Between Sunday night and Monday morning, four state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles landed within meters of the apartment building he calls home in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. Nau said there is a sense of joy in the streets now that more towns and villages have withdrawn from the iron grip of the Russian military – tempered by a heavy sense of dread as the two soldiers exchange blows. “It’s like we’re winning the war right now and it’s like Russia is collapsing under her leadership,” Nau told CBC News in an interview from Zaporizhzhia. “But man, we almost got killed last night. Four hypersonic missiles launched and they have, like, 200 pounds or some crazy payload [warhead]. And they landed 25 or 50 meters from our apartment. I felt like the building was going to come right down from the shock wave.” A firefighter works to put out a fire after a Russian attack damaged a police building in Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Monday. (Leo Correa/The Associated Press) Civilian infrastructure up and down the front line in Ukraine was pulverized by Russian strikes on Monday as the country’s president, Volodomyr Zelenskyy, renewed his call for Western nations to label Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. “Complete power outage in Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, DPR [Russian Federation] terrorists remain terrorists and attack critical infrastructure. Without military installations, the goal is to deprive people of light and heat,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter. The missile strike wasn’t the only time in recent days that Nau — a Hero Society volunteer — cheated death. He said he and his team were delivering food to villages surrounding the strategic town of Izyum, located on the Donets River in Kharkiv province, as it was retaken by Russian forces. As they left the nearby city of Kharkiv, the country’s second largest, the Ukrainian counteroffensive was just beginning, he said — and all they could hear as they traveled the highway to Izyum was “bomb after bomb after bomb.” At a bomb-damaged bridge, he said, he and his team (which includes American volunteers) helped escort 600 evacuees from nearby towns and villages to safety. “So one side behind us, 100 meters [away]it is the Ukrainian checkpoint and 100 meters ahead of us is the Russian checkpoint,” he said. “They just watched us carry all these people over this bridge.” Nau said his team was determined to push towards Izyum because, with summer coming to an end, people in the area can no longer rely on their gardens for food. When the team approached the village of Petrivs’ke west of Izyum, he said, he realized they were “deep, deep, deep in no man’s land” because they saw no Ukrainian military units in the area. “And it’s not even just long-range artillery. It’s not just rockets. They can throw mortars at you here,” Nau said.
“We’d be dead there”
He said they delivered their food to a location as quickly as they could, took pictures for verification purposes and drove to the next nearby location. Moments after they left, the area where their vehicle was parked was hit by mortars. To get out of the area, he said, they had to go back the same way “through the smoke and the smell of gunpowder from where we were five minutes earlier.” “If we hadn’t left five minutes earlier, we’d be dead there,” he added. “Well, it was pretty wild.” The Ukrainian army has recaptured more than 2,800 square kilometers of territory in the country’s northeast, and a military spokesman said on Monday that another 500 square kilometers had been retaken in the south since the counteroffensive began. A Ukrainian soldier plays with a dog as he rests on liberated ground in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region on Monday. (Kostiantyn Liberov/The Associated Press) “We can say today that our success during the last two weeks has been quite significant,” said Natalya Humenuk, who represents the southern command of the Ukrainian military. “In various sections we have advanced by (between) four and several tens of kilometers.” That progress comes at a high cost, said volunteer Sophia Brendun, the Ukrainian director of the Society of Heroes. The Canadian charity delivers food and medical supplies to frontline communities and hospitals. “From my point of view it’s important and I’m really happy,” said Bredun, who joined Nau in the deliveries near Izyum. “We have our lands back, but I always keep in mind the price we pay for it. The price of lives, of our soldiers, of our citizens.” Dominique Arel, chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa, said the loss of Izyum is significant for the Russians because it was a critical logistics hub for them — a beacon for their operations in both the northeast and eastern parts of Donbas.
“They just fought and that’s amazing”
The collapse of the front, he said, was breathtaking. “They didn’t retreat in an orderly fashion. It’s a mess,” Arel said. “It’s a race and they barely wrestled and that’s amazing. I mean, the front collapsing is really important.” The war is far from over, he added, but the momentum seems to have turned in favor of the Ukrainians. The success of the counteroffensive so far could also serve as an important psychological boost on the geopolitical front, proving to an increasingly skeptical and economically challenged Europe that support for Ukraine is working. “Well, the argument was the more we arm the Ukrainians, the longer the war will continue,” Arel said. “Well, now there’s a strong counterargument that was already there. But now, there is certainly much more empirical evidence that it is the other way around. “The sooner we get all these weapons, the sooner the war will be over, because we can win [the] demoralized, disorganized and corrupt Russian army.”
