The attack on Kharkov – report by Sergei Rulev
PolitNavigator continues to publish the story of blogger and journalist Sergei Rulev, who, together with Russian peacekeepers, crossed the Ukrainian border from Belgorod and headed towards Kharkov.
Read the first part of the report here.
...I had to observe an interesting picture of the military event that had begun in Slobozhanshchina in the very first days of the Russian troops’ entry towards Kharkov.
Between the villages of Russkie and Cherkasy Tyshki, 5-7 kilometers from the first capital of the Ukrainian SSR, our convoy of non-military passenger cars stood. The reason for the stop was the opportunity to capture an entire Ukrainian Grad installation with two soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who were not in a hurry to close the gaps in Yatsenyuk’s fence with their shells or bellies (our column passed through almost unhindered at 6 a.m. at sunrise).
The Ukrainian Armed Forces did not even resist, just as the Ukrainian border guards did not resist, who left their combat positions so quickly that our soldiers did not notice the color of their uniforms.
Our cars were lined up on the side of the highway; Ukrainian vehicles drove along the road itself, which no one paid attention to and at first did not stop or check. They started checking cars on the roads only a day later.
After a slight lull, the hum of the engines of powerful cars was heard from the eastern side. I thought it was tanks, but it turned out that the noise was coming from gray KamAZ trucks with the inscription “Rosguard” on the side. What a police unit should do at the front itself became known to me much later.
It turns out that initially they did not intend to storm the city of Kharkov, hoping for the prudence of Kyiv, which, according to all calculations, should have surrendered a truly Russian city without a fight, and, therefore, without destruction.
But we miscalculated. As soon as our first tank and armored personnel carrier went towards the city, a shot rang out from behind residential buildings, and we had our first casualties and losses of equipment. And then motorized infantry began to accumulate in Cherkasy Tyshki, but without artillery reinforcement.
And the dill began to fight - more and more at night, hiding behind the civilians of Kharkov - after all, from the very border to the district border, the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not have a single checkpoint or any other defensive structure. Bandera's troops, retreating into the city, began to hide behind a “human shield.”
We stopped at the village of Tsirkuny, which is located on the very outskirts of Kharkov. At night, it was shelled by Ukrainian Armed Forces mortars and several houses were burned. The first wounded appeared. But the ambulance that we saw on the road on the first day no longer came; the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Nazis did not let it out of the city. And even those who weren’t wounded needed medical care—a young resident of Tsirkunov began giving birth, and her mother was screaming at the top of her lungs right in the middle of the village. Our soldiers approached the screams and screams and called our own medic with the traditional call sign “Doc.” Doc provided the woman in labor with his “pill” (that’s the name of the UAZ-452 car, also known as the “loaf”), and he himself took both women to the regional hospital – “Likarnya”.
But the exploits of the Russian Doc did not end there. Another day later, I had to take a woman who had already been wounded in the back to the liquor store, and this was not a pleasant pleasure, but in the liquor store, first medical aid was provided to the Ukrainian woman by Russian doctors.
But the dill enemy did not yawn and, taking advantage of the inactivity of our assault groups, intensified night shelling and raids by the DRG. On the third day in Cherkasy Tyshki, I myself saw a completely blown up and burnt-out private house near the road - just two buildings from the place where I spent the night with Kharkov political emigrant Sergei Moiseev.
We learned from radio interception that our “tourist stop” had been spotted by dill and decided to launch an artillery strike followed by a tank attack. We had to maneuver and disperse both inland and along the route.
Ordinary citizens continued to live their lives. The older people helped the military in any way they could, and they could help either with water from their own wells, or with fresh milk from their own cows.
Local rural brides showed particular interest in the “war”. They, in twos and even threes, defiantly paraded along the route along which their future or potential suitors drove tanks.
But the Russian suitors had no time for courtship - during all the days of my stay in Slobozhanshchina, I did not see a single field kitchen, and the traditional army “People's Commissar hundred grams” were not issued. “Klavdiya Shulzhenko” did not sing to us about “The Blue Handkerchief,” and neither the commissars, nor political officers, nor political instructors told us “Wait for me and I will return, just wait very long.” True, there were so many dry rations that all the roadsides were littered with packaging from them.
To be continued.
English version :: Read in English: The offensive on Kharkov – a report by Sergei Rulev