Some complained of chaotic organisation, desertions and psychological well being issues brought on by relentless shelling.
Others spoke of excessive morale, their colleagues’ heroism, and a dedication to maintain preventing, even because the better-equipped Russians management extra of the fight zone.
Ukrainian troopers coming back from the entrance strains in east Ukraine’s Donbas area – the place Russia is waging a fierce offensive – have described life throughout what has became a gruelling warfare of attrition.
Lt Volodymyr Nazarenko, 30, second-in-command of the Ukrainian Nationwide Guard’s Svoboda Battalion, was with troops who retreated from Sievierodonetsk underneath orders from navy leaders.
Throughout a month-long battle, Russian tanks obliterated any potential defensive positions and turned a metropolis with a pre-war inhabitants of 101,000 into “a burnt-down desert”, he mentioned.
“They shelled us day by day. I don’t need to lie about it. However these had been barrages of ammunition at each constructing,” Mr Nazarenko mentioned.
“The town was methodically levelled out.”
On the time, Sievierodonetsk was one in all two main cities underneath Ukrainian management in Luhansk province, the place pro-Russia separatists declared an unrecognised republic eight years in the past.
By the point the order to withdraw got here on June 24, the Ukrainians had been surrounded on three sides and mounting a defence from a chemical plant additionally sheltering civilians.
“If there was a hell on Earth someplace, it was in Sievierodonetsk,” Artem Ruban, a soldier in Mr Nazarenko’s battalion, mentioned from the comparative security of Bakhmut, 40 miles to the south-west of the since-captured metropolis.
“The internal power of our boys allowed them to carry town till the final second.”
“These weren’t human circumstances they needed to struggle in. It’s tough to elucidate this to you right here, what they really feel like now or what it was like there,” Mr Ruban mentioned, blinking within the daylight.
“They had been preventing till the top there. The duty was to destroy the enemy, it doesn’t matter what.”
Mr Nazarenko, who additionally fought in Kyiv and elsewhere within the east after Russia invaded Ukraine, considers the Ukrainian operation in Sievierodonetsk “a victory” regardless of the result.
He mentioned the defenders managed to restrict casualties whereas stalling the Russian advance for for much longer than anticipated, depleting Russia’s sources.
