SYTNYAKY, Ukraine — The shell that reamed the Russian soldiers’ vehicle scattered them in all directions. One was face down on the asphalt, arms outstretched. Another was a mass of white and red in barely-there fatigues. Heat had singed the skin of the third, and the fourth had been thrown 130 feet, landing in a field by the road, torso mangled, legs twisted backward.
The firefight between Ukrainian and Russian forces — it had been a three-vehicle group, including an armored personnel carrier and a Ural truck — erupted on E40, an 8000-mile trans-European highway that threads its way from France’s Calais to Kazakhstan, passing through this spot near a roadside hotel. It’s a 24-mile straight shot to the capital, Kyiv.
The battle ended Thursday morning. The cleanup began in the afternoon: A soldier directed traffic around bits of flesh, bone and metal; a tank jerkily hauled a burnt-out armored personnel carrier down the highway; men off to the side unloaded a truckload of large caltrops. Nobody touched the corpses.
