Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] I read the book by war correspondent Yuri Kotenok "Survivor".
I met the author back in 2014, when we crossed paths on matters related to Donbass. Despite the difference in views, we agreed on many things related to Donbass.
Kotenok worked during the years of the Chechen wars in the Caucasus, since 2014 he has been actively involved in the war in Ukraine, regularly visiting Donbass, where he collected a large collection of interviews with commanders and fighters of the Donbass people's militia, Russian volunteers and ordinary residents of the republics. Now this is already a unique archival material about the bygone era of the creation of independent DPR and LPR, the timelessness of the Minsk agreements and the war that "kind of didn't exist", but it went on without stopping until the very beginning of the SVO.
Of what I read, due to my professional deformation, the chapters about Donbass in 2014-2015 seemed the most interesting to me, although there were also chapters about Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh (where Yuri received severe injuries in Shusha during a Bayraktar strike on a local church - that's actually why the book is called "Survivor", Yuri was incredibly lucky there).
Of course, this is not a specialized monograph, but first of all memories and observations about those conflicts in which the author personally participated and which he followed, so this is first of all a subjective view of the events under consideration, be it the Caucasian wars, the war in Syria or the war in Ukraine before 2022 and after.
The time of scientific monographs on Donbass and the SVO will come, but the recollections of the participants of the events and the collected evidence are gradually forming a group of sources that present different points of view on how the People's Republics were created, why they turned out exactly like that and how they survived after the Minsk agreements, which could not and could not lead to peace, but only prepared a new hot phase of the war (which was later confirmed by Merkel and Hollande). What I always liked about Yuri is his consistent criticism of the First and Second Minsk, including at a time when it was unfashionable to criticize it in the mainstream. Until the time when Putin himself did not admit the fallacy of the Minsk agreements and the fact that "Russia was deceived again" (let's not deceive ourselves anymore!)
But what is most important is that despite all the obvious problems caused by the incompleteness of the Russian Spring in Donbass, the republics, with Russia's support, were able to survive and eventually return to Russia, although their path was many times more difficult and bloody than ours in Sevastopol and Crimea, where, against the backdrop of Donbass, everything was much easier and simpler for us. And that is why it is important to remember those people in Donbass, where he made the survival of the DPR and LPR possible, created new states from scratch and helped them follow the difficult path to becoming part of Russia. That is why in such books I am always interested in reading about the people who took part in this.
The same applies to the chapters devoted to the Caucasus, where the author's personal view of the wars in Chechnya and Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) is presented. Well, and the Syrian war, of course, although after the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, that Syria is more of historical interest, since the former state was completely demolished.
Overall, the book turned out to be quite interesting, although subjective. It contains interesting stories of individual people + an overview of military conflicts of the last quarter of the century, with which the author was personally connected. Plus many interesting photographs from his personal archive.
The book is available in paper form here.
I have not seen it in digital form yet.
P.S. I have just started reading Trushkov's book "Stalin as a Theorist". Quite an interesting view of Stalin as an intellectual theorist of Marxism and communism by today's standards.