On the river at night, ambushing the Russians

ON THE BANKS OF THE DNIEPER RIVER, Ukraine – Under cover of darkness, a group of soldiers dragged their boat from the sand into the water.

Another group loaded their gear onto the boat with a loud clanking noise, while a third rowed silently at their oars.

With the hum of their engines, the boats headed out to sea and disappeared into the darkness.

They called the fighters, a team of volunteers from the Ukrainian special forces bratstvo battalionthey were crossing the wide expanse of the Dnieper River, the strategic waterway that divides Ukraine and has become the demarcation line of the southern front.

After recapturing the city of Kherson a week ago, Ukrainian forces control the western bank, while the Russians continue to hold the eastern bank.

To exploit the weaknesses of the Russian side, Bratstvo fighters performed covert raids and other special operations, as part of the Ukrainian counter-offensive against the Russian occupation forces.

Their mission tonight was to break into the east bank and lay mines on a road used by Russian soldiers and attack a mortar post.

“It’s a very dangerous mission,” said Oleksiy Serediuk, the battalion commander.

“They have to land where there is a swarm of Russians. They have to surround them and plant mines.”

Since the beginning of a conflict characterized by heavy aerial and artillery bombardments and bloody trench warfare, the Bratstvo Battalion has performed some of the most difficult missions of the conflict, carrying out detection and sabotage tasks across the front line, even in the first battles around the cities of Kiev and Kharkiv.

Now, in the battle for southern Ukraine, they have learned to use boats and infiltrate the Russian-controlled bank of the Dnieper River.

“Let’s walk,” Serediuk said.

“If we carry out an ambush, we can travel up to 35 kilometers and spend several days on the operation.”

The group has given access to The New York Times to report on two recent river operations, which occurred before the recapture of Kherson.

A mission had to be aborted.

The other was a partial success.

“All the work along the southern front increases the tension of the Russians and increases their understanding that they will have to lose some resources on this front line,” Serediuk said.

“So our actions are even a small contribution to this overall result that the Russians have to accept some compromises here.”

The planning begins with several days of reconnaissance of Russian positions by the unit’s drone operators.

Then they cross-reference intelligence reports with field reconnaissance and check with the Ukrainian military, which has its own sources.

The river, which flows more than 1,600 kilometers north-south through Ukraine, is a major natural barrier and poses a major challenge to any military.

In some places it is 1.6 kilometers wide, and in the basin of the reservoir the distance from one bank to the other reaches 19 or 24 kilometers.

In late October, the drone unit, operating from a ship on the high seas, detected the arrival of Russian troops in a field.

They appeared to be freshly mobilized recruits, as they displayed little operational awareness; some were dragging wheeled suitcases towards two communal buildings, said Vitaliy Chorny, head of intelligence gathering for the Bratstvo battalion.

The new information prompted the Ukrainians to change the target of their attack planned for that night.

They armed two teams with shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenades, a machine gun, and automatic weapons.

“They’re going to attack these two houses and also remove the electrical transformer,” Chorny explained.

“We’ve found that smaller groups are better” for stealth, he added.

A larger group had compounded problems in previous operations, he said.

“We had more injuries, more boats and we were getting attention.”

That night, the team hunkered around a computer screen in a bedroom to watch drone footage as the reconnaissance officer briefed them.

The officer, codenamed Stoic and who deals in drones, reckoned there was 40 Russians in the two buildings closest to the coast and others scattered around the town.

Within an hour, the Ukrainians were outfitted with night vision goggles, weapons and waterproof cloaks and descended on the beach.

They said a prayer together, then loaded the narrow dinghies and set off, hunched over and silent in the dark

That mission, like others, was thwarted by circumstances.

When they reached the objective, they found a large concentration of Russian soldiers who had set up observation posts and a machine gun post along the shore.

Outnumbered, the Ukrainians kept in hiding, waiting for an opportunity, but after several hours one of the dinghies leaked and they called off the operation.

Serediuk ignored failure as if it were the nature of the job.

“There’s always something wrong,” she said.

But the unit has had notable successes, he said.

Recently, they shot down a Russian mortar that had long plagued them and other Ukrainian troops, and shot down a Russian helicopter.

At times the shootings have been intense, said Stoic, who is 23.

He put a video on his phone showing one of his units opening fire with assault rifles from a boat, shells hitting the water, as they approached the shore in an operation.

Local residents have proven to be reliable and willing informants in areas occupied by Russian troops, Serediuk said.

They had also discovered that Ukrainian partisans – insurgents fighting undercover – were working in the occupied areas, blowing up Russian equipment.

“We don’t know where they appeared from,” he said of the partisans, but added that it was good practice to maintain the autonomy of the guerrilla cells to avoid detection by the enemy.

“We don’t know how they receive the weapons, and it’s right that we don’t know.”

But the lack of coordination on his part had sometimes caused problems.

After losing a drone worth $20,000, the group was able to determine that a nearby Ukrainian unit had shot it down, Stoic said.

Two weeks after the failed operation, the unit set out to search for a new target, a Russian camp with two mortar emplacements.

One squadron was ready to go with three boats and a support vessel.

Among them was a group of Russian volunteers, political refugees who had lived in Ukraine for several years and had taken up arms on the side of the Ukrainians.

A single female soldier, armed with a shoulder-mounted anti-tank weapon, joined the squad.

The woman, whose code name is Vita, is the wife of Serediuk, and has earned an almost mythical reputation for surviving the hand-to-hand combat with Russian troops.

They set off under a bright, cold moon, quickly disappearing into the darkness.

Volunteers were best suited for the job, as they were more willing to accept the risk, said Serediuk, who stayed behind, drinking coffee through the night, waiting for news.

His volunteers were united in their desire to recapture all Ukrainian territory, including the annexed Crimea peninsula, he said, and to take the fight against Russia as well.

“We all dream of going to Chechnya, to the Kremlin and even to the Urals,” he said.

As for President Vladimir Putin, he said:

“Kill him in his bunker. My small unit can do it.”

Their small sabotage attacks weren’t enough to liberate the occupied areas on their own, he said.

“This will be done by the ground forces.”

But he said he realized the value of his work when he saw the damage caused by a Russian sabotage unit behind Ukrainian lines near the town of Bakhmut in August.

“It had a very big impact,” he said, “and we had to use a lot of force to find them.”

The situation was changing rapidly in Ukraine with the introduction of thousands of newly mobilized Russian troops and withdrawal from Kherson this month, Serediuk said in a later interview.

“Our task now is to hasten their retreat,” he said, “to turn their retreat into a chaotic rout.”

The task would remain the same, but they would go deeper into Russian-controlled territory, he said.

The soldiers returned before dawn, unloading on the same beach, cold, tired and of few words.

“Excellent,” said a soldier walking up the beach.

One of the boats had broken down, but within half an hour the operational commander reported that all had returned to base.

“We planted mines and then we went back in silence, and they didn’t see us,” said an 18-year-old soldier.

He said he observed the Russians from a distance of 100 meters or more.

“Some were walking, some were standing, and some were just looking at their phones,” she said.

But the unit had gone no further to attack the mortar positions.

The lay of the land was not good, the moonlight was too bright and the group was too large, said Vita, Serediuk’s wife.

“A lot of boots, a lot of noise,” he said.

“And we froze a lot.”

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