In July 2025, on a stretch of the Kharkiv front, a group of Russian soldiers surrendered to machines. The ground robots that took their trench were operated by the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade - the most capable, most innovative, and most controversial military formation in Europe.
Through the Dead Forest tells the extraordinary story of how a volunteer brigade, born from Ukraine's most contested paramilitary movement, became the spearhead of a nation's defence against the largest land war in Europe since 1945.
From its roots in the Kharkiv underground of the early 2000s, through the Euromaidan revolution and the first battles for Mariupol, to the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, this book traces the Azov movement's transformation from a far-right militia into a professional military formation that would fight at every major engagement of the war. At Bakhmut, the brigade cleared two thousand metres of mined, booby-trapped forest in three months of fighting that a documentary filmmaker compared to the Western Front. At Avdiivka, it held a collapsing city against twelve-to-one odds under a rain of guided bombs. On the Borova line, it defended sixty kilometres of front against two of Russia's most powerful armies for an entire year. And in the drone schools and robotics workshops behind the front, it pioneered the unmanned warfare that is rewriting the rules of modern combat.
Through the Dead Forest is built on the testimony of the soldiers who fought: Courier, who inherited a platoon after its commander was shot and led the assault on a Russian trench; Freak, the Russian-speaking easterner whose presence in the brigade was a living contradiction of Moscow's propaganda; Sheva, who talked about the well at his house while the forest burned around him; and Kobzar, who asked the camera to film how beautiful he was, and who was killed five months later.
Drawing on the brigade's own communications, the BBC's investigation into Wagner Group casualties, military analysis from RUSI and the Institute for the Study of War, Forbes Ukraine's reporting, and Mstyslav Chernov's award-winning documentary, this book documents the brigade's battles, its technological revolution, its institutional evolution, and its human cost with unflinching factual detail.
The book confronts the question that has followed the unit since its founding: how a formation with neo-Nazi origins became a multi-ethnic volunteer force that included Georgian, Crimean Tatar, Belarusian, and Jewish soldiers, and that was cleared by the US State Department and studied by NATO. It addresses Russian propaganda head-on, documenting the transformation with evidence rather than evasion.
From the dead forest of Bakhmut to the ground robots of the Kharkiv front, from a warehouse in Kyiv where the brigade was assembled to the corps headquarters where forty thousand soldiers are now commanded, Through the Dead Forest is the definitive account of Ukraine's most remarkable military unit - and of the volunteers who chose to fight when their country needed them most.
Forward.
