The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Turn Channel small boats into Ukrainian little ships to reinforce faith in Kyiv’s brave fight
In the early morning of June 6 last year, the Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine was breached. Russia was widely agreed (except by Russia) to be the culprit. Hundreds died in the ensuing floods. Thousands had to flee their homes. Forests covering 120,000 acres were inundated.
The suffering was greater in the Russian-occupied area, and reportedly many Russian soldiers were drowned, but that probably did not trouble Vladimir Putin.
The aim of so much destruction was to deny a vast stretch of country to advancing Ukrainian troops. They could no longer push on to that part of the great Dnipro river (traditionally known in Britain as the Dnieper) which, once crossed, would allow them to make for Russia’s narrow land-link with Crimea.
This tactic was one reason why Ukraine’s land counter-offensive later that summer did not get very far. It still prevents large-scale forward movement in the damaged region.
The Ukrainians, however, are resourceful, perhaps the more so because, thanks to the delays of Western allies, they are currently under-resourced.
In October, Ukrainian troops began to cross the Dnipro. In order to attract no Russian attention, the first boats to cross were rowed rather than motorised. They established a tiny bridgehead.
Four months earlier, I had travelled to Kramatorsk with a British organisation, MissionUkraine.uk (see my piece in this paper on May 23). We were delivering a 4x4 vehicle driven over from Britain which had been repurposed as a field ambulance for the front.
Such operations by MissionUkraine. uk continue to this day, but once the Kakhovka Dam was breached, its mind began, secretly, to turn to boats. Its leaders, Alex Kruglyak and Dmytro Tomkin, Ukrainians based in Britain, and the thoroughly British Rose Cecil, began to solicit the help of their many contacts here.
In November, the organisation’s first boat crossed the Dnipro. Today, about two months later, there are three established bridgeheads on the occupied eastern side of the river with significant numbers holding them. Both MissionUkraine.uk and the Ukrainian military authorities feel sufficiently confident to reveal their work, described on page 4, and seek public support for many more boats.
The troops at the bridgeheads are 100 per cent dependent on boats. They arrive in them, as do all their supplies. They return in them, many sadly wounded. What the men are doing is almost unimaginably brave. It is impossible to cross the Dnipro by other means. There is no bridge and no air cover which would allow men or supplies to be dropped by parachute. Although one or two villages on the far bank are now occupied by the Ukrainians, the Russian forces are usually less than two miles away.
These “evac” boats themselves are frail vessels. They must be inconspicuous and not too large to navigate the innumerable channels of the Dnipro delta (never using the same route twice). Their journey is short
– the river is a thousand yards at its widest point – though never made in a straight line. In 2017-18, by happy chance (or foresight?), in that exact area an exercise took place in which the British helped train the Ukrainians in the art of pontoon bridges. The delta’s complicated rivulets are therefore well known to the troops.
The boats are inflatable dinghies and RIBs – some of them carrying as few as five men. The minimum requirement is simply that a boat be long enough for men to lie down in, though somewhat larger boats are preferred, to make room for more supplies. They have no means of defending themselves against drone attacks. In the early days, some of the boats were sunk by Russian bombardments, but most such attacks are now prevented by Patriot surfaceto-air missiles which were brought south-east for the task.
The only natural advantage the Ukrainian boats enjoy is that the western bank which their forces control is higher than the eastern. Russian boats venturing out could be quickly identified and hit, so they do not dare. Separately supplied are assault boats, fighting to establish new bridgeheads.
Obviously, the light evac boats make their short, perilous journeys hundreds of times and therefore they quickly wear out, or are damaged, or sunk. The average boat life is not much more than two weeks. At present, two MissionUkraine.uk boats reach the Kherson region each week. The demand is such that increasing the supply is urgent.
As with so many schemes to help Ukraine, British people are doing more than their bit. Indeed, at this stage, Britain is the only country whose
The troops at the bridgeheads are 100 per cent dependent on boats
citizens are organising such a volunteer effort. Alex Kruglyak tells me of volunteer drivers from Devon, Hadleigh, Manchester, London, South Wales, Wrexham and Dover and boats, fixed, repurposed and overhauled, from all over the country.
John Rigg, to whom I spoke, is a former councillor who has driven a vehicle to Ukraine. His contribution has been to secure, from Guildford Council and a local leisure centre, car parks where the boats can be loaded into an ingenious lorry which can take five trailers, each carrying a boat, one on top of the other. “A quart in a pint pot,” he admiringly calls it.
Once the arriving boats are repaired after work in Odesa or Mykolaiv, the British drivers take them on to the Kherson region, or thereabouts, and deliver them to the five brigades of the Ukrainian TDF (territorials) operating there.
What difference can such an enterprise make? For a few months now, Western coverage of the Ukrainian war has become more pessimistic. There are some justifications for this, but some things to be said on the other side.
One, noted by commentators like the academic Phillips O’Brien and the former Air Vice Marshal Edward Stringer at Policy Exchange, is that concentration on the land war’s real difficulties has distracted attention from Ukraine’s success at sea. The Russian fleet is, in effect, penned to the east. Rates for grain shipping insurance have dropped because the cargoes are getting through.
The Russians continue to suffer from bad kit, bad generalship, low morale and ammunition shortages. Putin’s policy of, in Stringer’s phrase, “placing a body in front of every Ukrainian bullet” produces astonishing casualty rates.
At present, Ukrainian bridgeheads across the Dnipro are in no position to advance towards Crimea, which is the ultimate aim. They have succeeded, however, in frustrating Putin’s attempt, by blowing the dam, to narrow the 600-mile front on which he needs to concentrate. It would seem a good plan to reinforce this, compelling him to look in too many directions at once.
There is also an important “optic” here. At present, the Western allies are still willing the end of Ukrainian victory but are not reinforcing the means. Putin rests his hopes on European weakness (which, in terms of resupply, I fear now includes
Britain) and a Trump presidency. Our governments’ hesitancy should be reproached by our citizens.
So I very much like MissionUkraine. uk’s idea about how to get more attention. Sitting in Dover, they point out, is a big pound of the small boats which Rishi Sunak, and most of us, dislike. They are notoriously inadequate for the English Channel but not for a river journey 20 times shorter.
Can’t the “small boats” which have brought us so much trouble be resonantly rebadged as “little ships” and help Ukraine fight back? Private feelers to officialdom have so far already brought the response that the boats are in too poor a condition to be usable. Surely the people who want to use them should be the judge of that.