Ukrainian commandos spend day in boat at sea during liberation of Snake Island

The Wall Street Journal reported the story how Ukraine’s Snake Island in the Black Sea was liberated.

The Wall Street Journal made a rare visit to Snake Island earlier this month and spoke with officers from Timur Special Unit, an elite unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, who took part in its recapture in summer 2022. They revealed new details about one of the most prominent moments in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s invasion.

After seizing it in February 2022, Russia quickly moved air-defense missiles onto the island and multiple rocket-launch systems that could destroy any approaching boats. Naval craft ferried troops and supplies from Crimea.

Ukraine’s efforts to take the island back started that April with the sinking of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, the Moskva. Ukraine soon began striking the island with missiles fired from drones and warplanes, sinking Russian boats and destroying a helicopter just after it landed.

Moreover, Ukrainian forces placed 155 mm self-propelled howitzers on barges and moved them around the Danube delta to firing positions. Multiple-launch rocket systems fired directly from barges.

“As soon as we started working systematically from the middle of June 2022, we forced them to abandon the island in two weeks,” said the HUR military-intelligence officer in charge of the operation, who is known by the call sign Shakespeare.

On June 30, Moscow announced it was pulling out its troops in what it called “a goodwill gesture.”

That was when Shakespeare sent in the two commandos on a gyrocopter, including a 38-year-old officer known as Ramses, to check if the Russians had left. They chose the small craft as it was hard to spot on radar and carried only pistols. They dressed in shorts and Hawaiian shirts to disguise themselves as tourists if they were captured or ended up in Romanian waters.

Soon after the gyrocopter flight, Ukrainian special forces briefly landed on the island and raised a Ukrainian flag on the lower part, before Russia bombarded the area from a warplane.

Ramses and five other commandos from Timur Special Unit returned on a stealthier mission to secure Ukraine’s control of the island.

They approached the western side of the island in a low-slung river craft under cover of darkness. Four of them led by Ramses scaled the cliff and worked their way slowly through buildings and past equipment that had been extensively booby trapped by the departing Russians. Amid rain and fog, they started clearing mines and swept up documents that had been left in a hurry. Ramses recovered the flag he had dropped and raised it.

The weather had worsened while they were on shore. On the way back to the mainland, violent waves knocked out their boat’s two motors, forcing them to transfer to an inflatable craft with no motor, only oars.

The boat was soon swept out to sea, in the direction of gas drilling rigs where Russian troops were stationed. The commandos spent the night constantly bailing out water that crashed over the boat’s sides and using a pump to keep it inflated.

Then, in the skies above, they saw a gyrocopter dispatched by Shakespeare to search for them. They set off a flare, and the pilot eventually spotted them and directed a boat to rescue them after 28 hours at sea.