A bottle of syrup made from Siberian berries, legions of dirty socks, and an army-issued tea bag marked “For Victory!”
For Ukrainian soldiers, one of the benefits of making at least creeping progress in the now-months-old counter-offensive in southern Ukraine is appropriating ready-made reinforcements from the retreating Russians, who, in months of preparation, have made deep, dug well-protected trenches.
For the Ukrainians, eerily enough, it also means living and fighting in positions long held by the Russians – with a huge proliferation of military debris and personal belongings of Russian soldiers scattered about.
“It’s not very pleasant,” said pvt. Maksim, a soldier of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade, who has collected a number of rarities, including what he believes was a talisman: several bullets covered in glitter and attached to a key ring.
“It’s our country, but it’s not very comfortable to be here,” said the soldier, who, like the other soldiers, gave only his first name and rank for security reasons. “It doesn’t feel like home.”
In early June, Ukrainian forces, including thousands of soldiers trained and equipped by the United States and other Western allies, began a counter-offensive to drive a wedge through Russian-occupied southern Ukraine. Thousands of Russian troops lay in wait in miles of trenches and other fortifications amid tank traps and thousands upon thousands of mines.
The Ukrainian forces are attacking at least three locations on the Russian defense front. At their furthest point of advance, they have moved south to form a bulge about five miles into the defensive lines.
Ukrainian commanders want to reach the Sea of Azov, about 55 miles away across open plains with little cover. If they succeed, they will divide the Russian-occupied south into two zones, cutting Russia’s land bridge to the occupied Crimean peninsula and seriously jeopardizing Russia’s ability to supply its troops further west.
During their advance, the Ukrainians captured Russian trenches, bunkers and firing positions in abandoned buildings, but under constant artillery bombardment they have had little time to clear away the rubbish and abandoned clothing, body armor, ponchos, bedding and leftover military rations. their enemy.
Take, for example, the village of Novodarivka, on the plains of the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine, south of the city of Orikhiv. A month after soldiers of the 110th Ukrainian Territorial Defense Brigade and other units recaptured the village, the village is still littered with waste from the occupying forces.
In the blazing sun on a recent day, the village seemed deserted, with the occasional military vehicle rumbling and kicking up dust on the single dirt road between ruined, abandoned houses.
Amid the roar of artillery barrages, Ukrainian soldiers dove into the captured Russian trenches. On the village’s main road lay a burnt Russian tank; in a nearby field, two blown up American-supplied mine-resistant vehicles called MaxxPros.
A grim task was retrieving the remains of Ukrainian soldiers who died defending the village in the early months of the war as Russian troops advanced rapidly.
As of April 2022, seven bodies lay nearby, said one of the soldiers, Lieutenant Volodymyr.
The Ukrainians had occasionally flown drones over the village while it was occupied, to make sure the Russians had not moved the bodies. On Wednesday, they finally got a chance to pick them up. “They were just skeletons” that would have to be identified by their DNA, Lieutenant Volodymyr said.
As for the Russian dead, he added, the Ukrainians have recovered those that could be removed without risk and are covering others with mounds of dirt, trying to control the foul smell. Nevertheless, a terrible stench hung over the trenches and swarms of flies buzzed everywhere.
In an abandoned house, Russian soldiers had scratched into the plaster walls the names of their hometowns or regions: Vladikavkaz, a city in southern Russia, and Primorye, a region on the Pacific coast, near Japan.
Pvt. Interviewed in the trenches, Maksim had collected a small pile of curiosities left behind, including the lingonberry syrup made in Yakutia, a region of northern Siberia. Gesture to the “For the win!” brand of Russian tea, he said about the former Russian owner, “he didn’t have time to drink it.”
Speaking of the back and forth nature of the fighting, Pvt. Maksim said, “We push them back, they push us back, we push them, they push us, and so on,” adding, “They had a lot of time to dig.”
Soldiers said in interviews that the slow progress was to be expected given the minefields, trenches and open countryside.
The 110th Territorial Defense Brigade, unlike the newly trained and equipped units deployed specifically for the counter-offensive, has been fighting in southern Ukraine for more than a year.
A soldier of the 110th, who identified himself as Sgt. Igor, said his unit has crept forward to the relative safety of tree lines between fields to attack Russian trenches, in small bursts of several tens or hundreds of meters at a time. Such slow advances were preferable to all-out attacks, he said.
“We have to creep forward little by little, with infantry, and break them this way,” said Sgt. said Igor. “Crawl forward, fight them off, then dig back in.”
Time must pass, he said, before advancing Ukrainian soldiers, trained by Kiev’s western allies, become proficient at fighting in the open farmland.
Soldiers deployed to the area develop a finely tuned ear for the whistles and bangs of outgoing and incoming artillery, he said, adding, “You hear it and should understand in a second whether to drop or not.”
Soldiers must arm themselves to maneuver in the trenches and fire their rifles at enemy troops approaching in an attack, even as the bullets whiz overhead, he said.
“Training abroad is not the same as real fighting,” he said. “They are gaining combat experience now,” he added, and as they do so the pace of advance could increase. US officials have said Ukrainian commanders are reassessing their tactics after the offensive’s slow start and poignant forays into minefields by soldiers.
Green recruits become demoralized when fellow soldiers are injured or killed, Sgt. said Igor. “Their morale is quickly affected,” he said.
“The soldiers will learn,” he added. “It’s complicated. And yes, it’s going slowly. But more importantly, it’s going.”
Yurii Shyvala and Maria Varenikova contributed reporting.
