As Ukraine Prepares Its Offensive, Russian Troops Begin Looting In Southern Region

The forced evacuations of civilians and the looting of homes and businesses is reminiscent of Russian troop behavior when they faced coming Ukrainian offensives last year, especially around Kherson. 

While Zaporizhzhia is not definitely the target, it is the most strategically logical. JL  

Yaroslav Trofimov reports in the Wall Street Journal, image AFP:

Kyiv is preparing three army corps of freshly trained troops, equipping some of them with newly provided Western tanks and fighting vehicles, for the spring offensive. Ousting Russia from the coastal areas of the Zaporizhzhia region and cutting off Moscow’s “land bridge” to the Crimean Peninsula is one of Ukraine’s most important objectives. Doing so would restore Ukraine’s access to the Azov Sea and make it harder for Russia to keep resupplying its troops in Crimea. In recent weeks, Russian forces started stripping and carting away the possessions of many Ukrainians living under occupation in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Only three people remain in a nine-story block of 146 apartments in this front-line city of southern Ukraine. For the past several months, they have been living in a basement, using a small generator because daily Russian shelling has long disrupted electric supplies to Orikhiv.

Despite all that, Vitaliy Pilyay, one of the basement’s three dwellers, was in a good mood on a recent day. Ukrainian forces are preparing a counteroffensive, possibly aiming to oust Russia from this part of the country, and he said he was confident that the end of Orikhiv’s yearlong ordeal is near.

“We have survived the winter, and that is already a victory,” said Mr. Pilyay, whose balcony has been partly destroyed by Russian shells. “Soon, our troops will start moving forward, everything will be great, and I could live in my own apartment once again.”

Few cities in Ukraine have suffered from the daily Russian barrages as much as Orikhiv, in the Zaporizhzhia region, which President Vladimir Putin declared to be part of Russia last fall despite not controlling its capital and many other towns. While the front line has moved forward or backward in other parts of Ukraine over the past year, it has hardly budged from the southern outskirts of Orikhiv since Russian forces appeared there in March 2022.

 

Russian attempts at an offensive near Orikhiv in January ended in failure, and a Ukrainian probe in recent weeks has also resulted in losses without much territorial gain. Kyiv is preparing three army corps of freshly trained troops, equipping some of them with newly provided Western tanks and fighting vehicles, for the spring offensive that Ukrainian officials say will be launched in the coming weeks.

Ousting Russia from the coastal areas of the Zaporizhzhia region south of Orikhiv and cutting off Moscow’s “land bridge” to the Crimean Peninsula is one of Ukraine’s most important objectives. Doing so would restore Ukraine’s access to the Azov Sea and make it much harder for Russia to keep resupplying its troops in Crimea.

Russia has bolstered its defenses in Zaporizhzhia with systems of fortifications manned by tens of thousands of troops, many of them freshly mobilized by Mr. Putin last fall. In recent weeks, these Russian forces started stripping and carting away the possessions of many Ukrainians living under occupation, said Serhiy Andrushchenko, chief of Ukraine’s national police for the district that includes Orikhiv and the nearby Russian-held city of Polohy.

“These days, the Russians loot everything. They come into homes and leave just empty walls behind. All the equipment of the farmers, of the entrepreneurs, it’s gone,” he said. “We hope that they are stealing like this now because they are planning to go.”

As Vadym Medvid, one of a handful of policemen who have stayed in Orikhiv, drove around the city on a recent day, he ignored the loud bangs of outgoing Ukrainian artillery fire but rushed to shelter once Russian multiple-launch rocket systems began to respond. This time, th. e Russian rockets hit far away.

The damage from previous strikes is everywhere. Mr. Medvid gestured at a school, a newly built swimming pool and a hospital that had all been destroyed.

“All gone now,” said Mr. Medvid, whose own house no longer had a roof. “Will there even be a sense to rebuild it all? Who will return here? What is the point?”

Though most homes in Orikhiv have been abandoned, often with their windows blown out, looting hasn’t been a serious problem, Mr. Medvid said.

Instead of law enforcement, the main task of the Orikhiv police force has been to distribute humanitarian aid that allows the remaining residents to survive—and, in the absence of ambulance services so close to the front line, to transport the wounded to the nearest hospital out of the reach of Russian artillery. Russian shelling injures or kills someone in Orikhiv almost every day, he said.

Adjusting to this deadly reality, Orikhiv mostly lives underground. In recent weeks, an entire mini-town has been built by volunteers in the warren-like basement of one of the local schools, complete with generators, a newly drilled well that provides piped water, laundromats, showers, a Starlink-powered internet center, a children’s cinema and dining facilities. A flat-screen TV on the wall provides news on the course of the war.

 

In one of the classrooms, the blackboard still has the homework from Feb. 23, 2022, the last day of peace: an elementary school essay on the topic “Daddy bought Olha ice-skates.”

On a recent day, Tetyana Khlystova was leaving the laundromat, which is free for the remaining residents, with two large bundles of freshly washed clothes, one for herself and one for her 91-year-old mother.

“We have no water, no power, no gas at home—nothing,” Ms. Khlystova sighed. “I don’t have any strength to live like that anymore and would have left long ago. But mama, she doesn’t want to go anywhere.”

“Humans are creatures that get used to everything,” said Vitaliy Serdiuk, who has been living in an Orikhiv basement for months, after sending his elderly parents to the relative safety of the city of Zaporizhzhia. “When my parents come here for a few hours once in a while, they cry and don’t want to leave again. I have to force them,” he added. “Home is home.”

While Orikhiv’s mayor has left, too, urging the remaining residents to evacuate, his deputy and scores of other municipality workers have chosen to stay behind, hoping for an imminent Ukrainian military success.

“Of course we are optimistic. Otherwise, why would we still be here?” said Orikhiv municipality worker Tetyana Karnaushenko, whose duties now also involve taking care of scores of pets left behind by residents who had escaped to safety, or had been killed.

Ms. Karnaushenko said she had been separated from her mother, who lives roughly 10 miles away on the Russian side of the front line, for more than a year. “I am very much looking forward to our offensive that will push the Russians away,” she said. “I want to see my mama again. I would be the first one sitting on a tank if I could.”