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After Furious Battles, Ukraine Loses a Pair of Hard-Won Villages
“It was like a fight between two packs of dogs,” said an officer, describing the struggle for one of the areas, Urozhaine. But “there came a moment when it made no sense to keep people there.”
By Carlotta Gall and Kamila Hrabchuk
Photographs by David Guttenfelder
A team of reporters spent several days in the Donetsk region talking to soldiers. The photographer David Guttenfelder was embedded for 24 hours with troops of the 58th Motorized Infantry Brigade on the front line.
For months, Ukrainian soldiers in southeastern Ukraine were able to fend off Russian assaults.
Even with shortages of artillery shells, the 58th Motorized Infantry Brigade repelled repeated attacks as they fought to defend the limited gains from their counteroffensive last year. The brigade took casualties but thwarted each Russian attack, including one by an elite marine brigade, leaving burned-out Russian armor littering the open steppe.
But at the end of March, Russian troops turned their focus on two small villages: Urozhaine and Staromaiorske. It took the Russians three months, but after occupying Staromaiorske in June they finally broke through the weary Ukrainian defenders and reclaimed Urozhaine on July 14.
An account of the fierce defense and loss of Urozhaine and Staromaiorske was pieced together through conversations with Ukrainian soldiers who served in the villages, as well as through one survivor’s post on social media. Official Russian posts on social media confirmed many of the details.
The loss of the villages was a blow for Ukraine, coming amid recent Russian gains along many parts of the 600-mile front line, and because Ukrainian marine infantry had fought so hard to capture them during the bloody counteroffensive.
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