‘Learn fast or you’ll be dead’: The bloody stalemate on Ukraine’s front line

There is a roar of noise in the far distance, echoing through the falling snowflakes. It fades away, leaving a moment of stillness over the frozen fields, and then the shells land – flame and ice, orange and white, bursting up from the ground.

The attacks on the Ukrainian positions have started once again on this front line in the eastern region of Luhansk, where Russian forces have been making small advances. It is attritional fighting, as both sides in the conflict try to claw their way out of a wider, and bloody, stalemate.

There is silence after the last round lands, with no one sure whether yet more are incoming. Eventually, we slowly get up and begin to shake down our clothes. Some of the mortar rounds were close, but there have been no casualties, apart from a young trooper who gashed his forehead when diving down.

There is no sympathy over the injury from Sergeant Roman of the Ukrainian army’s 92nd Brigade: “He’ll live, he just needs to be more careful.”

“We have lost six people killed in the last week; 11 injured. We are getting hit every day, and this is not going to end, things are going to get much worse. These young kids have to learn fast, or they’ll be dead. It’s that simple,” he says.

As this war in the heart of Europe reaches its first anniversary, changing the shape of world geopolitics as it progresses, a procession of international leaders has been arriving in Kyiv – the most important of whom has been US president Joe Biden, his presence providing a powerful symbolic assurance that the US and the West will stand by Ukraine. There has been scathing condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s aggression, along with promises of hastening up the supply of arms from Nato and the European Union. New sanctions have been proposed against the Kremlin hierarchy.

Facing the enemy at close quarters, the soldiers say the supportive words are welcome, but it is weapons that they need, and they need them fast. “For us, more arms and ammunition mean fewer lives lost,” says Sgt Roman. “The Russians haven’t been idle: they are bringing up artillery, armour. We can see them more clearly now there are less leaves on trees.”

It is here, in the east of the country, that the battle for one of Putin’s main objectives is playing out. Luhansk and its neighbouring region of Donetsk make up Ukraine’s industrial heartland, known as the Donbas. It is an area that Putin is keen to control completely. New offensives are still to come in the coming weeks and months, but there is no lack of action along this front line, as the opposing sides fight hard to gain strategic ground on the battlefield.

In just the last 24 hours, the Ukrainian defence ministry says its forces have repelled more than 90 ground attacks on a swathe of positions across the Donbas, including around the cities and towns of Bakhmut, Lyman, Kupyansk, Avdiivka and Shakhtarsk. In the same period, there have been 54 missile strikes, and 19 air raids using warplanes and drones.

Heavy fighting has continued around Bakhmut, a city that has become symbolic of what Russia wants to achieve, with Moscow believing its capture would be a stepping stone to the wider Donetsk region. But the supposed aim of the Russian military – to deliver victory there for President Putin by the anniversary of 24 February – is not possible, with the high command in Moscow saying it will be April before this is achieved. There is a similar stand-off near Vuhledar, around 90 miles west of Bakhmut on the other side of the Donetsk region, where the Ukrainians are holding firm despite taking a pounding from Russian artillery.

There have been repeated probing attacks where we are, on the stretch of Luhansk territory still under Ukrainian control. The aim, revealed in Russian communications intercepted by the Ukrainians, is to occupy vantage points before Western supplies of artillery and tanks – German Leopard 2s and British Challenger 2s – arrive.

The Russian forces here are a composite of regular troops and mercenaries from the Wagner group – the private military company that has become a key part of Moscow’s campaign in parts of the east – alongside some penal contingents, fighters from the separatist “Luhansk People’s Republic”, and lately, fresh contingents of Special Forces.

“We are facing a strong and determined enemy here. We are not just fighting mobics [newly mobilised soldiers] and Wagner criminals, we are now seeing Spetsnaz [Special Forces] here. They are very tough guys, they are trying to get behind our lines,” says Artem Vlasenko, a lieutenant in the 92nd Brigade. “We are losing experienced men. We keep fighting them off, but the Spetsnaz keep coming back.”

Forty-five minutes later, as we are trudging towards a forward operating base for troops, there is an eruption of shooting from a ridge to the left: a line of trees close behind us sway drunkenly as bullets smack into them. The Ukrainians fire back in sustained bursts while finding cover until the orders come to stop.

There is a cautious advance to a nearby ridge, a forward party crawling on their stomachs, but the shooters have disappeared. “No blood”, says Sgt Roman, kicking at the snow with the toe of his boot. “So we didn’t get any one of them. We need to do better.”

The unit wants to get back to more secure ground; with the light fading fast, the main danger comes from artillery shells. “The Russians have the advantage by about 4 to 1 when it comes to ammunition; we have to be careful how we fire back,” says Corporal Serhiy. “Things have got better than they were, but this is what we urgently need from America, Britain, Nato.”

The arrival of more armoured personnel carriers, along with the tanks that Western allies have offered, would also be a great help. Some soldiers are using old cars to travel around frontline villages, because of a lack of military transport.

Vitalii Babko, a member of the brigade’s machine-gun unit, is originally from Belarus. He has lived in Ukraine since 1995, and joined the army during the separatist war that began in 2014, when Russian-backed rebels claimed territory in Donetsk and Luhansk. He was not surprised that Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, is an ally of Putin, with Belarus being used as a launchpad for Putin’s failed attempts to take Kyiv at the start of the invasion.

“They are similar men. When I left Belarus, Lukashenko was in power; and he’s still there, two generations later. The only change there is that the country has deteriorated. I have cut all ties with Belarus, and also people I knew in Moscow. They believe what their regimes say,” says the soldier.

Private Babko left the Ukrainian army in 2016 and joined again last year. He shows the bullet holes in his 11-year-old Volkswagen, which he bought for $700 (£582) when the war started.

“It has been shot up a couple of times. No one was hit – can you believe it?” he says. “I was driving it one day when bullets went through the back of the car. I put my foot down and went. We had also been using a Lada at the time; I wouldn’t be here if I was driving the Lada that day. But we need to retire this car before the new battles begin.”

The 92nd Brigade, like the rest of the forces on the front line, is awaiting orders for the next chapter of the war, when winter conditions ease. Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, reiterated this week that the Russians are amassing troops and weapons across the border with the aim of capturing completely the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

There are varying estimates of Russian strength in relation to the forthcoming operations. Reznikov has claimed that 500,000 troops have been mobilised, while Western officials say it is around 350,000. The Pentagon says that 80 per cent of the entire Russian army are involved in what President Putin calls his “Special Military Operation”; the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace, suggests it is more like 97 per cent.

Western officials estimate that around 60,000 Russian troops have been killed so far, with another 200,000 injured. Kyiv has no official figures for Ukrainian casualties, but Western officials put the figure at around 100,000 dead or wounded.

This is the war that the Kremlin thought would end in 10 days, after President Putin sent in his troops to restore Russky mir, the “Russian world”. In this new reality, occupied Ukraine was to become an integral part of the Russian Federation, a collaborationist regime put in place, and obdurate opponents liquidated.

Those of us reporting from Kyiv on 24 February 2022 saw images of a 40-mile Russian armoured convoy heading our way. We were warned that the Russians would do what they had done in Chechnya more than 20 years earlier, and the Ukrainian capital would be razed like Grozny – whose destruction was one of the first acts of the Putin regime.

But Kyiv didn’t fall, despite facing overwhelming Russian firepower, tanks and warplanes. Ukrainian troops, backed by volunteers who had been practising with wooden rifles just weeks before, drove them back – first from the outskirts of the capital, and then from the surrounding areas.

The retreating Russians left behind carnage in the outlying towns that had become battlegrounds. We found grim evidence of what “ liberation” had meant for these people – executed corpses lying in streets, while others had been thrown into mass graves; stories of mutilation, rapes, and forced disappearances.

Modern cities – Mariupol, Kharkiv and Melitopol, among others – were being pounded by artillery, missiles and aircraft. We witnessed the destruction inflicted by advanced weaponry in crowded urban centres, civilians killed and maimed in smashed and burnt homes, and shattered streets. The Second World War, it seemed, was being revisited, with all its mayhem.

Hundreds of thousands of people – women, children, the elderly – fled the country, many of them probably never to return. Young Ukrainians who had rushed to join the country’s forces – the next generation – began to pay a heavy price. Many did not come home.

Slowly, amid fierce fighting, Moscow’s forces were pushed back from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, just 25 miles from the Russian border. Russian forces, including paratroopers, commandos and Chechen fighters, supported by helicopter-gunships, had smashed their way through to the city centre. They were forced to retreat.

From the end of April, Ukrainian troops began to retake the towns and villages around Kharkiv, and reached points along the border. As I travelled with a unit retaking the last hamlets, Major Nikolai Pavlyuk, who serves in a volunteer brigade, exclaimed with a broad grin: “It’s so good to be on the front foot and making them retreat, getting back territory. In the past, we were blowing bridges to slow the Russians; now they are blowing bridges to try and delay us. It is such a great feeling.”

For the first time, there was discernible belief among Ukraine’s Western allies that Ukraine could successfully resist and repel the invasion. The administration of US president Joe Biden declared that Ukraine had “won the Battle of Kharkiv”. What was now unfolding in the city, said Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, added to the growing belief that “Ukraine can win this war”. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of the British military, wanted to stress that “Ukraine’s independence is now guaranteed.”

However, in the newly liberated areas we found a now familiar, and appalling, pattern of human rights abuses by the occupiers – executions, kidnappings, torture and sexual assault, including a harrowing account of a rape at a village school.

The war now moved on to where it had all begun in 2014: the east, where Russian troops had entered the country and the separatist conflict that had led to the creation of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk had taken hold. Places where we had reported on the fighting back then – Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Lyman, Avdiivka – were being shelled and bombed again. Another exodus of people began from the Donbas.

The tide of the conflict was turning again, with the Russians now getting the upper hand, deploying heavy artillery that outgunned the Ukrainians – who were losing between 100 and 150 soldiers a day. The number of injured was not known, but the standard calculation – of three times as many fighters wounded as killed – gave some idea of the scale of casualties. Towns and cities were under fire every day. “Russia wants to destroy the Donbas,” warned a despairing Volodymyr Zelensky.

Captain Yuri Kaluzny, a marine, said at the time: “The shelling just never stops. They focus on a target, pour on fire, and then move forward. We simply haven’t got enough weapons to counter that, so we are losing a lot, dead and injured, and I think we’ll end up by losing a lot of territory.”

We experienced the pulverising effect of the relentless shelling in the trenches, and spoke to troops who – for the first time, to our ears, since the conflict had begun – questioned whether defeat could be avoided.

Russian advances with armoured support led to Ukrainian lines being pushed back, and the Donbas cities of Lyman, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk were captured. It seemed only a matter of time before the whole region slipped into Russian control, and before Putin could declare that he had fulfilled one of his pledges at the start of the invasion – to “reunite the Donbas”.

In Kyiv, grim-faced senior defence officials revealed that the overall assessment was dire, and there were urgent pleas for modern Western artillery before it was too late.

This came in the shape of high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) and multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS). The arena was stabilised. Capt Kaluzny and his comrades, far happier marines now, were told to prepare to move forward.

The Ukrainian offensive came in September and made rapid progress, resulting in the recapture of Lyman in the Donbas, Kupyansk in the Kharkiv oblast, and Kherson in the south. Russian morale appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The influential pro-war bloggers, whose presence had grown as the independent media had been suppressed or driven into exile, now rounded on the military establishment.

Evgeny Prigozhin, the boss of Wagner, and Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord, joined in the scathing criticism of the Kremlin high command. Wagner fighters led the assault on Bakhmut. I spent a long time in the town last summer; going back there in the autumn we found it being dismembered, a process that continues now.

Ukrainian troops say they are confident now of going forward when the order comes. Lt Vlasenko, of the 92nd Brigade, wants to reassure the Western public that Ukrainian forces would have no difficulty coping with the varied assortment of equipment from different donor countries. “We are quick learners, really!” he insists.

Capt Kaluzny, who has just returned to duty after medical treatment for a shrapnel wound, is awaiting deployment, with the city of Kupyansk a possible destination. “We are better armed now, and it’ll be even better when we get the tanks, and if we get the aircraft. Then things will really start moving,” he says.

Ukrainian reinforcements are expected to be sent to Kupyansk; it is a key railway junction for the region,which the Russians are expected to try to reclaim as a logistical hub. The city and its surrounding villages have continued to be attacked by the Russians since they pulled out. A 68-year-old man was injured by shelling on Thursday, which also damaged a nursery and a football field.

Most of Kupyansk has been damaged in the fighting, and the vast majority of residents have fled. At times, those leaving the city have come under fire. A convoy of six cars and a van were heading towards the city of Kharkiv when they were hit by shells soon after the Russians left. Two of the cars were incinerated; the occupants, including a family, were burnt alive. Ukrainian officials say some of those trying to escape the carnage appeared to have been shot at close range by a Russian team that had infiltrated areas behind the lines.

The frontline villages outside Kupyansk are now deserted, apart from a few elderly residents. In the village of Hlushivka, we come across three men digging out ice outside their homes while snow fell heavily.

Vasyl Olinichiuk, 60, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, has stayed put with his wife in the village.

“It is strange to find an army which I was once a part of is now fighting us. I look at young Russian soldiers and wonder. Most of us didn’t know what the hell we were doing in Afghanistan, and I don’t think this lot know what they are doing here either,” he says.

Another resident, Stanislav Shyryi, wants to stress that he has no intention of leaving. “All the young people have gone – some to safer parts of Ukraine, others to Europe. I am 76 years old, this is my home, and I’m staying.” He is adamant: “Even if the Russians come back, it’ll be Ukrainian again before this war is over. This is Ukraine: the days of empire are over. History is on our side.”