“I don’t want to make it sound like we were thrown to the slaughter. We could have opened a second front and changed the course of the war, as it was the case with the Normandy landings. But the situation became more complicated after the first week, which led to huge losses. Neither the weather conditions nor the geography favoured us,” Monakh, a marine.
“I saw people who were heroes,” Hans, 35th Marine Brigade.
One of the least publicised operations by the Ukrainian Armed Forces ended in July 2024: the landing of the defence forces on the left (east) bank of Kherson Oblast.
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Ukrainska Pravda found out about it about a week before it began, at the end of September 2023, and since then has regularly tried to put together, if not all, then at least a significant part of the puzzle of this operation.
The Ukrainska Pravda team was concerned about two key questions: what was the goal and was it worthwhile carrying out this risky operation?
However, it was not easy to find answers. Experienced officers whom we had previously met at the front refused to comment.
The first Ukrainska Pravda source, a wounded marine who introduced himself as Monakh (Monk), was so concerned about the privacy of the conversation that he contacted the team from different numbers almost every time before the meeting.
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Access to Kherson Oblast, where the operation took place, was consistently denied to journalists.
It was only after Ukrainian troops finally withdrew from the left bank this summer that we were able to speak to soldiers, officers, brigade commanders, council members, volunteers and others who were aware of the operation.
To put this story together, Ukrainska Pravda conducted about 20 long and detailed conversations.
In this article, we recall the role the UK played in the preparations for the operation to land marines on the left bank. We look back at the initial and modified tasks set for the military, and why they failed to achieve them. This article also recounts the story about the Ukrainian marines who sincerely believed in the success of the landing and risked their lives for it.
As is the case with every military operation, its history is written in the words of the survivors.
We decided to tell this story for three reasons.
Firstly, to draw attention to this difficult and silenced topic.
Secondly, to emphasise the complexity of the conditions under…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Ukrainska Pravda…