Ukrainian soldiers have been ordered to keep holding Kursk — as Russia races to take it back
Russian defence officials say its military has retaken three villages in the Kursk region, in what Ukraine is calling a major push to squeeze its troops out of Russia before U.S. president-elect Donald Trump takes office in the new year.
On Wednesday, Russia said it had recaptured two villages — Daryino and Plyokhovo — that are on the edge of an approximately 800-square-kilometre area of Russia that has been under Ukrainian control since a surprise incursion in August. On Thursday, it reported retaking a third village, Novoivanovka.
“They have been ordered to liberate the Kursk region by the first of January … using all means,” said Vitallii, 35, a Ukrainian soldier who spoke to CBC News by phone on Wednesday.
Vitallii, which is his first name, said he and other troops learned about the apparent timeline from Russian prisoners of war who were captured and later questioned in a basement in the city of Sudzha, which Ukraine took full control of on Aug. 15.
Soldiers interviewed for this story don’t use their full name in keeping Ukrainian military restrictions. Some have chosen to go by their call signs.
Push before inauguration
Vitallii said that despite recently losing ground on the flank, the overall situation in Kursk is relatively stable. He said Ukraine troops have been given orders to hold the line against a reported wave of 60,000 Russian troops, along with thousands of North Korean soldiers.
Almost three weeks ago, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he was sure that Putin wanted to “push us out by Jan. 20,” the day that Trump will take office.
The U.S. president-elect has repeatedly vowed to quickly end the war in Ukraine.
More than a half-dozen soldiers stationed in Kursk told CBC News that they understand the pressure to negotiate is mounting, but they can’t envision how both sides could possibly reach a deal — let alone one that would last beyond a temporary truce.
“I do not see any possibility that the Russians are tuning in to some kind of peace. They are doing well now and the dynamics of this, unfortunately, will continue,” said Vitaliy, who spoke to CBC News from an undisclosed location in the Sumy region. He was taking a break after being deployed to the Kursk region since September.
All of the soldiers CBC News spoke with said morale was relatively good in Kursk, despite the shortages of equipment and more troops.
Spirits flagging elsewhere
Elsewhere, though, the situation is more dire, said a soldier with a Ukrainian territorial defence unit who only wanted to be identified by his call sign. Bryn.
A few weeks ago, while on a break from his deployment to Kursk, Bryn visited his 26-year-old son who is on the front line in the Donetsk region near the town of Kurakhhove, where Russia is fighting to get full control.
In the southeast, he said, units are losing men and territory as Russia continues to advance toward the strategically important logistics hub of Pokrovsk.
“The troops don’t feel well, they are exhausted and losing their strength,” Bryn said in a phone interview with CBC News.
“The main problem is people. We are losing a lot of people there.”
In a rare admission, Zelenskyy stated on Dec. 8 that 43,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed since the start of Russia’s full-scale war on Feb. 24, 2022. Another 370,000 have been wounded.
Western officials estimate that as many as 800,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured in the same timeframe. Ukrainian defence officials report that in November alone, more than 1,500 Russian soldiers were killed or injured every day.
Bryn said that when he and his unit were previously deployed to Donetsk, there was a “pack your bags” mentality. Troops were always on the move because of Russian advances, he said.
Wary of negotiations
He said that is not the case in Kursk, where he is part of a team tasked with trying to bring down Shahed drones that explode upon crashing into a target.
Bryn described spending his days camped out in buildings or in trenches, watching the sky and listening. When drones are spotted, he often jumps in a vehicle and races out with others to try and bring them down.
He thinks the new year will bring more clarity around how exactly Trump envisions instilling peace. Even though he believes negotiations are likely at this point, he doesn’t want them.
“I would like victory … but I am afraid that many in civilian life will want negotiations,” he said.
“When you talk to civilians, sometimes it seems that they are more tired than (soldiers) are.”
Another soldier, who goes by the call sign Historic, told CBC News that if the war ends with Russia keeping the Ukrainian territory it seized, he can’t imagine staying in the country. He would try to move his wife and young children abroad, he said.
“What did our brothers die for if, in the process of negotiations, we give Putin everything he asked for?” he said during an interview over Zoom with CBC News.
“I want this war to end with the fact that we return all our territories, although this is not realistic now by military means.”
Russia has already squeezed Ukraine out of more than 40 per cent of the territory it seized in Kursk in August.
None of the soldiers CBC spoke to said they have seen any evidence of soldiers sent by North Korea to assist Russia’s efforts. But they all said that Ukraine is on the defensive and Russian attacks now seem more frequent.
Mobilization campaign ‘failed’
A military officer from Lviv, whose call sign is Saigon, said that they face assaults every day from Russian units, which will send in eight armoured vehicles at a time with as many as 10 men in each. The sound of drones overhead is almost constant.
Saigon said he thinks Ukraine’s decision to send troops to Russia was worth it because it drew significant forces away from the southeast and slowed the advance there.
Ukraine’s mobilization campaign, on the other hand, has “failed,” he said.
On checkpoints, he has seen middle-aged men inflicted with chronic diseases. To him, that means they can’t fight as effectively.
“We need a lot of young and motivated people,” he said.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Reuters that Ukraine needs to draft younger men and lower the call-up age, currently set at 25.
Ukraine has no plans to lower the draft age further, and has responded to the appeals from western officials by saying the country needs more weapons to equip the troops it has.
Saigon’s colleague, who goes by the call sign Google, spoke with CBC News during the same Zoom call. He mused that perhaps Ukrainians would be more eager to enlist if it offered the same relatively lucrative signing bonuses that Russian regions have started handing out.
He said it’s to be expected that Russia will try to take back all of Kursk, noting that would give them a sense of strength headed into any peace talks.
“But what kind of negotiations we can talk about now, I do not know,” he said.
“Perhaps our leaders have some other plans but we do our job.”
Published at Thu, 11 Apr 2024 22:52:23 +0000
He risked everything to stand up to Assad, but he never got to see the regime fall
As It Happens7:34He risked everything to stand up to Assad, but he never got see the regime fall
Again and again, Mazen al-Hamada risked everything to help his fellow Syrians.
In the early days of the Arab Spring uprisings, he marched in the streets and called for the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.
For that, he was repeatedly arrested and tortured in the country’s notorious prison system.
He escaped to the Netherlands in 2013, and spent the next seven years speaking out about the horrors he had both witnessed and endured in prison, hoping to convince world leaders to bring Assad to justice.
Finally, in 2020, he returned home in desperation hoping he could convince Syrian authorities to liberate those still trapped behind bars, including his own nephew.
But he was detained immediately upon arrival at the airport in Damascus, and his loved ones never saw or heard from him again — until Tuesday, when his family identified his body in a hospital morgue.
On Thursday, hundreds of Syrians took to the streets of Damascus, some for the first time in over a decade, for Hamada’s funeral procession.
“I got so emotional watching the videos. It’s a comfort to see people honouring him like that,” British filmmaker Sara Afshar, Hamada’s friend, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal.
“They’re giving him a funeral of a hero, which is what he is. He is a hero.”
Mourners took part in the funeral procession for Syrian activist Mazen al-Hamada in Damascus on Thursday. Hamada, whose body was found by his family in a military hospital this week, was a well-known activist during the Syrian revolution who was repeatedly arrested and tortured. He had escaped to Europe but returned to Syria in 2020 and was again detained upon arrival.
Afshar first met Hamada in the Netherlands in 2016 while researching for her documentary about the regime’s crackdown, Syria’s Disappeared: The Case Against Assad.
There were no cameras during that first meeting, she said. They just spoke. But she knew immediately that she wanted him to be a focal point of her film.
“He was incredibly open — more than anyone else that I had spoken to,” she said.
“He was willing to make himself vulnerable, at a great cost to himself. But the reason he wanted to do that was because he really wanted the whole world to hear his story, to hear about what was happening in these prisons, because he wanted the world to act.”
But the world, she said, let him down.
For three years after the film’s release in 2017, Hamada travelled the world with Afshar, meeting with policy makers and pushing for justice for Assad’s victims.
But what they found, she says, were governments ready to look the other way and normalize relations with the regime.
“That makes me really angry, and it made Mazen really angry,” she said. “He was, you know, telling people how appalling and monstrous the situation was inside these prisons, and the world was doing nothing about it.”
Why he went back
In 2020, Hamada returned to Syria, against the wishes of his loved ones.
He’d been given assurances from the Syrian government that he’d be safe, the Washington Post reports. But, instead, he was detained immediately upon his arrival at the airport in Damascus.
“We can sit here and think, well, why would he do such a risky thing?” Afshar said. “But, the thing is, he really felt like he had done absolutely everything he could in the West.”
After Hamada’s arrest, it’s unclear what became of him, which is not uncommon in Syria. The United Nations estimates 100,000 people went missing over the course of the 14-year war, many of them arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared.
When rebels ousted Assad this week and started opening the country’s prisons, Hamada’s loved ones hoped they might be reunited with him.
Instead, they found him dead in a military hospital, his body in a condition that suggested he had only been killed in the past week.
Chanting in the streets
On Thursday, Syrians carried his casket, draped with the Syrian flag, through the streets of Damascus.
“We will not forget your blood, Mazen,” the marchers, many of them young people, chanted outside a mosque while family and friends held funeral prayers inside.
Others chanted: “We will get our revenge, Bashar. We will bring you before the law.”
Some of the marchers knew Hamada, and some did not. Many held up black-and-white photos and shouted the names of their own missing loved ones.
Hamada’s brother, Saed, told Reuters that when Assad’s government fell, he wished Hamada would be released from prison so he could see what was happening in Syria.
But, now, he says, his brother is a martyr.
“After his martyrdom, we feel happy because we paid the price of this freedom with blood,” he said.
For some, Thursday’s rally and funeral were a symbol of hope for the war-torn country, whose future remains uncertain.
Many participants said they last protested in Damascus some 13 years ago, before Assad’s crackdown on protesters turned the conflict into a full-blown war.
“I could not have imagined going out in a rally in any way, shape or form in Damascus,” said Mohammad Kulthum, 32, as he marched in the procession with his mother.
Afshar says it would have meant the world to Hamada to see the spirit of revolution alive again in the streets of Syria.
“I wish and hope that where he’s resting in peace, he can see how they’re honouring him, and what he meant to them and to the fight and the campaign for the disappeared, and to what will come — which is the campaign for justice.”
Published at Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:29:08 +0000