Ukraine Faces Brutal Fight Against Russia in the East, Losing Men and Ground - The New ... - 0 views
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It all starts with a whistle, said Vladislav Goncharenko, a Ukrainian army sergeant, describing the relentless Russian shelling.“You lie in a trench,’’ he said, waiting in an ambulance packed with other wounded soldiers. “There are very loud explosions. You want to get deeper into the ground. And you have shrapnel whistling above you, like flies.”
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The momentum Ukraine generated after pushing Russian forces back from Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, has given way in the East to weeks of give-and-take over villages, heavy shelling — and a stream of Ukrainian dead and wounded from the battlefields.
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“Those people who said that the war would end very soon, that we have already won, that we will celebrate in April, said a dangerous thing,” Ukraine’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov, told Ukrainian media this week.
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Throughout the war, the state of the Ukrainian military has been difficult to assess from publicly available sources. As the war began, the Ukrainian military had about 30,000 troops deployed in the Donbas region, but neither the government nor the military will provide a current figure.
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Now they find themselves deployed into vicious combat in the East, an indication of Ukraine’s mounting demand for frontline fighters.A law passed on May 3, after many volunteers had already enlisted, allowed their deployment to combat outside their home regions.
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For now, said Sergeant Mykola Pokotila, who was wounded in a battle north of the town of Sloviansk, Ukrainian soldiers in the East are beleaguered, enduring punishing artillery barrages. “I’ve never seen such hell.”