Lang Holds the Line
Once an archaeologist, now a war-weary major, Lang buries friends instead of relics, fighting drones, grief, and silence to defend a country increasingly haunted by its own endurance.
KYIV, Ukraine — The rain was falling lightly on the worn pavements of Kyiv when I met Major Lang again, a soldier whose name had first entered my notebooks in 2022, during Ukraine’s early counter-offensives in Kharkiv. But it wasn’t until 2024, two years into a war that had already exhausted its combatants and disoriented the headlines, that I came to truly understand the measure of the man.
In October of that year, I published two detailed reportages1 that traced his transformation from archaeologist to artillery commander. Lang was no career soldier. He had once sifted through the earth in search of ancient stories. Now he fights to protect the fragile future of the country he once studied through its past. It was in those two stories, one told on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets River, the other in a worn-down café near the threatened city of Sumy that I began to see how the war was changing not just Ukraine’s geography, but its soul.
Now, in June 2025, as Russian forces push again with cold, mechanical precision, I returned to Ukraine to pick up the thread and found myself, once more, back with Lang.
Our conversation unfolded in a small cafe in Kyiv, joined by my Ukrainian colleague, journalist Olena Solodovnikova, who had helped facilitate the meeting. The mood was practical, stripped of preamble. These are not times for nostalgia.
“We had a plan to meet you in Sumy,” Lang said in deliberate English, so all could follow, “but things changed.”
Sumy had changed. The war had changed. Lang had changed.
He now carries the rank of Major, a promotion not born of ceremony but attrition. “In peacetime, it takes years,” he remarked. “Now, it’s only a matter of who survives.”
The Russian military, he explained, had returned to the north with a familiar and brutal patience. “They don’t rush anymore,” Lang said. “They’re taking two villages a day. Not by storm, by pressure. They want to surround Sumy, not destroy it.”
Lang’s brigade had only recently relocated from Sumy to Pokrovsk, part of a broader reorganisation of Ukrainian forces trying to anticipate Russia’s grinding momentum. “From our brigade, only some remnants remain in Sumy,” he told us. “But my friends in neighbouring units, they’ll help you organise everything.”
When I asked if I could embed with his unit once again, document their daily lives, their exhaustion, their resilience, he agreed without hesitation. “You’ve followed us for some time,” he said. “It matters. Come with us. We’ll make it work.”
In Ukraine, the line between access and bureaucracy is always thin. Lang understood this better than most. “Officially, yes, you need a press officer,” he said. “But unofficially, if you're with the commander, it’s safer. Less risk. Less paperwork to get you stuck.”
What followed was a detailed exchange about logistics: movements, dates, safe corridors, contacts, and shifting frontlines. Olena and I planned to travel to Sumy later this month, and Lang would meet us there or perhaps bring us into Pokrovsk beforehand, depending on the military situation. Flexibility, in war, is the only fixed condition.
But the war we spoke of was no longer fought with simple tools or clear boundaries. “We’re not just fighting soldiers anymore,” Lang said, his voice low, “we’re fighting drones. Kamikaze. FPVs. They don’t sleep. They don’t feel.”
The front, he explained, is now a 20-kilometre-wide “kill zone,” where movement, even in a civilian vehicle can draw sudden, lethal attention. “To survive, you must drive at least 150 kilometres per hour,” he said. “And even then, you’re not safe.”
His men no longer wear uniforms in rear areas. They travel unmarked. “We use civilian clothes, unmarked vehicles. The moment a drone sees military, it marks you.”
Lang still bears the cost of these changes. When I asked about his soldiers from the early days, he paused. “You remember Zakhar? From the Kharkiv region?” I nodded.
“He was killed. February 27. FPV drone. They were evacuating wounded. A direct hit.”
His voice, always measured, grew even quieter. “It’s war,” he said. But not the kind of war most outside observers understand.
In 2024, when we last spoke in Sumy, Lang had begun to show signs of psychological fatigue, the kind that weighs down even the most hardened soldier. His unit, like many others, had been fighting for so long that the war had begun to blur the difference between survival and purpose.
“They’ve stopped thinking of the enemy as human,” he told me last year. “Now it’s all drones and artillery. There’s no face anymore.”
That dehumanisation has only deepened. Lang now speaks of combat in metrics: drone speeds, strike zones, radar shadows, psychological thresholds. The battlefield has become a calculation, not a confrontation.
Still, in the midst of all this, he remains committed to telling the story, not for glory, but for documentation, for memory. “You can come,” he said. “Stay a week. A month. As long as it takes. If we go to Sumy after Pokrovsk, we’ll bring you.”
There is no safety now, not in Kyiv, not in the West, not even in strategy. “Even western Ukraine is under threat,” he said. “There are no safe places. Drones don’t care where you are.”
He told me about his children, both in Kyiv. One of his ex-wives had gone to Germany during the first waves of the full-scale invasion in 2022, but the children remained. “I visit when I can,” he said. “But there are missile attacks even here. Every few days. Five hours of bombing just this week.”
As we spoke, it became clear: Lang’s war is no longer one of movement, but one of permanence. He is not just holding the line, he is the line, and the toll it takes on him is both visible and hidden.
In the coming days, I will join his unit, follow their routines, listen to their exhaustion, and record their defiance. Together with Olena, I will document how soldiers survive this new form of warfare, and what they risk losing, not just in body, but in mind.
Major Lang embodies something essential about this war: that it is not merely being fought for territory, but for identity, for memory, and for the right to remain human in a conflict increasingly governed by the mechanical and the cruel.
He is no longer the captain I once photographed in Kharkiv’s battered forests. But he is still, resolutely, the same man.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said at the end of our conversation. “Just stay close. And don’t bring too much luggage.”
Somewhere ahead lies Sumy, and behind it, the uncertain fate of a nation fighting not just to hold the line, but to define what will remain once the drones have passed and the dust has settled.
And so, as we prepare to move eastward, toward Pokrovsk, toward Sumy, toward whatever remains of the front, I cannot help but feel that what I am documenting is not merely a war, but a slow, relentless erosion of the human soul. In the eyes of Major Lang, hollowed now by grief, courage, and unrelenting duty, I see the quiet extinction of a gentler past. This is a man who once exhumed the bones of ancient civilisations with reverence; now he buries his comrades in unmarked fields beneath skies that hum with death. Around him, boys grow old before they become men, carrying rocket launchers heavier than their dreams, standing guard over a future they no longer dare to imagine. And yet, they endure. In tattered boots, with trembling hands and eyes dulled by fatigue, they hold the line not for glory or flags, but for each other and for the stubborn, flickering belief that even now, in the howling machinery of modern war, something human is still worth saving.
An Unexpected Commander: How War Transformed an Archaeologist Into a Leader
Captain Lang, once an archaeologist, now commands an artillery unit, trading history’s artefacts for war’s brutality, defending Ukraine’s future with quiet resilience and determination. — The GPC.
The War That Never Ends: Ukraine’s Unseen Battle with Trauma and Technology
Captain Lang and his men are confronting a silent enemy: the creeping indifference and burnout that threaten to undo even their most hardened soldiers. — The GPC.