“We’ve pushed the Russians away a bit from the left bank, but there’s no real plan yet on how to move on, and without that it will be suicide,” the officer said. “Their defending line, with mortars and machine gun positions, all ended up under water.”Īs with the counter-offensive further north, decisive breakthroughs remain elusive. “The Russian-held side of the river is lower than ours,” he said. While it is thought to have been blown up by the Kremlin as a response to the counter-offensive, he believes it actually weakened Russia’s defences around Oleshky. Roman, however, also cites the flooding caused by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in June. But Ukrainian forces have still managed to gain a foothold around the bridge’s east side, forcing the Russians to retreat into Oleshky itself and beyond.Ī 192 officer said the foothold was gained by a combination of “boats and sheer heroism”. The Russians destroyed the bridge as they withdrew from Kherson, hoping to hamper any pursuit. Often, their drone hovers over Roman and Volodymyr’s old haunts around Oleshky, which used to be connected to Kherson by the Antonovsky Bridge, the main local river crossing. The trio now operate out of secret hideouts along Kherson’s riverside, the locations of which are not even disclosed to their Ukrainian commanders. He brought skills of symbolic, if not practical value - before the war, he was a professional coffin maker. They then fled to Ukrainian-held territory, enlisting in Kherson’s 192 Territorial Defence Battalion, and recruiting a third volunteer, Ivan. “Then we’d fly the drone for five minutes to take pictures of Russian positions.”Īt one point, the pair were briefly detained when a meeting with other partisans was raided by Russian troops, who shot and wounded two comrades. “We would drive around Oleshky with the drone camera in the boot, then stop and pretend we’d broken down,” said Volodomyr. The pair originally ran their wedding business in the town of Oleshky, on the opposite side of the river from Kherson, serving there as partisans when Russia first invaded last year. Progress here can help Kyiv isolate Russian forces in nearby Crimea, as well as tying down Kremlin troops who might otherwise be fighting elsewhere.įor Roman and Volodymyr, reclaiming the Dnipro’s eastern bank is also a personal conquest. ![]() While Western leaders focus their attentions mainly on the land war, the riverine conflict could prove equally crucial. Constant skirmishes take place over islets and in the reedy wetlands along the river mouth, rattling what remains of Kherson’s windows. Instead of Western-supplied tanks fighting across endless miles of fields, here the speartips are drones and speedboats that zip back and forth across the river, which in places is only 300 yards wide. The fight here is very different to the main counter offensive around Zaporizhzhia further north. During one evening in the city last week, The Telegraph counted 20 separate incoming artillery attacks. Russia has spent the past ten months trying to destroy Kherson from afar, shelling it relentlessly from their new positions on the Dnipro’s east side. ![]() ![]() The battle for control of the Dnipro’s Black Sea delta has raged ever since Russian troops withdrew from Kherson last November, giving up the only major city they held on the river’s west side. “Sometimes we’ll also bring along a guy with us who’s got a drone that can drop grenades on them too.” “When we spot Russian troop positions we pass the locations on to our own artillery units,” said Roman. And as they darkly joke, today they are in the business of planning funerals, not weddings. Now, rather than filming happy crowds at churches, the pair stalk the banks of the Dnipro river, sending drones across to spy on troops on the Russian-occupied east side. ![]() When Volodymyr and Roman send their drones on spying missions outside the Ukrainian port of Kherson, they use skills first honed doing wedding photography before the war.īack then, the pair ran “One Stop Nuptials”, a wedding agency whose services included drone camera-flybys of the bride and groom’s big day.
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