Thundering explosions shook the ground as the Ukrainian crew prepared to maneuver their American-made Bradley Fighting Vehicle to remove its camouflage and, once again, throw it into the fire.
The team commander, a sergeant with the call sign Lawyer, nervously scanned the sky. “If they see us, the KABs will come,” he said, referring to the one-ton bombs Russia has been using to attack Ukraine’s most valuable armor and defenses.
What had begun as a small Russian advance in the small town of Ocheretyne was becoming a substantial advance, threatening to unhinge Ukrainian lines on a wide swath of the eastern front. The crew’s mission was to help contain the breach: protect the outnumbered and outgunned infantrymen, evacuate the wounded, and use the Bradley’s powerful 25-millimeter cannon against as many Russians as possible.
But the 28-tonne vehicle was soon sighted. Mortars and rockets exploded everywhere and the gunner was seriously wounded, said the commander, identified only by his call sign according to military protocol.
A combat mission had turned into a mission to rescue his comrade. The gunner survived and is now recovering, the lawyer said a few days later. But the Russians gained territory and continue to try to move forward.
Ukraine is more vulnerable than at any time since the harrowing first weeks of the 2022 invasion, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders from a number of brigades interviewed in recent weeks said. Russia is trying to take advantage of this window of opportunity, intensifying its attacks in the east and now threatening to open a new front by attacking Ukrainian positions along the northern border outside the city of Kharkiv.
Months of delays in American assistance, a mounting number of casualties and a severe ammunition shortage have taken a heavy toll, evident in the exhausted expressions and tired voices of soldiers engaged in daily combat.
“Frankly speaking, I have fears,” said Lt. Col. Oleksandr Voloshyn, 57, a veteran tank battalion commander of the 59th Motorized Brigade. “Because if I don’t have shells, if I don’t have men, if I don’t have equipment that my men can fight with…” he said, stopping. “That’s all.”
The sudden Russian advance through Ocheretyne, about nine miles northwest of Avdiivka, in late April, illustrates how even a small crack in the line can have cascading effects, as platoons already deployed risk being outflanked. and surrounded and other units rush to cover the line. breach.
“It’s like the engine of your car hits you and you continue driving it,” said Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, deputy battalion commander of the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “The car runs, but at some point it just stops. Then you will end up spending even more resources to restore it.”
“There are also errors here that do not seem critical,” he said. “But they have led to the need to stabilize the situation now. And it is not clear where that stabilization will occur.”
“Every event you didn’t predict can change your situation completely,” Lieutenant Shyrshyn said. “And this is what happened at Ocheretyne.”
The domino effect
After the fall of Avdiivka to Russian forces in February, the small town of Ochertyne served as a Ukrainian military strongpoint along a highway. Most of the 3,000 residents had fled. Abandoned apartment blocks and other urban infrastructure provided good defensive positions and for two months the situation remained relatively stable.
But then something went wrong.
The Russians appeared so suddenly on the battered streets around Ivan Vivsianyk’s home in late April that, at first glance, he mistook them for Ukrainian soldiers. When asked for his passport, the 88-year-old knew Ocheretyne’s defense had collapsed.
“I thought our soldiers would come and knock them out,” he said in an interview after making what he called a harrowing walk across the front line to escape. “But it didn’t happen.”
Three weeks later, what began as a small Russian advance has grown into a roughly 15-square-mile lump that is complicating the defense of the Donetsk region.
Extending the salient further north could give the Russians a chance to bypass some of the strongest Ukrainian fortifications in the east that have held for years. Russia can now also undertake a new line of attack aimed at Konstiantynivka, a city that is a logistical hub for Ukrainian forces.
The Kremlin’s attempt to advance from one ruined village to the next has been captured in hours of combat footage shared by Ukrainian brigades on the front lines.
Russian infantry cross mine-filled fields on foot and use dirt bikes and buggies to try to outrun Ukrainian explosive drones. They attack in armored columns of varying sizes, with large assaults often led by tanks covered with huge metal sheds and equipped with sophisticated electronic warfare equipment to protect against drones. Western observers have nicknamed them “turtle tanks.” Ukrainians call them “wundervaflia,” which combines the German word for wonder with the Ukrainian word for waffle.
“We allow their infantry to get closer to us, which creates closer contact and direct firefights,” Lt. Shyrshyn said. “Therefore, our losses are increasing.”
The Russians are also paying a staggering price for each step forward. In April, some 899 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded a day, British military intelligence agency reported recently.
Despite sending so many soldiers into the fight, the Russians took an area covering only about 30 square kilometers in April. according to military analysts. And capturing Ukraine’s last fortified cities in the Donbas – urban centers like Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk – would almost certainly involve long, bloody battles.
Still, Russian advances in recent weeks in the east and northeast are beginning to alter the geometry of the front in dangerous ways.
The frayed line
“Look at the map, where we are and where Ocheretyne is,” said Colonel Voloshyn, tank battalion commander. He surveyed the terrain as he prepared to embark on a mission to target a house where 20 Russians were thought to be hiding. “Now I can assume that they can simply pass us on the left or the right. They have tactical success, they have equipment, men, projectiles. So we can expect everything.”
The lack of dramatic changes on the front for more than a year overshadowed the grueling positional struggle necessary to maintain that precarious balance. In a war where a battle over a single line of trees can last for weeks, the sudden Russian advance in the area around Ocherytne was the most dangerous kind of trouble: rapid, deep and surprising.
There is a bitter debate about who was responsible for the line not being able to be held there.
The Deep State Telegram channel, which has close ties to the Ukrainian military, accused the 115th Mechanized Brigade of abandoning critical positions without orders, allowing the Russians to infiltrate and assault the settlement.
The brigade issued a furious denial, saying its soldiers were outnumbered by up to 15 to one and held out as long as possible under a withering bombardment.
“We want to emphasize that no regular units of the 115th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine abandoned or fled their positions,” the brigade said. A special military commission has been created to determine exactly what happened.
Soldiers familiar with the fighting were hesitant to publicly criticize a neighboring brigade and said a host of problems, from poor communication to being severely outgunned, likely played a role.
Lieutenant Shyrshyn of the 47th, who was holding positions alongside the 115th, would not speculate on what went wrong, but said the consequences were immediate: It soon became clear that the 47th would have to withdraw or risk be surrounded and suffer catastrophic losses.
“The Russians sensed the weakness in that direction and took advantage of the gaps to get behind the Ukrainian soldiers,” he said. “Then we lost Ocheretyne, then Novobakhmutivka and then Soloviove.”
The Ukrainian high command does not like to give up any territory, the lieutenant said, adding that “it is very difficult to argue with them and explain to them why it is not good to maintain this position.”
Lieutenant Shyrshyn hoped the situation would improve with the arrival of Western weapons, but until then, he said, “we will continue to die, we will continue to lose territory.”
“The question is whether it will be at a slow pace and whether it will be defensible,” he said. “Or a fast and meaningless one.”
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from eastern Ukraine. Anastasia Kuznietsova and Nataliia Novosolova contributed to the research.