Sitting on an old Soviet tank, an acacia tree from the 70s riddled with impacts, Igor tells us about the rank and hurricane missiles that the Russians send day and night: “The machine was hit, yes, but the team is healthy and they were lucky.“It is the same type of machine that this Ukrainian soldier drives for missions of about 24 hours, always within range of the Russian artillery. We meet him near Kryvyï Rih, in the South of Ukraine, on the Kherson front, where the Russian army is now concentrating its efforts, 100 days after the start of the conflict.
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“The problem is that we need new weapons that would allow us to shoot from further away, Igor explains. Honestly, we’re playing Russian roulette, we even have to approach the infantry. We shoot twice and then we accelerate to quickly move back. Every time you leave, you don’t know if you’ll come back. Either you win or you pay. You are operating on autopilot. When it pulls and you see a black dot in the sky, you know you have to turn around. When the projectile arrives, we hear a hissing sound and two seconds later, we know that it will burst.
Igor’s daily life is that of thousands of soldiers. They dig trenches. While the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine are at a standstill, these soldiers live with the constant threat of shells and missiles and are beginning, for some, to take the hit. The Kherson region is an agricultural region with fields as far as the eye can see interspersed with rare groves. And for Lieutenant Colonel Mykola, she looks like Verdun: “For the moment the front has frozen and we are witnessing a war of position. We have to prepare for it.”
“Verdun is a different era, but there are similarities and it can last for years. We hope for the best and expect the worst.”
Lieutenant Colonel Mykolaat franceinfo
In this region of Kherson, the Ukrainian forces also lack long-range guns to be able to fight under cover. So far, no Western artillery weapons have arrived here.