KRAMATORSK – The Ukrainians blew up six bridges north of the city of Sloviansk to slow the Russian advance into the Donbass, and only one remains, in Raihodorok, in the immediate vicinity – which they can however blow up at any moment. Next to the road bridge is the railway bridge, which the Russians destroyed in a bombing and is now halfway in the water. The Russian pilots tried it again yesterday with the road one running parallel to about fifty meters, but they didn’t hit it hard and so it’s still standing. Crossing it today we see Ukrainian soldiers already placed in position to detonate the charges. To the north, which is the direction the Russians are coming from, you can hear the artillery shells and see the thin columns of smoke above the tree line.
Both sides, Ukrainians and Russians, want to decide the exact timing of the destruction of the bridge to Sloviansk. The Ukrainians want to blow it up in the next few days if the Russians get close. In this way they will turn the Siversky Donets River into a natural barrier, block the Russians north of the water and buy time. And he needs it all because the weapons sent by Western governments have not yet gone into action – Ukrainian soldiers in many cases are training to use them. The Russians, on the other hand, want to blow it up earlier, when many Ukrainian forces are still north of the bridge, so during the advance they can pin their backs to the river under artillery fire and force them to abandon many means to find escape on the other side. .
The commander of the Ukrainians hiding in the holes at the two ends of the bridge does not want shots taken with the mobile phone, now there is a new cause for anxiety, he says that the Russian spy planes intercepting communications on the ground – and this is an established thing – thanks to a new technology they also manage to extract photos and videos from mobile phones. They then pass them on to intelligence, which watches them and passes the information to the aircraft pilots and artillery. His soldiers also speak of another cause for anxiety: there is a saboteur, a thin, almost hairless old man who works for the Russians and rides a bicycle in the area. Where the old man stops, precise artillery shots arrive after a few hours. They show the photo of the old man, in a “wanted” poster, accompanied by explanatory notes.
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Denis is a border guard who arrived here together with five other companions, in theory they have nothing to do here, but they are volunteers, they decided without even telling their superior, they took some camouflages and introduced themselves. Next to him is Igor, his fingers are tattooed because “I’ve been in prison, these letters are the initials of a poem about mom”. They came here to fight, but Denis says you can’t resist Russian artillery with guns, he claps his hand on the Kalashnikov, we only have these. Don’t you have the American-given Javelin anti-tank missiles? Those are for regular army posts. He speaks of Russian artillery as a monster that cannot be stopped, too many cannons, too many rockets, too many bullets.
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He says that when they are hidden in the woods on the sides of the roads, the Russian shootings smash the trees, make them fall on his head. He explains that the local commander accepted them and assigned them a position, he is a good commander he says, because when there was to escape the continuous fire of the artillery he gave the order to retreat and did not hesitate. . There was nothing else to do. Handling the loss of land, surviving another day to resist, losing but not in a messy way. The Russians arriving from the north now have the advantage of superior firepower, it is necessary to give up without giving too much. Sooner or later, it is the hope of the Ukrainian soldiers, the Russian machine in the Donbass will jam as in Kiev, the ammunition will run out, the soldiers will run out, they will find better weapons than theirs. For now there is to suffer, back to the city of Sloviansk. If things turn for the worse, we all retreat to this side of the bridge and blow it up, the Russians will be forced to take a longer tour.