In the delayed war in Ukraine, death comes as quickly as ever

The pain came in waves as the wounded Ukrainian soldier slipped in and out of consciousness in the back of the ambulance. The driver, hurtling past crater fields on mud-packed roads, raced to escape Russian artillery fire north of the town of Avdiivka, hoping not to be spotted by drones.

“They are razing everything to the ground,” said the driver, Seagull, who used only his call sign, in accordance with military protocol. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Russian forces have been waging heavy attacks around Avdiivka for more than a month and recently launched simultaneous offensives across eastern Ukraine in what military analysts say is an attempt to regain the initiative as winter approaches. Ukrainian forces are putting up fierce resistance as they look for openings in a southern counter-offensive and carry out river crossings near the southern port city of Kherson.

When Ukraine’s top military commander, General Valery Zaluzhny, recently said that the war was a “stalemate‘– with intense and exhausting battles that yielded little territorial gain – it gave the impression in some quarters of a war at a standstill.

But for the Ukrainian soldiers and medics on the front lines, the violent struggle to stop the ruthless Russian attacks as they fight to regain favorable positions does not feel the least bit static.

“Of course it is becoming more and more difficult,” said Oleksandr, 52, a medic at the medical stabilization point a few kilometers from the front. “We understand it will be longer and more difficult and there will be more losses.”

Still, he said he had no choice but to fight so his grandchildren could grow up free from Russian tyranny. “We’ll stay here as long as it takes,” he said.

And so the fighting continues, with little territory changing hands while the grim body count mounts. Ukrainian forces largely thwarted Russian attacks by using a combination of drones and cluster munitions to inflict some of the heaviest Russian losses of the war, according to soldiers and military analysts.

But the Russian attacks keep coming and Ukrainian soldiers are also suffering horrific injuries.

As Seagull pulled the ambulance to the medical stabilization point, a team of medics waiting by canvas stretchers stained dozens of shades of red with the blood of other soldiers. The medics had to act quickly; they could be spotted by drones and were still within range of Russian artillery.

“His lower limb bones were shattered by a mine,” Oleksandr said. The team rushed to bandage the young soldier and do what they could to ease his pain. Within 15 minutes he was back in the ambulance and rushed to a hospital a safer distance from the front.

“We have more serious injuries, amputations of the lower and upper limbs,” Oleksandr said. “This man will be able to keep his leg.”

Another wounded soldier was quickly brought in. “It’s very difficult,” says Oleksandr, who was a thoracic surgeon before the war. “We hardly sleep.”

The current intensity of Russian attacks in eastern Ukraine – and Ukrainian attempts to gain control of the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in the south, potentially opening a new front in the war – underlines how precarious the situation is for remains for both parties.

“The positional war in Ukraine is not a stable stalemate,” said Frederick W. Kagan, director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last week.

The balance on the battlefield could now, he said in an interview, easily be tipped in either direction by a number of factors: the strategic choices made by Ukraine and Russia, the level of aid provided by the West and the willingness of the Kremlin to finally fully mobilize. Russian society before war.

“On the one hand, Western arsenals already have the weapons needed to address virtually all challenges facing fighters in Ukraine,” he wrote. “On the other hand, Russia’s full mobilization of its economy and society” could tip the balance in the Kremlin’s favor.

Soldiers in the thick of battle are acutely aware of how dependent they remain on Western support.

“It is unlikely that Ukraine itself can do anything to reverse the situation; it is a matter of allies,” said Synoptic, a soldier from the 110th Mechanized Brigade, which has been defending Avdiivka since the start of the full-scale war last year.

“It is necessary that we have an advantage in everything – then a breakthrough is possible,” he said. “We don’t have this advantage. They have more aviation, radio reconnaissance, electronic warfare and more people. But even under such conditions, Ukraine conducts offensive operations in certain areas.”

The same factors that have prevented the Ukrainians from making a major breakthrough — dense minefields, withering artillery fire and the widespread use of drones that make large-scale surprise virtually impossible — have helped them fend off Russian attacks, Ukrainian soldiers said.

“It’s an evolution of warfare,” said Carbonara, another soldier with the 110th. “We’re starting to beat them, they’re starting to beat us.”

More than a month after Russia began an offensive to encircle and capture Avdiivka, it is closing in on the sprawling industrial plant on the outskirts of the city. But what is most notable about the campaign so far is the staggering losses suffered by the units.

General Zaluzhny said in a statement last week he said Russia had lost more than 100 tanks, 250 other armored vehicles, about 50 artillery systems and seven Su-25 aircraft since October 10. He also claimed that Russia had suffered some 10,000 casualties.

Although his accounting is impossible to fully verify, Geoconfirmedan open-source reporting project, used commercially available satellite images to Verify that at least 197 Russian vehicles were damaged or destroyed between October 9 and November 1.

“We can now conclude that this is by far the most expensive Russian attack on a single city over three weeks since the start of the war,” GeoConfirmed analysts said.

Frederick B. Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and former top commander of the U.S. military in Europe, warned that it was misleading to measure Ukraine’s success simply by the territory its forces had captured. He said he was continually struck by “how linear and country-centric some observers” of the war still are.

“How telling that after nine years of conflict, two years since the Russian invasion, with all the advantages the Kremlin has on its side, they can only control about 18 percent of Ukraine,” he said.

But time, like weapons and ammunition, is a strategic asset, and the Kremlin clearly hopes it can outlast Ukraine’s Western allies.

According to the White House, more than 90 percent of approved military funding for Ukraine has been spent and delays in getting more aid approved by Congress are starting to be felt on the battlefield.

Philip M. Breedlove, a retired U.S. Air Force general and former NATO commander, said: “This war will end exactly the way Western policymakers want it to end.”

If the West continued to give the Ukrainians “only what they need to stay on the battlefield instead of what they need to win,” he added, Ukraine would ultimately succumb to Russian aggression.

In the meantime, the fighting doesn’t wait. According to the Ukrainian military, there were more than 130 combat clashes across the country on Thursday and Friday.

In a shelter hidden in a tree line outside Kupiansk in northeastern Ukraine – which on a rainy day can only be reached by moving quickly on foot across an open plain charred by the craters of shellfire – Ukrainian soldiers from the 57th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade: Russian attacks came every day.

They conduct research in small groups – perhaps five or ten soldiers at a time – and the 57th’s job, using surveillance drones, is to protect the infantry in the trenches on the front lines.

Sometimes, said the commander, a 26-year-old senior lieutenant who goes by the call sign Black, the Ukrainians will have to withdraw and his job will be to destroy the Ukrainian fortifications so the Russians cannot use them.

“They might move a little bit, but it will be very, very slow,” he said.

On most days the map will remain largely unchanged, but keeping the lines from moving requires a violent dance of its own, one that is in constant danger of becoming unbalanced. Explosions rang out around the dugout every 30 seconds.

“It can seem boring to people, watching, waiting and not seeing any change,” Black said. “But they have no idea how difficult it is to hold the line.”

“It’s stupid,” he said. “You feel like a constant target.”

Natalia Novosolova And Anastasia Kuznietsova reporting contributed.