Russian Armed Forces (9b8164b2)

The Russian Armed Forces are presented as a military presence whose meaning changes with the speaker and setting: in Sergeyich’s remembered picture of Crimea, they have been summoned to protect peace; in the grey zone, their presence is associated with a war in which soldiers are being killed. The novel develops this contrast through checkpoints, contested language, and the consequences of fighting rather than through a sustained portrait of the institution itself.

Role in Sergeyich’s imagined Crimea

While driving south, Sergeyich recalls what Akhtem had told him about Crimea: its fields, forests, and mountains, and the peaceful people who lived there. In the version of events he imagines, Crimeans summoned the Russian army, which arrived and remained to protect their peace. He takes this account as evidence that Crimea might offer a safe place for himself and his bees, even though he has never visited the peninsula. The hope is shaped by his immediate need to leave a war zone and find somewhere to set up his hives; it is not an independent assessment of the military presence.

That anticipated refuge is set against the novel’s geography of passage. At the Russian checkpoint, Sergeyich sees a sign identifying the Dzhankoy crossing, and remembers a warning painted on a transformer box at Chonhar that the Russian occupiers were only eighteen kilometres away. The route into Crimea thus carries two descriptions at once: a road toward the peace he hopes to find and a passage through territory marked by occupation.

The army in accounts of the war

At the border, Sergeyich attempts to describe the fighting in the grey zone to a media crew. He begins by saying that Ukrainians are on one side and Russians on the other. A young man interrupts and instructs him to repeat the account without naming Russians; Sergeyich then hesitantly substitutes separatists from Karuselino. The exchange exposes pressure on the language of the interview: the account is being shaped even as the beekeeper tries to describe the war as he understands it.

When asked about damage to his hive in Zaporizhzhia, Sergeyich says that one shell-shocked man, drunk at a soldier’s wake, attacked it. The soldier being mourned had been killed by the Russians. The young man ends the live interview and asks the crew to record the bees and the axe mark instead. The Russian Armed Forces therefore enter this scene through the reported death of a soldier and the media’s management of Sergeyich’s testimony, not through a direct encounter with the army.

Checkpoints, documents, and passage

The crossings make military and political divisions tangible in routine controls. At one checkpoint, soldiers examine Sergeyich’s passport and question why he is entering through territory they identify as the D.P.R. After one asks over a radio whether Little Starhorodivka belongs to it, they also take Sergeyich’s mobile phone and passport for inspection, directing him to pull onto the shoulder while other cars pass. They eventually return his documents and phone. This episode concerns the armed checkpoint authorities and the administration of divided territory; it does not establish that the soldiers are members of the Russian Armed Forces.

Later, at the border crossing beneath its broad canopy, Sergeyich and Aisha move through separate parts of the crossing process. He parks and approaches passport control while Aisha continues on foot with her suitcase. After passing the border post, he drives slowly through the buffer zone, overtaking people on foot and looking for her among those crossing. The sequence gives the broader military division a practical consequence: movement depends on documents, checkpoints, and the monitored spaces between borders.

Narrative significance

The Russian Armed Forces remain a disputed presence in Sergeyich’s efforts to make sense of the war. In the hope that draws him toward Crimea, the Russian military is imagined as a guarantor of local peace; in his account of a soldier’s death, it is the force responsible for the death being mourned. The contrast is sharpened by the scene in which he is told not to use the word Russians on camera. The novel links military power not only to territory and casualties, but also to the strained language through which people can describe who is fighting and what has happened.