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Hell and high water: When high-tech bows to age-old tactics in Ukraine war

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

The villagers of Demydiv are being credited with saving Kyiv from what could have been a decisive attack after they flooded their own neighbourhoods and surrounding fields in the weeks after Russian forces invaded Ukraine.

With Russian designs on the capital of almost three million now all but abandoned, the village of fewer than 2,500 is still cleaning up wet basements, soggy carpets and the saturated fields that had formed a quagmire the invaders—with all their technology, tanks and heavy tracked vehicles—could not cross.

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Warfighting at Mont Sorrel

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

Mount Sorrel and two nearby hills were the last elevated positions held in the Ypres Salient at the start of June 1916.

In the next two weeks Canadian forces would lose and recapture the high ground. Nearly 4,000 would die there and more than 5,000 would be wounded.

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A Canadian sniper in Ukraine: Numbers, deaths and homecoming

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

It was early morning and sniper Wali, his Canadian compatriot and two Ukrainian soldiers were in a trench at the far end of a wooded windbreak separating expansive farm fields in eastern Ukraine.

Huddled among leafless trees, they were essentially the point men in the defence of a village on the approaches to the strategic city of Mariupol. Russian troops and tanks were staging a measured advance across the fallow fields on three sides.

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Canada’s second major WWI battle

STORY BY SHARON ADAMS

In May 1915, Canadian troops entered their second major battle of the First World War, on the western front near Festubert in the Artois region of France.

On May 9, the British had suffered 11,000 casualties attacking nearby Neuve-Chapelle. A week later, Field Marshal Douglas Haig ordered another attack involving two Canadian brigades, hoping for a breakthrough.

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