Courageous Ukrainian Special Forces Push Back Russia In Heroic Fight

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Ukrainian military personnel have continued holding off Russian armed forces from overtaking the Ukrainian capital city, Kyiv, amid Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine — which he insists is unfolding according to his regime’s ambitions, despite claims from Ukraine of thousands and thousands of dead Russian soldiers. Western officials have tentatively backed up these Ukrainian claims of steep Russian casualties. As a report published Friday in The Wall Street Journal explained, referring to a location called Irpin: “Every day for the past week, Russian forces have tried to fight their way through this suburb of Kyiv to reach the Ukrainian capital. And every day, Ukrainian troops have forced them to retreat, leaving burning tanks and armored personnel carriers behind.”

A leader in the Ukrainian special forces named Volodymyr told the Journal, “We go out to hunt and destroy them… They certainly didn’t come here expecting that, expecting that we know how to fight.” The Irpin-area front lines in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have “largely held fast” as the devastating war has progressed, the Journal explains. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told the outlet that “Ukraine is fighting in a way nobody expected, not the Russians and not our Western partners… Kyiv was supposed to have fallen in three days.” On the Ukrainian side, authorities have “deployed elite special-forces units, trained by the U.S. and allies over the past several years, to defend Kyiv,” the Journal says, and these units’ arsenals include anti-tank weapons originating in the United States, where Biden’s administration recently outlined hundreds of millions of dollars worth of additional military aid for Ukraine.

Separately, Ukrainian forces have been striking a large Russian military convoy that’s been on the path to Kyiv and has been observed to have stalled. On Thursday, journalist Natasha Betrand said that a top U.S. official relayed that United States authorities “still assess that the convoy that everybody’s been focused on is stalled,” adding that U.S. officials “have no reason to doubt Ukrainian claims that they have contributed to it being stalled by attacking it.” Russian military personnel have been targeting Kyiv and other high-profile cities in Ukraine since the conflict began, and thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed amid the conflict, according to authorities in the war-torn country — although obviously, exact numbers are difficult to pin down at this point in time. Over 1.2 million Ukrainians have fled the country as refugees since the war began, and that number was set to continue rising.

Per the Journal, Russians have employed “long convoys that are vulnerable to strikes by small reconnaissance units and by Ukraine’s fleet of Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, Ukrainian officers said.” Although obviously in a substantially different form, Russian aggression has also been turned against the people of Putin’s own country. There have been thousands of arrests of anti-war demonstrators in Russia, and the Putin regime has blocked access to Facebook in the country, further isolating their population amid government violence.