‘This is hell on Earth’: Putin’s scorched earth strategy and the Ukrainian troops trying to hold on
We are watching as BM-21 Grad rockets rain down on Ukrainian positions near a village called Sviatohirsk. It’s impossible to see their individual effects amid the smoke and haze covering the densely forested hills. Standing in an observation post on high ground amid feathery grass and wild garlic, I give up on trying to count individual impacts and instead just count the salvos, timing each barrage. I witness as many as 480 rockets fired on a single position in less than a minute, followed by artillery.
Between my service in the U.S. Marines and over more than a decade as a foreign correspondent, I’ve been engaged in the professional study of organized human violence for 25 years. But I’ve never seen anything even close to this volume of artillery being unleashed.
Mace has chosen our ground well, as you’d expect from an officer in an elite reconnaissance unit. We’re in a fold of earth on a hill that gives us a clear view of the battle raging around Sviatohirsk — a quiet little village nestled among chalk hills, overlooked by a nearly 400-year-old monastery on the opposite side of the river. It lies to our left. We can also see the fighting around Lyman — a key railway junction — to our right.
What these two places have in common is they are on the Russian-occupied side of the winding Seversky Donets River, the main natural barrier to the enemy’s advance. There are tens of thousands of Russian soldiers with hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles attacking here, assaulting in a vast crescent surrounding Severodonetsk, one of the largest cities in Donbas that remained in Ukrainian hands before the invasion began in February.
Lyman is obscured by smoke from a forest fire that began amid the fighting. The white smoke of the burning trees is interlaced with dark columns rising from destroyed buildings or vehicles. The rumble of booms is almost continuous. The whump-whump-whump of artillery is punctuated by the scream of tactical ballistic missiles, and the salvos of rocket artillery make a distinctive pattering of successive concussions. Almost all of it is being fired by the Russians. The Ukrainian soldiers here have endured this maelstrom for weeks. [Continue reading…]