On the river at night, ambushing Russians
ON THE BANKS OF THE DNIEPER RIVER, UKRAINE>>
Under cover of darkness, a group of soldiers heaved a dinghy off the sand into the water. Another group loaded equipment with a heavy clanking into a boat, while a third pushed off silently with oars. Engines humming quietly, the boats turned to the open water and disappeared into the blackness.
The fighters, a volunteer Ukrainian special forces team called the Bratstvo battalion, were crossing the wide expanse of thednieper River, the strategic waterway that bisects Ukraine and has become the dividing line of the southern front. After recapturing the city of Kherson a week ago, Ukrainian forces hold the western bank, while the Russians still hold the eastern bank.
To exploit weaknesses on the Russian side, the Bratstvo fighters have been conducting secret raids and other special operations for months, as part of the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian occupying forces. On this night, their mission was to slip onto the eastern bank and lay mines on a road used by Russian soldiers and attack a mortar position.
“It’s a very dangerous mission,” said Oleksiy Serediuk, the battalion commander. “They need to land where there is a swarm of Russians. They need to go around them and plant mines.”
From the beginning of a conflict defined by heavy aerial and artillery bombardment and grinding trench warfare, the Bratstvo battalion has undertaken some of the conflict’s most difficultmissions, conducting forward spotting and sabotage along the front lines, including in the early battles around the cities of Kyiv and Kharkiv. Now, in the battle for Ukraine’s south, members of the battalion have learned to use boats and infiltrate the Russian- controlled side of the Dnieper River.
“We go on foot,” Serediuk said. “If we are conducting an ambush, we can go up to 35 kilometers and spend several days on task.”
The group gave access to The New York Times to report on two recent riverine operations — which took place before the recapture of Kherson.
One mission had to be aborted. The other was a partial success.
“All the work along the southern front increases the stress on the Russians and increases their understanding that they will have to lose some resources on this front line,” Serediuk said. “So our actions are also some tiny input in this overall result that Russians need to accept some compromises here.”
Planning beginswith several days of reconnaissance of Russian positions by the unit’s drone operators. Then they match intelligence reports with reconnaissance on the ground, and verify it with theukrainianmilitary, which has its own sources.
The river, running more than 1,000miles fromnorth to south throughukraine, is a great natural barrier and presents a huge challenge for any army. At some places it’s a mile wide, and in the reservoir basin the distance fromone shore to another is as much as 12 or 15 miles.
In late October the drone unit, working from a boat offshore, spotted Russian troops arriving at a camp. They seemed to be newly mobilized conscripts, because they showed little operational awareness; some were dragging wheeled suitcases into two communal buildings, said Vitaliy Chorny, head of intelligence gathering for the Bratstvo battalion.
The fresh information prompted the Ukrainians to change the target of their planned attack that night. They armed two teams with shoulder-held rocketpropelled grenades, a machine gun and automatic weapons.
“They will attack these two houses and will also take out the electrical transformer,” Chorny explained. “We found smaller groups are better” for stealth, he added. A larger group had compounded the problems on previous operations, he said. “We had more wounded, more boats and were drawing attention to ourselves.”
That evening the team crouched around a computer screen in a dormroom to watch the drone footage as the reconnaissance officer briefed them. The officer, who goes by the code name Stoic and operates drones, estimated there were 40 Russians in the two buildings closest to the shore and more spread out in the settlement.
Within an hour, the Ukrainians were outfitted with night-vision goggles, weapons and waterproof capes, and they descended to the beach. They recited a prayer together then loaded up the narrow rubber dinghies and set out, hunched silent figures in the dark.
That mission, as others have been, was thwarted by circumstance. When they reached the target, they found a large concentration of Russian soldiers setting up observation positions and a machine-gun post along the shore.
Outnumbered, theukrainians lingered out of sight, watching for an opportunity, but after several hours one of the dinghies sprung a leak, and they called off the operation.
Serediuk shrugged off the failure as in the nature of the job. “Something always goes wrong,” he said. But the unit has had notable successes, he said. They had recently taken out a Russian mortar that long plagued them and other Ukrainian troops, and had downed a Russian helicopter.
Sometimes the firefights have been intense, said Stoic, who is 23. He played a video on his phone of one of their units opening firewith assault rifles froma dinghy, bullets hitting the water, as they approached the shore on one operation.
Two weeks after that operation, the unit set out after a new target, a Russian camp with two mortar positions. A team was readied to go in three dinghies and a support boat. Among them was a group of Russian volunteers, political refugees who had been living in Ukraine for several years and had taken up arms on the side of the Ukrainians.
A single female soldier, armed with a shoulder-held anti-tank weapon, joined the team. The woman, who uses the code name Vita, is Serediuk’s wife, and she has gained an almost mythical renown for surviving close combatwithrussian troops.
They set off under a cold, bright moon, swiftly disappearing in the gloom.
The situation was changing rapidly in Ukraine with the introduction of thousands of newly mobilized Russian troops and then the retreat from Kherson thismonth, Serediuk said in a later interview. “Our task now is to hasten their retreat,” he said, “to turn their retreat into a chaotic flight.” The task would remain the same, but they would be venturing deeper into Russian-held territory, he said.
The soldiers were back before dawn, unloading on the same beach, cold, weary and with few words. “Excellent,” said one soldier clomping back up the beach. One boat had broken down, but within half an hour the operational commander reported all were back on base.
“We laid the mines and then came back without any noise, and they did not see us,” said one 18-yearold soldier. He said he had watched the Russians from a distance of 100 yards or more. “Some were walking. Some were standing. Some were just watching their phones,” he said.
But the unit had not pushed farther to attack the mortar positions. The lay of the land was not good, the moonlight too bright and the group too large, said Vita, Serediuk’s wife. “Lots of boots, lots of noise,” she said. “And we froze a lot.”