Five Weddings and a Funeral

The Kraken Special Unit (Part V)

May 23, 2023

Frank Dicksee, *Funeral of a Viking,* 1893

On 28 April 2022, Special Unit Kraken and other elements of the Main Intelligence Directorate took control of Ruska Lozoda, a town some five kilometers northeast of the city of Kharkiv. A video of the operation depicted the men of Special Unit Kraken handling a wide variety of weapons: an American M2 .50 caliber machine gun, a medium (82mm) mortar, a Strela hand-held anti-aircraft missile launcher, an anti-tank guided missile launcher, and several kinds of rocket-propelled grenades. The footage, emblazoned with the Kraken logo and posted on the new Telegram channel of the Kraken Special Unit, also showed a brief fire fight, the evacuation of civilian inhabitants, and the capture of a warehouse full of land mines and small arms ammunition.

On 10 May 2022, a notice posted on the new Kraken channel on Telegram claimed that the Kraken Special Unit had cleared the village of Pytomnyk. With a peacetime population of 200, Pytomnik was much smaller than Ruska Lozoda, which had 5,000 or so inhabitants before the start of the Russian invasion. Posted on Telegram on 12 May, an official Kraken video of the operation showed a pair of tanks sporting large Ukrainian flags, medics treating two wounded men, and the capture of a Russian armored personnel carrier.

On 19 May 2022, the Kraken Special Unit posted a list of seven members of the organization who had died in Ruska Lozoda and Pytomnyk. Of these, one died on 28 April (the day of the attack on Ruska Lozada), one died on 30 April (two days after the attack on Ruska Losada), and one died on 5 May (which may have been the day of the attack on Pytomnyk. In four cases, however, the date of death was 22 April 2022. This may indicate that the fight for Ruska Lozada on 28 April 2022 had been the second attempt by the Kraken Special Unit to take that place.

The announcement of the deaths of the seven soldiers was illustrated by a set of seven cards, each of which displayed a photograph of one of the soldiers, his full name, his call sign, the date of his death, three pieces of Viking-style scrollwork, and a picture of a burning longship.

In the month that followed, the posts on the Kraken Telegram channel painted a cheerier picture. Two depicted the firing of a single artillery piece (a 152mm gun-howitzer of the towed persuasion) at houses in a rural area. One showed the ambush of an armored personnel carrier, another an interview with captured Russian soldiers. (One of the latter expressed high regard for the “harmonious” way in which the Kraken Special Unit operated.)

Pictures of an award ceremony, posted on 10 June 2022 on the Kraken Telegram channel, showed Kostiantyn Nemichev and Serhiy ‘Chili’ Velichko in front of a formation of a hundred or so soldiers. A video, posted on 21 June 2022, show Mr. Nemichev and Mr. Velichko attending a multi-couple wedding in which all five of the grooms wore battledress.

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