For four months, Russian troops have been trying to seize the eastern Ukrainian village of Synkivka. On a map, this looks easy. Their forward position is on the edge of a forest. It is a mere 500 metres away from the Ukrainian frontline and a shattered collection of cottages.
Every few days the Russians attack. Their forays across open ground end in the same way: complete disaster. Armoured vehicles with men perched on top, speed across a landscape of moon-like craters and splintered trees. Soon it goes wrong. Some blow up on mines; others panic and reverse. The Ukrainians pick off fleeing infantry with drones and artillery. Typically, all the Russians die.
“It’s really fucked up down there,” Gleb Molchanov, a Ukrainian drone operator said, showing video he took from above the battlefield four miles north-east of the city of Kupiansk. The images are gruesome. Bodies can be seen lying in a zig-zag trench and frozen hollows. Nearby are the burnt-out carcasses of BMP-1 fighting vehicles, at least 10 of them. Despite this, the Russians keep trying.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“It’s really fucked up down there,” Gleb Molchanov, a Ukrainian drone operator said, showing video he took from above the battlefield four miles north-east of the city of Kupiansk.
The result of Ukraine and Russia’s extensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a kind of warfare that makes traditional Nato doctrine “pretty much obsolete”, Molchanov said.
Putin has reportedly ordered his generals to seize back by the spring territory along the east bank of the Oskil River on which the key railway-city sits.
But it isn’t enough to beat the enemy.” He said arguments in Washington – where Republicans in Congress have blocked $61bn in security assistance to Kyiv – had a huge effect on Kupiansk and the fate of the 3,500 people who remain there.
There are no civilians left in Synkivka but a few inhabitants – most of them elderly – cling on to their homes in nearby settlements, defying S-300 missiles and aviation bombs.
Bohdan Voitsekhovskyi, the deputy head of the radical-right Freikorps volunteer unit, said Russian politics explained recent doomed attacks.
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