A Russian-made Kord 12.7 heavy machine gun installed in the ruins of a building destroyed and located less a mile and a half of an observation post of the Russian troops, constitutes the last line of defense of the Ukrainian Army in the east of the Kharkiv province close to the town of Kupansk. At first sight, and considering not only the proximity of the occupying forces, but also the absence of any protective wall, the place seems very exposed to the enemy firean intuition that becomes a certainty when a hole is observed at one of the extremes of the position surrounded by graffiti in the language of Leo Tolstoy where you can read niceties such as “shave your dick.”
“It was an artillery hit this morning,” confirms one of the two soldiers standing guard on this cold morning of blizzard and snow in northeastern Ukraine. Since the rout of Russian troops from the logistics hub of Izium and its surrounding region last September, the war front in this region has hardly moved, but military activity continues in the form of skirmishes, with a special forces group carrying out the bulk of the harassment operations.
Unit members divide their time between the advanced positionwhere they also have an underground shelter in a well-protected basement a few meters away and equipped with bunk beds and heating, and they rest between rotations in a detached house already located in the safety of the urban area of Kupiansk, fifteen kilometers south. Here, they spend their time exercising with dumbbells, dumbbells y gym benches to stay in good physical shapefeeding on borsch (beetroot soup) and buckwheat, and preparing their weapons, all of them Russian-made and abandoned to their fate by the occupying Army when, at the end of the summer, it withdrew from this place practically in rout.
“War Trophies”
“All we have as weapons are war trophies who abandoned the Russians when They left“, Explain Vladislav Leinera big man barely 26 years old and two meters high, while proudly mounting a grenade before the same camera. On the garage shelves it is possible to identify from ammunition for semi-automatic rifles until grenade launcher y antitank Weapons, going by tripods y other military accessories. “As a rule, an Army must destroy weapons that cannot be taken with it in its retreat to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy, but if (in September) the Russians didn’t even have time to take I get 200 of his woundedmuch less margin they should have had to pick up or destroy their own weapons”, continues Vladshort for Vladislav, as known by his peers.
Vlad, like his colleagues, prefers the freedom of being part of a volunteer unit over integrate fully in the ranks of the Ukrainian Regular Army, which they regard as a too rigid structure y bureaucratic. And all this, even if it means eating food donated by civilians and not collect a salary like the regular soldiers. “We do not deploy where we are ordered, but where we choose and believe that we are most needed; once in place, we coordinate with the ukrainian forces deployed there,” he continues. His skill with weapons and battlefield effectiveness It is obvious, due to the exhaustive and demanding process of joining the unit.
Andrii, originally from the occupied Crimean peninsula, prefers not to reveal his real name for security reasons, agreeing only to be photographed. backwards. Thanks to your muscular and muscular silhouetteis capable of doing dozens of push-ups in the improvised sports room with all the equipment on, including the bulletproof vest, and has half the body covered tattoos. His, yes, is a work surrounded by mythology in the world history of war conflicts: he is the sniper of the group.
In peacetime, Andrii was an amateur marksman with a Remington XP-100, an American-made high-precision long-range weapon. “It is like un kalashnikov“, he clarifies. Now, with different types of rifles depending on his mission, he defines his task as “observing the enemy and seeing what happens”, in most cases “in support of the artillery”, while despising some of the cinematic myths created around elite marksmen, such as the story of the Soviet sniper Vassily Zaitsev in the movie ‘Enemy on the Lookout’ during the Battle of Stalingrad. “The movie ‘The Sniper’ is much more real,” by Clint Eastwood, he emphasizes. Asked about the number of enemy soldiers he has killed and the possible remorse this might cause him in the future, he simply shrugs: “I don’t know how many, I think dozens; no, I don’t feel anything, it’s maybe a protection mechanism“.