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On front lines of Ukraine counteroffensive, soldiers pay heavy price
ANDRIIVKA, Ukraine — The men of Ukraine’s 37th Brigade were freshly trained and armed with Western-supplied weapons, tasked with an initial push through Russian-occupied territory in the early days of a long-awaited counteroffensive.
They would pay a heavy price.
Within 20 minutes of their June 5 advance south of Velyka Novosilka, in the southeast Donetsk region, mortars exploded all around them, soldiers said. A 30-year-old soldier known as Lumberjack saw two of the men in his vehicle bleeding heavily; one lost an arm as he cried out for his family. Lumberjack crawled into a crater, but the shrapnel from a mortar went through the soil and pierced his shoulder.
“We were left there in the field, without tanks or heavy armor,” said Lumberjack, who spoke to The Washington Post on the condition that he be identified only by his call sign because he was not authorized to discuss the battle. “We were shelled with mortars from three sides. We couldn’t do anything.”
There were fewer than 50 men in the unit, he said, and 30 did not return — they were killed, wounded or captured by the enemy. Five of the unit’s armored vehicles were destroyed within the first hour.
The 37th’s reconnaissance push would eventually help other Ukrainian brigades liberate four villages in Donetsk, one of the counteroffensive’s key starting points, securing an early triumph for Kyiv during the most widely anticipated operation of the war.
Survivors from the 37th, which included some American volunteer fighters and soldiers trained in Europe, described their ordeal as the tip of the spear in Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Their accounts offered one of the first real glimpses into the brutal fighting on a new front this month, far removed from the antiseptic claims of advances and retreats by officials on both sides of the conflict. And the battalion’s heavy losses foreshadow the terrible cost that Ukraine’s leaders are prepared to pay — and believe they must pay — to oust the Russian invaders and reclaim their lost territory.
