The two British soldiers dug into snowbound trenches knew the Russian forces were coming.
Drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, artillery, mortars and grenades had harried them in the weeks leading up to Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Now Shaun Pinner and Aiden Aslin, who had burrowed themselves into fields on the frontline outside Mariupol, a city on Ukraine’s southeastern coast, steeled themselves for the coming storm.
Pinner, from Watford, but now a section commander with the Ukrainian marines, had a defiant message for Vladimir Putin’s forces.
“We haven’t got air superiority. We don’t have a very strong naval fleet. But Ukrainians fight. So we’ll give them a bloody nose, that’s for sure,” he said at the time.
Fast forward to the eve of the third anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Pinner, now 51, opened up on the weeks of bitter fighting as his troops battled Russians in bitter hand-to-hand combat before he was captured. Pinner then suffered a five-month ordeal at the hands of Moscow-backed forces who sentenced him to death.
He remembered the silence in those agonising hours before Russia launched its all out attack on 24 February, 2022, in a pre-dawn onslaught that changed the world forever.
“That first day of the full-scale invasion I didn’t realise how much at the tip of the spear I was,” he told The i Paper.
“I was 800 meters forward of the first line in an advanced listening post. I couldn’t have been any further forward without being in Russian territory.
“That first day, 11 hours of, really intense fighting. Grads, artillery, they had air dominance. We were now the Taliban. They were taking prisoners, because our left flank just crumbled.”
Commanding the second most powerful army in the world, Putin thought he could march on Kyiv in two weeks.
But the “bloody nose” Pinner promised has seen Ukraine fight on heroically in Europe’s largest conflict since World War Two, inflicting staggering casualties on the invading forces.
One Nato official claimed Russia had suffered 837,000 soldiers killed or wounded since the war started.
Pinner, spent nine years in the Royal Anglians which included a tour of Bosnia with the UN.
He moved to Ukraine in 2018, meeting his wife in Mariupol, before joining the 36th Brigade of the Ukrainian marines as the country rebuilt its armed forces following the annexation of Crimea.
With Kyiv’s future now hanging in the balance, he points to Kyiv’s battlefield victories despite Russia’s overwhelming military power.
“Three years later, we’re still fighting. Three years later in some parts Putin hasn’t made it even 50 kilometers past his own border,” said Pinner.
“We’ve sunk over 30 per cent of his Black Sea Fleet. We’ve got back over 50 per cent of what initially they took in 2022. We’re not losing this.
“But I think the main concern is Ukrainians feel Trump’s giving Putin a lifeline.”
Back in February, 2022, as tens of thousands of Russian troops massed across the border, it was clear to his brigade that all-out war was coming.
One night, his unit were told to stand to and prepare to resist an attack – a warning he’d heard countless times in two different armies. Only this time it was for real.
“We just had to wait for it to start,” he said.
“The artillery had been increased two weeks before the invasion, so we knew they were coming in.
“We were able to see the drones and they dropped ordinance at night, which was pretty new. They had thermal capability, and so everything was changing quite quickly.”
During 11 hours of fighting on the first day, his unit escaped without suffering a casualty, but were forced to move back to a second line position.
Over seven gruelling days, the marines mounted a fighting withdrawal back to Mariupol.
As fighting raged in temperatures as low as -10°C sleep became impossible, with soldiers completely exhausted.
He described terrifying close-quarter fighting over the next seven weeks as they they held on while surrounded in the Illich steelworks.
“It was like scenes from Saving Private Ryan,” he said.
“It was hand to hand combat, and they were in the compound. By that time we were running low on ammunition, food and water.
“We’d lost 60 per cent of our platoon through shrapnel and injury and death, and we were running on empty.”
Russian troops drove a train packed with 800kg of explosives into their position, blowing a 40-metre crater and wounding his eye and injuring him with flash burns.
But as their casualties mounted, he was forced to leave hospital while injured and move back on the frontline to plug gaps.
With their position untenable the troops attempted to break out, but Pinner was captured by the so-called Donetsk People Republic forces.
During his months in captivity, he described horrific torture, being stabbed in the leg, electrocuted, tasered and badly beaten. Surviving on scraps, his weight plummeted.
In a sham trial in which he wasn’t allowed to plead not guilty, he was sentenced to death along with Aslin, another prisoner of war.
The Russians then administered one final, brutal beating leaving him scarred and with blood running down his head before he was released along with fellow British captives Aslin, Andrew Hill, John Harding and Dylan Healy.
Their flight from Russia on a luxury jet took a surreal turn when they spotted the then-Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich with Pinner joking with the billionaire about buying his own team, West Ham.
Pinner, who now works with anti-mining group Prevail and lives in Dnipro, says he hasn’t suffered mentally from his time in captivity, with the loss of friends and his home during the war affecting him more.
He did accuse Donald Trump, however, of trying to sell out Ukraine, with the US President branding Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator as he looks to agree a peace deal with Russia.
“Trump seems to rattle off Russian narratives every single day. I don’t think there’s going to be peace, because Putin still wants Kyiv,” he said.
“Zelensky can’t be bought. He’s certainly not going to be bought by Putin, and he’s not going to be bought by Trump.
“It’s important to really talk about what’s happening in the UK, because inevitably, in my view, we’ll be going to war with Russia at some point. I think we’re there now, just nobody’s saying it.”
Pinner has written an autobiography, Live, Fight, Survive, about his ordeal which is now being turned into a Hollywood film by Tom Hardy’s dad.
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