By Max Hunder
VOLYN REGION, Ukraine (Portal) – Burst riverbanks, thick mud and wet fields could be seen for miles around northwest Ukraine’s border with Belarus on Thursday, making the prospect of a Russian attack from across the border unlikely for the time being, despite recent warnings from Kyiv.
Ukrainian officials have warned of a new imminent Russian attack, naming Belarus to the north as a possible launch pad while Moscow tries to revive its faltering invasion.
Russia and its close ally Belarus have strengthened their joint military formation in Belarus and plan to hold joint aviation exercises there starting next Monday.
Against this backdrop, the dense forests and treacherous swamps of the borderlands are guarded by the Volyn Territorial Defense Brigade, one of hundreds of Ukrainian units recruited from locals willing to defend their communities.
On the fringes of training exercises several kilometers south of the Russian border, soldiers and officers from the unit told Portal how the unusually mild winter had given them a significant tactical advantage.
“On your own land, everything helps you to defend it – the landscape, many rivers that burst their banks this year,” said Viktor Rokun, one of the brigade’s deputy commanders. The fields and trees around him were bathed in murky pools of cold water.
Unit spokesman Serhiy Khominskyi said help in making the site impassable also came from an unlikely ally: the local beaver population.
“Usually when they build their dams people destroy them, but this year they didn’t do that because of the war, so now there’s water everywhere,” he said.
“GATHER STRENGTH”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned on Tuesday that Russia was gathering “forces for a further escalation” of the almost 11-month war between the two countries.
Ukraine’s top general warned in December that one of the possible directions of a new attack could be Belarus, where the Ukrainian military estimates the presence of 15,000 Russian troops, while military analysts put the number at 10,000 to 12,000.
The story goes on
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko allowed Moscow to use his country as one of the launch pads for the invasion of Ukraine last February, when Russian forces were repulsed in an attempt to take the capital, Kyiv.
Across the border on Thursday, the deputy commander of what Moscow is calling its “special military operation” inspected Russian forces in Belarus. On the Ukrainian side, the Volyn Brigade was busy practicing internal combat and came under artillery fire.
Analyst Konrad Muzyka, who runs defense consulting firm Rochan Consulting, told Portal that although a Russian troop surge in Belarus could be seen, an attack into north-western Ukraine from Belarus would encounter enormous difficulties.
“It’s a terrible place to conduct an offensive operation. There are many watercourses there, very few roads,” he said.
“This makes it easy for Ukrainian forces to direct the movement of Russian forces to specific areas where they would be hit by artillery.”
(Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Tom Balmforth)