Vicious artillery war spreads in Ukraine
Constant barrages scar eastern Donbas region in a pitiless slugfest reminiscent of WWI.
LYSYCHANSK, Ukraine — The first shell was the worst, mostly because it came as a surprise. But then the soldiers thought it was OK to get up and dust themselves off. That’s when the second one landed, and it was the worst. The third one is when they understood they were being hunted, and somehow that shelling was now the worst.
Their commander, a breezily confident 31-yearold named Levan, gathered his squad and waited for the bang of outgoing artillery. He made a dash around the corner to the next block, taking cover beneath trees before sprinting in body armor across a square to an abandoned Brutalist apartment building. The Russian barrage was relentless, shells chasing Levan and his men almost to the door.
This is the conflict in Ukraine now: a pitiless artillery war, the kind perhaps not seen since the days of endless trenches and gouged terrain that marked World War I. Less strategy than slugfest, both sides lob barrage and counter-barrage over a seesawing front line and hope to still be standing after they pulverize the other side into submission, or at least a withdrawal.
The most ferocious battle is for Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, its sister city across the Seversky Donets River. Russian forces have battered their way to almost full control of the former and are preparing to encircle the latter.
All three bridges linking the two cities have been struck and cannot bear vehicles, in effect trapping 12,000 people in Severodonetsk’s residential areas.
The city’s Azot chemical plant is serving as a bunker for at least 500 civilians and hundreds of fighters, authorities say, setting the stage for a rerun of what took place at the Azovstal, the industrial complex in the embattled city of Mariupol where Moscow’s troops maintained a crushing siege on Ukrainian defenders.
In many ways, Severodonetsk’s importance is more symbolic than strategic, unlike that of Lysychansk, which is on higher ground, affording whoever holds it a good defensible position.
Severodonetsk instead represents the last major bastion of the Ukrainian government’s presence in Luhansk, one of the two provinces in the country’s eastern Donbas region that are the target of Moscow’s military campaign. But the battle for the city typifies the fight playing out across the region’s mining towns and fecund plains: The sheer size of Russia’s arsenal gives its troops the edge in outlasting the Ukrainians, who have clung to territory until it’s arguably too late to escape entrapment.
Pockets of street fighting erupt, but there are few close engagements between opposing troops near the cities. Most of the casualties are the result of barrages: In the last three months of the war, 80% to 90% were due to artillery, with the rest caused by bullets, said Oleg Vrolov, a physical training instructor turned army ambulance driver, who joined the military a few days after Russians invaded his southern Ukraine hometown of Kherson in February.
He has seen the effects of heavy shelling on the soldiers he evacuates near the front lines. Shrapnel slicing up legs so badly that there is no option but to amputate. Shrapnel in tiny pieces boring through a man’s body. Shrapnel cracking bone.
“It’s my job. I wanted somewhere active,” he said. Yet he acknowledged that his response belied the fear he felt when he evacuated soldiers from sites near what he called “the zero line.”
“The battles were so crazy that my legs were shaking,” he said. “I want to stay alive — that’s it — but I have to go to these places.”
Over his three months of service, the battle lines have swung to and fro, but it was two steps forward, one step back in favor of the Russians.
They had been raining fusillades from Grad rocket launchers and barrages from 152-millimeter howitzers on a checkpoint not three miles from the presumably safe position where Vrolov had delivered casualties for emergency care.
A visit to that checkpoint — made up of a handful of police officers and soldiers who challenged motorists passing by before scurrying to a bunker underground at the shriek of artillery — showed the precariousness of the Ukrainians’ positions.
“Every day. Twice a day, four times a day. Then also at night,” said Yevhen, one of the police officers there, adding that the attacks could last one to two hours, sometimes longer.
Sitting beside him in the bunker was Serhei, a 40year-old police officer.
“It got worse in the last week. It’s like Disneyland here,” Serhei joked, a tired smile on his face.
Some of the heaviest fighting was farther down highway P66, where Ukrainian forces continued to defend Lysychansk’s southeastern flank, at a terrible cost.
“The corpses, the smell of rotting flesh — it’s everywhere,” said Ahmad Akhmedov, a Dagestani commander deployed alongside Ukrainian troops near the village of Toshkivka, roughly 12 miles southeast of Lysychansk. “There’s shelling and shooting from all sides, and the Russians — they’re advancing a little more every day.”
He looked exhausted, his face made older by fatigue and perhaps the loss of too many comrades — as many as 30 a day, he said.
Ukrainian officials estimate that 100 to 200 soldiers are being killed every day. That could amount to as many as 6,000 per month, with multiples of that wounded. Analysts estimate that Russia has lost 10,000 troops since it invaded Ukraine on Feb. 22.
Ukrainians who survive this charnel house are withered, their morale sapped by the frequent explosions. Reinforcements aren’t arriving often enough, and when they do, they often have little training.
“Our soldiers are fighting all the time, but they’re tired. They haven’t left the trenches for months,” Akhmedov said.
Nevertheless, many of the fighters and officials interviewed in Lysychansk and its environs bristled at the notion of ceding territory. They suggested that despite pledges, Western nations have been reluctant to provide weapons as they urge Kyiv to consider ceding territory to bring about a cease-fire.
The men here weren’t too concerned with the larger politics at play but were unanimous in calling for additional weapons, especially long-range, multiplelaunch rocket systems and Western artillery systems that could knock out targets 300 miles away.
“We don’t need four HIMARS. We need a thousand,” Serhei said, referring to the high-mobility artillery rocket systems that the U.S. recently provided to Ukrainian troops.
Washington pledged this week to send an additional $1 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, including more rounds for HIMARS. But Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley cautioned that HIMARS aren’t a “silver bullet.”
“No weapon system — singular weapon system — ever ‘turns the balance,’ ” he said at a news conference Wednesday in Brussels. Still, he lauded the Ukrainians for inflicting what he said was a 20% to 30% loss on Russia’s armored force. Open-source experts say Russia has lost about 1,000 tanks.
Milley pushed back on the notion of an inevitable Russian takeover of the Donbas, pointing to Severodonetsk as a place where the Ukrainians are fighting the Russians “street by street, house by house, and it’s not a done deal.”
“There are no inevitabilities in war,” he said.
But he acknowledged that the “numbers clearly favor the Russians. ... In terms of artillery, they do outnumber, they outgun and outrange.”
It seemed clear all over Lysychansk that the Ukrainians were suffering major losses.
Strewn around its neighborhoods, or nestled among its hiking trails, are the burnt-out carcasses of armored vehicles, antitank guns and at least one pontoon bridge truck, all knocked out of commission by Russian artillery, residents said. Buildings that Ukrainian troops had used as bunkers were perforated by shrapnel from Grad rockets, their fuselages and fins still sticking out of the asphalt.
From the screen of a drone flown by a Ukrainian soldier tasked with determining targeting coordinates over Severodonetsk, the effect of the artillery duel appeared like a cancer, bashing everything in its path into pixelated versions of what they once were.
Up close, nearly everything appears scorched and ground down to a palette of black, dark gray and gray. The only splashes of color come from the occasional children’s toy or fluorescent police vest left among the ruins.
The cancer is slowly spreading to Donetsk province as the footprint of the war gets larger. The main highway from Lysychansk to Bakhmut, a city in Donetsk province about 30 miles to the southwest, was a Russian free-fire zone a month ago, which has forced residents and supply convoys to use back-country routes in the area.
But signs of the ferocious fight taking place all around have begun to appear there too. Roads are increasingly cratered. A short drive outside Bakhmut on Tuesday was the still-smoking wreckage of three mud-and-brick houses, all felled by the explosive power of one strike.
The next day, a few miles away, hulking Kozak lightarmored vehicles, Kamaz military trucks, ambulances and Soviet-era clunkers navigated past the shell of a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier. It had blown up sometime overnight, spilling oil, chunks of metal and tattered belongings over the two-lane road.
At one point, what looked like a Ukrainian Mi-17 helicopter flew low, hugging a line of poplar trees to avoid detection, looking from a distance like a fat bee flying by a green field of wheat.
Even as the fight to encircle Severodonetsk raged on, it appeared that Lysychansk was on borrowed time. Soldiers flagged down cars on highway P66, warning motorists of heavy shelling near the main checkpoint outside the city.
“When the shelling stops, you have three minutes before it starts again,” one of them said.
Behind him was the percussive beat of a battle about 10 miles into the forests south of the city, punctuated by the sustained bursts of machine guns from helicopter gunships.
“Now you can go,” said another. The driver didn’t hesitate, straining his van’s engine as he barreled down the highway. He stared ahead, silent, waiting for the sound that meant his luck had run out.