Ukraina på vikende front - The Washington Post

 

A bloody retreat as Ukraine unit hit by Russian cluster bombs

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STEVE HENDRIX AND SERHII KOROLCHUK

THE WASHINGTON POST • June 26, 2022

Wounded Ukrainian soldiers are treated outside the embattled city of Lysychansk, Ukraine, on June 26, 2022. (Heidi Levine/for The Washington Post)

OUTSIDE OF LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — The Ukrainian Airborne unit was relieved to be pulling back from the front Sunday morning, riding a column of armored personnel carriers away from the embattled city of Sievierodonetsk, which had already fallen to the Russians, and Lysychansk, which was on the brink.

“Nothing happened to us to when we were at the front,” the unit commander said. “It was while we were retreating that we got hit.”

They were hit, and hit badly.

As the convoy moved into the farm village of Verkhniokamianske, with many of the soldiers riding on the outside of the vehicles, the first blast struck right by them. It was a cluster bomb, they would later surmise, something that tore through the contingent of men clinging to that side of one truck.

Several men were wounded, with blood pouring from limbs and, in one case, a soldier’s head. But there was no time to treat them while the convoy remained in the crosshairs of Russian artillery. The uninjured applied tourniquets where they could, dragged the hurt back onto the vehicles and raced out of the village, across rutted farm lanes to a line of trees across a golden wheat field about a kilometer away.

It was just one of the many chaotic scenes that keep unfolding as Ukrainians give up ground to Russia’s relentless push to control the eastern Donbas region.

Some soldiers pushed their unit’s vehicles into the tree cover, piling on branches to keep them hidden from drones used for target identification.