The battle for Donbas has seen Russia switch to artillery barrages that last day and night. Ukraine's National Guard have endured much of it and have shared their footage with the BBC. The video below is what is left of Rubizhne bbc.com/news/world-eur…
The guardsmen held out for two months, before retreating to Lysychansk a couple of weeks ago. Many were combat veterans but hadn't experienced anything like this. “It wasn’t Mariupol, but it was pretty close," one man told me. Between 1000-1500 strike a day.
Russian shelling is indiscriminate. In Rubizhne, Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. "artillery was removing those houses very fast - people were trying to hide in the basement so they had no view, no assessment of the current situation, so there was a lot of losses during that time.
Repeatedly the Russians struck the town's chemical plant. Ukrainian service members were left struggling for breath, with blood pouring from their mouths and nose.
This isn't a campaign of attrition, it's a war of oblivion. when I asked about Russian tactics: "well, there are a lot of them, there's a lot of artillery - bombardments are like nightmare, we shoot one round they shoot 10"
Russia may be running low on tanks, precision weapons, morale, etc, etc. But it isn't running low on old fashioned artillery shells.
"When our Sniper is shooting, they send in a full packet of grads on his position - so it's basically a sniper with one bullet and they send like $1,000 artillery rounds just for the sniper so they really don't care about how much ammunition they use"
"I mean,(the Russians) have a lot of manpower, same with ammunition. And all that they do is come, die, retreat and start shelling from the artillery. They treat their soldier as meat, not as a living human beings. That’s it.
The guardsmen and women I spoke to have suffered greatly, but they are back on the front lines, they refuse to submit. "The only question is time. The time and that’s it. And everything will be Ukraine".
You can read more here bbc.com/news/world-eur…
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