24 hours with artillery troops of the 1st Azov Corps in Ukraine

The mission of the artillery troops of the 20th Lioubarte Brigade, 1st Azov Corps was very important. The elite of the Ukrainian army must prevent the Russians from capturing the strategic city of Pokrovsk. The city is an important logistics center for the Ukrainian army. Russian troops tried to surround it, but Ukrainian troops resisted.

At 6 am, an armored vehicle drove at full speed on a muddy road northeast of Pokrovsk. The smell of gunpowder still lingers, houses are destroyed and shell holes are visible. This was where the artillerymen of the 1st Azov Corps were stationed, in what they called the “death zone.” At any time, drones can attack.

The armored vehicle parked in front of the field shelter, hidden under a camouflage net. There are five people living here, a commander and his men. The front line is about seven kilometers long, one of the most difficult lines at the moment, as Oleh emphatically confirms: “Yeah, I think you could say that.”. An explosion was heard. “It’s true, this is a hot spot,” By continuing.

This unit’s mission was to assist the soldiers on the front lines by shelling Russian positions. At 9 o’clock the order was given, “in battle”. The men must be ready in a minute. With assault rifles in hand, the five soldiers had to run sixty meters to reach their half-buried cannon. The Soviet-made Gvozdika machine with a caliber of 122 millimeters was hidden under a branch. Two of them slipped inside, the other two positioned themselves on each side.

Crouching behind the cannon, the commander, with his eyes glued to his cellphone, waited for orders and provided firing coordinates. Two shocks were heard. Place By is in the canon: “My job is to aim and shoot precisely. I’m used to it. I’m a little deaf.”

Artem is the youngest in the team. At 23, he is outside the canon: “My job is to monitor whether an enemy drone is approaching. If it attacks us, I will shoot it. But if it doesn’t see us, I won’t shoot because otherwise it will see us and we will then become targets for Russian artillery.”

At 0920, the men were on permanent alert in front of their shelter, in camouflage. At the slightest suspicious sound, Valiko looked up at the sky through the net. “When the weather is good, there are so many drones that we can’t even get out of shelter. It’s like bees in a hive flying in all directions. Some are visible, some are not, it’s impossible to know whether they are our drones or theirs. They are everywhere, the sky is buzzing.” A drone passed right over their heads. It’s a Russian drone, you need to get to a safe place.

At 12 o’clock at night, inside the shelter, there was no sunlight. The place measures three by five meters. There is a table, stove, bunk bed. Time stretches out. This was punctuated by the clicking sound of the radiator. The guided bomb attack made everything shake. Covered by two layers of tree trunks and fifty centimeters of soil, the shelter was dug by the men themselves. Lying in their beds, the shooters kill waiting on their phones.

In the evening, at 3 pm, Valiko, with his hat pulled up to his ears, with a sharp gaze, explained that before becoming an artilleryman, four months ago, he fought on the front line: “The main difference is that before I killed in close combat and today I do it from a distance. Let’s say for sabotage and reconnaissance, I’m old.”

Valiko shows a photo of two corpses of Russian soldiers on his cell phone. At the start of the offensive a year ago, he was on the front line in Pokrovsk: “First, they sent all their criminals as cannon fodder. They advanced, they took up positions in groups of two or three. These guys, the Russians didn’t care. Then? They sent elites to strengthen the positions. They had the advantage in numbers. They were much more numerous. These scum were sometimes sent unarmed, to settle at home or on land. I can tell you that all that is the truth.”

“You miss the person you love, you can’t share all the love you have for them”

Valiko, artilleryman in the 1st Azov Army Corps

at franceinfo

At 6 p.m. on the surface, the dogs of the abandoned village located next door huddled together under the camouflage of the raiders. “There are few people here, not many people to talk to. Thanks to dogs, cats, you can compensate for this deficiency. In another position, a mouse came while I was eating. It sat near me and ate without fear.”

At 9pm, it was now dark. The men take turns every two hours. For Artem, death is everywhere: “Death is the most frightening thing. In civilian life, it was my parents who were waiting for me. My biggest fear was that they would never see me again. Every day they worried about me, they prayed for me. My biggest fear was not seeing my family again.”

The next day at 5 am, five guided bombs fell outside. For them, the next generation will be here in two weeks.