Name: Ukraine: Coming under fire in the Donbas trenches - BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-07-28T16:49:48.000Z
Duration: 5 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Infantryman Dima, he's only 22 years old, is escorting us forward.

Basic passive voice

The village over here is half held by the Ukrainians and half held by the Russians.

Adverbs of degree

There's two Russian shells that have just come in.

The safest place for these men is in the trenches.

Quentin, we got a flavour of it there in that clip.

Well, frankly, it's very muddy and very dangerous.

We've just moved from winter into spring, so there was this thick mud all over every battlefront that we went through.

And in that particular set of trenches down in the south of Donbass, the men had been dug in there for about seven months.

And actually, as I was going through that area, they were digging the trenches deeper.

And the reason they were doing that was because they're facing relentless Russian fire every single day.

And the Russians are throwing everything at them, whether it's automatic grenade fire, whether it's artillery fire, tank fire, Grads, everything is being fired at that particular unit.

And they're seeing that whereas they do respond, they can in no way match the kind of firepower that the Russians have.

This question needs to be addressed to the senior military.

Later in that report, Dima said to me, the Russians have warehouses full of these shells.

And certainly, Russia has lost its capability in some of the more sophisticated weaponry.

But when it comes to your traditional artillery shells and grenades sent from automatic grenade launchers, they've got plenty.

You spent a lot of time with Ukrainian soldiers.

I think that one of the things they always tell you is they always fetishize NATO standards.

When you meet, there are different parts of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

And depending on the brigade you meet or the battalion you meet, some of them have had that NATO training and they're very, very able, very capable.

And they've learned the ways to operate in urban combat and in that kind of trench warfare we've seen.

They haven't had that training, particularly the volunteers.

And because we've seen significant attrition of Ukrainian forces, and a lot of Russians, of course, have died on the front lines, but a lot of Ukrainians have died too.

And remember, Ukraine is a far smaller country with far fewer reserves to draw upon.

It's always a risk when you're at one battle or you're in one set of trenches to try and extrapolate and see how the entire war is going.

But certainly, in Bakhmut, the Ukrainians have suffered, I think, because they've lost some of the more experienced fighters.

I should probably ask, I mean, the question that one always has to ask when journalists are embedded with forces, how do you know that you're not being spun?

How do you know that you're not being shown an unrepresentative part of the bigger picture to present Ukraine in a good light, for example?

Well, usually when the Russians start firing at you, you know it's the real deal.

And we spend a lot of time planning and speaking to the particular Ukrainian units that we're with, because what we don't want is we don't want a horse and pony show.

We don't want someone to take us to a tank or to a field gun that fires off a couple of rounds, and then the Russians fire back, and then it's all over, that it's done just for the cameras.

We're heading right to the very forward position.

So from the beginning, we've been with units in Kharkiv during the battle to save that city and then to drive the Russians out of that region.

We've been with Ukrainian army, with units who are engaged in improper combat.

And as you know yourself, Frank, when the bullets are flying, you know they're not being put on for effect.

One of the things that's been very difficult in Ukraine compared to some of the other wars I've covered has been access.

The Ukrainian military don't seem built for media access.

They don't have a culture of media access.

And it has got better, but it's only improved in the sense that you're sometimes taken to those horse and pony shows.

So you have to find workarounds and you have to build relationships with individual commanders and sometimes with senior commanders to allow you to get to the very front, to the zero line where the actions happen.