Fightback on the front line

Our man in Ukraine joins troops battling to repel Russian advance

- JEFF FARRELL

EVGENY peers down the barrel of a machine gun and says “f**k the Russians” before he fires at Moscow’s troops as Kyiv gears up to repel the invader from Ukraine. 

 

The 23-year-old rattles off round after round of 12.7mm thick armour-piercing bullets that explode when they hit their target.

The Kord gun’s muzzle flashes and the sound is deafening as he blasts at the Kremlin’s men on their frontline just 1km to the east.

It comes amid fierce fighting in the outskirts of Kupiansk, a city in the north eastern state of Kharkiv which borders the Russian region of Belgorod.

In villages dotted along the landscape, plumes of smoke rise into a blue sky after Moscow’s shells hit homes where locals still live.

The civilian death toll rises almost daily as the some 5,000 remaining residents in Kupiansk who refuse to flee the war are brutally killed.

The bloody fighting this week played out as Kyiv’s defiant troops gear up to drive out the invader in a much trumpeted counter-offensive. But here in Kupiansk, Russia is making slow gains as Ukrainian fighters holding the line plead for the West to send more weapons – and faster.

We are standing in a room on the third floor in a concrete carcass of a building on rural land that is a stretch of Kyiv’s zero frontline – just 50km from the border with Russia.

Evgeny, a member of the Freikorps volunteer brigade, steps back from the Kord weapon he had blasted at Moscow’s troops and the air stinks of gun powder.