Ukraine war: ‘It doesn’t stop’ – the soldiers fighting Russia from beneath the trees
When soldiers in Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanised Brigade do their work, most tasks are performed under trees.
It is a simple matter of staying alive.
Members of the brigade’s Oril Company stack their munitions under a stand of gnarly-looking trees. Their mortars are hidden in the bushes.
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We were told to walk in single file – and strongly advised not to stand in groups of more than two.
Best to try and look like an ordinary civilian if the Russians are watching from the sky.
And everyone knows the Russians are watching.
“Quadcopters (drones), it’s quadcopters. They can see us. Everything we do needs to be masked,” says Yurii, the commander of Oril Company.
A former carpenter, Yurii is now military commander in a village just outside the eastern city of Bakhmut.
Drones have become a serious headache, he said, passing information onto Russian gunners.
“It’s like 24 hours a day, we have attacks on our positions, it doesn’t stop,” he added.
Yurii says Oril Company comes under attack 24 hours a day
‘Time for us to go down’
However, the 93rd Brigade also has drones and when the company commander was radioed a set of coordinates, his men ran over to the bushes to retrieve the mortar.
“Vuha!” shouted a serviceman, warning everyone to cover their ears, as he dropped one of two mortar shells down the tube.
There was a momentary silence, before the munition screamed into the sky.
A minute or two later, we received the Russians’ reply. A tank shell descended with a sickening whine, crashing into the earth several hundred metres from our position.
“Time for us to go down,” said Yurii, calmly.
Like a game of hide and seek, we took refuge in a nearby underground bunker as a succession of Russian shells screeched through the vicinity.
When they hit the earth, a blast of air gushed through the bunker’s main door.
Six or seven soldiers eat, sleep – and store their arms in the bunker – and with unmistakable pride.
Yurii showed me a bulky 50-calibre machine gun that his team had ripped from the top of a Russian tank.
They are probably his biggest supplier of weapons, he said.
“We have American, Romanian, Czech, Bulgarian and Russian stuff. It’s multinational, but we have a lot of Russian (equipment), they’re like trophies, but we prefer Czech or American.”
‘Russians are learning from us’
Western countries, like the US and UK, have provided Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of military hardware, but they are still outgunned by the Russians.
Yurii thinks the enemy has five times the number of artillery pieces.
Still, human motivation is a different story. “We know what we’re fighting for. They don’t,” he said.
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Yurii and his men have been trying to turn their fleet of off-the-shelf drones into miniature bombers, by strapping cigar-shaped grenades to the bottom.
“I ask my friend, to drop a present in this hole, and we have success,” he said, showing me a video of the grenade tumbling into a pit hiding a gun position.
“But Russians now (do) this too, we show them the example, so they are learning from us.”
‘Don’t walk in the middle road, OK?’
After the Russian barrage, we returned to the surface, for the commander wanted to take us to a town called Soledar. It is the site of some of the most ferocious fighting in this war.
Every structure had been damaged or destroyed, and smoke emanating from the ruins of a salt factory made it difficult to breath.
It was like a scene from World War Two.
“It’s like Stalingrad,” he said. “We maybe have 90% (of the) buildings smashed. We call it Soled-grad. Like Stalingrad yes?”
Yurii emitted a sad-sounding laugh, then readied his men for the walk back to the bunker.
Before we parted, he offered a few words of advice.
“Don’t walk in the middle road, OK? And if you hear something coming, jump in the ditch.”
World
‘Widespread sexual violence’ took place during Hamas’s 7 October attacks, report by Israeli experts says
A newly released report led by Israeli legal and gender experts presents detailed evidence alleging “widespread and systematic” sexual violence during the Hamas-led terror attack on 7 October.
Warning: This story contains descriptions of rape and sexual violence
The findings, published by the Dinah Project, argue that these acts amount to conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), and assert that “Hamas used sexual violence as a tactical weapon of war”.
The report draws on 18 months of investigation and is based on survivor testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with first responders, morgue personnel and healthcare professionals.
According to the Dinah Project, the documented patterns – such as forced nudity, gang rapes, genital mutilation, and threats of forced marriage – indicate a deliberate and coordinated use of sexual violence by Hamas operatives during the attack.
Reported incidents span at least six locations, including the Nova music festival, and several kibbutzim in southern Israel.
A destroyed car near the police station in Sderot, following the 7 October attacks by Hamas. Pic: AP
One section of the report describes victims “found fully or partially naked from the waist down, with their hands tied behind their backs and/or to structures such as trees and poles, and shot”.
At the Nova music festival and surrounding areas, the investigators found “reasonable grounds to believe” that multiple women were raped or gang-raped before being killed.
The report’s findings are consistent with earlier investigations by the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
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The UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict previously concluded that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” CRSV took place during the attack.
Destroyed vehicles near the grounds of the Supernova electronic music festival. Pic: AP
Significantly, the Dinah Project urges the international community to officially recognise the use of sexual violence by Hamas as a deliberate strategy of war and calls on the United Nations to add Hamas to its list of parties responsible for conflict-related sexual violence.
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The nature and scale of sexual violence on 7 October have been a subject of intense controversy, with some accusing parties of weaponising the narrative for political ends.
This report seeks to confront what its authors call “denial, misinformation, and global silence,” and to provide justice for the victims.
Hamas has denied that its fighters have used sexual violence and mistreated female hostages.
World
Israeli soldiers ‘psychologically broken’ after ‘confronting the reality’ in Gaza, UN expert says
A UN expert has said some young soldiers in the Israeli Defence Forces are being left “psychologically broken” after “confront[ing] the reality among the rubble” when serving in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, was responding to a Sky News interview with an Israeli solider who described arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza.
She told The World with Yalda Hakim that “many” of the young people fighting in Gaza are “haunted by what they have seen, what they have done”.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Ms Albanese said. “This is not a war, this is an assault against civilians and this is producing a fracture in many of them.
“As that soldier’s testimony reveals, especially the youngest among the soldiers have been convinced this is a form of patriotism, of defending Israel and Israeli society against this opaque but very hard felt enemy, which is Hamas.
“But the thing is that they’ve come to confront the reality among the rubble of Gaza.”
An Israeli soldier directs a tank near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel. Pic: AP
Being in Gaza is “probably this is the first time the Israeli soldiers are awakening to this,” she added. “And they don’t make sense of this because their attachment to being part of the IDF, which is embedded in their national ideology, is too strong.
“This is why they are psychologically broken.”
Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, said he believes the Sky News interview with the former IDF solider “reflects one part of how ugly, difficult and horrible fighting in a densely populated, urban terrain is”.
“I think [the ex-soldier] is reflecting on how difficult it is to fight in such an area and what the challenges are on the battlefield,” he said.
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Ex-IDF spokesperson: ‘No distinction between military and civilians’
‘An economy of genocide’
Ms Albanese, one of dozens of independent UN-mandated experts, also said her most recent report for the human rights council has identified “an economy of genocide” in Israel.
The system, she told Hakim, is made up of more than 60 private sector companies “that have become enmeshed in the economy of occupation […] that have Israel displace the Palestinians and replace them with settlers, settlements and infrastructure Israel runs.”
Israel has rejected allegations of genocide in Gaza, citing its right to defend itself after Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.
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‘Israel has shifted towards economy of genocide’
The companies named in Ms Albanese’s report are in, but not limited to, the financial sector, big tech and the military industry.
“These companies can be held responsible for being directed linked to, or contributing, or causing human rights impacts,” she said. “We’re not talking of human rights violations, we are talking of crimes.”
“Some of the companies have engaged in good faith, others have not,” Ms Albanese said.
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Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
The companies she has named include American technology giant Palantir, which has issued a statement to Sky News.
It said it is “not true” that Palantir “is the (or a) developer of the ‘Gospel’ – the AI-assisted targeting software allegedly used by the IDF in Gaza, and that we are involved with the ‘Lavender’ database used by the IDF for targeting cross-referencing”.
“Both capabilities are independent of and pre-ate Palantir’s announced partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry,” the statement added.
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