The artillery fire begins just before dawn. A soldier steps into a darkened trench and lights a cigarette, carefully cupping the flame with his free hand. A boom and crackle of outgoing fire sound in the distance.
Viktor, the infantryman, ducks his head under a canopy of camouflage netting and looks up at the brightening sky. The incessant buzz of a drone sounds overhead, moving a dozen meters from one end of the trench to linger just above him.
Viktor swallows. A moment later, the buzzing sound moves on.
“One of ours,” the 37-year-old soldier says, bringing the cigarette back up to his lips.
The sun finally rises and the noise of war picks up. For weeks, Viktor has barely slept as Russian drones and artillery continually target his position. During the day, he watches for any attempts by Russian troops to cross a minefield that separates the two sides. At night, he picks up a shovel to dig and fortify his trench.
“They’re constantly firing, constantly probing,” he says. “We have to survive somehow and we have to hold the line.”
It is the start of another draining day on Ukraine’s eastern front line. Monitoring his scratchy radio, Viktor will try to move as little as possible in a trench less than 800 meters from where Russian soldiers are amassed. For seven months, Viktor’s unit has held this sector of the front, repelling a relentless onslaught of Russian assaults.
Now in the third year of full-scale war, Ukraine’s top military leaders openly admit that the battlefield situation on the eastern front has deteriorated. Two years of war have sapped Ukraine’s ammunition and manpower, while the country’s failed counter-offensive last year sank morale.
As Reuters traveled along the eastern stretch of Ukraine’s 1,000-kilometer front line in April, soldiers in infantry, artillery and drone units all expressed exhaustion. They spoke of an acute shortage of ammunition and an urgent need to replenish troops. A new push by Moscow earlier this month near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is likely to further divert precious ammunition and personnel from other sections of the front, stretching Kyiv’s military thin at a critical moment in the war.
“Death can come at any moment. I’m starting to get used to the idea of death … that it can happen, and you can’t escape it.”
Though Congress finally greenlit a long-delayed $60 billion U.S. military package in April, analysts say that a severe worldwide shortage of artillery shells means Ukraine will likely be outgunned by Russia for the remainder of the year as Kyiv’s allies ramp up production. Reuters could not independently establish how much of the new U.S. weaponry has made it to the front line. On a visit this month to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured Ukraine that the delayed aid was “now on the way” and some had “already arrived.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said recently there were no reports of artillery shortages. But in an interview last week with Reuters, he called on Western allies to speed up aid, saying every decision they’ve made on military support for Ukraine has been “late by around one year.”
With the possibility of Donald Trump, who has questioned American military aid to Ukraine, returning to the presidency later this year, many Ukrainians fear the continued support of their most powerful ally hangs in the balance.
Russia, meanwhile, has continued to batter Ukraine with seemingly endless resources.
President Vladimir Putin, riding high as he begins his fifth term, has redoubled his war effort. In 2014, Russian-backed separatists staged a battle to control the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine. Since 2022, Putin has made clear his aims to annex the entirety of the area, known as Donbas. To that end, Russian forces have made steady advances in recent months. In February, they captured the eastern city of Avdiivka.
Now, Russia is trying to seize Chasiv Yar, a strategic hilltop city that, if captured, would allow its troops to more easily advance toward the remaining cities of the Donetsk region. Russia’s recent incursions in Kharkiv have distracted the world’s attention from the heavy battles being waged in the Donetsk region, Zelenskiy told Reuters.
The Ukrainian armed forces and the Russian defense ministry did not respond to questions for this story.
Fighting to hold the line
In recent months, Russian forces have made modest but steady gains along Ukraine’s eastern front.
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion two years ago, Viktor, the infantryman, was working as a window framer outside of Uman, a city in central Ukraine. His wife had just given birth to a baby daughter. They lived with his parents in his childhood home built on a small hill overlooking verdant forests and fields that changed color with the seasons. (Like all of the Ukrainians profiled in this report, Viktor asked to be identified by his first name only, in keeping with military protocol.)
Viktor received his mobilization notice four months after the beginning of the war. He was quickly sent to an area in northern Ukraine that borders Russia to dig trenches and fortifications. Later, he was transferred to Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, where mercenaries from Russia’s Wagner group were fighting to capture the city. Last September, Viktor was handed a Browning machine gun and taught how to clean and maintain the weapon. A week later, he was transferred to the front in Donetsk without having fired a single practice round.
When Viktor’s infantry unit first arrived here, thickets of oak and birch trees lined the grassy fields. There were still birds in the trees then and the leaves were just starting to change color. The soldiers dug trenches into the tough black soil but had no time to cover them with wooden planks before the Russian bombardment started. Through winter, the Russians’ near-constant shelling reduced the trees and fields to ashes, leaving only a tangle of charred stumps.
In winter, temperatures in Viktor’s trench fell as low as minus 26 degrees Celsius. On warmer days, shin-high water pooled at the bottom of the canal, mixing with the earth to turn into slushy mud, soaking everything. All the while, Russian drones flew overhead, hovering above the open trench and dropping grenades.
At the beginning of this year, Russian forces attempted yet another assault, driving an armored personnel carrier into a field just meters from Viktor’s position. He fired at the vehicle with his machine gun and diverted it to a minefield, where it detonated a mine and exploded.
Several of the Russian soldiers died in their vehicle, say Viktor and his commander. Others survived with serious injuries and tried to crawl through the minefield back toward the Russian positions. One of them, a former convict from Russia’s Buryatia region, was taken prisoner, Viktor says. Immediately afterward, Russian attacks on Viktor’s position intensified.
“It’s not like how it looks on a map with all these pretty lines and arrows … I see my friends, what’s happened to them, what we’re fighting. It’s hell, it’s worse than hell.”
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