Ukraine goes on defense against relentless foe
Outmanned and outgunned, troops dig in
EASTERN UKRAINE — His unit decimated by Ukrainian fire, the last surviving soldier in a Russian assault took cover in a shallow crater while Ukrainians shouted at him to surrender. As he lifted two grenades in the air, a Ukrainian drone swept in from above and exploded.
Soon, the smoke cleared and a surveillance drone overhead revealed the Russian soldier’s corpse. That day’s attack, just north of the destroyed city of Avdiivka, was repelled. But the Ukrainians were under no illusions: There would be many more.
“They come in waves,” said Lieutenant Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, the deputy battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “And they do not stop.”
As the war enters its third year, Ukrainians find themselves outmanned and outgunned. After dominating the fighting in parts of the first year and battling mostly to a standstill in the second, they have relinquished the momentum to Russia. Now they are digging in and fighting to hold on.
Mortar crews need to ration artillery shells. Troops are being rotated from units in the rear to join undermanned infantry units at the front, and there are shortages of critical supplies needed to repair and maintain Ukraine’s armored vehicles.
Because the Ukrainians are critically short of ammunition, for instance, they cannot afford to fire at only one or two advancing enemy soldiers, so the Russians have adapted and often move in small numbers to their most forward positions. They try to amass enough soldiers to storm a Ukrainian trench and overwhelm the defenders.
“Now, we don’t have enough equipment, enough people to go on the offensive,” Shyrshyn said. “So the main goal, for now, is to hold the position we have.”
Ukraine recently announced the allocation of nearly $500 million to build fortifications along its border with Russia and to create a deeper defensive line in the eastern Donbas region that can serve as fallback positions should the Russians achieve a major breakthrough.
The epicenter of the fighting remains around Avdiivka in the eastern Donetsk region, where the Russians have staged relentless assaults, no matter the obstacles. They spent weeks fighting for control of an industrial slag heap on the outskirts of the city, sending waves of troops up only to be cut down in horrifying fusillades. They creep through tunnels under the city streets and direct unmanned vehicles packed with explosives at Ukrainian positions.
It is all in the pursuit of another annihilated city. But their attacks in Avdiivka and elsewhere along the front serve a larger goal: to seize the advantage at a time US military support to Ukraine has ceased and to overwhelm the Ukrainians with sheer mass.
Long-range missiles and shelling are also an increasingly used option for both sides. Moscow-installed officials say Ukrainian shelling killed at least 28 people at a bakery Saturday in the Russian-occupied city of Lysychansk.
Ukrainian officials in Kyiv did not comment on the incident, according to the Associated Press.
While they are now almost exclusively engaged in defensive operations, Ukrainian soldiers interviewed along the front said that did not mean they could simply hunker down. They are seeking to inflict maximum pain on Russian forces while avoiding prolonged battles that could result in their own steep losses.
For the moment, Russian forces are achieving only marginal gains despite pouring enormous amounts of resources into their winter offensive.
Last month, journalists from The New York Times were able to watch several recent battles with commanders and drone operators around Avdiivka and another ruined city, Vuhledar — two key hot spots on the eastern front. The scope of the Russian losses was evident in the fields of ruined armor and the broken bodies of soldiers littering snow-covered fields.
The Ukrainians are using mines and other obstacles to channel Russian armor into kill zones, where they can be hit with heavy guns nearly every time they mount an armored assault. They are aggressively using Western-supplied fighting vehicles and tanks when Russian troops get close to the Ukrainian positions.
Since the Russians are now able to fire five times as many shells as the Ukrainians in some parts of the front, according to artillery units working there, the Ukrainians have had to increasingly turn to bomb-laden drones piloted remotely, known as FPVs, to try to plug the gap.
But the Ukrainian firepower is still limited. Major Serhii Bets, 30, the chief of staff of the 48th Separate Rifle Battalion of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, said that the drones were an effective tool but could not be compared with the big guns.
“A first-person drone will not disassemble the dugout, will not mow the tree line,” he said. “It does not exert such psychological pressure on the enemy. And we don’t have a lot of FPV crews.”