Ukrainian troops dove under their tank, screaming at Washington Post reporters to take cover with them. Together, they pressed their bodies against the damp earth and grass, as Russian firepower rained down along this eastern front, where Moscow is concentrating its military might and inflicting massive casualties on outgunned Ukrainian forces.
“Get out from under here!” one soldier yelled, understanding that the tank — despite serving as temporary cover — was in fact a prime target. “Go! Go! Go!”
The group sprinted through the woods, as the tank roared down a dirt path.
Having reached its 100th day, the war between Russia and Ukraine is now at a demoralizing stage for many Ukrainian soldiers. In the trenches of this coal-mining region, they are reeling from brutal Russian artillery onslaughts that call to mind the indiscriminate savagery of World War I. They are holding out hope for victory despite the grim reality of their struggle’s mounting cost, and successfully holding the line in many places to make the Russian fight a painful slog.
Russian forces are killing as many as 100 Ukrainian troops each day and wounding up to 500 more on the eastern front, President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week. At that rate, Ukraine would be losing, in about 2½ months, as many forces as the United States lost in Iraq and Afghanistan over 20 years. In recent days, Ukrainian territory has slipped away incrementally to Russian forces, who according to Zelensky now control 20 percent of the country.
“In some respects, this is one war but two distinct campaigns,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at Virginia-based CNA. “The first was to decide whether or not Ukraine would survive as an independent state — and Russia lost that conflict decisively. … This second phase is about what territory that independent Ukrainian state will ultimately control, and that remains very much in contest.”
Russia’s catastrophic missteps and embarrassing retreat in the first stage of the war buoyed Ukrainian spirits and resolve. But the barbarity of Russia’s concentrated artillery fire has made the second stage far more challenging for many Ukrainians in the trenches. The war has seen relatively few infantry engagements or tank-on-tank battles; Russia, rather, is concentrating overwhelming artillery power on relatively small areas to blast its way forward in a path of grave destruction.
“They have adopted this technique, which is a World War I technique fundamentally, of using artillery to just obliterate everything in front of them and then crawl over the rubble,” said Frederick W. Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute.
He said facing down such artillery bombardments is daunting and devastating for Ukrainian soldiers.
“The amount of firepower, the number of explosions, the length and duration of the attacks — all of that together, and the fact that you can’t defend against it, you can’t shoot down the rounds, means it’s a lot of casualties and it is also incredibly demoralizing,” Kagan said. “It is disorienting. This is where ‘shell shock’ comes from.”
Moscow is obliterating towns with faraway artillery to minimize its losses and play to the Russian military’s strengths as an artillery-focused force. But Kagan said Moscow is also relying on those tactics because Russian forces have been gutted by casualties and disenchantment from the first phase of the war and have shown an inability to fight successfully otherwise.
The losses Ukrainian forces are suffering are horrible, Kagan said, but they aren’t necessarily going to force Kyiv to capitulate or “lose” the broader war. Even if Russia takes control of all of Donbas, which would be difficult due to Ukraine’s defenses, the Ukrainians still have forces that can counterattack and retake territory elsewhere, he noted. Ukrainian troops, for example, recently launched a counteroffensive near the occupied city of Kherson.
On Thursday afternoon, Ukrainian soldiers said the four rounds of artillery that struck their position appeared consistent with cluster munitions. Such weapons are banned under an international treaty because of their ability to inflict indiscriminate damage in populated areas or leave behind unexploded ordnance as they spray “bomblets” over a wide area. Neither Ukraine nor Russia is a signatory to the treaty.
No soldiers or journalists were wounded in the attack, which appeared to come from the direction of Lyman, a small city that the Russians recently seized.