'Russian warship, go f*** yourself!’ What really happened on Snake Island?
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On the first day of the war in Ukraine, a story emerged of a David and Goliath face-off in the Black Sea, when the Ukrainian soldiers on a small, desolate island responded to a Russian warship’s call to surrender by telling it to go f*** itself. The Ukranians were thought to have been killed and the story became one of the great founding myths of the war - but what really happened to the men on the island and who uttered that fateful phrase?
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Guest: Louise Callaghan, foreign correspondent, The Sunday Times.
Host: Luke Jones.
Clips: Telegraph, Reuters.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we begin, a warning this episode contains swearing and descriptions of torture. |
| 0:12.2 | The one-year anniversary of the rushed invasion of Ukraine came and went, but one mystery |
| 0:17.5 | endured, a mystery that goes right back to the first day of the war that Sunday times |
| 0:21.9 | foreign correspondent Louise Callahan has been trying to get to the bottom of. |
| 0:29.3 | When the Russian full scale of invasion began on February the 24th, Russian forces were |
| 0:33.8 | pouring over Ukraine's borders from all sorts of different directions. |
| 0:39.3 | They were also launching a naval attack, and as part of that, they took this place called |
| 0:44.1 | Snake Island, which is this completely miserable, windswept, rocky outcrop in the Black Sea, |
| 0:52.3 | 22 miles off the coast of Ukraine. |
| 0:57.6 | But that tiny island got this kind of instant global infamy because during the night of |
| 1:04.0 | the invasion, when the Russian forces came to take the island, they'd radioed from a |
| 1:10.3 | Russian ship to the command center on the island where the Ukrainian border guards were. |
| 1:17.1 | And they said, surrender immediately, the Russian warship is here. |
| 1:26.0 | The Ukrainian border guards are replying, saying, Russian warship, go fuck yourself. |
| 1:36.7 | And that reply became this kind of legendary rallying resistance against this huge force, |
| 1:44.1 | and it became this David and Goliath tale which kind of symbolized plucky Ukrainian ingenuity |
| 1:52.9 | and cohesion in the face of this Russian invasion. |
| 1:59.9 | The next morning, the news had been published everywhere. |
| 2:03.0 | The bravery of those border guards was known across the world. |
| 2:06.5 | But they also said that these border guards had been killed. |
| 2:20.0 | The report said the Russians opened fire and killed all 13 border guards, all for telling |
| 2:26.7 | the warship to go fuck itself. |
... |
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