“The fighting was pretty intense, a lot of shelling,” Ayres, 48, told CNN. “We fought very hard and took the Russian positions we had to take.” Ayres suffered a severe shrapnel wound to his left leg on the second day of the counterattack, along with four others wounded from his unit. But despite losses on the front line, he said Ukrainian forces were making slow but clear progress on the ground. “It’s not going to be fast, it’s hard, it’s slow, measure by measure, position by position, because we don’t have the resources to do a massive blitzkrieg, with masses of artillery and armor,” Ayres said. “So we have to do it smart and try to do it (with) as few casualties as possible.” So far, the Ukrainians claim to have captured a small handful of settlements in the Kherson region during the offensive, gains that British intelligence experts said were likely achieved with a “degree of tactical surprise”. Ayres, originally from London, fought alongside former US Marine Michael Zaffer Ronin, who was also injured last week when the counter-attack began, suffering shrapnel wounds to the head, stomach and arm. The couple first met while fighting alongside Kurdish fighters in Syria. Now, they are recovering in hospitals in the city of Odessa, on the embattled shores of the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. Zafer Ronin, 34, a native of Kansas, said the morale of the Ukrainian military on the front line is still “pretty high” but, in contrast, opposing Russian forces appear to be “a bit unprofessional and disorganized”. The two men arrived early in the war as volunteers and later signed up as paid soldiers for the Ukrainian army on three-year contracts. Ayres said he came to join the fight because he was “inspired” by the spirit of the Ukrainian people. “It was (between) right and wrong,” Ayres said. “It was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country.” He has “no sympathy at all” for Russian soldiers, he added. Their main challenge on the battlefield is outnumbering and outnumbering their Russian counterparts. Front-line units are well-stocked with small arms and ammunition, but lack heavy weapons such as artillery and tanks, Ayres said. A limited number of weapons supplied by the US and NATO, such as the HIMARS, Howitzers and Javelin anti-tank missile systems, have proven useful in this fight, but are insufficient to match the firepower of their adversaries. “They’re just pounding us with artillery all the time, so that’s what makes it so much more difficult, the artillery and the armor they have, it’s superior to ours,” Ayres said. “Our strikes are more surgical, but more limited.” On Saturday, a report from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that according to Ukrainian officials, the attack was “a deliberately methodical operation to degrade Russian forces and logistics, rather than an operation aimed at the immediate recapture of large parts of soil. “
“Back home I’m nothing”
Ayres has a white beard and is nicknamed “Grandpa” by his Ukrainian comrades. But he has already won the trust of his younger colleagues. “Once they’ve seen you in combat and they know you’re here to stay and they know you’re a capable soldier, you gain their respect right away,” Ayres said. Ayres spent his teenage years as a Royal Green Jacket — an infantry regiment of the British Army — and now feels that battle has given him renewed purpose. “Back home I’m nothing, I’m just an old man renting a room,” Ayres said. “Whereas now, I’m a soldier, I’m doing something good, I’m fighting.” His son is proud of what he does, he adds. For both of these injured foreign fighters, their next focus is not to fly home safely, but only to return to the front lines to rejoin the fight as soon as possible. “Once everything heals in my body, probably in three to four weeks, I should be right back,” Zafer Ronin said. “Of course I’ll go back,” added Ayres. “Because I’m a soldier.”
