The commander of a Ukrainian unit fighting near the town of Dobropillya in eastern Ukraine has told RFE/RL that it will not be easy to regain territory seized by Russian forces in a sudden advance earlier this month.
“Cutting off this incursion will require considerably more effort than we’ve spent so far,” Vitaliy Pyasetskyy, commander of the Ukrainian 93th Mechanized Brigade, told RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service.
“The enemy has deployed reconnaissance and combat drone units. So cutting them off will be difficult,” he said.
Tank units with Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade are still trying to drive out the Russian units who broke through the defensive line after months of constant pressure, using small squads riding motorbikes.
“Our mission was to repel the enemy’s breakthrough in the village of Vesele and to mop it up in cooperation with our reconnaissance unit,” explained a Ukrainian soldier with the call sign Snake.
“We had reports that Russia was having no trouble in that part of the front so we had to f**k them up and push them out of the village.”
The interviews with Ukrainian soldiers were carried out in recent days.
On August 26, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think-tank and research group, reported that Ukrainian forces continued to pressure the Russian positions east and northeast of Dobropillya.
The ISW cited a report by a Ukrainian military observer the previous day that said Ukrainian units had seized territory east and southeast of Dobropillya and along the western edge of the Russian penetration.
Battlefield claims could not be independently verified.
RFE/RL has also spoken to Russian prisoners-of-war in Ukrainian captivity.
They described confusion during their advance and said their units had experienced heavy casualties.
“Our commander ordered us via radio to go through wooded areas. We didn’t know exactly where we were going,” said one of the men, whose identity cannot be revealed.
While these accounts can also not be confirmed independently, they correspond to similar statements made by Russian soldiers after returning home from front-line fighting in Ukraine.
Ukrainian soldiers told RFE/RL that their forces had used robotic ground drones mounted with machine guns in recent fighting.
These had been successful in scattering Russian soldiers, they said, adding that use of loudspeakers mounted on them calling on Russians to surrender were less effective.
“The enemy paid no attention and didn’t give up,” as Pyasetskyy put it.
Ukrainian ground forces have had successes in cutting off at least part of the invading troops, he said, but repeated that more resources were needed.
