“In the Days of Defeats and Victories” was the title of Arkady Gaidar’s first story about the events of the Civil War, which also unfolded in Ukraine. Gaidar’s name is engraved on the memorial in the editorial office of Komsomolskaya Pravda in memory of war correspondents who did not return from the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. The entire journalistic fate of Komsomolskaya Pravda military correspondent Alexander Kots is connected with this memory, it is no coincidence that he called his book about the Special Military Operation “500 days of defeats and victories.” The honest and “unkempt” diary of the war correspondent reconstructs these days through the fates of famous and unknown, charismatic and discreet people with whom the author was lucky to be close on all fronts of the Northern Military District - from Donetsk to the Kyiv region, from Lugansk to Kherson, from Artemovsk to Zaporozhye...