They were promised a three-day war. A victory parade in Kyiv. Flowers thrown at the feet of liberators.

But for the men of the 64-kilometer-long convoy, the road to glory has become a frozen river of mud and steel. For Captain Dmitri Volkov, a logistics officer, the war is not a battle of heroes, but a grim equation of dwindling fuel, failing equipment, and timetables that have become a grotesque joke. His logbook, once a sanctuary of order, is now the meticulous record of a slow, grinding descent into hell.

As days bleed into weeks, the Zampolit’s patriotic speeches fade into the howl of the wind. Discipline rots. Hunger becomes the only law, and fear, the only currency. In this frozen purgatory, Dmitri’s command over diesel and rations makes him the reluctant king of a two-kilometer fiefdom, bartering for medicine, trading lies to keep his men from turning on each other, and standing against the cynical brutality of veteran soldiers who know this war was lost before the first engine turned over.

But the ghosts in the Polesian forests are not the only enemy. The true horror waits in the silence of abandoned villages and in the static-laced whispers of a Ukrainian radio broadcast that shatters the last of his illusions. He is not a liberator. He is a cog in a machine of atrocity. The enemy is no longer just the unseen soldier in the trees; it is the brutalized comrade fighting for a mouthful of food, and the hollow-eyed stranger staring back from his own reflection.

"The Long Road from Prybirsk" is an unflinching, shattering, and deeply human account of the collapse of an army and the damnation of a man’s soul. When the orders are lies, survival is a sin, and the path back home is gone, what is the price of one final, defiant act of atonement? The answer is written on the last, blank page of a blood-stained logbook.