Ukraine Goes on Defense on a Reletless Foe

 By Marc Santora

Photographs by Tyler Hicks

Marc Santora and Tyler Hicks spent time with Ukrainian units on the front line outside Avdiivka and in and around Vuhledar to report this article.

His unit was decimated by Ukrainian fire, and 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, a surveillance drone overhead showed, revealing 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 Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, the deputy battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “And they do not stop.”

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.

“Now, we don’t have enough equipment, enough people to go on the offensive,” Lieutenant Shyrshyn said. “So the main goal, for now, is to hold the position we have.”

Kyiv 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 when American military support to Ukraine has ceased and to overwhelm the Ukrainians with sheer mass.

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.

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•  Unpacking the Aid Package: Opposition from Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary had been the primary obstacle to a deal — until he reversed his position. Here’s what was decided.
•  Good Cop-Bad Cop: To make the deal happen, Europe’s most important leaders each assumed varied roles to push Orban into line.
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•  A Longer Game: For Orban, aid to Ukraine has never been a question of immovable principle. It is just one of many issues on which he has sought to establish himself as the leader of a populist and nativist pan-European movement.

• 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 as hunter-killers 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 on the front, 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.

  
  

As the war enters its third year, Ukrainians find themselves outmanned and outgunned. After dominating the fighting in 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.
 

“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”

The Russians also still dominate the skies and, after a brief pause following the downing of several Russian fighter jets, the aerial bombardments have resumed, soldiers said.

Scores of giant craters left by 1,000-pound bombs in annihilated villages testify to the destructive force that Russia continues to bring to bear.

While it is unclear how long Kyiv can sustain its defense if its Western allies do not continue to provide robust military support, Ukrainian forces continue to inflict heavy damage on Russian forces while mostly holding the line.

Since Russia began renewed offensive operations in October, it has lost 365 main battle tanks and some 700 armored vehicles, “but only achieved minor territorial gains,” the British military intelligence agency said last Monday.

More than 13,000 Russian soldiers were killed and wounded in only two months of operations aimed at capturing Avdiivka, according to a declassified American intelligence assessment released in December. That works out to about 3,000 Russian casualties for every square mile of territorial gains.

Still, the British intelligence agency warned that Russia would most likely be able to “continue this level of offensive activity for the foreseeable future.”

“If the Russians are interested in a particular section of the front, they will raze it to the ground,” said Major Bets of the rifle battalion, pointing to a screen showing live drone footage to illustrate his point.

“Since mid-December, the Russians have completely destroyed this tree line,” he said. “If you look around the tree line in a radius of 100 by 100, there is just plowed land.” But, he said, Ukrainian defenders are “digging holes to live somehow, holding on.”

Still, even small Russian gains pose risks for Ukraine. The capture of Marinka — a town near Avdiivka outside the city of Donetsk — after years of fighting has allowed the Russians to open up a new line of attack on another town, Vuhledar, from the north.

“The enemy has partially succeeded,” Major Bets said. “We will not hide it.”