Ukraine’s fight to retake Kherson is ‘worst hell of war’

Despite a news blackout on the offensive on the only city to fall to the Russians, soldiers’ accounts show the Ukrainians have learnt to fight an offensive war.

Oleksandr Shulga looks at his destroyed house following a missile strike in Mykolaiv, north of Kherson on Ukraine. Picture: AFP

The angels were on Sergeant Oleksandr’s side. He had been told the Russians were retreating, but when he crested the rise out of the village there was one on the other side waiting for him, with a machinegun.

“You are supposed to lead from the front, they say, so I decided to do just that and headed up the hill,” he said just a few hours later on Saturday. “But the bastard was just standing there.” The Russian fired a volley of shots but somehow managed only to hit Oleksandr, 27, through the upper arm. He fell back down the hill and managed to get back to his men.

“Then there was real hell,” he said. “The worst hell of the war.”

His men’s position was exposed and the Russian artillery came raining down as he tried to get back from the front line for treatment. “They even sent in a tank.”

For an hour and a half, with a comrade helping to apply a tourniquet, he attempted his escape back across the fields. The countryside around Kherson is open arable land, the crops divided by rows of trees that make perfect artillery cover. Back at a hospital behind the front, his arm now bandaged, Oleksandr was pleased to report that despite the onslaught, the rest of his men were able to hold their position.

Smoke rises at the front line in Mykolaiv Oblast, north of Kherson. Picture: AFP

He asked not to give his surname, as the Ukrainian authorities have imposed a tight news blackout on the Kherson offensive.

Hell had come at the expense of four men injured, he added, though none killed, and with a prize of just over 800m of territorial gain. The encounter was typical of the fighting along the whole front of the offensive towards Kherson.

The news blackout on the offensive on the city, the largest to fall to Russia, is part of the hybrid war that Ukraine says it is now waging, its main military spokeswoman, Captain Natalia Humeniuk, said.

“We have an information front line as well as the military front line,” she said. “The information front line that is advanced by political forces is very different from the advances according to military tactics.”

The accounts of injured soldiers who left the battlefield for treatment as recently as the weekend suggest the advance is slow going, with heavy but not necessarily catastrophic casualties.

An injured woman after a missile strike in Mykolaiv. Picture: AFP

The soldiers’ version of events shows the Ukrainians have learnt to fight an offensive war like the Russians, particularly now they have accurate medium-range artillery such as Himars and M777 howitzers provided by the US, Britain and other NATO countries.

That means grinding away at Russian lines and depots before seizing one small patch of territory at a time and then regrouping.

“There is no blitzkrieg,” said Denys, 25, another soldier recovering from concussion and a foot injury in the same hospital as Oleksandr.

He had been fighting on the western side of a broad but shallow front, more than 100km long across the north and west of Kherson. He described how his unit was told its objective on the first day of fighting was to seize one village then move on to a second. By the time they surrounded the first village, it was empty, so they pushed on. But it was a trap – or, perhaps, conventional tactics in an artillery war.

“They were waiting for us in the trees,” he said.

Firefighters douse the rubble of a restaurant complex destroyed by a missile strike in Kharkiv. Picture: AFP

As he crossed the fields towards the second village, the artillery started coming in and a retreat was ordered to the first – which, of course, was already in the Russians’ sights.

He had been in a BMP – a light-armoured vehicle – but said he was lucky, as when its tracks were hit by a mortar shell he was outside with another soldier dragging to safety a third who had sustained leg injuries.

“I don’t know what happened after that,” Denys said but he, the other rescuer and the injured soldier all made it safely back.

While Ukraine’s politicians say the aim of the offensive is to take Kherson, western military strategists say the army’s tactics suggest it is trying to squeeze the Russians into the built-up area while cutting its resupply routes across the Dnipro River, which splits Ukraine in two from north to south. Kherson is the only Russian-held city on the western side.

The Ukrainian leadership hopes the offensive will force Russia to withdraw across the river into Crimea without the need for potentially disastrous street-to-street battles. The squeeze was clearly planned to be slow, to avoid the sort of casualties inflicted on Russia during its attempted blitzkrieg on Kyiv and Kharkiv.

A senior doctor at a hospital that cannot be identified said its emergency department had been busy in the past week but not overwhelmed. Of the 200 casualties it had received, it had lost only one man, with another critically injured after having pieces of bone removed from his brain.

“It is not as bad as at the beginning,” the doctor said, referring to the period in March when the Ukrainian army put up a desperate and ultimately successful defence against Russian forces pouring north and west from Kherson towards the cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa. “The injuries are less severe.”

Those injuries are still largely caused by shelling, rather than bullet wounds, indicating the Russians are relying on their numerical advantage in artillery rather than on infantry.

The Ukrainians have managed two incursions along the lines. One is to the northwest from Mykolaiv, where they have seized up to 20km of largely open and sparsely defended territory, according to another soldier, Mikolay, 40.

On the other hand, attempts to break through along the M14 main road that connects Mykolaiv and Kherson have seen back-and-forth fighting, with the front line hardly changed. The village of Posad-Pokrovske, which since April has been in no man’s land, “is no more”, according to one Ukrainian officer.

The other “breakthrough”, to Kherson’s north, has established a bridgehead that is now the scene of the fiercest fighting on the front, and is where Russian sources say the most Ukrainian casualties are being sustained. To its east, back-and-forth fighting over the small town of Vysokopillya ended in a victory for the Ukrainians, who filmed themselves raising a flag over the town hospital on Sunday.

The Ukrainian authorities insist they are not in a hurry. Oleksandr said the Ukrainians were losing men but that the Russians were losing more. He also claimed the Russians were finishing off their own injured men as they retreated, to prevent them falling into Ukrainian hands.

“We can hear the injured Russians asking for help, and then single bullet shots,” he said. “We find the bodies when we advance.”

The Times