A Ukrainian reconnaissance team crouches in a modest house in a village near Mykolaiv. Machine guns and army backpacks line the walls, sleeping bags are strewn across the floor, and a pot of soup is heating up on the stove.
Outside, the garden shed is littered with spears and other shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons.
Soldiers smoking on the balcony barely notice the rumble of incoming artillery shells, landing about 10 km away. Today is not your turn to fight on Ukraine’s southern front.
The owners of the house, who fled to Poland after war broke out in late February, are happy to hear that their villa is back in Ukrainian hands.
Senior Lieutenant Andrii Pidlisnyi was one of the soldiers who drove the Russians out two months ago. “At first it was a defensive operation to stop them,” he says. “After that we found some good places where we can carry out offensive operations and retake our territories. And now we are doing it.”
Pidlisnyi commands a 100-man unit tasked with identifying Russian positions, often by drone. They then call in the artillery.
On his computer, he shows the CNN body camera videos of their missions at the start of the war. He’s had some problems, but says his morale is high after recent successes. US hardware helped.
A video shows Pidlisnyi sitting in a trench, using his drone to pinpoint the positions of Russian tanks. “Call the American gift,” he says over the radio.
Russian troops are now on the defensive in this part of the south – as opposed to the east, where Ukrainian troops are the ones being forced to give ground.
But here, too, is hard work. The goal of soldiers like Pidlisnyi is to take small strategic pockets, areas of high ground with views of occupied Ukrainian cities in the distance, from where more gains can be made.
“I’m not sure if we’ll win. [até] the end of this year,” he says, referring to the retaking of Russian-occupied areas in southern Ukraine. “Maybe not until the end of next year.”
Ukrainian troops claim to have reconquered some territory. They say they drove the Russians out of two more villages along the Mykolaiv-Kherson border earlier this week.
But it is a large area of open farmland where any advancing forces would be exposed, and the Russians have had several months to build three-tiered defensive positions across the region.
And the Ukrainians have limited assault forces – in much of this conflict they have been playing defense and this has degraded some of their best units.
The weapons provided by the Western Allies are generally not designed for ground offensives, and the Ukrainians are short of air cover for any advancing forces.
Ukrainian forces also suffered heavy losses in the south, although the military rarely provides details.
There are growing signs that the Russians are beefing up their military presence on Kherson, determined to keep it as a vital part of the land bridge to Crimea – and as the peninsula’s main source of water.
In the last two weeks, large convoys have headed west from Mariupol, through Melitopol, to Kherson.
Many civilians have already fled. Ukrainian officials estimate that nearly half of Kherson’s population has left the region for Ukrainian-held territories.
They accuse the Russians of preventing more people from leaving cities like Melitopol in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region so they can be exploited as “human shields” in the event of a Ukrainian offensive.
Changes on the battlefield
Ukraine’s southern front begins near Mykolaiv, a port city north of the Russian city of Kherson. It is hit by missiles and rockets almost every day.
To the south and east, a winding front line runs from the Black Sea coast through farmland and up towards the Zaporizhzhia region.
This area is a far cry from the calcified Donetsk front – disputed since 2014 – but is now just part of a battlefield that stretches over a thousand kilometers.
Along the line, artillery pieces clash, in battles that one Ukrainian soldier described as “ping-pong with cannons”.
It’s been that way for months.
Now the Ukrainians say they have an advantage: Donated weaponry, particularly the US-supplied HIMAR rocket system, is destroying crucial storage depots and command posts and ammunition depots deep within Russian territory.
This month, Ukraine says it destroyed at least two ammunition depots in New Khakova, in the Kherson region. The country also hit three bridges over the Dnipro River and even a Russian S-300 missile carrier – a revamped surface-to-air projectile that caused horror in Mykolaiv.
On Thursday, the UK Ministry of Defense said Russia’s 49th Army, stationed on the west bank of the Dnipro River, “now appears highly vulnerable” after Ukrainian long-range artillery hit the three bridges.
“One of them, the 1,000-meter-long Antonivskyi Bridge near the town of Kherson, was damaged last week,” and after a further attack this week, “it is highly likely that the crossing is unusable,” the Ministry of Health said. Defense.
He further claimed that “the city of Kherson, the most politically significant population center occupied by Russia, is now virtually isolated from the other occupied territories.”
However, the Russians still control large areas northeast of the city and can resupply forces on the west bank with floating bridges and river ferries across the Dnipro. And more Russian hardware will replace what is lost.
THE CNN obtained exclusive video footage taken by guerrillas showing S-300 missiles at Dzhankoi railway station in occupied Crimea. Satellite images and analysis provided by Maxar indicate up to 50 S-300 missiles in wagons at the station on Thursday (21). Only an S-300 could destroy a building somewhere in Ukraine.
Yet despite the enormity of the Russian war machine, Ukraine’s military leaders said this month’s attacks on Russian stores and resupply routes could turn the tide on the battlefield.
Now, several frontline soldiers have backed this up – telling the CNN who believe the Russians have noticeably fewer rounds to fire at them.
“We had about two to three weeks where they didn’t have enough ammunition to fight us with artillery, rockets and so on,” says Lieutenant Pidlisnyi.
Elsewhere on the southern front, Ukrainian Armed Forces captain Volodymyr Omelyan told CNN that surgical strikes behind enemy lines are part of Ukraine’s ongoing modernization strategy.
“We believe the Russians will surrender much faster, especially in the Kherson region, when we have already hit three main bridges, two automobile bridges and a railway bridge,” says Omelyan, who was a politician before joining the army.
Omelyan says gains are being made “day by day” on the battlefield, but that Ukraine chooses not to announce them: “It is good policy for our commanders to talk about what is happening after it has already happened.”
Preparing for a long fight
In the southern industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian forces are put to the test: reservists and national guards armed with lead weapons must storm a house. The Ukrainian police are on a level above, playing the role of the Russians.
After an hour of mock fighting, the interns were unable to make it to the top floor – a sign of how deadly and difficult urban hand-to-hand warfare is.
Its commander, Oleksander Piskun, was seriously injured when he drove Russian-backed separatists out of towns in eastern Donbass in 2014 and has been in a wheelchair ever since.
“Street combat, the battle to invade a settlement is the hardest combat,” he says. “It is more difficult because we are not capturing settlements, we are liberating settlements. These are our cities, these are our people.”
For now, fighting on the southern front is dominated by artillery, not street combat. Ukrainians say the future will bring an attack on Kherson, but first the long-range battle must be fought and won.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
