ROARING through reeds on a speedboat with a machine-gun lashed to the foredeck, The Sun joined Ukraine’s heroic defenders waging a “secret river war”.
We saw the deck fill with brass bullet cases spewed from the .50cal gun during a lightning raid on a suspected lookout post.
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Our group of volunteers then raced away to dodge the threat of deadly Russian drones.
The islands of the strategically important Dnipro delta became a front line after the only two bridges for 200 miles were destroyed in November by Vladimir Putin’s retreating invaders.
Ukrainian forces have secured a bridgehead on the left bank of one of them — the Antonivskyi road bridge near Kherson.
Our raiding team went into action after Russian soldiers were spotted sneaking on to one isle, ready to launch mortar attacks on the city.
We were led by Ihor Chayka, a tax official before the war.
Brits Macer Gifford, 36, and a 51-year-old former soldier, giving his name only as Tony, have been part of the fight since December.
They described a campaign of deadly close-quarters gun battles, drone attacks and artillery blitzes — yet one overshadowed by the bloodbath Battle of Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region.
Macer said: “Everyone was talking about Bakhmut while this secret river war was going on.
“We have tied up a lot of Russian forces to stop them going to other fronts.”
The Brit pair are part of the Vidmak, or Witcher, unit of foreign volunteers.
They said they rotate on and off the islands every few days.
In one mission, Tony’s team hid out in a wooden dacha blitzed by grenade-firing Russian drones.
The former Royal Anglian soldier said: “The first blew out the kitchen, but no one was in it.
“The second bounced and luckily didn’t go off.
“The third one was an incendiary bomb, like a Molotov cocktail.
“You hear the hit of the bottle then the whoosh of the fire.
“We stayed in the house as long as we could because you know the drones are waiting for you. But we had to move.
“We hid in the void under the house for about five minutes and then made a run for it into the bushes.”
Vidmak’s commander Damien Rodriguez said his troops had faced hundreds of drone attacks and mortar bombardments, plus a handful of close quarters gun battles.
In one instance, Russian soldiers posed as “friendly forces” — but did not give a password and were told to “f*** off”.
They stormed the building with stun and smoke grenades.
By then the Vidmak team were on the first floor.
They opened fire down the stairwell until one fighter was forced to leap out of a window when a grenade was rolled into his room.
Damien told The Sun: “He came face to face with the Russians downstairs.
“They were right there in front of him, through a window, and he just emptied his magazine.”
When The Sun joined the daylight river raid, Ihor said: “It is easy to see a boat with a drone. And the Russians have lots of drones, really a lot.
“We don’t have enough kit to stop them.
“We need more electronic warfare and anti-drone weapons.
“But as long as we keep moving it is very hard for them to hit us with artillery.
“The most important thing is to never stop moving on the water.”
‘Never stop moving’
His own spy-drones had spotted the teams of four and six Russian soldiers moving through bomb-blitzed dachas on the southern edge of Potemkin Island, about two miles downstream of Kherson.
He scrambled the fast assault boat, armed with the .50 cal belt-fed machine gun, a PKM machine gun and Ihor’s AK-47 Kalashnikov.
Boat driver Mikola floored the 250hp engine and carved through a network of channels barely wider than the vessel.
He had worked on a trawler before the war and was the team’s most experienced river pilot.
He said when Russian forces abandoned Kherson they took boats from the city’s marinas and scuttled the rest.
Our team’s boat was donated by friends in Kyiv.
We zoomed past rows of splintered dachas, with a comrade from Ihor’s battalion guiding progress via a spy-drone overhead.
Suddenly the boat slowed. The gunner, called Serhii, opened fire.
The first bullets ripped into the river, plotting their deadly course to the shoreline. The deck filled with the bullet cases.
Mikola turned hard towards home and gunned the engine again as Ihor put down covering fire from his Kalashnikov.
His comrade joined him with a PKM light machine gun until the boat was out of range of return fire.
Later the team raced to hide the boat from any artillery strikes.
But they cannot defend Kherson as much as they would like.
Last week a doctor was killed when a mortar hit an operating theatre.
The Sun saw a cathedral set ablaze.
Next day a supermarket and a morgue were hit.
But Ihor insisted his troops would never give up.
He said: “We are fighting for our country, I am fighting for my city.”
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