The story of Le Figaro’s special correspondent

Special Envoy to Zaporizhia, Nikopol, Novoliksandrovka, Dudchany, Novokiri and Kherson

If they had binoculars, Lvov and Andrei could see Russian troops hidden in great carpets of forests, less than a kilometer away, just a zigzag from the Dnieper River separate from them. Otherwise, they hear them. Here, near Milov, a ghost town, ‘Artillery bombardment often’, notes Lvov, 47, a volunteer whose only experience is military service. The 51-year-old Andrei is a veteran of the Yugoslav and Iraqi wars. Both occupy a position, among the myriad of points in the new front line which follows the curves of the river. A fortified shelter and a trench full of rubbish that leads to another shelter.

These columns now move spread out and are reinforced on about 300 km of lower river bed between them Zaporizhia, to the north, and Mykolaiv to the south. The movement has accelerated since the withdrawal of the Russian army from its western bank…