Documenting Russian War Crimes: A Journey Through Ukrainian War Zones in a 1973 Lada Zhiguli

I introduce you to my 1973 Lada Zhiguli which we first called a POS and drove through the terrible roads of the Ukrainian war zones documenting Russian war crimes.

Remember when you first buy an old car check that it has a pumped-up spare tire and a jack.

We left Petrivs'ke in the afternoon headed north on a small back road towards Husarivka. Oddly there was no traffic on that road as it undulated through the hilly Ukrainian countryside with golds, maroons and greens mixing to relax the soul. Tooling along cautiously we arrived upon three tank mines. Now we understood why the road was deserted.

We navigated slowly around the mines heading for a bridge to cross over into Balakliya. We stopped after the land mines to take a few photos of a lovely sunset across the beautiful (mine laid?) fields…..

Having enjoyed our respite after passing the mines we meandered back to the Lada to find the left rear tire flat. Popping the trunk we first noticed we had no jack. Opps….dumb and dumber.

So, we walked to the blown-up bridge we had hoped to cross and found a 30kph sign with a 4x4 post and two truck tires plus some big blocks. Back to the Lada with my tall strong Ukrainian fixer. Laying the truck tires stacked next to the Lada we stuck the post under the car and lifted it up a bit, improvised jack but not enough.

So Zhenya put the weights and water bottles from the car in his backpack and put all his weight onto the post and got it just barely high enough I could drag the flat off the tire and quickly put the half flat spare on. We turned around and swerved slowly through the mines and putted back to the village where our overnight host hand-pumped the spare back up for us…

Thanks for sourcing fine classic cars like mine www.LadaKing.store