This week, a series of enormous explosions at a Crimean airfield sent shockwaves well beyond the Russian-occupied peninsula off the southern Black Sea coast of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government asserts that its troops destroyed at least nine Russian jets in a raid, and recent satellite photographs seem to reveal extensive craters and burnt soil.
Stunned beachgoers who were unwinding more than 100 miles away from the closest battlefront were forced to flee as a result of the enormous explosions.
According to former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer Hal Kempfer, the Ukrainian troops carried out a “deep attack” beyond Russian lines.
He said to Charlie D’Agata, senior international reporter for CBS News, “Frankly, it shifts the front across the board.”
“They may be able to push all the way across that southern flank if they can maintain the momentum, if they can continue to perform deep attacks, if they can continue to make advances across the Kherson Oblast.”
Russia responded to the airbase attack swiftly and harshly. Increased shelling and missile strikes on towns and villages across southern Ukraine were in response from Vladimir Putin’s army.
D’Agata encountered Roman Kulyk, a local commander who was proudly sporting an American flag on his Ukrainian uniform, in one of them.
He told CBS News that the scenario he and his forces were in, attempting to maintain the front line near the southern port city of Mykolaiv while facing a Russian assault and rapidly running out of ammunition, was “catastrophic.”
He said that when American howitzer artillery pieces eventually arrived, they helped to preserve the lives of his comrades.
The two sides have been pressing against one other back and forth for weeks along the damaged front line in southern Ukraine.
The village’s playground shows the effects of combat in the mostly deserted community, which is caught between Ukrainian troops struggling to cling onto the region and the Russian invaders’ forces at their farthest point.
Few people were living in the area when D’Agata and his colleagues arrived, including 76-year-old Anna Shepel.
She left during the first several days of combat and returned to find her house almost completely wrecked, its windows broken, and its walls covered with shrapnel.
She described the moment she returned home to discover it in such a dire situation to CBS News, saying, “I thought I would have stroke.”
I became paralysed. She revealed to D’Agata that while her windows have been changed three times since she got back, Russian shelling continues to blow them out.
She remarked, “I hope that every minute and every hour the Russians felt what I felt in that instant.”
Momentum may be on the Ukrainian troops’ side as they get ready for a huge counterattack in the south to attempt to recover the captured Kherson area.
Soldiers and citizens alike are preparing for what they believe will be a difficult war ahead despite the constant supply of weaponry from the U.S. and its allies.
Anna Shepel told CBS News that she wanted to remain there, joining the hundreds of other Ukrainians who either believe they have nowhere else to go or outright refuse to be uprooted by Russia’s invasion.