Troy Offenbecker, a former U.S. Marine who has been fighting against Russian forces in Ukraine since June of last year, was supposed to be on a break.
He’d been fighting with the 3rd Bbattalion of the Ukrainian Foreign Legion and had taken several days off to try to decompress last week. Then his buddies in a different unit—the 1st Battalion—called him up to see if he wanted to attempt an assault on Russian forces near Bakhmut, where heavy fighting has been underway for months. The team said they had worked out a way to cut around the Russian drones’ thermal imaging.
Ukrainian military officials have repeatedly stated Bakhmut is a key focus of Kyiv’s counteroffensive against Russian forces. Just days before this mission, Ukrainian officials announced that the counteroffensive had begun in earnest. Russians had been trying and failing to seize Bakhmut from Ukraine for months, suffering what America’s top general called a “slaughter-fest for the Russians” in March, eventually claiming victory in May.
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Offenbecker jumped at the chance to join in on the action and on Thursday last week he found himself fighting and killing Russians at close range, throwing grenades, and tripping over dead bodies that littered the battlefield.
“That proximity—being within a foot undetected—that’s the first time I’d ever gotten that close and had them not even have any idea that we were sitting right on top of them,” he told The Daily Beast.
Element of Surprise
At about 9 p.m., it was go time. The group infilled an area near Bakhmut—Offenbecker would not divulge more specifics of the location for security reasons—and huddled in a trench to wait for the Russians to stop barraging them with artillery fire.
“We had to sit in a trench staging area because there was artillery hitting everywhere, so we sat there for a few hours until everything calmed down,” he said.
The goal was to kill as many Russians in the suspected Veterans PMC unit as possible in the area—in part to diminish their numbers, and in part to hurt the Russians’ morale, Offenbecker said. They wanted to “try to push the Russians back and at the same time hit them with attrition, and take out as many as we could to try to… bring their morale down.”
The battlefield grew quiet, and the group moved about 150 meters into the enemy line before realizing they were outnumbered, by about 7-to-1.
“When we were on the ground and actually looked at the situation, we all had night vision… the team leads had thermal clip-ons, so we could see the heat signatures of the Russians and they were everywhere inside this tree line, there were at least 50 Russians,” he told The Daily Beast. “We had seven guys with us.”
Slowly, they pushed in 400 meters. But when the team realized the Russians weren’t the wiser—they decided to go even farther. “We had pushed in and when we realized we had actually crossed some of them undetected, we were kind of like: ‘Screw it, let’s go as far as we can,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast.
They crept closer and closer, eventually standing one foot away from the Russians’ trenches, close enough to see their legs, Offenbecker said. “We had sat and listened to them, we walked right up onto their trench,” Offenbecker said. “We were a foot away.”
That’s when things got messy.
One of the Russians seemed to think he heard something and asked his comrade, “‘Did you move?’” Offenbecker recalled. “The other Russian in the trench was like, ‘I don’t know, maybe,’ instead of saying he didn’t move.” Offenbecker said his teammate got a good look at how many Russians were in there before backing off a bit.
Then, all hell broke loose.
“He backs off, and when he looked back in the other trench, the Russian had a rifle pointed at him,” Offenbecker recalled. “So he shot him, we think like three or four times. And when he did, the guy yelled out to his friend.”
When another Russian fighter stood up from some shrubbery covering his trench, Offenbecker shot him several times, the former Marine said. “We got both of these guys real quick… but then a third guy that was probably eight to 10 feet away opened up and started shooting at us.”
At that point, a Ukrainian that had embedded with the team shot the Russian and killed him, Offenbecker recalled, triggering a flurry of bullets flying in every direction that brought several more of the Russian troops down.
Surrounded on All Sides
With one Russian just eight to 10 feet away from the American ex-Marine, the team decided to exfiltrate and peel back. That’s when Offenbecker’s rifle jammed.
“When I couldn’t get my weapon up, I took a grenade, I threw it in his trench, threw it in his hole. Killed him,” Offenbecker recalled.
The stream of Russians was seemingly endless. There was another Russian “about 25 feet away into the tree line and a bullet went past my face,” Offenbecker said.
He remembers looking at his teammates attacking Russian troops nearby. One of them was suffering from wounds on his hand and face. Without a rifle to cover his teammate, said Offenbecker, he reached for another grenade.
“I reached in and grabbed my second grenade and I just threw it as hard as I could,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast. “I see the grenade blow up next to him… I couldn’t see… but by the way he was screaming I don’t think he lived much longer than that.”
After that, the unit continued to peel out through the tree line to avoid any potential Russian artillery. In all, he and his teammates were in and out in a matter of approximately 15 minutes, he said.
“We got in pretty quick, smashed them immediately, and egress all within like 15 minutes. It was probably no more than 20 minutes when we were out of there,” Offenbecker told The Daily Beast.
The day of the attack, Ukrainian officials said the counteroffensive was ongoing in “several directions” with gradual advances in the south of Ukraine, according to Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar. “The enemy certainly does not give up its positions easily. That's why there are battles everywhere and a powerful confrontation," Maliar said in a briefing in Kyiv, according to CNN.
Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that day that it was a “very difficult fight” and a “very violent fight.” By his telling, though, Ukraine “was making steady progress.”
In the Bakhmut area alone, Ukraine was able to advance three kilometers, or about two miles, in 10 days, Maliar claimed on the day of the attack. A day later, officials said some progress was made around Bakhmut.
Other groups have been making inroads against the Russians in Bakhmut in recent days. Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces said in a statement Thursday that infantrymen were wounded after coming into contact with Russians at the Bakhmut front.
“While performing a combat mission, a group of a Special Operations Forces unit came into contact with the enemy. Soldiers of an infantry unit of the Defence Forces were also in the same area at the time. During the battle, several infantrymen were wounded,” a spokesperson said, according to Ukrainska Pravda. “The Special Operations Force soldiers provided first aid to the wounded and evacuated them to a safe area."
