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Arestovych's pre-OP military career

Because there’s nine years’ worth of misinformation around Arestovych, and as someone who’s gone through the full “huh he seems interesting” -> “huh he has to be full of shit” -> “no he genuinely did a lot of hardcore things at personal cost and it’s mostly just that he’s weird and obnoxious and politically inconvenient” arc, I feel the need to make a comprehensive post with links and photo evidence from all my digging.

His military career is still a popular angle of attack for people trying to discredit him, given a lot of it sounds wild and a good deal would necessarily be confidential and hard for him to prove, but there's nonetheless some very interesting stuff out there. I plan to follow this post up with another one on his (also heavily misunderstood) work in the OP.

TL;DR: He's largely honest about his personal achievements, he did some bonkers things and there's evidence, people who actually worked closely with him personally seem to have a lot of regard for him--and tbh, he's less of an asshole than most people would become after putting his life on the line repeatedly for his country and getting nine years of unhinged hate for it.

Given my language limitations and those of the intended audience, I'll be basically exclusively providing text and image sources that can be easily machine translated, plus some videos with English subs/dubs. Corrections and additions welcome!

According to Arestovych, he met Zaluzhnyy at Odesa Military Academy, they’ve been friends for 28 years, he served under him in the Donbas in 2018-2019, and he really loves cuddling with him. As with most of his stories, this is not as improbable as it might sound. I feel like that's an apt note to start this on.

Some people like to claim he “only” has a military translator diploma from Odesa Military Academy as a way to discredit his military background. But here's him front and center in a group photo with an honor guard sash, and he explained in a 2011 forum post from an account that was by that point linked to his real identity that he graduated with a civil bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a military specialty in mechanized combat, and the translator diploma was in addition to that, traditionally received by military and intel officers. (Yes, he transcribed his entire courseload from his diploma to win a forum argument, if anything he's mellowed out with age.)

People also like to insinuate that he didn't really work for the GUR back in the '00s, there's no evidence for it (never mind that naturally if he worked for military intel a lot of information would be classified). But I've found a certificate of distinction from the GUR dated to 2003. Budanov, when asked about whether Arestovych worked in the GUR in a recent interview, answered "as far as I remember, yes."

Which might seem a bit vague, but they have an interesting relationship of their own. Arestovych left the GUR before Budanov started working there, but he's claimed that he'd known Budanov since before 2014 through GUR connections, and that they worked together in 2018 while he was serving in the army. In support of this, there's this..."interview" from August 2020, right after Wagnergate and the firing of the previous head of the GUR, when Budanov was the young and then-little-known newly appointed head of the GUR and Arestovych was "just" an infamous milblogger, not yet working for the OP. Ostensibly, it's the head of the GUR taking the unprecedented step of interviewing with a notable blogger and commentator to dispel rumors around the PR mess on his hands, but if you actually watch...it's a very odd video. They seem to know each other better than they're letting on, it's more of a creative collaboration to control the narrative than an actual interview, and it's very interesting that Budanov would pick Arestovych to do this with in the first place--Budanov gave interviews only rarely before the full-scale invasion, and Arestovych already had something of a reputation. Some hidden currents there.

Anyway, there's not much else in the way of public surviving evidence from all the way back then, but Arestovych has talked about going to Britain as a lieutenant on exchange, gathering intel for Ukraine's involvement in the Iraq War, and going to the conference with Dugin as part of his intel work (which convinced him in 2005 that Russia had revanchist designs on Ukraine, but his superiors wouldn't take him seriously.) [Edit 4/21/23: I'd seen hints before, but he confirms in this interview that one of his military specialties was "information counteraction", shaping the public opinion to a given objective. Which sounds an awful lot like the work he'll do later on.]

Arestovych quit the GUR in 2005, he says due to conflict with higher-ups, and spent the better part of the next decade bouncing around civilian life. One interesting interlude: in 2008 he was involved in unofficial preparations for the defense of Crimea against Russian invasion. Maidan was when he first became a public media figure (and almost immediately attracted a hatedom and Russian spy accusations, some things never change.) I've posted a bit about what I've found about that period here and here, but for the purposes of this post I'll move on to the outbreak of war in the Donbas.

On the one hand, Arestovych started volunteering almost immediately. He was already in Kramatorsk in April 2014, and he did a lot of work collecting donations and delivering supplies to the frontlines, especially comms equipment. He was awarded two medals around this time, for his work at Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and he's talked a bit about his adventures (including nearly getting shot up by his own side twice) in this post and its associated comments. He founded the People's Reservist program to train fighters to supplement the dire state of the Ukrainian army at the time--he worked with a lot of notable volunteers at this time, including the combat medic Tayra, who's talked about training in his program, taught combat medicine for it, and remains friendly with him now.

On the other hand, he also gained a decent amount of fame as a prolific military and political commentator, both on social media and on various TV channels and media publications--including the one Podolyak was editor-in-chief of at the time, interestingly, although there's no sign they ever met before the OP. (It's worth noting that Arestovych makes a point of calling himself a military commentator rather than a military expert--in his words he dislikes the term "expert", he doesn't call himself that, and tries to correct other people if they use the term, but he can't be correcting everyone.) After the initial years of the Donbas war, he was pretty open that he'd been waging information war, trying to maintain morale and fight enemy narratives. And he seemed to take some pride in doing more good as a smooth-talking soft-skills pretty hipster popular with housewives than what gruff manly "proper military men" could manage. He's been called out on his fake news, especially after entering politics, and his defense is that everyone else used "black PR" too but only he admits it, and that unlike a good deal of the domestic intelligentsia he did it for the country instead of for someone else's money. (And the OP wanted him precisely because of the fake news, but that's something I want to save for the next post.)

But his chronic problem is that because his life story is so batshit, and because he's a weirdo self-confessed lying propagandist with really obvious neurodivergent vibes, people tend to assume the worst about him personally. The Russian spy and provocateur accusations seem to follow him no matter how many times he's done genuinely valuable and dangerous work for the cause--he generally just makes fun of the accusations, up to and including his old Facebook description being "swindler and FSB agent", but he's still new enough to them in May 2014 to sound actually hurt.

And people really like to accuse him of lying about his own accomplishments and credentials. His actual philosophy, in his words, is something like "boasting in front of a dead lion is worthy of all contempt, but boasting in front of a lion you killed is worthy of all respect." He'll dramatize, but the main evidence that he's outright made up any of his own exploits is lack of evidence, and when it's actual Russian policy to seek leverage on important officials and hunt out the social networks of potential resistance, he has very good reason these days to, say, not to give away the names of people he fought with even nearly a decade ago unless the connection is already public. He's been dragged to hell and back for getting goaded into saying he didn't like to talk about his missions publicly but he's made "33 combat outings" and has seven awards, in what he apparently thought was an off-camera conversation with a reporter in 2020 that got edited into the main interview, but I really think he's being honest. The one witness he's named for some of them is Tayra (with her permission), who posted in 2014 about being in Mariupol with him and others from the People's Reservist program, around the same time he posted about making four outings near Mariupol spotting enemy positions with a drone, in the context of soliciting donations for more drones. And I've seen another source for him having fought as a volunteer in 2015 that I'll get to below, discussing his stint in the actual army in the ATO September 2018-September 2019.

In a way he really didn't help the speculation around his service by deciding to hide that he was in the army that entire year, keeping up a stream of social media posts and comments to news sites as always, and then going "surprise! guess where I've been!" when it was over. To be fair to him, this might not just have been for the sake of trolling--there's a 2015 interview where he says that his enemies have tried to get him called up to the front (where, it's implied, they could get him killed), only he's a specialist of a type that can't get called up except in the case of full-scale war. Which sounds wild, but--he was a significant enough figure during Maidan that he had SBU trying to dig up dirt on him, other activists and volunteers were mysteriously ending up dead those years, and he was then vocally hostile to various forces in power. So he might've had actual reason for secrecy--although he was also having a great time trolling his audience. Someone notices he's been posting fewer videos than usual? He's just taking a break! Someone asks if he's planning to serve in the army once it's been reformed? Oh no, he's far too much of a delicate flower!

He started out as a captain, serving as assistant chief of intelligence to the 72nd Mechanized Brigade and performing recon, before getting promoted to major three months later, and apparently serving in the General Staff at some point. In response to Butusov accusing him of lying about his service and rank after he got a government position, he posted his seven awards and documentation, which include three medals dated to 2019, and another dated to November 2018, for the minefield incident, which is a story worth expanding on.

This is the original account of the incident by the brigade commander: a trained group sweeping for snipers in front of their positions hit a landmine that killed two and wounded two, and they evacuated with the help of a reserve group. Only the killed are named in the article, but it says that everyone in the group received an award, and the date lines up with that on Arestovych's certificate. He's talked about the incident a few times himself: he escaped the mine explosion with only slight injuries and made four trips to help evacuate, including one where he got separated from the others and wandered into his own side's minefield, in a position exposed to enemy fire, and he was so exhausted and past caring that he just walked straight through the minefield. And, miraculously, made it out alive. Upon which he went back again to bring back more equipment.

In a way, further confirmation of his involvement is the fact that, unlike Butusov, who insinuated Arestovych never really served on the front, Serhiy Kryvonos, a general and Poroshenko-era appointee whom Zelenskyy fired from the NSDC the same month that Arestovych became an advisor to the OP, insinuated that Arestovych was on the front where he deliberately led his team into the mine. Kryvonos had lengthy and ongoing beef with the Zelenskyy team, but he might have even older beef with Arestovych--one interesting circumstantial item is that Arestovych was at Kramatorsk Airport in 2014 while Kryvonos was commander, and has since criticized the leadership he saw there.

Aside from Arestovych's own response to the accusation, pointing out the holes in the story, there's another poster on the same military forum that Arestovych used to frequent who claims to be a Ukrainian officer who knows someone who knows him--although they're anonymous, they have a five-figure post count and the other posters aren't calling bullshit on them in that much earnest. According to them (translated in DeepL to make it slightly more comprehensible), awards don't correspond well to what someone's actually done in the military, and Arestovych shouldn't have been on the front when he could've been doing military analysis like he was trained for, but he really was at work on the frontlines and did the things he said he did.

Though the best evidence for his military career in general is that most of the people he's working with in the government and the higher echelons of the military would have access to his military records and the power to do background checks--and the press is free to make inquiries too, for that matter. Even if they can't obtain the details of his work, when he made an offhand quip last year that people took to mean he'd been promoted to colonel, journalists had no problem obtaining a document from the MoD signed by Reznikov confirming that he hadn't been. The fact that they can't manage anything for the rest of his service and awards besides insinuations is a pretty strong sign.

So that gives some idea of his extremely wild and extremely formidable resume coming into the OP. They hired him for a reason, despite the many rude things he'd said about them in the past. He's someone with, uh, dramatic flaws, but also a lot of genuinely heroic virtues and accomplishments, and I suspect that there's a lot more that we don't know about. For all he has a reputation as a narcissistic blabbermouth, he seems quite responsible about other people's secrets, and doesn't give away as many of his own as people think--more than once, he's embraced the accusations instead of laying all his cards out on the table.

More on that next time, hopefully: Arestovych's work in the TCG, the OP, and how there are no ex-advisors.

#oleksiy arestovych

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