Ukraine is ready to take back its land from Russia

• Ukraine’s spy team lives in a small house near Mykolaiv.
• The garden shed is full of Javelins and other anti-tank weapons that can be fired from the shoulder.
• Russian troops are now on the defensive in different parts of Ukraine.

A spy team of Ukraine lives in a small house in a village near Mykolaiv. The walls are covered with machine guns and army backpacks. Sleeping bags are spread out on the floor, and a pot of soup is warming on the stove.

Outside, the garden shed is full of Javelins and other anti-tank weapons that can be fired from the shoulder.

Artillery shells land about 10 kilometres away, but the soldiers smoking on the porch don’t even hear them. On Ukraine’s southern front, it’s not their turn to fight today.

The owners of the house, who ran away to Poland when the war started at the end of February, are glad that their village is now back in Ukrainian hands.

One of the soldiers who drove the Russians out two months ago was Senior Lieutenant Andrii Pidlisnyi. “At first, it was a defensive operation to stop them,” he says. “After that we found some good places where we can make offensive operations and take back our territories. And now we’re doing that.”

Pidlisnyi is in charge of a group of 100 men whose job is to find out where the Russians are, often by using drones. Then they send in the heavy guns.

On his computer, he shows CNN bodycam videos from missions he did earlier in the war. He’s had some close calls, but he says he’s feeling good because of recent successes. US equipment has been helpful.

In one video, Pidlisnyi is seen sitting in a trench and using his drone to figure out where Russian tanks are. He says over the radio, “Call in the American gift,”

In this part of the south, Russian troops are now on the defensive. This is different from the east, where Ukrainian troops are being forced to give up ground.

But it’s hard here, too. Soldiers like Pidlisnyi are trying to take small strategic areas, like high ground with a view of occupied Ukrainian towns in the distance, from which they can make more progress.

“I’m not sure we will win it [by] the end of this year,” he says, referring to taking back the parts of Ukraine’s south that Russia has taken over. “Maybe not until the end of next year.”

The Ukrainian troops say they have taken some land back. They say that early this week, they forced the Russians out of two more villages along the border between Mykolaiv and Kherson.

But it is a large area of open, rolling farmland where any advancing forces would be exposed, and the Russians have had several months to build defensive positions in three layers across the area.

And the Ukrainians have few attack forces because they have spent most of this war playing defence, which has hurt some of their best units.

Most of the weapons given by Western allies aren’t made for ground offensives, and the Ukrainians don’t have enough planes to protect any forces that move forward.

In the south, Ukrainian forces have also been losing a lot of people, but the military rarely gives details.

There are more and more signs that the Russians are increasing their military presence in Kherson. They want to keep it because it is an important land link to Crimea and the main source of water for the peninsula.

Over the past two weeks, big convoys have moved west from Mariupol through Melitopol and on to Kherson.

Many people have already left their homes. Ukrainian officials say that almost half of the people who used to live in Kherson have moved to territory that is controlled by Ukraine.

They say that the Russians are making it hard for more people to leave cities like Melitopol in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region so that they can be used as “human shields” if the Ukrainians attack.

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