Artillery brings war to cruel level
Shelling from both sides evoke images last seen in 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, 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 the trees before sprinting in body armor across a square to an abandoned 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 barrages over a see-sawing front line and hope to still be standing when they pulverize the other side into either submission or at least a crushing withdrawal.
The most ferocious battle is for Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, its sister city across the Seversky Donets River. Russian forces have battered their way to almost full control of the former and prepare for an encirclement of the latter. All three bridges linking the two cities were struck and cannot bear vehicles, in effect trapping 12,000 people in Sievierodonetsk’s residential areas.
At least 500 civilians and hundreds of fighters are bunkered in the city’s Azot chemical plant, authorities say, setting the stage for a rerun of 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, Sievierodonetsk’s importance is more symbolic than strategic, unlike Lysychansk, which is on higher ground and would afford those who occupy it a good defensible position. Instead, it represents the last major bastion of the Ukrainian government’s presence in Luhansk, one of the two eastern provinces that are the target of Moscow’s military campaign. But the battle typifies the fight playing out across the country’s
eastern Donbas region: The sheer size of Russia’s arsenal favors it in outlasting the Ukrainians, who have so far clung to territory until it’s arguably too late to escape entrapment.
Pockets of street fighting erupt, but 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 a few days after Russians invaded his 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 was no option but to amputate. Shrapnel in tiny
pieces boring through a man’s body.
“It’s my job. I wanted somewhere active,” he said. Yet he acknowledged that his response belied the fear he felt when he went to evacuate soldiers from sites near what he called “the zero line.”
Over his three months of service the battle lines have swung to and fro, but it was still two steps forward one step back in favor of the Russians. Now, they were raining Grad fusillades and 152 mm barrages on a checkpoint not three miles from the presumably safe position where Vrolov delivered casualties for emergency care.
A visit to that checkpoint — a handful of policemen and soldiers who challenged motorists passing by before scurrying 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 policemen there, adding that the barrage could last one to two hours, sometimes longer.
Some of the heaviest fighting was farther down the P66 highway, where Ukrainian forces continue to mount a defense of Lysychansk’s southeastern flank at a terrible cost.
“The corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, it’s everywhere. There’s shelling and shooting from all sides, and the Russians — they’re advancing a little more every day,” said Ahmad Akhmedov, a Dagestani commander deployed alongside Ukrainian troops near Toshkivka, roughly 12 miles southeast of Lysychansk. 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 anywhere from 100 to 200 soldiers are killed every day. That could amount to as many as 6,000 per month, with multiples of that wounded. Analysts estimate Russia has lost 10,000 troops since the beginning of the war.
Ukrainians who survive the charnel house are withered, their morale sapped by the constant explosions. Reinforcements aren’t arriving often enough and, in any case, they often appear with little training.
“Our soldiers are fighting all the time, but they’re tired. They haven’t left the trenches for months,”