AT THE KHERSON FRONT, Ukraine – The commander banged on the door angrily.
“I need help!” he shouted.
When Tetiana Kozyr opened up, the commander rushed forward, carrying a young soldier on his shoulders. She said the young man was sunburned, thin and badly injured.
The Ukrainians are trying to retake her village, the tiniest dot on the most detailed military maps. Russian forces have just blown up 3 Ukrainian tanks. The fire broke out from the corrugated iron roofs of neighboring houses.
The commander gently placed the young man on the floor of Miss Kozyr’s kitchen, then tore off a pack of bandages and stabbed him in the chest and neck, which was bleeding profusely. Miss Kozyr hovered over them, feeling helpless and frightened in her own kitchen, watching the commander try to save the young man’s life.
“He looked very scared,” said Ms Kozyr, who lives on a small farm, corroborated by others in the village. “I had to turn away.”
Outside her house, several other Ukrainian soldiers lay face down on the grass.
Ukraine’s southern offensive is the most anticipated military action of the summer. According to the forecasts of Ukrainian officials for weeks, its goal is to push the Russians back into a strategic area along the coast, strengthen the confidence of a devastated population and demonstrate to allies that Ukraine can make good use of weapons provided by the West.
That push continues, even as Ukraine made a stronger advance this month in the northeast, routing Russian forces. Ukraine is regaining territory in the south, albeit slowly, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is concerned enough about suffering an embarrassing defeat he has suffered. refuses to let his commanders retreat from the city of Kherson, according to US officials.
But overall, the south is still a different story than the northeast. Interviews with dozens of commanders, ordinary soldiers, medics, village chiefs, and civilians who have recently escaped from conflict zones reveal a more difficult and costly campaign: The fierce, hard-fought skirmish and many casualties, perhaps the most heartbreaking battle in Ukraine at the moment.
Russian forces are being dug in here, and this weekend the Kremlin is trying to bolster its interests by holding controversial referendums in occupied areas to village count them. Ukrainian officials say they have no choice but to attack.
They are racing to recapture the territory before October rains turn the roads here into impassable mud. And they need to continue to prove to the world, especially before a nasty winter begins and tests the resolve of their allies, that they can push the Russians out.
The Ukrainian government usually doesn’t release casualty figures, but soldiers and commanders interviewed over the past week described losses on the battlefield as “high” and “major.” They describe massive attacks in which columns of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles tried to cross open fields only to be mercilessly fired by Russian artillery and blown up by Russian mines.
A Ukrainian soldier, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to discuss the casualties publicly, said that in a recent attack, “we lost 50 people in two hours.” Elsewhere, the soldier who worked closely with various front-line units said “hundreds” of Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded trying to capture a single village still in Russian hands. .
Across the occupied south – a wide crescent-shaped field, villages and cities along the Dnipro River and the Black Sea – the Russians built formidable defenses: zigzag trenches along the banks of the Black Sea. irrigation canal; fortified bunkers; medicine box; fox pit; even the tank trenches were carved with earth and covered with concrete slabs so that the Russians could explode shells from positions that the Ukrainians had a hard time hitting.
The Russians are determined to keep this part of Ukraine because it protects the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. It also serves as a connection point for important waterways and energy facilities, such as factories. Zaporizhzhia nuclear power, Europe’s largest.
Despite their high advantage, there is little direct fighting between the two sides, as in the early days of the war on the outskirts of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Every Ukrainian soldier along the southern front carried an assault rifle, but very few fired their weapons.
In the south, death comes at a distance. It is indiscriminate and total. When the shell hit, the young man pressed himself to the ground, holding his ears with both hands, his mouth open to let the violent wave pass through his body.
“This is a different kind of war,” said Iryna Vereshchagina, a volunteer doctor working near the front lines. “We are attacking the Russians but there is a big payout for this.”
She said, of the hundreds of battlefield casualties that she has treated, she has not seen a single wound.
“A lot of people are being blown up,” she said.
She looked down at her boots.
“Sometimes,” she said, “only a few people are left.”
Part of the reason why Ukraine has faced stiff resistance in the south is due to its highly effective information campaign about the country’s counter-offensive. The signals it sent were so convincing that the Russians hastily redeployed their tanks, artillery and thousands of troops, including some of their better-trained units, from the northeast to the south.
That leaves the Kharkiv area open to infiltration, which is what happened two and a half weeks ago. But it also left the south protected by tens of thousands of well-equipped Russian soldiers. And attacking is always more dangerous than defending a entrenched position, especially when the opponent knows the other side is coming.
All this has made some Ukrainian soldiers fighting along the front lines insecure.
“The problem is that we are advancing without artillery preparation, without suppressing their firing positions,” said Ihor Kozub, commander of a volunteer army unit near the city of Mykolaiv.
He said the Ukrainian military was suffering “great losses” because “we don’t have ammunition,” and he begged the United States to send more.
“All these heroic attacks are done with a lot of blood,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
An army spokeswoman defends Ukraine’s strategy.
“The enemy’s artillery superiority does not determine the outcome,” said Nataliia Humeniuk, head of the communications department of Ukraine’s Southern Command. “History is known for cases where there were unique battles where the quality of the battle was decisive. Not the number of weapons”.
She did not provide information on the number of casualties, but the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, recently said that Ukraine lost 50 soldiers a day.
The battle to the south was vastly different from Ukraine’s blitzkrieg in the northeast, where the Russian army was clearly unprepared. The Ukrainians had only recaptured a few hundred square miles to the south, 10 times less than what they had captured in the northeast in a few days.
But the Ukrainian commanders in the south always knew that this would be a fierce battle. The strategy was to cut off Russian supply lines by cutting roads and destroying bridges, slowly choking off the Russians’ ability to carry food, fuel, and ammunition.
An American soldier serving with a Ukrainian unit in Mykolaiv said taking the Russian villages was no small feat when the Russians knew they were coming for months.
“It can sound like a slogan,” he said, emphasizing anonymity for security reasons. “But for us, it’s progress.”
Weeks before the counterattack began, the Ukrainian army, including snipers known as Pirates, began tracking the targets.
Pirate is his codename – he doesn’t want to reveal his real name. He’s 29 years old with sparkling blue eyes, fleshy shoulders, and a skull and crossbones patch on his chest. For three days, he said, he lay on his stomach looking through the scope of a squad of Russian soldiers. They were digging fortifications in a village near Kherson. Pirate and another sniper hid in a row of trees nearly a mile away.
Eventually, the Pirate said, they identified the officer in charge, who was wearing a white T-shirt. Pirate and his partner calibrated their vision, measured the wind – a light, side wind – and counted: one, two, three. Then they tighten their triggers.
Their two bullets flew through the clearings, exceeding the speed of sound. Before he could even hear the gunfire, the Russian officer collapsed to the ground.
Pirate said: “I try not to think about who he is.
He spoke from a destroyed building near the frontline that had been turned into a base. This is a picture of many southern towns. They were completely destroyed: schools, roofless houses, electric poles strewn across the muddy streets, pine trees split in half, branches drooping like broken arms.
Even the earth itself has been gouged out by rockets and rockets, leaving moon-like craters everywhere, some with steel fins still protruding. The smell of dried sunflowers hung in the air. So many sunflower farms, a major industry, lay burned and ruined.
Ms Kozyr, who witnessed the wounded soldier lying on the floor of her kitchen, said her village had also been destroyed. This place used to be a hamlet of a few hundred people who worked on small farms and raising cattle. Now there’s no one left. The Russians captured it in March and the Ukrainians fought hard to liberate it in late August, when they officially announced the start of the attack. She fled a few days later and is now living in a migrant shelter in the city of Zaporizhzhia.
She said, when the new commander arrived with wounded soldiers, she was very scared.
“I yelled at him: ‘Why did you bring him here? The Russians will kill us all! ”, she said.
But the commander had just crossed the threshold, desperately seeking shelter. The village was on fire, in the middle of the two armies that were blowing each other up.
She cringed as her husband and commander bandaged the young man’s wound. The shrapnel went through his back and lungs. Her kitchen floor was soon covered in blood.
That night, the couple slept in their cellar. The commander curled up next to the wounded in the kitchen upstairs.
When Miss Kozyr stepped outside the next morning, to check on her calves and pigs, she walked past the kitchen and looked through the window.
The soldier’s hand twitched, his body stiffened. He died.
She started to cry when she remembered it, pulled a small rag from her pocket and wiped her eyes. But she did not question the counterattack.
“It needs to be done,” she said. And then she repeated herself, a little softer. “It needs to be done.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Oleksandr Chubko Reporting contributions from Mykolaiv, Ukraine, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Pokrovsk, Ukraine.
