Commander of the 92nd Brigade tells how they managed to hold Kharkiv
KATERYNA TYSHCHENKO – FRIDAY, 10 JUNE 2022, 16:23
At the beginning of the full-scale war, fighting in Kharkiv took place "literally on every street", and involved both the military and civilians.
Source: Pavlo Fedosenko, Hero of Ukraine, commander of the the 92nd Separate Mechanised Brigade named after Ivan Sirko Pavel Fedosenko, as reported by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi on Facebook
Details: The 92nd Brigade, along with other units, defended Kharkiv and is now taking part in the counteroffensive, pushing the Russian occupying forces to the border of Kharkiv Oblast.
In the first three days after the full-scale invasion, the brigade fought on the front from the administrative border of Kharkiv and Sumy oblasts to the administrative border of Kharkiv and Luhansk oblasts. After that, the order was given to defend the perimeter of Kharkiv, and the fighters took up the defence along the ring road.
Fedosenko: "At that time, there were street fights in the city. Everyone was fighting for Kharkiv: both the military and civilians. Units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard, the police and those who had simply volunteered. The enemy was being beaten literally on every street.
It was extremely important to seize the initiative in the first 10 days, and that is what we did. We knocked the Russians out of the city, entrenched ourselves, and that's it – they lost the moment of surprise and realised that they could no longer make their way into the city."
More details: Fedosenko is sure that it was at that moment that everyone felt for the first time that the Russian army was not as scary as it seemed.
"The Russians are an army of barbarians and looters. When we knocked the Russians out of Tsyrkuny, for example, they left their wounded, their personnel, but loaded washing machines on their equipment, etc. and fled with this looted junk to Russia," the Commanding officer of the brigade recalls.
According to him, the Russian army is fighting with the maximum number of tanks and artillery, exceeding the Ukrainian capabilities by dozens of times. He stressed that Ukraine needs more weapons for effective defence and offensive operations.
