In the valleys of death, a game of hide and survive
In the leaves, a muzzle barked. A flash of smoke spun out across the field, something whirred into the distance, and the butterflies in the young crops barely flinched.
The howitzers in the trees fired twice in quick succession, then their crews dismounted, replaced dislodged camouflage, and reloaded.
Artillery, rocket launchers and mortars are more likely to decide the outcome of the war in Ukraine than any other weapon system.
In eastern Donbas, massive Russian barrages are pounding a path for the infantry and tanks as they try to surround the city of Severodonetsk – with ghastly consequences for anyone caught in the way.
Ukrainian guns and rockets are firing back, trying to counter river crossings and kill enough of the enemy to disrupt the advance. They, too, have inflicted horrendous casualties.
But Russia has the upper hand. And although the West has provided Ukraine with some more modern weapons, like American M777 howitzers and HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems), most of its arsenal, like the self-propelled guns in this tree line, is from the Soviet era.
The target now was a group of Russian infantry and armoured vehicles spotted about six miles away near Izyum.
“All preparation for the counteroffensive,” said the divisional artillery commander observing the guns.
Rumours abound about when and where Ukraine will put in a counterstrike. Some officials have suggested it will come later in summer, when the Russian offensive in Donbas has exhausted itself. Others have hinted it is needed urgently now.
In the meantime, the guns are duelling for dominance over vast distances on the rolling east Ukrainian plains.
It is a ponderous but deadly game of hide and seek.
On the modern battlefield, with counter-battery radars and surveillance drones, the working assumption is that you have about three minutes to move before incoming counter-battery fire. But as with so much in war, the application differs wildly from the theory.
“Much of it is our own intuition. You get a feeling when something is coming in. You kind of know OK, now something is going to happen,” said the battery commander, a bearded captain who went by the call sign of Horizon and seemed remarkably relaxed.
“The other day, we hadn’t even fired before they opened up. A whole battery was working on us,” he said.
“But right now thank god it’s quiet. They’re not around. I don’t even know why. Maybe we already f----- them up properly,” he said.
“They use drones to find us. When they begin to fly in a circle above you, you know you’d better move.”
“That’s a drone, though. There’s also the situation where you’ve got to save some infantry, for example, and you can’t damned move in any event.
“You have to carry on working no matter what – although on paper you’re meant to do as much as you can and then move on.”
The border of the Kharkiv and Donetsk region is a landscape of rolling plains, broad shallow valleys and low crests that rise and fall like a gentle ocean swell.
The villages and towns tend to lie in the low valleys, where meandering rivers and lakes lie in thick reed banks. Up on the crests of the ridges, the landscape falls away for miles around.
It is a place of light and space: vast skies, long roads and distant horizons.
‘The assumption is that you have about three minutes to move before incoming counter-battery fire’
In wartime, it makes one incredibly vulnerable.
It is on the high ground that the Russians have made their best advances in the east, and where both sides’ big guns manoeuvre around, trying to find and destroy one another at ranges of over a dozen miles.
Wide fields of rape and barley, unlikely ever to be harvested, are pockmarked with shell craters and the tail sections of rockets.
All along the horizon, smoke rises from burning fields and villages where one or another side’s artillery have found a target. The drumming of Grad rockets is as regular as the chirping of the insects.
Humans have vanished, ceding the village streets to free-roaming livestock: muscovy ducks, chickens, the occasional goat.
Where there are trees, the armies wrap themselves in cloaks of leaves and branches. Where there are buildings, they confine themselves to the cellars.
Where there are neither, they dig as deep as they can. Depth means safety.
This artillery war is one of extreme and humiliating fear.
“I’ve literally s--- myself loads of times,” said one soldier in a forward mortar platoon charged with covering the infantry at the very front.
“Everyone is afraid. There’s not a single person here who isn’t scared by
‘Fields of rape and barley, unlikely to be harvested, are pockmarked with shell craters and rockets’
it. But you’ve got to fight it. The thing to do, when it comes in, is not think about it very much. You sit in the shelter and breathe. Just breathe.”
“We were pinned down under a two and a half day barrage and you had to p--- in a bottle where you lay. You couldn’t go anywhere. What are you going to do, go outside?”
These men live much closer to the front than the howitzer crews on the ridges, and know intimately what it is like to be on the receiving end.
They, too, live in fear of discovery: trying not to move around too much in the open, and keeping their weapons hidden from the prying eyes of Russian Orlan drones. But even they have seldom seen the people they are fighting.
“If you’re talking about gun fights, there hasn’t been one here. Not once,” said Roman, the company commander. “We fell back three times since the battle began, but for the past two weeks the front has been mostly static.
“The day before yesterday it was hot though.”
While the men sheltered, unmoving, in the tiny cellar they call a bunker, incoming rounds blew up their kitchen area, several chicken coops, and abandoned agricultural machinery.
Nasty, but too random and untargeted to suggest the Russians had found them. “Stray shells,” one of the men said, apparently meant for a barrage elsewhere.
His explanation was interrupted by a pitter-patter of falling Grad rockets, closer than comfortable. It was time to sit and breathe underground.
In the bunker, they made sweet instant coffee on a butane stove and smoked at the foot of the stairs to the surface, and shared videos of much closer calls.
When they emerged, the air was still and the shadows were longer.
A hare hopped cautiously across a road, sniffed at a brace of anti-tank mines, and disappeared into the deserted field.
A pair of jets skimmed the treetops of a valley like white darts, too fast to tell whose side they were on.
“They know we’re somewhere in the area, but they don’t know exactly. Otherwise they’d have hammered us,” said Tulip. “As long as you don’t show yourself, it’s not a fact they’ll find you.”