At the hot spots of the eastern front line, Ukrainian troops are outmanned, outgunned and digging in.
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, 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.”
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.
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,” 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 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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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.
Soldiers from the 72nd Mechanized Brigade in Vuhledar, a Russian target in eastern Ukraine.
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