From her enclosure a kilometer away, the Ukrainian sniper aimed her rifle at the hole punched through the concrete perimeter of the quarry, waiting for the Russians to reappear.
The 47th Brigade sniper had fired ten .338 rounds into the wall behind which five men were hiding. One was apparently wounded before he woke up and hobbled to cover, minus his gun. The Russian assault group, part of a wider assault on Avdiivka, was in disarray.
In the spring, foliage obstructed the sniper’s line of sight. In the summer, changes in temperature fooled her heat-seeking range. In autumn, the wind blew too hard.
But the onset of the colder months—when the trees offered no barrier save the occasional clump of mistletoe, and human bodies flashed a telltale orange in her scope—meant that the conditions were now in her favor, especially since the Russians seemed intent on send poorly trained men into no man’s land.
Known as the Cuckoo because of her habit of perching high above the battlefield, the sniper knew that the four remaining foot soldiers would have to try to escape across the chasm to reach the safety of the nearby forest. All he had to do was wait.
The three-man Ukrainian team, including the Cuckoo, Jackson, her commander and spotter, and a second sniper with whom she rotated night shifts, waited 48 hours.
Now the appearance of a helmet and torso, a representational goal, required a moment of calm. It was a cool day. Unfortunately for the Russian soldier, 32-year-old Kuku, a photographer in Kiev before the war, got her calculations right.
A bullet traveling 300 meters may require up to 60 cm of adjustment.
“When I take a picture, I wait for the moment when the subject expresses an emotion. When I work as a sniper, I just wait for the right moment to shoot,” she admits to The Times.
She pulled the trigger on her custom rifle, the barrel of which was spray painted a matte gray.
“It’s not like in the movies. There was no fountain of blood,” she says. “I saw him fall. Then he stopped moving.”
The others, seeing their comrade killed, seemed paralyzed with fear. Ukrainian infantrymen were sent in accompanied by a Bradley fighting vehicle and easily killed them – another example of the added value of a sniper on the battlefield through the terror they inspire.
According to US intelligence, Russia has sacrificed 13,000 men in an attempt to capture Avdiivka, the coal-mining town outside Donetsk at the center of recent fighting. Kuku is tasked with protecting the Steppes, one of the villages in the north that is resisting the city’s encirclement.
Ukraine’s summer counter-offensive failed to shift the front lines of the war to the Sea of Azov as Kiev had hoped, and President Putin is eager to present another victory to the Russian public before elections in March. It does not lack manpower.
Ukrainian troops have dug in around Avdiivka and are using the defenders’ advantage to inflict as many casualties as possible on the waves of enemy soldiers.
Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, suggested withdrawing from Avdiyivka if losses became too heavy. But until then, he is determined to inflict maximum defeat on the enemy.
Kuku finds the task of defending the village much easier than dealing with the raiding troops around Robotin during the summer. But the Russians kept coming, including unarmed men going out on apparent suicide missions, carrying plastic bags to deliver water and food to their comrades.
These strange characters are given nicknames by Ukrainians like “Gandalf”, a bearded man with a staff, whom they watch wandering aimlessly towards the Ukrainian positions one day.
Last month, the U.S. military welcomed the first active-duty female sniper into its ranks. Ukraine, on the other hand, has a long history of female shooters, and Kuku is far from the only one lined up against Russia. She said that after medics, sniper is the position with the most gender equality in the Ukrainian army.
The Soviet Union relied on female snipers to defend the homeland during World War II, the most famous of whom was Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Ukrainian known as “Lady Death.”
Earned her nickname by the American press during a US propaganda tour where reporters asked her if she wore makeup into battle, Pavlichenko scored 309 kills during the sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol, making her one of the deadliest snipers in history.
“We mowed down the Hitlerites like ripe grain,” she said.
The cuckoo, a diminutive figure whose movements are always distinct and deliberate, has a similar mindset.
“To be a good sniper, you have to have stamina,” she told The Times. “Women are more patient than men. We don’t feel like getting up and running around shooting people. We wait for the enemy to come to us.”
Unlike urban battles such as Stalingrad, Ukrainian snipers rarely engaged opposing positions, preferring to deliver artillery strikes rather than challenge the Russians to a firefight. Two Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Avdiivka last week by Russian snipers when they went to smoke a cigarette.
Kuku is a fan of Pavlichenko, but she doesn’t want to be given the same nickname and scoffs at some of the taller tales she’s heard about heroic snipers.
She prefers the sober accounts of Chris Kyle, the American sniper whose tragic story is told in an Oscar-winning film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper.
Putin may draw on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ex-prisoners and conscripts from Siberia in an attempt to capture Avdiivka, but Ukraine is running out of soldiers.
Cuckoo was recently ordered to serve in the regular infantry despite her sniper skills honed over seven years in the Ukrainian army. The last time she was granted leave to visit her family in Kiev was in August.
Shortly before Christmas, a tank shell exploded near Kuku’s position, leaving her severely concussed.
Jackson, who is 44, says the Russians facing them have increased their rate of fire from 100 mortar shells a day to 500. “We have a lot of shells, but the Russians always have more.”
The Cuckoo, for its part, says it could improve its kill rate if it had 375 CT bullets, increasing its range to 2km.
Cross-eyed riflemen are fondly known by the regular infantry as the “one-eyed brigade”. Last year one of them, 58-year-old Vyacheslav Kovalsky, a former businessman, claimed to have killed a Russian soldier at a distance of 3.8 kilometers, a world record.
The cuckoo scored two kills from 1.3km, two from 1km and three from 600m. “Sometimes you see something in the bushes moving, you shoot and it stops moving. But we don’t count them,” she says.
Her heavy rifle is transported around the battlefield already assembled, meaning she only needs to set up her bipod and attach the silencer.
“It’s a lot more interesting than being in the infantry because you have to use your brain,” she says. “You make a plan, find a position. Then the hunt begins.”
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2024-01-04 20:10:00
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