Ill-equipped Ukraine soldiers count cost of 14-month war
As the Ukraine war enters its third year, the infantry of 59th Brigade are confronting a bleak reality: they are running out of soldiers and ammunition to resist their Russian invaders.
One platoon commander who goes by his call sign “Tygr” estimated that just 60%-70% of the several thousand men in the brigade at the start of the conflict were still serving. The rest had been killed, wounded or left for reasons such as age or illness.
Heavy casualties at the hands of Russian forces have been compounded by dreadful conditions on the eastern front, with frozen soil turning into thick mud in unseasonably warm temperatures, playing havoc with soldiers’ health.
On the cusp of the second anniversary of its February 24 invasion, Vladimir Putin’s Russia is in the ascendancy in a conflict that combines trench combat reminiscent of World War 1 with hi-tech drone warfare..
Moscow has made small gains in recent months and claimed a major victory at the weekend when it took control of Avdiivka in the hotly contested eastern Donetsk region. A spokesperson for third Separate Assault Brigade, one of the units that tried to hold the town, said the defenders were outnumbered seven to one.
Reuters spoke to more than 20 soldiers and commanders in infantry, drone and artillery units on different sections of the 1,000km front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.
While still motivated to fight Russian occupation, they spoke of the challenges of holding off a larger and better supplied enemy as military support from the West slows.
Another commander in the 59th Brigade, who only gave his first name Hryhoriy, described relentless attacks from groups of five to seven Russian soldiers who would push forward up to 10 times a day in what he called “meat assaults ”— highly costly to the Russians but also a major threat to his troops.
“When one or two defensive positions are fighting off these assaults all day, the guys get tired,” Hryhoriy said.
“Weapons break, and if there is no possibility of bringing them more ammunition or changing their weapons, then you understand what this leads to.”
Kyiv relies heavily on money and equipment from abroad to fund its war effort.
Artillery shells are also in short supply due to Western countries’ inability to keep up the pace of shipments for a drawnout war. On top of the US supply pause, the EU has conceded it will miss its target to supply 1million shells to Ukraine by March by nearly half.
INSUFFICIENT AMMUNITION
Michael Kofman, a senior fellow and Russian military specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think-tank, estimated that Russia’s artillery was firing at five times the rate of Ukraine’s, a figure that Hryhoriy of the 59th Brigade also gave.
“Ukraine is not getting a sufficient amount of artillery ammunition to meet its minimum defensive needs, and this is not a sustainable situation moving forward,” Kofman added.
Moscow now controls almost a fifth of Ukrainian territory including the Crimea peninsula it annexed in 2014, even if the front lines of the war have stagnated in the past 14 months.
Ukrainian officials have said their armed forces number about 800,000, while in December Putin ordered Russia’s forces to be increased by 170,000 troops to 1.3-million.
Beyond personnel, Moscow’s defence spending dwarfs that of Ukraine. In 2024 it earmarked $109bn for the sector, more than twice Ukraine’s equivalent target of $43.8bn.
PINPOINT ACCURACY
Conventional warplanes are a rare sight over the front lines, largely because air defences act as a deterrent. Yet a different battle is raging in the skies, with both sides striving for the upper hand in drone technology.
Drones — or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — are cheap to produce and can surveil enemy movements and drop ordinance with pinpoint accuracy.
Kyiv has overseen a boom in drone production and innovation and is developing advanced, long-range UAVs, while Moscow has more than matched its rival with huge investments of its own, allowing it to nullify Ukraine’s early advantage.
The scale is astonishing. On the Ukrainian side alone, more than 300,000 drones were ordered from producers last year and more than 100,000 sent to the front, digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov said.
A strong focus now is on light, nimble FPV drones, with which operators, or pilots, get a first-person view from an on-board camera. President Zelensky has set a target for Ukraine to produce 1-million FPV drones this year in light of the battlefield advantages it delivers.
Limuzyn, a company commander in the 59th Brigade, said Russia’s widespread use of drones made it difficult for Ukrainian troops to establish or strengthen fortified positions.
Drones have also forced the Russians to move valuable vehicles and weapons systems back by several kilometres, according to two Ukrainian drone pilots in different units.
“It’s now very hard to find vehicles to hit … most vehicles are 9-10km away or more,” said a pilot in the 24th Brigade with the call sign “Nato”. “At the beginning they were very comfortable being 7km away.”
As the use from drones grows, both sides are bolstering deployment of electronic warfare systems, which can disrupt the frequencies that feed commands from the pilot to the drone, making them drop out of the sky or miss their target.
Darwin, a 20-year-old who dropped out of medical school to enlist when Russia invaded, compared the current drone arms race to that between aviation and air defence: aircraft dominated in World War 2, but modern air defence systems greatly limited their use in this war, he said.
“In future, I am sure there will be an analogous situation with drones: the concentration and effectiveness of electronic warfare will become so big that any connection between an aerial vehicle and its pilot will become impossible.