Near Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine: A large series of explosions this week at an airbase in Crimea sent shock waves past the Russian-occupied peninsula off Ukraine’s southern Black Sea coast. New satellite photographs appear to show deep craters and scorched earth, and the Ukrainian government has not disputed claims that its forces destroyed at least nine Russian fighter jets in an attack.
The massive explosions surprised the bathers, who were relaxing more than a hundred miles from the front line closest to the war, rushing to safety.
It was a “deep attack” on Russian lines for Ukrainian forces, said Hal Kempfer, a retired U. S. Marine Corps intelligence officer. In the U. S. , to CBS News.
“Frankly, it’s turning the front at each and every level,” he told CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata. Gains through Kherson Oblast, could push all the way down that southern flank. “
The attack on the air base provoked a swift and brutal reaction from Russia. Vladimir Putin’s forces responded with bombings and missile attacks on towns and villages in southern Ukraine. In one of them, D’Agata met with local commander Roman Kulyk, proudly wearing an American flag on his Ukrainian uniform.
He told CBS News that he and his troops were in a “catastrophic situation” facing the front line near the southern port city of Mykolaiv, facing a Russian attack and running out of weapons.
Then came U. S. shell artillery and said they helped save the lives of their soldiers.
The fighting along the battered front line in southern Ukraine has been brutal, shoving for weeks.
A playground in the village shows the scars of fighting in the virtually deserted village, trapped in a no man’s land between the farthest point that the Russian invaders controlled to succeed and the Ukrainian forces, who decided to keep the territory.
Anna Shepel, 76, one of the few citizens of the village when D’Agata and his team arrived. After evacuating in the early days of the fighting, he relocated his nearly destroyed home, with windows damaged and walls dotted with shrapnel. .
“I think I’m going to have a stroke,” he told CBS News of the moment he returned home in such a desperate state. “I was paralyzed. ” She told D’Agata that other people had replaced their windows 3 times since their return, but that they were still being blown up by Russian bombing.
“I need the Russians to feel what I felt at that moment, every minute, every hour,” he said.
As Ukrainian forces prepare for a major counterattack in the south in an attempt to retake the occupied Kherson region, it is possible that momentum is on their side. preparing for what they know is an exhausting war ahead.
Like thousands of other Ukrainians who feel they have nowhere to go or who categorically refuse to be uprooted by the Russian invasion, Anna Shepel told CBS News she intends to get back to where she was.