news drives on the good highway that connects the big city of Dnipro and Donetsk in the eastern part of Ukraine. It has been a long time since anyone has been able to drive this entire stretch, because here runs the front line between the Ukrainian forces and the Russian army of occupation. About 15 kilometers before we reach Donetsk city, we are met by Major Serhii and some of his soldiers. They belong to the 59th Motorized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army. news runs from the Ukrainian city of Dnipro and eastwards towards the front. – It was only a few hours ago that we fired a volley of rockets at the enemy, says the Ukrainian major. He will not give his last name. He says that the Grad rockets that his department is equipped with can reach targets up to 16 kilometers away. They can destroy most things within an area of six hectares, if all 40 rockets in the battery are fired at once. Want to drive away the occupiers In the distance we hear the cannon fire, but Serhii reassures news that this is outgoing Ukrainian fire. Donetsk city has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. The mood among the Ukrainian soldiers here is high, although right now their own are hard pressed further north-east, around the towns of Soledar and Bakhmut. FIGHTING: Major Serhii tells news that there is intense fighting at the front near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. – There are intense battles going on. We do our job as artillerymen, our soldiers do their part of the job so that the occupiers can be chased away from our land, says Serhii. He says that the brigade has been fighting for nine months on the southern front section, near the city of Kherson. There they helped to attack the Russian forces again and again, in order to break down morale in that way. So now the brigade has been transferred here to the Donetsk area, where the hardest battles of the war in Ukraine are taking place. When news drove east from Dnipro towards Donbas, we saw several transports with tanks, which may indicate that the Ukrainian army is preparing an attack in the area. Old weapon that works The Major shows off the weapon that his department is set up with. It is an old Soviet rocket artillery system that was created about 40 years ago. It’s called Grad, or hail in Norwegian. CAN HEAR THE SHOOTING: news’s employees Morten Jentoft and Lokman Ghorbani are at the front in eastern Ukraine. It is mounted on an older military truck and can launch as many as 40 artillery shells. – But is it good enough in this war? – Yes, it works in its own way, says Serhii. Grad plays an absolutely central role in the artillery war between the Ukrainian and Russian forces along the more than 1,000 kilometer long front line. Moral support A few tens of kilometers behind the front, there is a small party in a park in the town of Prokovsk. A group of volunteers from Scotland has set up with pizza, coffee and music. SUPPORT: Greg Smith is with a group of volunteers from Scotland. Today they made pizza for people in the town of Pokrovsk. It is a kind of traveling aid circus that tries to provide both concrete and moral support to the population of war-torn Ukraine. – We were with our kitchen for a week in the city of Kherson, and it was a little scary, says Greg Smith. After Donbas, they are scheduled to go on to Kharkiv, and perhaps also visit the capital Kyiv. Today alone they baked 3,000 pizzas for the people of Prokovsk.
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