Kill, be killed: Ukraine’s battlefield equation

KYIV, Ukraine — As Russia mounted wave after wave of attacks over the summer, Sgt. Mykola Rogozovets and fellow members of his unit started drawing little plus signs in the dirt of their bunker while artillery shook the ground around them.

Each cross, said Rogozovets, a 48-year-old unit commander in Ukraine’s 1st Presidential Brigade, represented a Russian soldier they had killed in fighting. He added 12 plus signs in a single day in August, he said, before a shell exploded at his position in northeast Ukraine and his left shoulder was wounded by shrapnel.

“When new guys replaced us, they asked, ‘What are these pluses?’” he said Friday in an interview at a base outside Kyiv. He told them what they stood for and then left with these words: “‘Continue our mission, kill the enemy and put pluses.’”

Ukraine, like all wars, is in large part about attrition: killing enough enemy soldiers and destroying enough of their equipment so the opponent can no longer bear the cost of fighting.

Now, as the days grow shorter and autumn rains begin to soak the battlefields of Ukraine, that bloody equation is playing out under a relentless hail of artillery along the vast front line. Europe’s deadliest war in generations remains exceedingly violent, precariously balanced and increasingly complicated by factors far from the battlefield.

Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are squared off across trench lines that have barely shifted for nearly a year. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Ukrainians are bracing for another winter of terror and suffering as Russia stockpiles missiles that could be used to target their nation’s infrastructure in an attempt to demoralize civilians and make cities uninhabitable.

Ukrainian forces are still fighting to break through heavily fortified Russian lines in the south, but the pace of their advance has been slow, averaging only 90 yards per day during the peak of the summer offensive, according to a new analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

That is the same pace as the Allied forces during the bloody five-month Battle of the Somme in 1916, the analysis said.

While Ukraine is still pressing its counteroffensive, defenders have the clear advantage in the war, said Seth Jones, one author of the report. Ukrainians pierced one line of Russian defense around the flattened village of Robotyne in the south. But after five months of brutal fighting, they have yet to achieve a major breakthrough.

Russia, however, is not just sitting back on defense. It is using perhaps its greatest advantage — the sheer mass of its army — to launch renewed offensive operations in the east. In particular, its forces have staged their largest assault in months, with fierce, bloody fighting around the ruined Ukrainian city of Avdiivka.

The decision to commit thousands of soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles to the fight for Avdiivka is a sign of the Kremlin’s confidence that it has sufficiently blunted the Ukrainian offensive in the south to allow it to press forward elsewhere.

Two ongoing battles taking place hundreds of miles apart underscore the importance for both armies of being able to replenish their forces and equipment.

While Russia is attacking Avdiivka with ferocity, the campaign has been something of a disaster, some analysts say.

Its army has lost more than 100 tanks and armored vehicles and scores of fighters while failing to dislodge Ukrainian defenders, according to combat footage verified by independent military analysts.

Still, that determination to press shows Russia’s ability to throw waves of soldiers into assaults, no matter the casualty count, and Anton Kotsukon, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade, said they expected the attacks to keep coming.