Ukraine’s War Effort Is Stuck. This Heroic Battlefield Failure Shows Why.
The planners of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the country’s Russian invaders last year envisioned that elite forces, like the unit led by Capt. Anatoliy Kharchenko, would sweep in to deliver the final blows of a D-Day-like triumph. But by the time paratroopers in Kharchenko’s company entered the battle on a moonless night last August, the counteroffensive was already skidding toward failure—and his men were about to learn all of the deadly reasons why.
As the company crept along the edge of a field in southeastern Ukraine, the operation’s objectives had already been severely downsized. Because the West had dithered for months over the provision of tanks and other armored vehicles, the Russians were ready. They had dug in on the flat farmland of southeastern Ukraine, laying hundreds of thousands of mines and setting up firing positions for machine guns and antitank missiles.
The first wave of Ukrainian brigades, launched in June, had barely advanced and suffered heavy losses. A switch to small, infantry assaults had been stymied as well, advancing just a short distance and seizing only one village. Now Kharchenko’s company came in not as closers, but as a final roll of the dice.
Their initial goal, assaulting a hill near the village of Verbove, was modest. But things went badly wrong within minutes. Just after dawn on Aug.
12, drones swept overhead as they approached the target along a line of trees between farm fields. Kharchenko’s men had been told Russian drones would be downed by Ukrainian jamming equipment and assumed they were their own. Then the drones began dropping explosives.
The trees exploded with machine-gun fire. Grenades lobbed from automatic launchers burst around them. The platoon was incapacitated.
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