"He died? Then who met me yesterday?" Three stories involving the number 200

Russia’s war against Ukraine has left its mark, among other things, on the Ukrainian language. In everyday speech, "cotton" no longer means a textile fibre but often refers to explosions [Russian propaganda, initially refusing to use the word "vzryv" (explosion), used "khlopok" (a bang) instead. However, "khlopok" also means "cotton", and this has since become a meme - ed.]. "Moped" doesn’t mean a vehicle – it’s a slang term for a Russian kamikaze drone, whose engine sounds resemble that of a small motorbike. A "pixel", once only tied to digital images, is now military slang for the pixelated camouflage worn by Ukrainian troops. A "bird" is a drone carrying explosives. And the plus sign on a phone screen – indicating signal – has become the most reassuring sight.

For many years, Ukrainian military terminology saw little change – and rightly so. Ukrainians never wished for it to expand. This is something that happened without choice.

Yet in at least one case, both the army and society made a conscious lexical choice. In the summer of 2022, a public debate arose around the term "cargo 200" – a Soviet-era euphemism used to refer to soldiers killed in action, originally from the war in Afghanistan. In August 2022, Ukraine’s Armed Forces officially abandoned this term, replacing it with the phrase "on the shield", a reference to the soldier's bravery in fighting to the death, since in ancient Sparta a warrior would be exhorted to return either with his shield or on it.

"We cannot treat our fallen defenders as some kind of cargo… For the Armed Forces of Ukraine, every defender is not just a number in a report, but a person who gave their life so we could live and communicate," the General Staff explained at the time.

But something strange happened. Thanks to the efforts of activists, the word "cargo" has been almost entirely purged from public usage. Today, to call the fallen soldiers "cargo" would be seen as offensive. The new phrase "on the shield" – rooted in ancient Sparta – has taken its place. However, no alternative has been found to the number 200. It continues to be used in military communication and, for many, has even lost its Soviet connotations. If a soldier reports over the radio that they have "a 200", no one will accuse them of disrespecting a fallen comrade.

What follows are three stories of people who encountered the number 200 – each at a different time, under different circumstances. For some, it saved them from the enemy. Others heard it addressed to them. And someone even found an alternative to it – one you likely haven’t heard of.

"I'm 19 years old and I am seeing dead bodies"

For twenty years, Serhii Triskach from Kyiv was believed to be "a 200".

In 1984, during the fifth year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 19-year-old Serhii was conscripted. First came training in Uzbekistan, then deployment to Kabul, as part of the 103rd Vitebsk Airborne Division. He still recalls the fortress near Kabul, built by the British: stone barracks and a swimming pool within the compound.

But what he will never forget is his final battle.

It was four in the morning. A Soviet unit – around 40 men – was climbing a mountain to take and hold a position. Triskach was among them. Due to a command error, the unit lost its way and walked into an ambush. A close-range firefight broke out.

Those at the front managed to reach a plateau – a good position for shooting back. To prevent the enemy from flanking them, a machine gunner with the surname Havrylov moved to take a nearby hilltop. But he never made it. He was shot.

Seeing his wounded comrade, Triskach rushed to help. He crawled to Havrylov and began dragging him back to their unit. Metre by metre, metre by metre.

Finally, they reached a safe position. Just one last step remained, and Serhii raised himself slightly to shove the wounded man forward. At that moment, a bullet struck him in the head.

It was a sniper.

Then Serhii had a strange vision. He saw his father, who had died four years earlier, alive and driving a cart. The father reached out his hand and said, "Come with me", but didn’t stop the horse. Serhii ran after him, ran – and just as he was about to catch up, he tripped on a rock and fell. The cart with his father disappeared.

Later, witnesses said that while Serhii lay unconscious, another soldier – also named Serhii, from Lviv – pulled him out from under fire, carried him back to the unit and reported: "Triskach is a 200, take him".

The "200" Triskach was taken down into a valley where the killed and wounded were gathered. That’s where he first regained consciousness and asked for water.

After that battle, ten fallen Soviet soldiers were sent home in zinc coffins. According to one of the etymological theories, the term "cargo 200" comes from the approximate weight of such a coffin and its contents – about 200 kilograms.

These days, Triskach sometimes corrects fellow Afghanistan veterans when they use the term. A few years ago, calling someone "a 200" felt normal to him. But with the emergence of the phrase "on the shield", he came to realise that it’s time to abandon Soviet-era terminology.

Still, Triskach admits that back in Afghanistan, that brief phrase had a sort of therapeutic value. It allowed soldiers to say someone was gone without uttering the word "killed".

"Imagine – I’m 19 years old, and I am seeing dead bodies," he says. "For example, there was a bed near mine where my comrade used to sleep. Then he was killed. I’d wake up in the night, and he’d be gone – that really messes with your head. If you take it all to heart, it’ll drive you mad. And back then, there was no such thing as psychological rehabilitation."

In the mid-2000s, an old friend of Triskach’s came to visit him from the United States. After spending the night in Kyiv, he headed off to Lviv. There he met another friend – the very Serhii from Lviv who had pulled Triskach from the battlefield.

They sat down to reminisce, and the man from Lviv said to the American: "You’ve come from Kyiv? I used to have a friend from there who served with me in Afghanistan. He died in my arms. His name was Serhii Triskach."

"What do you mean – he died?" the American replied, astonished. "Then who met me at the airport yesterday?"

For twenty years, one Serhii had believed the other was dead. Now, their families are close friends.

Mission 200

Someone with a heart of stone and a melted brain might say that volunteer Tetiana Pototska-Yevchuk transports "cargo 200". Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she has been transporting the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers from the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine back to their families in Volyn Oblast.

But there’s no doubt that if Tetiana ever heard such a phrase directed at her, she would have plenty to say in response. Pototska-Yevchuk is not one to mince her words. Such directness is common among those who frequently come face to face with death.

The number 200 is written on each side of the refrigerated van she uses to transport the bodies of fallen soldiers. But if someone adds the word "cargo" aloud, Tetiana winces.

Last year, she became the subject of a documentary by director Volodymyr Sydko which closed the programme of the 2024 Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival that summer. When the director asked Tetiana what the film should be called, she answered: "Mission 200".

Although she reacts extremely negatively to the word "cargo" in relation to the dead, Pototska-Yevchuk fiercely defends the right to the number 200.

"Let me put it this way: "on the shield" may look and sound nice, but to this day, the military still transmits information about the dead in numbers. It's just much more convenient. No one says: "Five dead, five wounded". They say: "Five – 200, five – 300". Say these words yourself and calculate how long it takes," explains Pototska-Yevchuk.

The difference between the two is no more than a fraction of a second, but for Tetiana, the difference between words and numbers can cost someone’s life.

The roads she travels to pick up the dead are frontline roads. Sometimes a drone flies overhead. The numbers on her van are a sign that can protect her from a Russian attack. The symbol "200" is universal for both armies and can be a decisive factor for the Russians in deciding whether to attack the vehicle.

As she gets behind the wheel, Pototska-Yevchuk knows for sure that she is not carrying cargo in the fridge. Tetiana doesn't remember the names of all the people she has transported over the years, but she keeps documents for each of them. During this time, the volunteer has suffered two heart attacks. Whenever she gets the chance, Tetiana visits the graves of those she transported on their last journey home.

She bought a vehicle to transport the bodies with her own money in 2022. Despite the insane number of roads this vehicle has travelled (sometimes Tetiana travelled from Lutsk on the west to the east three times a week), it is still in excellent condition, from light bulbs to generators. Tetiana takes care of the bus – if it breaks down on the road, it will be a disaster.

Once, in the heat of the summer, when she was transporting the body of a defender, thick smoke came out from under the bonnet. Tetiana stopped the van, and the first thing she did was to take the deceased out of the vehicle and put him on the ground.

"You can buy another vehicle, but if, God forbid, the body burns, you can't get it back. That was my priority," Pototska-Yevchuk explains her logic.

From Soviet terms to Ukrainian traditions

Few people in Ukraine know as much about Ukrainian military vocabulary as Olha Andriianova, a professor at the Department of Humanities at the Hetman Petro Sahaidachnyi National Army Academy. She has been studying it all her professional life.

1993, Sevastopol. The Department of Ukrainian Studies is opened at the Naval Institute, which will later become the Academy, and young Olha becomes one of its first teachers.

The establishment of such a department was an important step in transforming yesterday's Soviet army into a Ukrainian one. Sevastopol officers take an oath of allegiance to Ukraine, but they are wary and even hostile towards the use of the Ukrainian language.

"The Soviet army used to address people as "tovarishch" (comrade). In the nineties, the statutes were translated – they were simply duplicated from Russian and nothing new was introduced. And suddenly the word "pan" (sir) appeared in brackets. The officers in Sevastopol were shocked. "Who are they talking about? Are they going to address us as pan now?" Although it was used delicately, in parentheses. And then it stuck and became the official form of address," Andriianova recalls.

According to her observations, it took the military about two years to get used to the Ukrainian language. For the next decade and a half, they accepted the use of Ukrainian as a matter of course.

Andriianova experienced a real shock in 2013 when she reported on the introduction of the Ukrainian language into the educational process at a meeting of the teaching staff. Suddenly, the officers in the audience began to ask whether they even needed the Ukrainian language. At that moment, it was as if Andriianova had gone back twenty years.

Studying Ukrainian military terminology has become a matter of principle for Andriianova. Back in the 1990s, she came to the Institute of the Ukrainian Language of the National Academy of Sciences to propose a topic for her dissertation. She was told by a leading expert in the terminology department that there was no military terminology in Ukrainian. She had to write a dissertation to prove the opposite.

Throughout its history, Ukrainian military vocabulary has developed in waves: in the princely era, the Cossack era, and the period of the liberation struggle. In the literature of the princely era, Andriianova found 30 terms, such as "strukh" or "nasad", which are now meaningless. You have undoubtedly heard words from the Cossack era, such as "khorunzhyi" (standard-bearer) or "sotnyk" (captain, literally commander of a hundred men).

The professor calls the period from 1921 to 1931 the golden age of military vocabulary, when the Institute of Ukrainian Scientific Language had a department for it. It was then that the Yakubskyi brothers, both linguists, compiled the Russian-Ukrainian Dictionary of Military Terminology.

After the declaration of independence, Ukrainian linguists were divided in their opinions on the development of military terminology. Some focused on internationalised terms and Russian borrowings, which was more practical because this vocabulary would be understandable to yesterday's Soviet officers. Others proposed to use the national terminology of the 1920s and 1930s as a basis (but this vocabulary mostly did not correspond to the current state of technology and the army as a whole).

"Over the past 100 years, of course, everything has come a long way. Where should we get vocabulary to describe new concepts?" Andriianova asks. "Researchers said that we should rely on our native language. That is, there were options. For example, not "flot" (fleet), but "fliota", or not a "hvyyntivka" (rifle), but "kriz", as the Sich Riflemen used to say. [Sich Riflemen was one of the first regular military units of the Ukrainian People’s Army in 1917-1919 – ed.]

In short, there is a principle today that we must restore the authenticity of Ukrainian military terminology, de-Russify it and use our own word-formation means."

A new military identity cannot be built without changes in the language. Russia's war against Ukraine has not only enriched military vocabulary but also launched the process of rethinking it and moving away from the Soviet era.

For example, the word that comes up most often when talking about establishing clear terms of service is "demobilizatsiia" (demobilisation). Meanwhile, the word "dembel", which was still common in Ukraine in peacetime, has now fallen out of use. Just as the word "tovarysh" (comrade) is slowly disappearing, it is now increasingly being replaced by "pobratym" (brother-in-arms). Soviet "stroiova pidhotovka" (drill) is being replaced by the Ukrainian "vyshkil".

However, many active words grate on Professor Andriianova's ears. Instead of the expression "osobovyi sklad" (personnel), she advises using "viiskovyky". She suggests replacing the word "nariad" (duty) with "cherhuvannia" or "viiskove zaluchennia". And the words "soldat" (soldier) and "riadovyi" (private) should be replaced with "viiskovyk" or voiin (warrior) or "boiets" (fighter).

Andriianova points out that abbreviations are also markers of the Soviet era: "kombat, komroty, komvzvodu... For the Ukrainian language, it is more organic to use the full forms –  ‘battalion commander’, ‘company commander’, ‘platoon commander’," she says.

And the most striking Soviet marker is the expression "cargo 200".

To find an alternative to them, the professor opens the same dictionary by the Yakubskyi brothers, which will celebrate its centenary in three years.

"The word "a person who has been killed" is translated there from Russian ("ubityi") as "vbytyyi", "zabutyi", "utorovanyi" and I would recommend this word - "utorovanyi". It has a long history, is recorded in the dictionary and sounds good," says Andriianova.

Author: Rustem Khalilov
Translators: Anna Kybukevych, Yelyzaveta Khodatska
Editor: Susan McDonald