NYTimes | Under the fire of Russia’s long-range arsenal and facing a desperate need for ammunition and weapons, Ukrainian forces remain outgunned on the long and pockmarked eastern front, according to military analysts, Ukrainian officials and soldiers on the ground.
Just one engagement on Thursday and Friday on a small swath of the line, in a forest north of the town of Sloviansk, sent about a dozen Ukrainian soldiers to a military hospital with harrowing shrapnel wounds.
“You ask how the fighting is going,” said Oleksandr Kolesnikov, the commander of a company of soldiers fighting in the forest, interviewed on an ambulance gurney outside a military hospital in Kramatorsk. “There was a commander of the company. He was killed. There was another commander. He was killed. A third commander was wounded. I am the fourth.”
Out on the highways in the Donbas region, trucks towing howitzers and flatbeds carrying tanks rumbled east on Saturday, suggesting the Ukrainian military was reinforcing its front lines. The army does not disclose its force numbers but has publicized the arrival of Western weaponry, including American M777 artillery guns.
“We needed to move a group to the left flank and they immediately started pounding us with mortars,” said Mr. Kolesnikov. “That is how I was wounded.”
He called for artillery fire from the Ukrainian side to hit the Russian mortar crew, but said the Ukrainian battery was only able to shoot a dozen or so shells, which did not halt the Russian mortar attack.
The deputy commander, Anatoly Ignatyenko, was wounded a day earlier in the same spot. The two soldiers, now off the front line, comforted one another in the ambulance, and Mr. Ignatyenko helped his commander drink from a bottle of water.
Both said President Biden and the leaders of other Western nations need to hasten the supply of long-range weapons, such as rocket artillery, to even the odds in the battle for the Donbas.
“Let Biden not be stingy with weapons,” said Mr. Ignatyenko. Russian artillery attacks were relentless, he said: “There is not an hour without a pause.”
Also on Friday, a Ukrainian logistics unit resupplying the soldiers in the forest suffered losses. Soldiers drove an armored personnel carrier to the position to deliver food and ammunition.
When the soldiers inside stepped out, a mortar landed nearby, killing the commander of the carrier and wounding two others.
“I’ve never seen such hell,” said Mykola Pokotila, a soldier wounded by shrapnel in the forest.
Another wounded soldier, Serhiy Osetrov, sat gingerly in the same ambulance, wincing from shrapnel still lodged in his right leg.
The Ukrainian soldiers were deployed to the forest to repel a Russian advance in the area, on the western edge of the larger battle raging in the east. “We try to push them back but it doesn’t always work,” said Mr. Kolesnikov. “We don’t have enough people, enough weapons.”
Nearby, another more heavily wounded man was wheeled out on a stretcher, his head bandaged. Bloodied field stretchers were stacked up in a line against the wall, traces of the daily cost from the front lines of the Donbas.
0 comments:
Post a Comment