A few kilometers from the front line in Pokrovsk (eastern Ukraine), holed up in a house, a few Ukrainian soldiers scan the area they have just left on eighteen control screens. In the fields pockmarked with shell holes, here and there, carcasses of cars, motorcycles and the bodies of Russian soldiers appear.
These soldiers, who returned the previous evening from the trenches where they fought for more than ten days, belong to the 38th Marine Infantry Brigade. The 2,000 “porpoises” (marine infantry soldiers) of this unit joined the Donbass front two months ago to relieve exhausted units ready to give up because the Russian pressure was so intense.
« The brigades before us were exhausted”,
explains their captain, code name Prophet.
They suffered daily attacks, sometimes ten per day,
he said, smoothing his long beard. We stabilized the front…
