Symbolism or strategy? Ukraine struggles to maintain small gains

Ukrainian soldiers ducked into trenches for hours as artillery exploded around them, then ran to the safety of an armored personnel carrier – only to be chased through the vehicle’s open rear hatch by an exploding drone.

“All I could see were sparks in my eyes,” said one of the soldiers, a sergeant, as he recounted how the pursuing drone exploded, leaving him and his team injured but somehow still alive . He asked to be identified only by his first name, Oleksandr, as per military protocol.

The fighting on the plains in the southern Ukrainian region of Zaporizhia, where Oleksandr’s vehicle was hit earlier this year, has been raging for ten months now in two phases: first with Ukrainian forces on the offensive, and now on the defensive, as Russia attacks on the area are escalating. Ukraine gained ground during last summer’s counter-offensive.

Military analysts have described Ukraine’s strategy as “hold, build and attack”: holding the line in the country’s southeast, replenishing units with new troops and hitting back with long-range drone strikes on oil refineries and military logistics targets in Russia.

In Zaporizhia, this meant defending an area created by last summer’s counteroffensive, a semicircle 10 miles (16 kilometers) deep that pushes into Russian-held territory, forming a bulge. Soldiers describe destroyed villages, trenches and fields that form a moonscape of shell craters.

At the southern tip of the semicircle lies the village of Robotyne. Ukraine retook the country last summer, in the culmination of a counter-offensive that not only failed to achieve a breakthrough but also left the Russians in a strong enough position to push back across the southern front.

Ukrainian forces occupying that frontline bulge could be attacked from three sides, creating a dilemma: giving up that pocket would ease pressure on them, but it would also represent a symbolic setback in the war, losing territory lose what they had won in a war the previous year. high costs in casualties and destroyed weapons.

During an interview last week, soldiers who had recently fought there described minor fluctuations on the front in both directions, and being severely defeated by Russian artillery. Overall, Russia is firing seven times as many artillery shells along the front line as Ukraine, Gen. Ivan Havryliuk, a deputy defense minister, told Ukrainian media on Monday.

American weaponry donated to the counteroffensive last year, including Stryker armored vehicles, has proven useful in protecting soldiers from this barrage as they fight defensively.

But American politics now threatens the arms supply. A package worth about $60 billion in military and financial aid has been stalled in Congress for months over objections from some Republicans. The Biden administration announced last week that it would send $300 million in emergency aid using funds left over from previously approved aid.

Russian forces have attacked the region around Robotyne and nearby areas nine times in the past day, the General Staff Headquarters said on Tuesday. When the Ukrainians captured the village last year, they pierced a key Russian anti-tank defense line; now the Russians are trying to push them back and fill that gap.

Like Bakhmut and Avdiivka, Robotyne, which had about 500 inhabitants before the war, is now just a ruin. Throughout the war, U.S. officials have repeatedly expressed concern that Ukraine was holding out for too long in defending such places, using soldiers and munitions to cling to devastated cities of little strategic value.

But for Ukraine, the area around Robotyne remains worth fighting for, at least for now.

“At some point, symbolic becomes strategic,” Yurii Sak, a former adviser to the defense minister, said of the fighting. Defending the gains of the offensive, he said, is “important for morale, it is important for popular support, it is important for the inner belief in our potential to win.”

The battle also inflicts more casualties on the attacking Russians than on the Ukrainians in their defensive positions, Mr. Sak said. “As long as that calculus continues, it supports holding the ground,” he said. “It’s a war, so casualties are inevitable on both sides.”

Russia is now on the offensive along the entire frontline, which stretches in a 600-mile crescent from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine to the southern Dnipro River. The Kremlin’s military has exploited its advantages in ammunition, manpower and aviation.

Russia has expanded the ranks of its military by deploying squads of former convicts. The country is buying artillery shells, missiles and exploding drones from North Korea and Iran to replenish its supplies. Its planes evade Ukrainian air defenses by dropping bombs from a safe distance that glide toward their targets.

This year, Russia has dropped more than 3,500 glide bombs, according to the Ukrainian military. Moscow’s electronic warfare tools jam signals and confuse coordinates for Ukraine’s satellite-guided weapons.

The result was enormous progress compared to February expelled Ukraine from the small town of Avdiivka in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Since then, Russia has been attacking with a combination of ground attacks and aerial bombardments at seven points along the front, the Ukrainian General Staff Headquarters said.

In the northeast, Russian troops are advancing through pine forests toward the city of Kupiansk on the Oskil River in an attempt to reverse the gains made by Ukraine in a counter-offensive in the fall of 2022.

In the Donbas, a region of rolling hills dotted with coal mines and factories, Russia has pursued four lines of attack, trying to exploit the openings created by the capture of Avdiivka. Ukrainian forces say they are taking up defensive positions west of the city, although Russia has captured several small villages as it tries to advance.

Near the southern city of Kherson, Russia attacked a Ukrainian outpost across the Dnipro River, on its eastern bank, in an area otherwise controlled by Russia. Russian forces attacked the position three times on Monday, the Ukrainian military said.

The position there is supplied by boat and, like the bulge in the lines around Robotyne, is precarious.

These battles are worth it, Ukrainian officials say, because they are killing and wounding Russia’s tens of thousands of soldiers, but there is skepticism in Washington.

“I understand the administration is frustrated,” said Evelyn Farkas, director of the McCain Institute, referring to the Biden administration.

“It is unclear whether military decisions are purely military or influenced by political pressure or even direction,” she said.

When training for Ukrainian troops fighting in the semi-circular area near Robotyne, soldiers noted one benefit of the shift to a defensive strategy: fewer casualties. The Russians now have to leave their trenches to attack, while the Ukrainians fight from the cover of their positions.

Withdrawing, according to a soldier also named Oleksandr, would only leave Ukrainian troops fighting in other positions under similar conditions. “You have to defend every meter,” he said.

Yet it is a fierce battle in the south, across a landscape of open fields, muddy roads, ruins of farms and countless blown-up vehicles, with Russian forces confronted from three sides.

Ukrainians have fought in the area long enough to give the positions they defend nicknames such as The Wheel, Silicon and Tank Trench.

Russian reconnaissance drones continuously fly overhead, directing artillery or mortar fire at the soldiers. Aerial bombings are common.

Small drones equipped with explosives and cameras regularly buzz around, chasing cars and sometimes people. The one that flew into Sergeant Oleksandr’s armored personnel carrier in January injured everyone inside, but they all survived. Last week he was training to return to fighting in the same area.