Ukraine troops secure village as new push seeks momentum

The blue and gold flag flying above the shattered doorway of the Blagodatne cultural centre is Ukrainian, but the soldiers lying dead inside are Russian.

A week after launching their counteroffensive in the southeast against Moscow’s invasion force, Ukraine has retaken a small string of settlements on the Mokri Yaly River in the region of Donetsk.

Kyiv’s forces are pushing onwards, and even the Russian army confirms that its positions in Urozhaine, another two kilometres (just over a mile) south of Blagodatne, have come under attack.

The push south in this valley is led by the experienced 68th Jaeger (Hunter) Brigade, and is the most concrete sign of Ukrainian progress since the wider offensive began.

The Ukrainian military has said that it has already faced “powerful resistance” from Russian troops, despite not yet reaching the invader’s main fortified defence line.

“When I get to the centre of Donetsk I will say that our mission is partly accomplished,” a senior officer from the 68th, using the call sign “Lermontov”, told AFP.

“I’ve been dreaming about Donetsk since 2014, it’s the heart of the Donbas,” he said, in a brief interview as he juggled a walkie-talkie and a smartphone to hand out orders.

Blagodatne, a small farming community, is 90 kilometres (55 miles) west of Donetsk, the main city in the Donbas, a region partly held by Moscow’s proxy forces since 2014.

The Ukrainian offensive aims to recapture all the land seized by Russia either during the 2014 conflict or after last year’s full-scale invasion, but it has only just got underway.

Ukraine raised the flag over Blagodatne on Sunday, but soldiers there told AFP that clearing pockets of resistance took a further two days.

Some areas of the village have yet to be swept for mines, and there are corpses of Russian soldiers and a small number of Ukrainian civilians still to be cleared. 

At least four Russian troops died inside the gutted cultural centre, scarred by months of frontline artillery exchanges even before the latest battle.

They lie where they fell amid broken glass and spent 5.45 mm cartridges.

One of the dead had his cranium blown apart from below as if he had been shot from under his jaw, perhaps a suicide in the desperate final stages of the battle.

Another body lay in a shell-damaged library, under a portrait of the 19th-century poet and artist Taras Shevchenko, the founding figure of modern Ukrainian literature.

In the lobby of the centre stood a half-full crate of unused 5.45 mm cartridges, the calibre used by the Soviet-era AK-74 assault rifle used by both sides.

The corpses were not long dead, but the centre seemed long-abandoned. Swallows swooped through the shattered windows into the roofless concert hall, nesting in the rafters.

The 68th Jaeger Brigade is not one of the new units given Western training and NATO-issue weapons to lead the much-anticipated main effort of this year’s counteroffensive.

It was set up in April last year, shortly after the Russian invasion, to specialise in fighting in forests and wetlands and has been in combat ever since.

The unit does not have the Leopard tanks or Bradley fighting vehicles of some of the brigades on the southern front, but has now been issued US-made MRAP armoured vehicles. 

Equipped with powerful .50 calibre machine guns in a roof turret, these already battle-scarred MaxxPro vehicles can ferry soldiers to the fighting despite continued Russian shelling.

Combat medic “Vinni” told AFP that this was what got the brigade into the battle.

“We wouldn’t have made it if we had only had our old vehicles,” he said.

“Whichever way you look at it, this counteroffensive is necessary. If not us, then who will do it?” he said.

Of the Russians, he said: “We need to destroy them and drive from our land.”