The truck does not stop jumping and Viteli, the driver, tries not to leave the road that goes into the great pine forest in the Yámpil region of Donetsk. The area has been left full of mines, he says, and only roads that have been traveled before should be trodden on.
It is a difficult challenge to overcome on a road where trunks appear across the road. Some still have fresh, green leaves. “These are new, from attacks in recent hours,” explains Viteli, 60, a math and physics teacher until the invasion.
He tries to control the rudder despite the jumps while watching the map drawn from the command on his tablet. The holes formed in the rainy season are dry and have turned this dirt road into a difficult obstacle barrier even for off-road vehicles, including armored vehicles. Despite the jumps, Viteli does not slow down. He is dangerous. Russian attacks have never stopped since the beginning of the invasion in this area of the Kreminná front, but they have intensified in the last week.
On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense, Hanya Mayler, highlighted the harshness in this sector of the east of the country, in the direction of Liman and Kupiansk, retaken from the Russians at the end of October. “It's difficult,” she said, stressing that this is the main objective of the Moscow forces, which have significantly increased the number of units in this sector, in particular airborne assault units. “They are trying to take the initiative away from us. There is high enemy bombing activity and fierce battles await us,” Mayler noted.
Meanwhile, in the Zaporizhia area, where Ukraine has focused the biggest attacks of the counteroffensive that seeks to retake invaded regions, Russia is on the defensive.
With its offensive in Yámpil and northern Donbass, the Ukrainians believe, Russia seeks to attract as many Ukrainian troops as possible to take pressure off other fronts, such as Bakhmut or Vuhledar. "They are trying to advance," says one of the commanders of the 100th Brigade, to which Viteli belongs.
In Yámpil, a village of peasant houses at the gates of the forest has been emptied of civilians. In winter, when there was no electricity or gas, they were seen in the morning on their way to shopping and collecting humanitarian aid. Many older women sat in front of the store in the center of town to talk, regardless of the fact that the artillery sounded in the distance and that the military cars passed by in a hurry. Yesterday, that same store was closed, and the inhabitants, evaporated. Not so the constant sounds of artillery and missiles, which fell very close.
Before stopping the vehicle, parking it under some leafy pine trees and covering it with dry branches to avoid detection by drones, Viteli points out large tracts of burned trees. Some of them were still emanating smoke. "These are from the last days," he says, later showing a burning log from an attack hours before. “Last night they threw firebombs again and a fire started around us, we had to go out to put it out,” explains Román, vice commander of the unit, who is in charge of the surveillance position where Viteli directed us.
After walking 800 meters following a path guided by an almost invisible rope tied between the trees, he leads us to one of the bunkers in the middle of the forest. To get there you have to run through the uncovered ones and always looking at the ground to avoid stepping on a mine.
The objective is to avoid being seen by the drones, which monitor everything, despite the height of the trees. There are Ukrainian and Russian drones, day and night. They are the eyes of both forces. "Our brigade does not have kamikaze drones, which would be very useful to destroy their tanks," says Román, who assures that the enemy's new strategy is to burn everything to make them leave the forest. “They are certainly trying to break through our defense, but in this direction they have not been successful,” he says.
The situation is more difficult on other flanks of the front. There, the Russians are launching what the Ukrainians know as Storm Z (Storm Z). That is to say, they base their attack on men taken from the prisons that they send in groups, one after the other, as cannon fodder. A strategy that Moscow forces have used since the fall to break through the Ukrainian lines. "Our colleagues from other units say that, many times, these men do not even have vests or helmets," explains Basuka, who assures that the men located in this part of the front are from the airborne assault units, some of the most professional in the Russian army.
Basuka, along with Makro, are on duty at one of the last two defensive positions in this part of the forest. The Russian forces are 250 meters away and sometimes as close as 150. He sees them through his binoculars, although he says that in the summer it is difficult to identify them when they move during the day. The green of the forest helps to camouflage. At night they can detect them with infrared.
So far they have been able to stop them, despite the fact that the Russians use everything in their power. Planes, drones, tanks, artillery, mortars... "We have rendered at least eight tanks useless," says Basuka, without denying that the situation is difficult. Especially since four days ago, when they started shooting mercilessly. And the other flanks began to be attacked by waves of men sent to die.
This is the testimony of Yuri Alexander, one of the brigade's doctors, who leads a unit of doctors inside the forest. In recent days they have had to remove more wounded men, which is torture for this medical team, which has to stabilize the wounded while traveling on dirt roads full of holes.
“It's the hardest experience of my life,” says this veteran doctor who worked with Soviet troops in Afghanistan. "There we had planes to take out the wounded, here we take them out by car on these roads," he adds, and says that in winter it was worse. And at night, even worse. "It's difficult, but here we are all holding on and we don't let them pass," he concludes.
