There is a strange ritual to artillery fire. The most important thing is the camouflage. When properly wrapped up in foliage, the muzzles of howitzers look like fungi.
There is a strange ritual to artillery fire. The most important thing is the camouflage. When properly wrapped up in foliage, the muzzles of howitzers look like fungi.
Then there are the messages to be written on shells. On Thursday, it was “For Zaporizhzhia”, where Russian missiles had wreaked carnage in the morning.
A battery commander scribbles calculations on a pad of paper and barks the countdown to fire.
The howitzers belch yellow flames. There is a pause of a few minutes while whoever called in the strike assesses the damage, then another salvo.
In the interim, a cacophony of automatic fire erupts on the other side of the wood – a Russian drone has been spotted. Rather than taking cover, the gunners ignore it.
Their confidence is a mark of how profoundly the tide of this war has changed.
Back in May, these men from Ukraine’s 14th mechanised brigade were struggling to hold back Russia’s relentless offensive in Donbas, trying to answer an enemy firing five or seven times more shells than they could.
But last month, they took part in the offensive that liberated the Kharkiv region. Now they have crossed the strategic Oskil river and are firing in support of an imminent battle to liberate neighbouring Luhansk oblast.
Now it is the Russians struggling to respond. The target of this strike was “a group of Russian infantry – a bunch of f*****ts, to use the technical term”, said Denis, the officer commanding, who asks for his surname to be withheld.
