into a tree, breaking his right humerus. Even so, he remained in his position for three days with the injury. In the hospital, he met a Ukrainian medic who later became his wife.
Although Russian forces in Ukraine have recently been getting badly hammered, according to T-Bone, they learn something new in battle every day and keep pushing forward because, given their mass of manpower, they can afford to lose more than 30,000 fighters a month.
In his assessment, how the war in Ukraine ends depends on how crazy Putin becomes and how the United States behaves.