For a handful of Ukrainian gunners, camped under a stand of trees not far from Russian lines, the day goes by next to a BM-21 Grad rocket launcher awaiting orders to fire.
The Soviet-made device is the 1960s version of “Stalin’s organs,” a fearsome World War II-era weapon that terrorized Nazi German soldiers. Its 40 tubes can fire 122mm rockets that can hit targets up to 20 kilometers (12 miles). a way.
Far behind them, Ukrainian guns are shelling the Russian positions from above.
The latter respond in a relentless artillery duel along the front line.
Maksym, a bearded man in his 30s, wore his hat backwards and told AFP the day had been “hectic”.
“This morning they (the Russians) shot at us, not far away. We had to go into the bunkers.
The coffee had just been served in plastic cups when the commando’s order finally arrived.
The men grab their guns, helmets and bulletproof vests and race toward the truck, which takes off with a bang, roaring its mighty diesel engine before rolling across fields at breakneck speed.
– thunderclap –
Suddenly it stops. The tubes rise and rotate as the men make final adjustments.
Just three minutes after the truck has stopped, five missiles, one after the other, thunder out of the tubes.
Each Grad missile, a word meaning “hail,” shoots a bolt of fire behind it amid a thick cloud of smoke.
It’s time to go: if you’re spotted by enemy radars, you risk unleashing a swift and destructive response.
The truck returns to “base” as quickly as possible to take cover, leaving the target confidential to AFP journalists, as well as the techniques that allow targeting it.
“We’re given the order, and we have to hit the target,” said a young 23-year-old officer nicknamed “Buk” (“beech”), coincidentally the name of the Russian missile system that shot down an airliner over the same region in 2014. killing 298 people.
“We set off, take care of the destination and come back.”
When asked about the effectiveness of the Grad, a weapon developed 60 years ago, in a modern war, Buk insisted that “the effectiveness of the weapon depends on (the skills of) those using it”.
“This weapon is still effective because it has long range and can hit many targets,” he added.
“It depends on how angry the Russians are. If they don’t leave our infantry alone, we’ll go out a lot more,” he says when asked how often they perform this maneuver a day.
And to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision on Wednesday to order a “partial mobilization” of 300,000 men, Buk answered bluntly: “That will be enough for us to fertilize our country.”
