In a muddied trench under fire from Russian forces 200m away, Ukrainian military personnel injured while holding the line near the bloodiest battle of Moscow’s invasion face a precarious extraction.
“If someone gets unlucky, we have to carry them between one and 3km to the nearest place they can be collected,” a Ukrainian soldier who calls himself Begemot said several kilometers from the embattled city of Bakhmut.
“Even a light injury can be fatal in these conditions,” he added, the sound of artillery thundering behind him.
Photo: Reuters
The difficulty of hauling out injured troops is just one among the myriad factors dictating the timing of a highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian positions across the sprawling front line.
Ukraine is understood to be stockpiling precision ammunition, mass recruiting assault battalions and mastering Western-supplied arms in preparation for a decisive pushback against Russian forces.
Observers of the Kremlin’s invasion say that after fending off a months-long lackluster Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region, Ukraine could hit back within weeks.
However, in the water-logged eastern industrial Donetsk region, Ukrainian soldiers tasked with holding the line against waves of Russian forces say: not yet.
“Any military hardware that passes here, their undercarriage will get stuck in the mud. They’ll be targets. We can’t talk about a counteroffensive yet,” Begemot said.
Agence France-Presse journalists moving toward a frontline position near Bakhmut saw Ukrainian troops dislodging by hand their transport stuck in the mud.
Watching over that very same battlefield from footage streamed by drones over the trenches, 42-year-old battalion commander Evgeny sees assault as inevitable.
“It’s going to happen. Clearly. The situation on the front line dictates that, but a counteroffensive can only happen when the enemy’s forces are exhausted,” he said.
Evgeny said that even over the weeks his troops have been tasked with containing Russian forces from advancing around Bakhmut’s flanks, the attackers have been loosing steam.
“We have to grind them down so they can’t relocate their forces,” he said, describing in detail how Russian forces send waves of dispensable, then more experienced fighters toward his trenches.
Based on intercepted radio communications and footage his drones feed back to the bunker, he believes Russian forces — still pushing deeper inside Bakhmut — are ultimately preparing for Ukraine to attack, too.
“The enemy has started to lay mines along sections of their lines, which means they are tired. They’re preparing to defend,” he said.
That was a sentiment echoed this week by Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin whose fighting force, Wagner, has been spearheading the assault for Bakhmut.
“The ideal option would be to announce the end of the conflict and to tell everyone that Russia has achieved its objective, and in a sense, we have really achieved them,” Prigozhin wrote on social media.
“Now only one thing remains: gain a firm foothold and dig into the territories that we already control,” the 61-year-old Kremlin ally said.
For civilians in the crossfire — those who have not already fled more than a year of intense fighting — the prospect of an escalation changes little.
Several kilometers west of Bakhmut, in the village of Kalynivka, 71-year-old Vera Petrova gestured to the artillery damage to her home to explain why she was not making preparations to flee a counter-offensive.
“We’ve already been shelled. Half the kitchen roof was destroyed. Our neighbor’s roof was destroyed. This isn’t even serious,” she said referring to thuds, near and distant, of incoming and outgoing shelling.
Her street, lined with cherry trees and abandoned one-story homes, has only about two dozen residents remaining — a fraction of those who once called it home.
“If my home is destroyed. I’ll live in my basement,” she said, not flinching after each boom.
In the trenches, Begemot said that even if Ukraine manages to increase the rhythm of the artillery fire, it would be senseless to attack now.
“Even if there are a lot of us, and we had a bunch of artillery, how far could we go in one day? Five kilometers? Maybe 10?”
“They won’t have any strength left and you are not just walking, you need to fight,” he said.
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS