July of 2022

The Kraken Special Unit (Part VI)

Ilya Repin Farewell to a Recruit (1879)

On 22 June 2022, a video documenting the restoration of captured Russian equipment appeared on the Telegram channel of the Kraken Special Unit. The 97-second film, which showed the repair and reconditioning of machine guns, trucks, and armored personnel carriers, began with a quotation from Stepan Bandera. ‘The Ukrainian people’, the passage proclaimed, ‘can only win an independent state by means of their own struggle and hard work.’

In the month that followed, a number of artillery-themed videos appeared on the Telegram feeds of founder Konstantin Nemichev, field commander Serhiy ‘Chili’ Velichko, and the Kraken organization. Consisting largely of scenes in which single gun-howitzers fired single shells into single-family dwellings, these programs often ended with a shillsheet requesting donations to the Kraken organization. (Where the sound track of the first film featured stirring martial airs performed by a symphony orchestra, those of the ordnance-intensive ilk made use of less sophisticated sounds.)

A gun-howitzer of the type (122mm D-30) showcased in videos produced by the Kraken organization in the summer of 2022 (DVIDS)

These venues also published a video about a Russian officer taken prisoner by a Kraken patrol in the Donbas.¹ While the makers of this 10-minute movie paid a good deal of attention to the debrief of the alleged ‘GRUnik’, the real star of the show was the cell phone captured with him.² In particular, the filmmaker interleaves pieces of remarkably casual conversations between the prisoner and a masked, voice-disguised interrogator with visuals taken from the aforementioned device: clips of Russian soldiers relaxing in camp, photos taken in training, and snapshots of family, friends, and two young woman. (The videographer, who devotes considerable screen time to the latter ladies, identifies one of them as the ‘sweetheart’ of the scout and the other as his ‘mistress’.)³

One of the pictures in the Kraken-produced video about a captured Russian scout shows the latter wearing the ‘bat over crosshairs’ badge of Russian Special Forces

On the last day of July of 2022, the official Telegram channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that a long-range strike on a campus in the city of Kharkiv inflicted considerable damage to elements of the Kraken organization assembled there.⁴

High-precision weapons of the Russian Aerospace Forces have hit temporary deployment point of Kraken nationalist formation on the territory of Morozov Mechanical Technical School in Kharkiv. As a result of the strike, the enemy suffered up to 350 casualties. Also, 11 units of military equipment were destroyed.

On 8 August 2022, a weekly roundup on the aforementioned feed included a claim that the desire to replace casualties caused, both directly and indirectly by the strike, caused the Kraken organization to attempt coercive recruitment.

Russian Aerospace Force and Missile Troops precision strikes at Ukrainian nationalists' temporary deployment points have resulted in the mass casualties and mercenary desertions. Kraken nationalist formation has lost its combat efficiency in Kharkov direction.  

In order to make up for losses urgently, the commanders of the Nazi [sic] formation unsuccessfully try to force the citizens of Kharkov to join it.

Neither the Telegram channel of the Kraken Special Unit, nor those of its two co-commanders, made any mention of a strike of this sort, let alone its alleged consequences. On the same day as the strike, however, Konstantin Nemichev posted a piece about the missile strike that wrought great damage to the Regional Administration Building in Kharkiv on 1 March 2022.⁵ (At that time, the Regional Administration Building housed the recruiting office for the organization, then known as Regional Defense Unit ‘Azov’, that would soon evolve into the Kraken Special Unit.)

On 3 August 2022, the Kraken Special Unit posted a call for recruits. The advertisement, made up largely of answers to frequently asked questions, lacked the emphasis on selectivity that loomed so large in earlier solicitations. In particular, it mentioned neither the entrance tests (both psychological and physical) nor the recruit selection course described in the previous advertisement. (The latter appeared, on 13 April 2022, on both the Kraken channel and the personal feed of Mr. Nemichev.)

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For other articles in this series:

Special Unit Kraken (Navigator)

For other articles about the war in Ukraine:

Articles about the War in Ukraine

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1. For a summary of the story told in this video, see Alona Mazurenko ‘Ukrainian fighters Captured a Russian Intelligence Officer’ Ukrainska Pravda 20 July 2024.

2. ‘GRUnik’ combines the initials of Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye [Main Intelligence Directorate] with the word ‘nik’, which might be translated as ‘person involved with’.

3. The Ukrainian words used were, respectively, ‘dushenka’ [душенька] and ‘lyubovnytsa’ [любовница].

4. The name of the school struck by the strike honors the memory of Aleksander Aleksandrovich Morozov, the head of the team that designed, among other tanks, the iconic T-34.

5. This video, posted on the YouTube channel of Ukrainska Pravda, captures the moment that a Russian missile struck the Kharkiv Regional Administration Building on 1 March 2022.