Doctors and nurses at a hospital in Sloviansk work to stabilise a Ukrainian soldier who had been wounded by shrapnel on June 1, 2022. Photo / Ivor Prickett, The New York Times
It all starts with a whistle, said Vladislav Goncharenko, a Ukrainian army sergeant, describing the relentless Russian shelling.
"You lie in a trench,'' he said, waiting in an ambulance packed with other wounded soldiers. "There are very loud explosions. You want to get deeper into the ground. And you have shrapnel whistling above you, like flies."
Soldiers, he said, "just want it to stop".
Although much of the world's focus in the war has been on Russia's disorganised and flawed campaign, Ukraine too is struggling. Ukraine's army has suffered heavy losses, shown signs of disarray and, step by step, fallen back from long-held positions in Donbas, the eastern region that is now the war's epicentre.
The momentum that Ukraine generated after pushing Russian forces back from Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, has given way in the east to weeks of give-and-take over villages, heavy shelling — and a stream of Ukrainian dead and wounded from the battlefields.
Ukraine's troops now face a Russian force that has shifted strategy from the hasty, reckless advances of the early weeks of the war to a creeping, grinding march enabled by massive artillery bombardments.
On Wednesday, Russian forces advanced in street fighting in the ruins of the city of Sievierodonetsk, a key target of their offensive, where Ukrainian soldiers are at risk of being surrounded. With bridges over the Seversky Donets River destroyed or under fire, resupply has become tenuous.
Ukrainian officials have been candid about the army's travails while arguing more rapid deliveries of Western weaponry will resolve them. Every day in the current heavy fighting, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with Newsmax this week, 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed and another about 500 soldiers are wounded in combat.
To fill gaps in the front line, Ukraine has resorted to deploying minimally trained volunteers of the Territorial Defence Force, which mobilised quickly as the war started. Hints of morale lapses have surfaced. One unit recorded a video protesting dire conditions. In interviews, soldiers said their artillery guns sometimes go quiet for lack of ammunition.
"Those people who said that the war would end very soon, that we have already won, that we will celebrate in April, said a dangerous thing," Ukraine's national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov, told Ukrainian media this week.
In the messy seesaw fighting on the east's rolling plains, the Ukrainian army is buoyed by the promise of Western weapons arriving soon. On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden announced plans to give Ukraine multiple rocket launch systems, a powerful, long-range artillery weapon.
But those are weeks away at best, and it's unclear if they will arrive in time to repel the Russians' slow advance. Last week, Ukraine was forced from positions that it defended through eight years of war with Russian-backed separatists near the town of Svitlodarsk.
Throughout the war, the state of the Ukrainian military has been difficult to assess from publicly available sources. As the war began, the Ukrainian military had about 30,000 troops deployed in the Donbas region, but neither the government nor the military will provide a current figure.
The Ukrainian government has largely withheld casualty figures and Western governments have not volunteered their own assessments of the army's difficulties, as they have in describing Russian setbacks. The last Ukrainian casualty update came on April 16, when Zelenskyy said fewer than 3000 soldiers had died, but his comments about casualties last week suggest the figure is far higher now.
Ukraine is also hampered by the deterioration and depletion of its Soviet-legacy artillery, said Mykhailo Zhirokhov, the author of a book on Ukrainian artillery. The worn barrels fire less accurately. Shells are running low. Western replacements are arriving, but slowly.
The morale of volunteer fighters is also proving to be a challenge, at least in some units. Many who signed up to Ukraine's Territorial Defence Force in the first days of war believed their task would be limited to defending their hometowns. There were teachers, computer programmers, taxi drivers and others, most with no battlefield experience.
Now they find themselves deployed into vicious combat in the east, an indication of Ukraine's mounting demand for frontline fighters.
A law passed on May 3, after many volunteers had already enlisted, allowed their deployment to combat outside their home regions.
Some are trained only after arriving at the front to fire heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles and grenade launchers, because the weapons are only available there, Serhiy Sabko, the head of the Territorial Defence Force general staff, told Ukrainian media last month. "We are forced to carry out additional training" near the front, he said.
Meanwhile, the strain on military families is showing.
In Lviv, a city in the west that has avoided serious shelling, wives and mothers of men in the 103rd Territorial Defence Brigade have protested, terrified about their husbands' and sons' deployment into combat in the east. To assuage concerns, a commander, Vitaliy Kupriy, met with about 200 women in a concert hall but the conversation devolved into screaming and crying, local media reported.
In interviews in ambulances as they were evacuated from the front, about a dozen wounded Ukrainian soldiers said artillery was the cause of most casualties. They echoed appeals of Ukrainian officials for the West to transfer more long-range artillery to counter Russian bombardment.
"It's a weapon that I, as a rifleman, cannot fight," Goncharenko said of Russian artillery.
He was wounded in a barrage on the northern rim of the front around Sievierodonetsk that knocked a tree over the trench he was sheltering in. He suffered a concussion that left him dizzy, vomiting and unable to fight.
The Russians mix artillery barrages with probing maneuvers by infantry or armoured vehicles, identifying new targets by approaching Ukrainian lines and drawing fire. The maneuver is called "reconnaissance until contact".
Ukrainians open fire on the probing Russians, causing casualties. "We collect their dead,'' Goncharenko said.
But then, having ascertained Ukrainian positions, he said, the Russians "pull back and fire artillery".
Russia has paid heavy costs as well. On Tuesday US officials estimated that the Russian military's overall fighting strength had been diminished by about 20 per cent. In late March, Nato estimated that 7000 to 15,000 Russian troops had been killed.
Still, Russia's artillery has devastated towns and cities ahead of the advance and prompted about 80 per cent of the population of Ukrainian-controlled areas in the Donbas to flee. Russian soldiers wind up taking ruins.
"The only way they will occupy Donbas is reducing it to rubble," said Maria Zolkina, a political analyst. "If they capture Donbas, it will be without cities" or people.
Some military analysts see no clear end for now. Russia is unlikely to soon capture the claimed borders of two separatist states whose independence it recognised in February. And Ukraine seems far from ready for a counterattack to turn the tide.
"This is a war where territory is going to change hands, there's no logical stopping point in the conflict and there's no stalemate," said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Virginia. "This is going to be a longer war."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Andrew E. Kramer
Photographs by: Ivor Prickett and Finbarr O'Reilly
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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