A pall of black smoke hung over the string of hamlets downstream of the Ukrainian-held village of Velyka Novosilka as nearby Ukrainian heavy guns delivered an ear-splitting barrage on to the Russians hiding among the settlements’ shattered buildings.
The force of the firepower erupting into the expanse of clear blue sky caused an involuntary tremble deep in the belly. The crump of the shells’ impact, discernible to the ear moments later, offered evidence of the close proximity of the targets, while the buzz of a reconnaissance drone overhead – most likely Russian – gave voice to the potential of an imminent return blast, amid rumours that enemy aircraft were on their way.
The clearest progress in Ukraine’s two-week-old counteroffensive has been here, 75 miles north of the devastated and occupied coastal city of Mariupol, in a normally sleepy jumble of farming communities sitting on the meandering Mokri Yaly River.
From Velyka Novosilka at the top, Ukrainian troops have inched their way down the river on the way to Mariupol, settlement by settlement, spilling much blood along the way.
First they made their way south into the adjoining abandoned hamlet of Neskuchne. Then to Blahodatne, where Russian soldiers had to be “cleared”, to use that most antiseptic of euphemisms, from the forests.
Heavy close combat fighting then ensued in neighbouring Makarivka, and on Tuesday they were bearing down on Urozhaine. Several kilometres, all in all, but an advance nonetheless.
But the price of progress on this road to Mariupol and elsewhere has been high, as British military intelligence confirmed in one of its recent updates.
A group of four injured soldiers, exhausted, fresh from battle and being evacuated by a small ambulance from the front on Tuesday, were able to give their own personal testimony of that human cost as they made a stop near Velyka Novosilka on their way to a hospital in Dnipro, a further three hours’ drive away.
Earlier that day at 4.20am, Ruslan Tymchuk, 27, and comrades in Ukraine’s 420 shooting battalion had come under heavy shelling in a forest about 2 miles north of Bakhmut, further east in the same Donetsk region.
Two of his comrades, one of whom Tymchuk said would certainly lose his hand, had been badly injured from the first flurry of shells. He had been using his tourniquet to try to save one of them when another missile came in. “I was thrown by the wave of the explosion,” Tymchuk said, his lip trembling.
In some ways, he got away lightly. Tymchuk had strained his back, taken a heavy knock to the head and the eyesight in his right eye was blurred. Asked whether he had lost many friends, he became silent. “I would rather not say,” he said. “But a lot.”
Yevhen Udovyehenko, 37, a commander in an assault group in the 122 battalion of the 81st brigade, was lying on his back in the ambulance, his heavily bandaged foot resting up on a khaki-coloured bag.
He lost the back of his right foot at 2.30pm on Monday after his freshly dug trench in Bilohorivka, further east again, was struck by Russian mortar fire.
“I was with academy recruits and shouted to them that an artillery shell was coming and to take cover,” Udovyehenko said. “We were hit by mortar. It landed a metre from me and because the soil had been freshly dug for trenches, it was loose and shrapnel went everywhere.”
It was not Udovyehenko’s first injury. He rolled up his sleeves to show a deep scar on his left shoulder and a smaller one on his right collar. “I lost 12cm of flesh there, and that one was from artillery shrapnel. I have saved people, carried them from the battlefield, who had asked me to kill them because the pain was too bad.”
“The situation is not good,” he said. “We don’t have enough weapons and armoured vehicles. We were almost encircled in Bilohorivka, just one way in and out.”
“We need better training,” he added. “I tell the recruits that they must pee in a bottle and then they leave the trench and are shot dead.”
Asked whether the offensive was making progress in Bakhmut, Tymchuk again went quiet. “I don’t know, 50:50,” he whispered.
The paramedic onboard, Pavlo Potikhonehenko, 25, has a cheerful demeanour but conceded that it had been difficult since Ukraine’s long-awaited counter offensive was launched earlier this month. “It has been hot,” he said with a wry smile
Back in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian capital’s air defences had shot down two dozen Iranian drones overnight, the Ukrainian MP Serhii Rakhmanin, who sits on the parliament’s defence committee, appealed for patience.
Just two of the 12 new battalions prepared for the offensive were yet in battle, he said, with much of the new western weaponry yet to be deployed. In a statement on her Telegram channel, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Maliar wrote that the “biggest blow” was yet to come.
Speaking to the Guardian, she further disclosed that Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of the ground forces of the armed forces of Ukraine, and widely held responsible for both the successful defence of Kyiv and last year’s sweep through Kharkiv, last week brought his commanders together in the combat zone to assess the situation on the ground.
“They made a full in-depth analysis of their actions and based on this analysis they created tasks for themselves,” Maliar said. “People expect the speed of a movie in this war. It seems to us that this is editing. But there is no editing in life.”
