Ukraine’s bog warriors brave swamps, stench and Russian drones

In Kherson locals speak, with a biblical sense of time, of “before” and “after” the flood. When the Kakhovka dam exploded on June 6th, the area around the mouth of the Dnieper river near the city of Kherson, 58km (36 miles) downstream, was inundated. In some places the water rose six metres high, sweeping away houses and causing toxic oil leaks. “The landscape has changed,” a fisherman told me. “Where there were docks, there are now beaches. Where we used to catch fish in the reeds, there are piles of sand.”

The front line runs down the river. It’s a “no-man’s-land, the Berlin Wall”, one soldier said. Russian and Ukrainian reconnaissance teams had been playing a game of cat and mouse among the dozens of islands in this area ever since Ukraine retook Kherson in November 2022. Control of the islands could help the Ukrainians establish footholds on the Russian-controlled east bank, threatening Crimea and forcing the Russians to reinforce the sector with troops from elsewhere along the front. The marshy terrain presents a formidable obstacle before the Ukrainian fighters even reach the Russian defences.

“We keep our armoured vests unzipped and our boots unlaced, so that we can take them off quickly. Even being a good swimmer is not going to save you if you go into the water”

The burst dam caused a strange pause in hostilities, but the fighting quickly resumed. Beaver – Ukrainian soldiers go by military nicknames for security reasons – led the first Ukrainian team back onto one of the larger islands in a five-day operation in late June. He is baby-faced, wears glasses and smiles easily. He comes from a village near Crimea now under Russian occupation, where his mother still lives.

The four men on this team traversed the river in a dinghy at midnight, carrying all the supplies they needed. The crossing takes around ten minutes. During this time, the team are at their most vulnerable.

On his first mission, Beaver told me laughing, he had lost contact with two of his men during a march at night. He only found them later because one of them was snoring so loudly

“It’s dangerous to be on a boat,” Musician, a drone operator, told me. His red beard and earring give him a piratical look, though he has a kindly demeanour. “We keep our armoured vests unzipped and our boots unlaced, so that we can take them off quickly. Even being a good swimmer is not going to save you if you go into the water.” Among the dangers are river mines, canisters of explosives tethered to the river bottom that float just below the surface. Many were torn up and drifted loose during the flood.

As the boat left the Ukrainian side, Beaver could hear the whomps of the nightly artillery duel. On the river, the smell of the flood’s aftermath soon became unbearable – “swamp, rotting, raw sewage”. The men listened for the sound of Russian drones, which can observe them with night-vision sights. At the island’s edge, they disembarked quickly to prevent themselves from being spotted. The wooden jetties had all been washed away, so they waded ashore, hoisting their rifles and kit above their heads. In the dark they found an abandoned house to use as a base.

On the first morning of his mission, Beaver looked out over the desolation the flood had wrought. He showed me a video clip on his phone: warped wooden houses silted up to their windowsills, torn corrugated-metal roofing, half-buried wooden steps, tree branches, flotsam and debris strewn over a mudscape.

First his team had to find shelter and look for possible observation positions. Then they planned to deploy an anti-drone rifle that emits radio waves to block the connection between an enemy drone and its operator. It was Beaver’s first outing with the device. Musician explained to me that they can “capture” the drone by making it hover in the air so that it doesn’t respond to the operator’s command. Sometimes they whizz the intercepted drone up and down, so that the battery drains and it crashes.

“I know these places, but the flood made it impossible to orient myself. Where there was a tree now there is no tree. Where there was a house, now there is no house”

After a day or so, Beaver said, his men got used to the stench. Much of the delta’s rich wildlife – lizards and mice, snakes and hedgehogs – had been swept away by the flood, but some creatures appeared to be flourishing. There were turtles everywhere. “And the mosquitoes were rampant, it was pretty hard to sleep,” said Beaver. A solitary dog had been left behind and they listened out for its barking, using it as an alarm to warn of anyone approaching. One night Beaver heard a Russian team around 100 metres away through his amplifying headphones and caught the blink of a red LED in his night-vision scope. He called in an artillery strike on their position and didn’t bother checking how many had been killed.

Apart from the thudding artillery, the city of Kherson is quiet. The pre-war population of nearly 300,000 has been reduced to around 50,000. Many shops and businesses are boarded up; shattered buildings are dotted throughout the city like broken teeth. Weeds have grown waist-high along the pavements and the playgrounds stand empty.

The banks of the mighty Dnieper lie out of bounds. The streets leading down the hill towards it are exposed to Russian positions on the other side. Here, as it reaches the Black Sea, the river forms a delta, carved with channels and rivulets, and fans out several kilometres wide. Sand-bar islands are clustered with dachas and surrounded by marshland.

The battle for the river is slow and painstaking, fought by small reconnaissance teams nipping around after dark in inflatable rubber boats, flushing out Russians. The hum of drones mixes with the chug of unseen motors and the tormenting buzz of mosquitoes.

They planned to deploy an anti-drone rifle that emits radio waves to block the connection between an enemy drone and its operator

Beaver has been fighting in the delta since February, as the Ukrainians have endeavoured to dislodge the Russians from the islands, from where they can fire mortars into Kherson. During the winter, the fighters would have to break the ice with their paddles. The paths through hamlets and swampland were treacherous: one wrong step and you could sink into a bog or tread on a mine. Ukrainian reconnaissance teams would frequently run into their Russian counterparts. They advanced slowly, just 100 metres at a time.

Before the flood, the Ukrainians had slowly been driving the Russians off the islands. Beaver fought in Donbas in eastern Ukraine before the full-scale invasion in 2022 and was awarded a medal for his leadership in the fight for the Dnieper delta. But he could tell the Russians were learning from their adversaries how to drop grenades from drones and jam signals, as well as devising methods of their own. One Russian tactic was to transport a motorbike on a boat, then zip across an island on it, firing off a few rounds before zipping back again. “It was a pretty smart idea,” he said.

Beaver told me that “80% of our unit’s success and chance of survival depends on my team listening to me. If I say ‘don’t breathe’ they should not breathe. If I say ‘get down’ they should get down. We can’t smoke. We can’t light a fire. We keep our movements minimal.” Snoring causes big problems and some of the men keep watch over the others while they sleep to hush them if they get too noisy. On his first mission, Beaver told me laughing, he had lost contact with two of his men during a march at night. He only found them later because one of them was snoring so loudly.

The main danger the Ukrainians face is from Russian drones. “Their number-one target is to take out [Ukrainian] drone teams, to blind us,” said Musician. The Russian drones fly back and forth in relays, searching for signs of life: flattened plants, a door or a gate that was closed but is now open, or one that was open, now closed. If they don’t see any activity, the drones drop grenades indiscriminately onto houses to make a hole in the roof, and follow up with an incendiary charge, hovering to detect any soldiers that run out. One Ukrainian soldier described waiting inside a burning house while a Russian drone buzzed up and down, peering through the windows, as he and his team crouched in a hole they had dug under the floorboards.

Beaver was on one of the larger islands on the night that the Russians blew up the dam. Three hours before the explosion, his team was ordered to withdraw. “We drove out...wondering why we had been pulled back early,” he said. (They still don’t know whether it was by accident or design.) After the flood, soldiers and civilians went out on boats, criss-crossing the river to pick up the stranded. Only a handful of civilians were still living on the contested islands; some, it seems from several reports I heard, came under Russian fire when they tried to evacuate. Beaver told me that a few people in the villages on the east bank didn’t want to be evacuated to the Ukrainian side and waved them away. During one evacuation mission, two Ukrainian soldiers drowned when their outboard motor stalled in the heavy current.

The Ukrainian-held bank is an escarpment and most of Kherson sits on higher ground. Only a few areas were flooded. But the low-lying Russian-held bank was badly affected. Beaver told me he saw drone footage of Russian soldiers up to their chests in water holding their rifles above their heads. Later, when the waters subsided, videos appeared of drowned men.

The Russian drones fly back and forth in relays, searching for signs of life: flattened plants, a door or a gate that was closed but is now open, or one that was open, now closed

The soldiers had to learn their bearings again on a transformed battlefield. “At the beginning of the flood, I could not find my way through the air, there was no point of reference that I recognised, Musician said. “I know these places, but the flood made it impossible to orient myself. Where there was a tree now there is no tree. Where there was a house, now there is no house.”

Oleshky, the village on the eastern bank where Musician is from, was almost completely submerged. He flew his drone over the house he had grown up in – now empty – and his throat closed up. The black high-water mark was over a metre up the walls. There was so much oil in the water that it formed a kind of jellied carpet over the garden. In the aftermath of the flood, the Russians began to move back. “They are trying to dig new positions,” he said, before showing me drone footage of him dropping a grenade through a roof. “We are not letting them.”

It is difficult to see how the Ukrainians can make significant advances while they remain entirely reliant on small rubber boats for transport and supply, and have no way of driving heavy armour or artillery through the swamp. The Russians have planted new mines to replace the ones that floated away. The Ukrainians try to clear them with underwater drones. The crump and crunch of artillery does not give an accurate indication of who is winning the river battle. I received different assessments depending on which soldier I asked. “There’s a lot I can’t say,” said Beaver and smiled, in that strangely optimistic way Ukrainian soldiers are given to. They feel they will win but they also know it’s taking too long.

“I have so many emotions and feelings,” said Beaver, looking tired after another long night. “I try not to show them.” His mother, living under occupation, told him she had planted potatoes but there were too many for her to harvest them alone. “I want to be there to help her,” he said. ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here

IMAGES: Redux / Eyevine, Getty, AP