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The commander persuaded an army general to provide three 152 mm howitzers with a range of 11 miles. Frodo arranged for a Ukrainian fixed-wing drone called a Leleka, or Stork, to provide live video. Frodo would be in charge of making sure they had a link.

Special-forces soldiers used chain saws to carve a path through the woods for trucks to drag the guns.

In the early hours of March 16, the trucks pulled the guns forward. Frodo went with them. In position a few miles from Zirka, he couldn’t get the Starlink powered from his car, as he’d planned, and had to call for a generator, which was rushed to his
position.

As the Leleka was approaching the target around 10 a.m., the connection suddenly appeared.

The artillery commander standing next to the drone pilots called the gunners on Signal on his cellphone and gave the order to fire, directing their aim using the picture from the drone.

A video from the craft posted later on Facebook by Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, shows the destruction. Truck after truck is blown up as the howitzers score 47 hits from 52 shots. Gen. Zaluzhniy’s video is
set to the song “Highway to Hell,” by AC/DC.

Peat Bog
------------
By the start of March, the blown bridges had halted the Russians on the Irpin River. The flooding had prevented them from crossing in the north.

Over the following days, Mr. Dmitriyev observed drone footage that showed the river spreading from a channel of some 10 yards, submerging fields and bushes and leaving trees and pylons sticking out.

But there was a stretch of a few miles where the Russians could attempt a crossing. The peat bog was absorbing water like a sponge. Another sluice gate near the village of Chervone was blocking the flow. The Ukrainians tried and failed to destroy it with
shelling.

Spotting their opening, the Russians began laying pontoon bridges. Dozens of vehicles came across through channels of water, thick woods and Ukrainian machine-gun positions.

The Ukrainian defenders, including a battalion of the 72nd Brigade and Marik’s special-forces team, withdrew to defensive positions on the edge of the village and the forest, where villagers had used a backhoe to help them dig trenches. The Russians
took control of an area filled with cottages that is on the river’s edge in front of the village, where the drone team had fired from on the first day.

Concerned by the Russians’ progress, Gen. Zaluzhniy came to the 72nd Brigade’s command post at the tennis academy in a nearby Kyiv suburb.

“You must stop them here,” Gen. Zaluzhniy told Col. Vdovychenko. “Kyiv is right behind you.”

By then, the Russians had dug trenches in a forest on the village’s northern flank and sought to thrust into central residential areas. Battles raged in the streets and forests around the village. Ukrainian forces later found the bodies of 27 Russians
that their comrades had not recovered.

Forced back into the ruins of the village ravaged by artillery strikes, the Ukrainians held firm.

“There was nowhere for us to retreat to,” said Col. Vdovychenko. “If the enemy could have created a bridgehead and regrouped its forces, it would certainly have entered Kyiv.”

But help was at hand. On March 8, sappers had returned to the dam at the mouth of the Irpin River and blown it wide open.

The fresh flow of water overwhelmed the sluice gate at Chervone and rendered the pontoon bridges largely unusable. Marik saw from surveillance drones that Russian vehicles were stranded on the bridges or washed into the river. They couldn’t get them
onto the bridges on boggy ground. With no reinforcements able to cross, never mind tanks, the Russian assault petered out.

The Irpin River, said Marik, “changed the direction of the whole war.”

‘They were like rabble’
------------------------
For the Russian troops under Col. Zakharov, who had died in the yard of a village house, things quickly went awry.

Following the battle, they rammed their vehicles through villagers’ gates and parked them in their yards.

A group returned to Mr. Bobko’s house with some Champagne looted from a foodstore and offered it to his wife as an apology for troubling her with their bloodied and dying commander a day earlier.

“We don’t need it, we have some,” she told them.

“Oh, you have some?” one soldier replied.

The next day, the soldiers returned, asking for alcohol. She gave them a bottle of Champagne and a bottle of cognac to get rid of them.

An hour later, there was a noise outside. One of the soldiers had scaled the brick wall, apparently in search of fresh supplies, and fallen asleep on top.

The occupiers had a brutal streak. They held captives, including the local Orthodox priest, in various cellars across the city. One Russian soldier killed a man and raped his wife, according to Ukrainian prosecutors.

Many of the troops were young men. They would shoot from their tanks a few times in the direction of Ukrainian positions in the morning and a few in the evening, but didn’t try to advance. Instead, they spent their time scrounging cigarettes from
locals, arguing over looted goods from stores and stealing items such as sneakers, jeans and a garden trimmer.

“They didn’t look like soldiers,” said Nataliya Landyk, a 67-year-old retiree. “They were like rabble that had just gotten out of jail.”

On the roadside near her house, the Russians dug in a few tanks and covered them with branches. They set up a dining area with beer crates for seats, polishing off bottles of beer, wine and brandy.

Vadym Horbach, the 44-year-old owner of a car-repair yard, asked one officer of around his age what he was doing there.

“I myself don’t know what I’m doing here,” the officer responded. But, he said, he was a military man and had no choice but to follow orders.

The Russians made one more halfhearted effort to advance to Brovary on March 19. As the tanks began firing at the railway bridge where Ms. Chornovol was positioned, she got off a shot that hit the first tank. The rest retreated.

Afterward, the soldiers from the 72nd Brigade and Ms. Chornovol piled into Khutorets, a cafe near the bridge where the cooks would serve them coffee, tea and potato pancakes.

The women had baked a cheese pie, but were refusing to hand it over to Ms. Chornovol’s teammates.

“It’s for the guy who took out the tank,” one of them said.

“It wasn’t a guy,” Ms. Chornovol exclaimed. “It was a gal!”

The Powerlifter
---------------
The Russian attacks in the east and west were stalled. The main remaining hope was somehow getting around Kyiv to the south and cutting off the Odessa Highway.

Around the bridge near Makariv, Cat and Greek were going on the offensive. They were outnumbered, which meant they would have to work harder.

The first target was a radio tower deep in the woods. Greek took a team there on foot, leaving a video camera at the top of the tower and setting up observation posts. He tried to leave as much evidence of his presence as possible to trick the Russians
into believing that the Ukrainian force was larger than in reality.

There were about 30 of them at that stage, while the Russians numbered hundreds.

In mid-March, Greek decided to go for the dachas where the Russians had dug in. Some were living in basements. They had taken a calf from a nearby field and slaughtered it for meat. Packages of looted food lay everywhere, as well as a few green Russian
Army ration packs.

Most of the reconnaissance for Greek’s Group was carried out by a drone pilot who would fly for hours on end sitting on a plastic garden chair with a rug over his legs. He would pause only to charge his vehicle.

Cat’s team of six would speed into position just south of the woods and have their mortar, with an accurate range of around 2 miles, ready to fire in around 15 minutes.

Cat was firing his mortar like a sniper, taking out Russian vehicles and infantry just a few dozen yards away from Greek’s advancing men.

They were moving around and firing in quick bursts, seeking to confuse and startle the enemy in a cold foreign wood.

After around six hours, the Ukrainians pulled back.

Near the end of March, the Russians suddenly launched an assault on the bridge with armored vehicles. The regular Ukrainian troops were wavering.

“Damn, Greek, send a group,” the local commander pleaded with him by phone.

They rushed there and used a machine gun to down a Russian drone, halted four tanks with missiles and called in artillery fire.

They were working round the clock.

“We wanted them to feel like they were in hell and wouldn’t get through,” said Greek. “We didn’t let them rest for a moment. We exhausted them.”

On March 29, they assaulted Russian positions with the help of paratroopers, but lost a tank and suffered casualties, and withdrew.

At night they heard a rumbling sound. The following morning, they were preparing for another assault the drone pilot came with news: “Greek, they are gone.”

Across the whole front around Kyiv, the Russians were pulling back. From Bohdanivka on the eastern flank, from Antonov Airport in the west, and from the far side of the dam in the north.

Cat arrived back from Kyiv where he had gotten his car fixed.

Greek called him and broke the news.

“The f—ers left!” Cat told his group, his voice laced with joy and bitterness. He had wanted to go finish them off.

Aftermath
------------
Marik had been back and forth across the dam and the wrecked bridge in neighboring Demydiv. He would cross at night in the freezing cold with a small team and, guided by locals, ambush Russian positions.

One evening, he had gone to rescue a family that had fled their home and had got lost in the dark on the water-sodden bank. By the time he reached them across the damaged bridge, it was past midnight and one of the children, a young girl, had lost
consciousness. He carried her across the bridge and put her in his armored vehicle, covered her in rugs and turned on the heat. Then he went back for her family.

Marik crossed the dam one more time on March 31 after the Russians retreated, pausing to await reinforcements.

He’d done his part to save Kyiv and its people as best he could. He’d acted like a surgeon with a scalpel, making small cuts to drastically change the course of the battle.

“I don’t think one person or another can say they stopped the assault on Kyiv,” he said. “Everyone did.”

Oksana Grytsenko contributed to this article. Maps by Emma Brown.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-invasion-ukraine-battle-of-kyiv-ragtag-army-11663683336

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