Ukraine's Jewish soldiers battle on despite the odds
Instead, the bucolic countryside visible over Senior Lieutenant Valery Prusalovsky’s shoulder is marred by the maneuvers of heavy artillery and the whine of incoming rounds.
The white-haired Jewish career officer is grim-faced as he stares into our video call, and for good reason. After months of stinging losses and failed campaigns, Russia’s army finally has the war that its artillery-based forces are built for.
With a more than twenty-to-one ratio in rockets, artillery and mortars in their favor, Putin’s forces have adopted a new strategy that’s impervious to Ukraine’s tactics of tank-hunting with anti-armor missiles. Instead, the Russian army is pounding Ukrainian defenses into submission and slowly gaining ground in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine, and around Kherson in the south.
“If we had heavy weapons, then we could retake Kherson,” says the Kharkiv-born Prusalovsky. “But without them, we can’t attack at all.”
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