384. Hubris at the Gates: The Fall of Russia's Elite

Battleground

Goalhanger

History

4.5 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you would like to watch this podcast you can watch it on Spotify or you can find it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@BattlegroundUkraine In this special on-the-ground edition of Battleground Special Forces, Saul David and Julius Strauss travel to the outskirts of Kharkiv and Kyiv to examine the catastrophic opening hours of the 2022 Russian invasion. Through eyewitness accounts and visits to the sites of intense urban combat, they reconstruct how Russia’s most elite units—the GRU-trained Spetsnaz and the VDV Airborne—faced fierce resistance that derailed the Kremlin’s "two-day" victory plan. This episode features: • The Siege of School 134: A detailed look at the 13-hour gun battle in Kharkiv where dozens of elite Spetsnaz soldiers made a final, hubristic stand before the building was destroyed by a gas explosion. • The Battle for Hostomel (Antonov) Airport: The strategic "linchpin" operation involving helicopter assaults and a desperate back-and-forth struggle for the gateway to Kyiv. • The Human Cost in Bucha: A somber visit to the Bucha cemetery, where the rows of civilian victims bear witness to the 32-day Russian occupation. Join Saul and Julius as they explore the "battlefield detritus" and the layers of history in a region still caught between recovery and the ongoing realities of war. Julius Strauss writes the blog Back from the Front and also owns and runs Wild Bear Lodge, a bear-viewing lodge, in Canada. Here are the hyperlinks: Substack: https://backfromthefront.substack.com/ Wild Bear Lodge: https://wildbearlodge.ca/ Join the Conversation: If you have a question about the war in Ukraine or any of the conflicts we cover, email us at podbattleground@gmail.com Follow us on: X - @PodBattleground Instagram - podbattleground Producer: James Hodgson A Goalhanger Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Akamai Cloud, GPUs for Agenic AI, bring AI inferencing closer to users everywhere.
0:05.9	Get started at acamey.com slash GPU.
0:08.6	Hello and welcome to this special edition of Battlegrounds Special Forces.
0:13.4	In this episode, recorded on the ground in Harkiv and Boucher, we examined two battles from the very opening hours of the invasion.
0:21.1	The Spetsnazs assault on Kharkiv
0:23.0	and the VDV airborne operation at Hostomel Airport outside Kiev.
0:28.5	Two of Russia's elite forces, two catastrophic failures,
0:32.1	and the moment Russia's war plan began to fall apart.
0:48.1	The United States Russia's war plan began to fall apart. On the 24th of February, 2002, Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Leading the ground assault in the
0:57.0	east were units from the Second Guard Spetsnaz brigade, Russia's elite special operations soldiers,
1:03.7	trained by the GRU for exactly this kind of mission. We're standing outside the school in
1:08.8	Harkiv, where some of those soldiers made their last stand.
1:12.1	What happened here in the first hours of the war is a story of hubris, fierce resistance and catastrophic miscalculation.
1:21.3	So, Julius, we're on the edge of Harkiv.
1:24.5	And this building behind us is relevant to an episode we put out a couple of weeks ago
1:28.5	on the Battleground Special Forces Spetsnaz episode in which you talked about a fierce gun battle
1:35.6	that took place here, the early stages of the Ukraine war. It involved a second guard spetsnaz brigade,
1:42.5	sort of storied unit first formed in 1962 by the GRU,
1:46.5	that's Russian intelligence, to give it behind the lines capability, a bit like our SAS or
1:51.5	the SEAL Team 6 in the US. And on the morning of the 24th of February, 2020, they were the
2:00.0	spearhead to the advance into Harkiv. What happened next?
2:04.5	Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were the spearhead, and I suppose the big thing that's difficult to
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