by Carlotta Gall who spent a week talking to Ukrainian soldiers and commanders involved in the battle for Avdiivka.
The tall chimneys of the Avdiivka Coke Plant stand out against the skyline. Beside it a sprawling slag heap juts into the sky, offering a high point overlooking the city of Avdiivka and surrounding villages.
The two landmarks have been the focus of furious fighting since Oct. 10 as thousands of Russian troops began a major new offensive in eastern Ukraine to seize Avdiivka, a long-coveted prize that would extend Russia’s control of the coal mining region of the Donbas.
Yet within days this battle for Avdiivka was shaping up to be perhaps the costliest of the war for Russia. Ukrainian artillery destroyed Russian armored columns on the approaches to the city, and drones armed with explosives struck down infantry as they dismounted from vehicles and advanced on foot, according to Ukrainian soldiers and commanders, Russian military bloggers and independent military analysts.
Waves of Russian soldiers scaled the industrial waste heap to gain its heights. Each time they were shredded by Ukrainian artillery.
Nearly three weeks into the battle, the Russian army has failed to make the swift breakthrough it wanted. It has lost hundreds of men and more than 100 armored vehicles and tanks, the Institute for the Study of War reported, and twice that amount by Ukrainian accounts. In the main direction of the attacks, it has advanced barely a mile, and in other places only a few hundred yards.
As both sides have found in nearly two years of heavy artillery battles, a mechanized assault against a strong defensive line is always a brutal experience.
The Ukrainians are taking heavy casualties, too; one soldier described how only six soldiers from his unit of more than 50 remained uninjured after the first days of fighting.
The Russian losses at Avdiivka are even more numerous than those suffered by the Russian army in battles last year and at Vuhledar in March this year, Ukrainian officials and analysts said.
Those earlier losses of equipment severely restricted Russia’s ability to maneuver as it had planned, and the new losses may hamper its operations in the same way again, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington D.C.-based research group.
The State of the War
A Bloody Price: The fight for the battered Ukrainian city of Avdiivka has emerged as the fiercest battle of the war. Waves of Russian assaults have not broken through so far.
‘Franken’ Weapons: To meet Ukraine’s demand for more air defenses, the United States is producing so-called FrankenSAM systems that marry advanced Western weaponry with Soviet-era items still in Kyiv’s stockpiles.
On the Diplomatic Front: Dozens of countries met at a forum in Malta intended to rally support for Ukraine and to encourage countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia that have taken a neutral stance in the conflict there not to side with Russia.
The city has been a target of Russian guns ever since Russian proxy forces seized it and then lost it to Ukrainian forces in 2014.
“The most we have had is half a day of quiet,” said a former lawmaker now serving in the 109th Territorial Defense Brigade near the city, his hometown. “But this assault was the harshest that we have had in the whole war.”
He asked to be identified only by his call sign, Deputat, for security reasons, as did all members of the military interviewed for this article.
Over the past nine years Avdiivka has become a bastion of Ukraine’s defense in the east. The city stands a few miles from Donetsk, the largest city of the Russian controlled eastern provinces, well within range of its airport and main installations.
Even as Ukrainian troops have lost surrounding territory, they have continued to block Russia’s use of the main highway and railroad along the frontline.
That gives Avdiivka strategic military value, since capturing it would push Ukrainian forces back from the threshold of Donetsk and open up the main rail and road routes for Russian forces in the area.
For this article of nine pages with all of the images, please click on this link to the New York Times or click on the link below for a pdf file with also all of the images.
Vladyslav Golovin and Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Donetsk region. Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting from London.
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent currently covering the war in Ukraine. She previously was Istanbul bureau chief, covered the aftershocks of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, and reported from the Balkans during the war in Kosovo and Serbia, and from Afghanistan and Pakistan after 2001. She was on a team that won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan. More about Carlotta Gall
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 31, 2023, Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Ukraine, Defending a Prized City, Fights a Pivotal Battle on a Slag Heap. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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