Friday 8 July a few kilometers from the site of the massacre of almost two entire battalions about two months ago (see article), Russian forces were intercepted by Ukrainian-held Western artillery and missile systems and, once again, forced to suffer a massacre of exceptional size. War correspondent and former SEAL Chuck Pfarrer told the story on Saturday 9 July.
But let's go in order. The story of the 100% Russian-controlled Luhansk oblast was true for a few days: then, politicians and soldiers realized that a patch of land was missing, in the territory of the village of Bilohorivka - notorious for the Russians -, where the Kiev forces have managed to keep one foot in the only oblast of which Moscow has almost managed to complete the manu military conquest.
You know the village of the irreducible Gauls of the adventurous stories of Asterix, the last Celtic bastion in a world conquered by the Romans? Here, Bilohorivka is not in Armorica but on a hill north-west of Severodonetsk. But for the purposes of our story we are not interested in the hills - although excellent for defense - but the now famous river, the Siverskiy-Donetsk, which in this period of the year and especially at this distance from the mouth is little more than a trickle of water. water, but which - for the umpteenth time - proved to be an almost insuperable barrier for Russian troops. The story began four days ago ...
On the morning of Wednesday 6 July, the Kiev general staff announced that Ukrainian soldiers had inflicted significant casualties on Putin's soldiers during a Russian attempted offensive in the areas of the Verkhnokam'yanske, Bilohorivka and Hryhorivka settlements. The occupants have withdrawn. We are talking about a patch of land, but politically it counts as much as Kamchatka in the game of Risk: in fact, for a colossal mockery of fate, without those few kilometers, the control of the Luhansk region is a brag and the military governor of the oblast can prove you wrong every time you connect on Telegram: we still have a foot, or rather a boot in our territory ...
Thus, the order starts from the Kremlin: we attempt a circumventing maneuver by moving in a south-east west and north-east south-west direction to crush the last Ukrainian defenders. And here the donkey falls ... With insufficient artillery coverage, an entire battalion - more precisely a battalion tactical group, approximately 500-700 Russians - finds itself under fire from Ukrainian defenders just as it has concentrated vehicles and men in the 'crossing of that cursed river (for the Russians). And it is annihilated. The images you see below are eloquent:
Paradoxically, the new images of the vehicles destroyed two months ago (opening photo), a few kilometers away, also re-emerged due to the drop in the river level, are also from the same 6 July. No doubt about it: any description we got from Kiev of that disaster is exaggerated… but by default!
