A large sequence of explosions at an airfield in Crimea earlier this week sent shockwaves well beyond the Russian-occupied peninsula off the southern Black Sea coast of Ukraine. New satellite imagery seems to reveal extensive craters and burnt soil, and the Ukrainian government did not reject accusations that its troops had shot down at least nine Russian jets.
The colossal explosions sent shocked beachgoers, who were more than 100 kilometers from the closest front line, scrambling for shelter.
After explosions shook a Russian military airport in Novofedorivka, Crimea, on August 9, 2022, smoke is seen rising in the distance from the beach at Saky on the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine.
Hal Kempfer, a veteran U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, told CBS News that it was a “deep attack” below Russia’s borders by Ukrainian troops.
“This fundamentally alters the front,” he told CBS News senior global reporter Charlie D’Agata. If they can maintain momentum, continue to conduct deep attacks, and continue to make advances in the Kherson Oblast, they may be able to drive over the whole southern flank.
A satellite picture published by Planet Labs PBC depicts the destruction of Russian planes at the Saki Air Base in the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula on August 9, 2022. In 2014, Russia grabbed control of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine and annexed it unilaterally.
The attack on the airfield prompted a swift and violent retaliation from Russia. Vladimir Putin’s soldiers replied with escalated bombardment and missile assaults on southern Ukrainian towns and villages. D’Agata met local commander Roman Kulyk, who proudly wore an American flag on his Ukrainian uniform, in one of them.
He told CBS News that he and his forces were in a “catastrophic scenario” as they attempted to maintain the front line near the southern port city of Mykolaiv while facing a Russian assault and were running out of ammunition.
Then, U.S. howitzer artillery pieces came, and he said that they saved the lives of his troops.
The battle along the damaged front line in southern Ukraine south has been intense for weeks, with both sides advancing and retreating.
A children’s playground in the hamlet exhibits the wounds of combat in the nearly abandoned community, which is stranded in a no-land man’s between the farthest point the Russian invaders have reached and Ukraine’s military, who are desperate to retain the region.
Anna Shepel, aged 76, was one of the few villagers there when D’Agata and his colleagues arrived. After leaving during the first days of conflict, she returned to her house to find its windows shattered and its walls riddled with shrapnel.
10 August 2022: Anna Shepel shows Charlie D’Agata shell damage to the gate of her house in a hamlet north of Mykolaiv, only a few kilometers from the active front line in Ukraine’s war against Russia’s invading troops.
She told CBS News that she feared she might have a stroke when she returned home to see it in such a deplorable condition. I became paralyzed. She informed D’Agata that her windows had been rebuilt three times since her return, but they continue to be destroyed by Russian bombardment.
She said, “I hope the Russians felt what I felt at that moment, every minute, every hour.”
Momentum may be on the side of Ukrainian troops as they prepare for a big counterattack in the south to reclaim the captured Kherson area. Despite the constant flow of weaponry from the United States and its allies, troops and people alike are preparing for what they anticipate will be a brutal conflict.
Anna Shepel told CBS News that, like millions of other Ukrainians who either have nowhere else to go or flatly refuse to be uprooted by Russia’s invasion, she wanted to remain there.