Ukraine will win. What I saw in Kharkiv, Bakhmuta, Zaporozhye and Nikolaev

We are in the wagon ourselves. With us, only a small group of accompaniment - Ukrainian volunteers who go from us from Lviv. Video of the day here is a station in Kharkiv in the pastel light of this summer, which is still ongoing - also deserted. At first glance, the city belongs to the most affected from the war. He was bombarded in March, when the Russians hoped to intimidate and break it in three days.

In May, when they were blocked in the northern outskirts of the city, and they took revenge, shot all their ammunition on even more destroyed residential buildings.

And the latest shelling, from the distance of thirty kilometers to the east, where they were pushed with a counter -offensive: a broken administrative building, a kindergarten with multicolored playgrounds, where the wind shakes a single surviving swing; The electrical substation, the destruction of which will leave entire quarters and hospital without light next night. Nevertheless, the city lives. It is empty, but lives.

And even on these victims of the surrounding area, where we meet only a strange lost young woman in a camouflage jacket, with some absurd cart that sits a big baby for him (they did not leave the basement for two months), there is something like that (silence? Cheerful soldiers who in the park of attractions say that the Russians were running away weapons and things and dressed in civil), which makes it clear that the city breathes, it is free, and the nightmare will end.

*** General Alexander Sirsky is the commander of the Armed Forces and the developer of this counter -offensive in the East. We meet on the Balakliyev highway on the parking lot of one of the few open hundred. In a few minutes, everyone gets into the car under the noise of rations, which probably warn that its location has been determined and there is a risk of drilling from drones. We stop kilometers at ten further, at the edge, near the huge field, from which they have already harvested.

It looks like a young centsurion. Athletic physique, camouflage, as in the military. He speaks concisely and accurately. When he lacks information, a young officer is very similar to Lee Miller in 1944, with hair collected under the beige of the National Guard. Sometimes he closes his eyes and seems to listen to the echo of the past over the river and under the trees. Sometimes he admires his story about the Russian retreat.

He has a dazzling victorious smile and an interesting manner widely open the narrow cracks of his gray eyes, as if expressing his own surprise. He does not interview. But from his story, in the surreal -evening light, I understand two things. The striking lowness of Russian soldiers, its infamous escape, and after Balakliya, even the lack of resistance.

On the Ukrainian side, a surgery, designed and carefully planned in complete secrecy, is designed to preserve the lives of not only civilians but also soldiers. Did the Minister of Defense Alexei Reznikov, with whom we saw in Kiev the day yesterday, did not tell us among other things about the effectiveness of the French artillery installations "Caesar"? General Sirsky had at least two counter -offensive.

It is the heroes of the battle for Kyiv, organized by and performer of which he was, and seven years earlier - the heroes of the battle for Debaltseve, the Donbass city in siege, from which he managed to bring 2475 defenders who were trapped . . . *** in Lyman 20 kilometers east of Izium, in the heart of Svyatogorsk National Park, the Russians resumed their positions. But Ukrainians do not give them rest.

We are here, with them, between Raygorod and Starodubivka, in the Slavyansk district, among young forests and a broken branch, where the maze of trenches, dug in black soil, snook. We need a good hour to overcome them. In such a small period of time it is difficult to evaluate the real placement of forces. But we see a trophy artillery installation. Mortars. Armored personnel carriers hidden under trees.

Men, collected, full of strength, with black faces, in the dusted from dust, stand in groups of two to three meters with machine guns on their shoulders, with ramped ground. The passage twice breaks. We draw on a naked hill that hangs over Russian positions. In general, it is dangerous here. There are other men here. Some in wooden shacks, others in metal shelters, which at night drag from place to place, so as not to express positions, and some in the open area.

They seem to be more willing to come than to defend. These men "guard the border", so I know that in Ukraine border guards are real military. I am very interested in listening to what their commander tells, Colonel Yuri Petrov. In the depths of the shelter, sitting on the boxes with ammunition, we eat salty cucumbers and pour local alcohol in the mug. He explains that they are the elite unit of the army. There is another sign.

It is those who join the war, despite the fact that it does not like it, they go against the dogs of the war. And the truth is that calm power, initiative and confidence clearly switched to the other side. *** In Bakhmut, further south, but still on the Eastern Front, we came to Mozart. It is Andrew Milburn and his three dozen foreign volunteers, including many veterans of British special purpose units.

They assumed a noble task to look in the gray zone of civilians who disappeared and were in danger. The meeting occurs near the railway bridge, in a restaurant, where they are fed with delicious borscht and old chips. Milburn talks about the creation of a public organization. About its decision to call it "Mozart" as opposed to the Russian "Wagner" - saboteurs and hired killers. About the times when he organized very risky evacuation of Azovstal defenders in Mariupol.

About the network of contact persons who now inform him that in such a village there is a person with a disability, an elderly person or just a low-income local resident who would like to escape but has no one and cannot pay the carrier. He invites me to go with him for his operation. There is a problem here. My Ukrainian support against: people fear the inevitable actions of the enemy and consider me the target. I listen to them. Then change my opinion.

Together with Mark Russell, I try to catch up with two Mozart SUVs. But too late. They have already turned off the phones. Having passed the last Ukrainian checkpoint, we find ourselves in the heart of Bakhmut, in the middle of the silence of a deserted city, before the railway crossing is the only named Milber's landmark, which we remembered. In half an hour there is an explosion. Then another. And yet. My Ukrainian satellites were right. Mozart is trying to destroy.

Three killer drones have just been targeted at Mozart's humanitarian mission and not hit. These are they, the Russians in Bakhmut. They lost in a fair battle and gather on peaceful unarmed volunteers, who, risking their own lives, came to save the most disadvantaged. What a shame! *** We saw Zaporozhye, numb from Putin's blackmail, who placed his artillery and troops in the middle of the nuclear power plant. We spent the night in Kryvyi Rih.

A few hours after our departure, the fire of the dam caused the flood in the Lyubov Adamenko area and deprived part of the city of electricity. Hence the strategic importance in this battle for energy, deployed in all directions by Putin's state terrorist, Donbass coal mines, and now the Pavlograd mines, where we are going to come. Here the front line runs at a depth of 245 meters underground.

We descend there in a tight metal elevator mine, which rises and quickly sinks into the bowels of the earth. Then the trolleys bring you three kilometers to the end of the dimly lit gallery, which is kept steel vaults and rusty metal nets. There's a mining area with side openings, a maximum of a meter high where you need to climb crustaceans, even lie down on the stomach and crawl to see the miners in the dust -soaked air beat the vein with pneumatic hammers . . .

Even if safety standards are optimal, in case A possible explosion of methane with a short circuit of ventilation systems, blocking of water pipes that open in the fire, and stopping the conveyor tape, which ensures the evacuation of precious brown gold. We cannot but be afraid of a stroke that breaks the system that provides a rise to the surface.

Therefore, people with black faces are baptized as if they were going to the front, in front of wooden gilded icons at the entrance to the first level. In four hours on the way back, we sing the anthem of Ukraine before returning to the fresh air. The battle for coal in France in 1945 completed the resistance epic. Here, in Ukraine, miners are epic heroes on the first line in a war that unfolds on earth and underground.

*** In every expedition, even the hardest, there are moments of unexpected but strong joy. This time it happened south of Zaporozhye, on the front, along with a wonderful bad guy, whom I called "why Ukraine" in my movie "why Ukraine". He tells us three good news. The first is that we left him in June in Guliaypol, at the homeland of anarchist Makhn. And now he is much further, and although I am forbidden to report his location, I can say that he has advanced a few tens of kilometers.

Second: he was moving with minimal losses - and we meet the same people, except changed by victory - ruined craftsmen for working with skin, fishermen and traders, who are more than ever set up to return Mariupol and Crimea.

And most importantly, he kept a surprise for us: remembering the long evenings when Gilly Duke told him to the people of the free France, he learned from the high command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which his 197th battalion of the A7363 brigade was renamed the battalion of Charles de Gaulle. The ceremony occurs around the pot, served in a wet rural comfort of its bivac headquarters, on the hood of the SUV.

Together with our friend and satellite in this adventure, Serge Osipenko, they made a large blue-white-red flag, exactly the same size as Ukrainian. The wall of men unfolds two standards nearby, as if the only flag. Ukrainians and French, we sing our national anthems in unison. Only one overshadows our joy. We are shown to be shot down in the southern direction of the drone. It is a large white bird from which the visceras fall out.

Looking carefully, we find electronic components by the inscriptions: "Made in France" . . . *** Military secret obliges: I promised not to reveal the location of Ukrainian forces around the southeastern port of Kherson, which was the only regional capital at the beginning of the war Putin.

I will only say that we, from Bereznegvyaty to turnout, white star and Kiselivka, are crossed by broken roads, where the pendants of our cars at every pothole almost break, the tactical arc that is now surrounded by the city. We saw a lot of mortars in thickets. BRM-1K armored vehicles from the Soviet era, as well as the reactive system of the Hurricane volley fire between the two villages.

We saw the SU plane that the peasants flew over his head and hit the ammunition in Kherson, and returned a few minutes later, flying very low, without receiving the enemy's answer. We talked to the local residents who bombed the bridge over the Ingulets River in Berezneguztok, came to the rouletted button blocks to measure the depth of the carts and evaluate the extent of destruction.

In the trench of the second echelon, we listened to the sergeant Andrei Lusenko, who was an actor at the Mariupol Theater, where so many of his comrades were killed under rockets, and a soldier Sergiy Sergienko, who proudly wears a poet icon on his jacket and put a hymn of his battalion. In short, people with weapons. Weapons are still not enough, but it will soon be enough for strategic parity declared in the summer of Zelensky.

And the grip, compressing around the occupying army, cut off from the rear and exhausted. Tolstoy argued that in the war it is impossible to completely surround the army. Well, Tolstoy was wrong and proof in Kherson. *** In Nikolaev, further west, on the way to Odessa, the situation was less clear. The Black Sea rocket struck the old factory last night, which was given under the workshops and small shops before the war.

Fortunately, the other was beaten a few hours, at dawn, over the school in the administrative district, where the school year began.

The head of the Nikolaev regional administration, Vitaliy Kim, who, together with the president of Zelensky and mayor of Kiev Vitaliy Klitschko, is one of the most popular personalities, explains to us by passing along fresh ruins and former boulevard Lakes and reservoirs were at the beginning of the war by the enemy of Russian malefactors, but now it is difficult to go into counter -offensive for the same reasons.

" But between the beginning and the present is the difference that changes everything. Missiles can fall as much as you like. Some alarm signals do not have time to silence. Sirens are shot daily, reporting that the threat is maximal and you need to hide immediately. Residents are no longer afraid. They no longer listen to sirens or speakers.

And on the Maidan, squeezed with trees and amazingly southern, where we stopped on the terrace of Sushi-Bar, the elderly gentlemen continue to play chess as if nothing had happened, and the elderly ladies gathered to warm up in the sun, swollen from standing in the queues for humanitarian queues by helping. Teens are flirting, and the Hero of Ukraine, which we interview, tells us about our feats. Only dogs lose their heads, run between trees and scary.

*** It was in Odessa that six months ago I plunged into this new Ukrainian war. And it is in Odessa that there is a temporary solution! After all, in fact, it is all. Then the city of Babel and Pushkin was siege. She did not know whether he would turn into Teuulel or Gernik, whether he would live or die. An experienced traveler could predict that Putin would "not dare" to turn the most European city of Ukraine into another Mariupol. Now Odesa is breathing. Odesa is revived.

As in Nikolaev, the old cafe on the Deribasivska began to open again. And if the bronze statue of the French governor of the city, the Duke Richelieu, is still buried under the mountain of white jute bags with sand, the walls that were intercepted by the Potemkin Stairs and the port fell. We sit on one of the patrol ships of the Ukrainian Military Fleet. It is thirty meters long and carries a 30mm artillery system. His mission is observation and interception.

It is responsible for the careful check of the sea in search of the smallest signs of hostile presence. And here is the ship on April 13, probably calculated the coordinates for shelling, which allowed the cruising missile to flood the Russian flagship "Moscow" and, thus, to reach one of the first military exploits of Ukraine. Today - no suspicious movements. No hostile ship, tells me a crew, at least on the island of Snake.

And if this Ukrainian army was attacked six months ago on earth, in the air and in the sea, it is necessary to take into account the fact: it closed the sky above Kiev, began to restore the lands lost in the Donbass, and in Odessa, it seems, again became the queen of the seas. I'm not saying the game is completed. Putin, like all dictators in hopelessness, can put everything on the map to avoid defeat, surrender and international tribunals. But this is the law.