Velikiy Ivanopol’/Velikii Ivanopil – Stephan Crown-Weber

November 26, 2025

Three exposed LED bulbs illuminated Captain Kirpichnikov as he stepped through a squealing doorway in relatively quiet boots.

The LEDs glorified in Private Belkin’s mind the incremental struggle towards energy security, him being just old enough to have known the honor of unscrewing his parents’ apartment’s final tungsten bulbs at the end of the incandescent era; Kirpichnikov, some eight centimeters taller than him, appeared then an instance of a proper commanding officer.

The dimensions of the teaching unit that Kirpichnikov was visiting and this being rural Belarus made Kirpichnikov picture a prosperous bumpkin’s house. The fifty-ish streaked-blonde civilian teacher had theoretically dismissed this class of thirty or so—of whom four were Kirpichnikov’s—for the meal that would replace kilocalories they had shivered into a gray winter atmosphere. But Kirpichnikov held up his hand against micromobilizations. He appended his own note to a morning session that had been on sentence formation in hybrid Surzhyk dialects: “People murmur about Ukrainian CIA biolabs implanted on the Nazi border with Russia where they engineer diseases to harm rusnyu, to use slang that even Nazis have adopted from the Second Chechen War. You see? Rusnya. Chechnya. Rusnya?” The teacher nodded demurely at some dimension of this concession to linguistics when Kirpichnikov glanced over. “They scarcely ever say, except to the point of banality amongst the intuiting Deep People, that the real biolabs include hipster cafes in Kiev with,” here he flipped from baritone into falsetto for a breath, “A precious bespoke ambiance. Key LGBTs have fled Russia, frail in their sleeveless shirts. They’re so crazy at the heights of comorbid syphilitic fever that they start and stop medicines and broadcast disease freely, sweaty in discos. Fecal obsessions. Pedophile recruitment fetishes. Central to the Kiev regime’s theme is HIV culture, their poisoned gift to the peoples of the Russian Federation when these gaunt ones swarm back across the border as drug mules. A regular guy who merely wants a sliver of luxury is tricked by the steamed milk palm tree in the girly latte. The Khokhly are all transitioning to Westerners…trans-Zapadniki. All for Nazism. Now eat lunch.”

These subordinates saluted him with a simultaneity that Kirpichnikov found pleasing and shocking, even for a war game. The civilian teacher tentatively lowered her head, short of a curtsy, as he could see from the right end of his field of vision.

Belkin saluted him a second time in rapid succession on the way out the door, with the line: “Thank you for the lesson, Captain Kirpichnikov.”

****

Some pro-Kremlin bloggers and journalists would after the fact communicate that Kirpichnikov’s company had been positioned “towards Velikiy Ivanopol’” for a time near the start of the Special Operation. Not north, south, east, or west of it, but nebulously closer to Russia than not.

Pro-Nazi elements would indicate that Russian forces had beset Velikii Ivanopil. In truth, a company that unbeknownst to nearly anyone had been Captain Kirpichnikov’s company, came upon it from the northeast, precisely as Nazi Khokhly and their NATO handlers had been divining in pellucid digital overlays of the “Kyiv region.”

Very nearly that day of penetration towards the Kiev area, Private Belkin dismounted from an advanced offensive vehicle that had rumbled up to the concrete apron of a gas station along the highway beyond what was rumored to be a Ukrainian Territorial Defenses checkpoint; ordnance chucked from somewhere a kilometre back had ripped a tread on the now-smoking lead vehicle. As mechanics attended to it, Belkin noted: “Captain, this sign doesn’t display the price of benzene and diesel in this part of the Ukraine; this is early-February pricing. This looks like an abandoned gas station.”

Certain subordinates opened the storm door and the broken steel security hood: the glass front door of the gas station turned out to be shattered. In view of a road sign that incorrectly called the town Velikii Ivanopil, Kirpichnikov mused aloud: “A squirrel recognizes squirrels.” He looked at Belkin, the little squirrel.

They had the momentum. Would stooped babushki who had refused to abandon their cats in leaking hovels control this district while their husbands or sons looked up LGBT transition surgeries, or fled to a recruitment center near the Polish border, or drank antifreeze to forget, or played online “casino” games in Kraków?

Supervisors had instructed him, Captain Pavel Borisovich Kirpichnikov, to pay special attention to Private Aleksandr Vadimovich Belkin out of those who would be barreling through the border checkpoint with him. This private might trade up to Special Forces University to become an intelligence officer. Belkin was from Elektrostal, a Moscow suburb. The portmanteau was slightly nonhuman, though not quite LGBT: Elektro-stal—perfective verb phrase—electrally-became. Belkin’s father was a civil engineer who had not especially distinguished himself militarily, though he had served loyally and satisfactorily in a regiment near Estonia twenty years back. His wife and other offspring lived in a newish high rise not far from a highway convenient to the capital or the suburb’s main train station. These Belkins lacked riches—male cousins of military age had even fled since the start of 2022, one perhaps to Riga, according to the FSB, one to Leipzig, according to the SVR.

This Private Aleksandr Belkin was legally an ethnic Russian: pale skin and sandy brown hair, besides. His cheeks were rosy on top of jutting bones; his eyes were slightly cat-lidded as though Tartars had fought on his family tree well beyond the reach of the ethnic passport system. The scarring was deep and blackened beneath the cheekbone; certain acne craters had seemingly gunked up without disqualifying him. Belkin also looked all of fourteen instead of eighteen, narrow-shouldered and sub-sixty kilos. Kirpichnikov nevertheless could not ignore how in-character Belkin’s body was, lacking a boyish superfluity.

No one had briefed these enlisteds about benzene prices in north-central Ukraine. Kirpichnikov informed Belkin in the shelter of this gas station, hemmed in by buildings that would turn out to be abandoned, that he was receiving a field promotion to corporal and perhaps then quickly up to junior sergeant, his main specialization in the mold of an aide-de-camp to Kirpichnikov.

Belkin thanked his superior. Belkin then got out that deciduous leaves had been strewn before an adjoining residence even as the grass outside remained short, as though there had been no time for more deception.

Kirpichnikov had gray-blue eyes and a balding head shaven clean. He was thirty-two and kept the peninsula of blond hair invisible that would have run to the peak from the back of his head; he was a father with a mate in any event. He wiped this head and put his cap back on. It was moreover surely unsightly, for his camouflage face paint to end at the forehead. Winter was not quite over, after all, especially in the breeze just outside this gas station.

As they ate their meal kits seated on the floor inside the requisitioned gas station, other enlisteds were joking that they would all aim to get themselves a “geisha” when this was over. Belkin shouted, “A Rossiyanka is right for you.”

It was easy enough at such a rate of stupidity for Kirpichnikov to focus his attention on this one clever logistics expert out of all the thirty men.

And so he would mutter to him in the corner by the former site of the cash register, surely long since emptied of its cigarette cartons and vape cartridges: “The suicide bomberesses—the smertnitsy—are out there. They are the most permissive women in this society, hags to the fags. You sense how the worm turns.”

Belkin mused, correctly: “The true latte purchasers.”

“Affirmative.”

Belkin asked permission to piss in the gas station’s miserable, demoralized bathroom, raised his right palm to his cap, and received a salute in return.

****

Viktor Sergeyevich Boiko was a solidly built twenty—and was already a junior sergeant in charge of one of their three transport vehicles. No adversary fire had hit his transport vehicle. Boiko’s father’s passport identified him as an ethnic Ukrainian, though Viktor Sergeyevich himself had grown up in post-communist Saint Petersburg. When they entered Velikiy Ivanopol’, Viktor Sergeyevich let loose a vwow over walkie talkie at the sight of the sculpture in the center of the city’s most formidable roundabout before, in all the spareness of radio communication, going: “Yep, Nazi symbol.” It was modern architecture, a steel folly with spherical finials connecting it to resemble a giant atom. The chrome-silverish exterior, with just a few rust streaks at odd rivet points, was just burnished enough that it failed to gleam when the sun peeked out. This at best represented the kinetic communist future that was nevertheless built on the dream of a greater Russia—yet the monument had been begun in 1988 before completion by the Nationalists and future Nazis—something to do on closer inspection with Jews being special victims.

This vwow had been a bit too cinematic, one understands. Captain Kirpichnikov moreover now got a bad feeling whenever Boiko flashed his teeth. They were unnaturally straight and white. In the secured SVZSU warehouse in a city devoid of stirring humans but not of the pitter patter of mice or rat feet, Kirpichnikov sidled on over to him to speak his mind informally. True to form, the subordinate smiled: “Junior Sergeant Boiko, white teeth are the essence of Hollywood. Hollywood is the essence of LGBT. LGBT is the essence of the West.”

“Yes, Captain Kirpichnikov. But many LGBTs are ugly.”

“You, as a man, fancy yourself pretty?”

“Gosh, I don’t know, Captain. I think I worry about hygiene. This is how I look.”

“You are culturally LGBT.”

“Why would you believe such a thing, Captain?”

“You want to transition to beauty.”

“But, Captain, women like men who are handsome.”

“Women respect men who have served with honor in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. You need to watch your mouth. You want to transition, you parakeet.”

“I’ll not contradict you, Captain.”

“You are perhaps even transgender. Culturally Hollywood.”

“I’ll not contradict you. Affirmative, sir.”

“At ease.”

Boiko saluted. Kirpichnikov smiled.

*****

Captain Kirpichnikov thought of those “teeth” the next morning as he aimed at the old man of perhaps eighty with a darkened row of snaggleteeth. In the absence of commotion, the Khokhly had begun to stir primally at dawn in all its mistiness infused by the river. Kirpichnikov’s mind rejiggered to the thought that his company were occupying this city, but also besieging it for all that these creatures stirred.

“Stoyat’!” Kirpichnikov yelped down a street adjacent to his temporary home; it was lined with closely packed dingy brown brick houses that all seemed to date from the same era if not builder. The old man failed to obey orders; he kept tottering away with his arms raised over his head, and crumpled under impact from a bullet in a fittingly distressed black nylon coat that hit halfway between the waist and knee.

At that crack of munition, a whelp of a boy several houses away began running in another nylon jacket, bright and vernal rather than overtly militaristic, and not as hidden by fog as he thought. “Stoyat’!” Kirpichnikov shouted.

Miraculously, when Kirpichnikov aimed at this suspected partizan, he thought to shoot precisely the distance ahead of the boy that would connect his torso with a bullet. The boy collapsed.

“We understand, Junior Sergeant Belkin, that these Khokhly are partisans, They will be out in underbrush casemates in no time.”

“Every local on this street is an insurgent,” Belkin shouted. Kirpichnikov pantomimed a shooting motion with both arms lifted and Belkin shot five rounds through an open window, perhaps at the sound of stirring inside.

A scream resonated, female and pitiable, yet all the same foreign, operatic: “My zhe chleny chelovechestva!”—We are truly members of humanity—followed in Russian that bore the uncanny plainness of words spoken in the Near Abroad.

Captain Kirpichnikov laughed at the double entendre: “We are penises of humanity.” He ordered Boiko and Sharafetdinov into that house. “Master that female.” He shouted to the other boys in his company: “We are in the zigzag of Saint George: we zed and restore a proper course.”

Kirpichnikov had that same morning attended to himself alone in the shower while tugging on his dog tags at the thought of calling his own wife a slut. Arousal evaded him now. The blood in his limbs prevented another power. For some tragic reason, he was accompanied up the stairs of that woman’s abode by Avram Avramovich, who seemed to sense his superior’s masculine inevitability.

The resident woman, on the final creaking board before he reached a line of sight, shouted “I am going to shoot.”

He found the voice frail. Kirpichnikov shouted “Superlesbian, impossibly trans, you’re as sweet…” and did not finish the thought. She shot a bullet all the way through his brain and into the wall in the hallway. Avram Avramovich moved into her line of sight and hit empty space above her and then managed to strike her neck. The woman, undead, attempted to withdraw into the next room, crouching in the bathtub as Kirpichnikov bled out. Avram Avramovich then shot her in the forehead point blank.

Avram Avramovich came on the walkie-talkie to say that Bird Dog was down. Others perhaps had caught the sound of a single round of an unusual pistolet.

As Belkin entered that house, something craven or wise inside him prevented him from hunting through every remaining room. He heard additional drawn-out reports of well-maintained Russian automatic weapons up and down the street in many multiples of ten.

The bodies gave little resistance in rutted approaches to the cairn; in only a few places was the mud remotely slick. By the end of the hour, there was a cairn of civilian corpses in the center of the roadbed; many outfits were unsalvageable. None of the civilians/partisans was carrying much money, least of all Russian currency despite a few valid Ukrainian bank cards.

Avram beat all others over and over again to the topic of praying for Kirpichnikov. He had in mind collective prayer, which perhaps eventually occurred amongst just five men out in the field before they retreated to the hangar once used by Ukraine’s Territorial Forces, where a substantive prayer in actual Church Slavonic was uttered.

By that point, perhaps at the moment when a civilian took a famous secret photo with a smartphone from an upper story, the atomic sculpture at the center of the nearby roundabout at the end of the block began to bloop. It bleeped. It buzzed. It glowed. It strobed. Folklorically.

“Fucking partisans,” Boiko shouted. “All of them transgender.”

Belkin countered that it might be the CIA. It set in like sugar crystal: “Trick town,” Belkin muttered, thinking about Kirpichnikov and his pronouncements. That afternoon, they struck the monument with various incendiary devices, no longer its full height of twenty meters but dilapidated in much more of a pile, the counterforce beneath it finally scattering without shooting all that many bullets.

Belkin in hindsight had known, sort of, that relatively few partisans were trans. At Boiko’s urging, he wrote in his report that the company had killed “thirty-two civilians.” And in parentheses, he placed some of the epithets that seemed to be terms of art: “partisans, trans-Westerns.” It crystallized almost immediately that something was wrong with this report; for one, there had been no close genitalia inspection, as a superior confirmed over the satellite phone before asking what a trans-Western was.

When Kirpichnikov’s superior in the airborne battalion did a review of the company in the hangar, he seemed to eye this boy like a contemptuous crow, perhaps all the more so because Belkin was one of the shortest enlisted men in the region, though at that moment perhaps a centimeter taller than when this story began. Belkin reported to him and was just as soon shooed away, until an hour later when his character announced to him that Aleksandr Vadimovich Belkin’s meritorious field promotion was the work of a superior experiencing a mental-health crisis.

Belkin tried to say in response, that, “Sir, Kirpichnikov was merely eccentric and boisterous at times.”

Belkin appreciated the lack of superfluity to the response, much as it horrified him: “And he issued no notification on your behalf on this alleged matter, if indeed he had intended to.”

***

The tinny blooping continued after this very bombing. Who would believe them that the CIA has created such a tricky structure or that Ukrainian forces had done the same? The statue was continuing to produce something very nearly like a folk tune, yet modern and not all that repetitive, a long tone poem that was not absorbed by the surrounding mud or mist. Myaskovskian.

And perhaps retroactively true to form the Western sources began to claim that there has been carnage in a little town outside Kiev, a “massacre of civilians.”

****

Belkin was at his new thinking spot the next morning, a green sleeping bag over a mat. A Gothic darkness overhung him; there were light fixtures high above in the rafters—but the Ukrainians had seemingly smashed the facility’s fluorescent tubing supply, despite or because of the mercury risk, generous enough to limit this mess to several mislabeled closets.

Hidden amongst troops aligned with Russia would be one or several yurodivyi of a secret kind. Belkin wanted to say that such a holy fool might be present in all of them. He was plausibly not a tough, not a dreamer, but an intellectual, a man of high culture. Surely this was enough for Russian military intelligence. There was a medievalness backlit all the way to the present in such a way that Belkin was perhaps simultaneously inhabited by the scholars of long, long ago.

As Belkin’s shift started, someone with their codes now reported on the patchy satellite phone that the gas station that they had recently secured was engulfed in black smoke that plumed downriver. Belkin attempted to confirm that the Partisans had destroyed it but the more he pressed this issue with Zhuranov, the less sure he was what had happened.

There were no birch-bark bast shoes here but age-old things did happen. Birds flew out there. Red foxes maneuvered. It gave Belkin some peace to think on behalf of the departed that there might have been a useful blinking map overlay of secret transgender forces as erratic and stubborn as housecats, perhaps displayed with pink circles, blooping to the undead atomic tune.