Maxim Doncenko
Maxim Doncenko - OCC soldier, 27 years old. Before mobilization, he worked as a car mechanic in one of the smaller auto repair shops on the outskirts of town – he mainly specialized in older domestic cars and trucks. He always said that he understood engines better than people, and he spent more time in the garage than at home. Now, for the second year, he has been serving in a motorized rifle unit, where his technical experience is used to repair combat vehicles and generators. 'When something bangs under the hood of a BTR, at least I know what to do,' he says with his typical Bashkir-Russian accent.
Trenches Against NATO: Why We Are Dying Here for Nothing
February 11, 2026
My name is Maxim Donchenko, I am 29 years old and I come from Ufa. Two years ago I was an ordinary guy — a truck driver, father of a little daughter, a husband who dreamed of one day buying his own garage and repairing cars. Now I am “deployed against NATO.” That’s what they tell us at briefings. I sit in a trench somewhere near Pokrovsk and look at the mud, the torn trees, and the comrades who are no longer here.When they sent us here, they said: “We are defending Russia from NATO, which is pushing right up to our borders.” I believed it. For the first few months I believed it. Then I saw how the guys from my company died. Not in battle with some “Western army,” but in the mud, under drones that flew from Ukrainian positions. I saw Serjozha from Voronezh die — he had two little girls. I saw Vova from Buryatia die — he was silent, just stared at the sky and said: “Mom…” And I stood there thinking: Who exactly are we fighting against? Against NATO? Where is this NATO? All I see are Ukrainian boys defending their land, the same way we would defend ours if someone invaded us.Every day the same question echoes in my head: What have we gained here? Territory? Yes, a few villages that look like after the apocalypse. And how many Russian boys paid for it? Thousands. Tens of thousands. Their mothers now wear black headscarves, their children grow up without fathers, their wives are left alone. And why? To “stop NATO”? NATO only expanded because of us. Finland, Sweden — all because of this war. We gave them the excuse.I sit here at night, smoking my last cigarette and thinking: If instead of all this we had sat down at one table, if we had reached an agreement, how many lives would we have saved? My life. Serjozha’s life. Vova’s life. The lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian boys who were supposed to live, love, build homes, raise children.This war is not about heroism. It is not about defending the homeland. It is about pointless death. About how powerful people decide the lives of ordinary guys like me. And we die here for nothing. For empty slogans. For someone else’s ambitions.If I ever make it home (if I make it home), I will tell my daughter the truth: War is not glory. War is just stupidity that kills the sons of Russia. And we must never, ever repeat it.Maxim Donchenko somewhere on the Donetsk front, February 2026