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Inside Ukraine's covert Center 73, where clandestine missions shape the war behind the frontline
(www.independent.co.uk)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Skif, Ukrainian shorthand for the nomadic Scythian people who founded an empire on what is now Crimea, moves like the camouflaged amphibian that he is: Calculating, deliberate, until the time to strike.
In the operation’s opening days, on June 6, an explosion destroyed the dam, sending a wall of reservoir water downstream, killing untold numbers of civilians, and washing out the Ukrainian army positions.
The locals who refused to evacuate have all become accustomed to the sounds of war, so even their unnerving calm in the face of air raid alarms, nearby gunfire and artillery doesn’t seem unusual.
The men had the most modern equipment, night-vision goggles, waterproof rifles that can be assembled in a matter of seconds, underwater breathing apparatus that produces no surface bubbles, and cloaks that hide their heat signature during nighttime raids.
They wake around sunset, load gear into a 4X4 and drive to a different point on the riverbank to scout new routes for a counteroffensive, provoke Russian forces into shooting at them to pinpoint the enemy’s location, retrieve soggy caches of supplies with their boat.
And that’s how, in mid-October, a Ukrainian drone carrying the national blue and yellow flag came to fly above Krynky at just the moment Skif and his men made their way to the occupied village across the river.
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