Nobody here has been on the offensive for years. This is what the war in eastern Ukraine, a region known locally as the Donbas, has been like since an uneasy stalemate took hold in winter 2015, following nearly a year of all-out war. Now, the top of his helmet was nearly a foot below ground level. “It should be deep,” Ivashchenko said, monitoring Andriy’s work.Īndriy shoveled dirt and tossed it over his shoulder. Three weeks later, Andriy, a 21-year-old soldier with a carefully trimmed beard, was digging with a pickax and shovel at the spot in the trench where Tychyna was shot. He’s now one of the roughly 14,000 people killed since the war started in spring 2014. Tychyna was rushed to a nearby hospital but died New Year’s Day, the first Ukrainian soldier to do so in 2022. There was a hole in his skull and blood was pooling beneath him in the fresh snow. Ivashchenko found Tychyna moments later, slumped over. “It was dark and snowing, and he was moving. “It was a Mission Impossible kind of shot,” Denis Ivashchenko, a 21-year-old officer to whom Tychyna reported, told me this week when I visited his brigade’s positions. With the mud squishing beneath his feet, he almost certainly didn’t hear the quiet chirp of a sniper’s bullet, fired from a bluff 800 meters away before it penetrated the left side of his head just 1 inch below his helmet. The lanky 20-year-old of the 95th Air Assault Brigade was stomping through the neck-deep maze of trenches when he reached a shallower segment of the channel. NIU-YORK, Ukraine - In this little town in eastern Ukraine, where residents on the front line of Russia’s eight-year-long war never sleep a sound night, it was soldier Ihor Tychyna’s turn to keep watch.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |