Each block is a different battle: Ukraine’s newest eastern stand
It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning and Captain Fritz, a Ukrainian infantry officer, had already smoked half a dozen cigarettes.
He is 24, but his pale blue eyes seemed older than his years, a reflection of the weariness of war, but perhaps something else, perhaps a spark of mischief.
He crouched in a ditch, his head tilted to one side. If he got up, he could easily be shot down by Russian snipers hidden in a thick treeline a few hundred yards away. The walls of the trenches and mud floor trembled with explosions, the steady roar of Russian artillery erupting every day at dawn with an almost absurd regularity.
“See those bushes?” said Captain Fritz, identifying himself by his call sign, as many Ukrainian soldiers do. “That’s where some Russians are hiding. I want to wish them good morning.”
He jumped out of the trench with a grenade launcher on his shoulder.
“Good morning, you…!” he yelled, then unleashed a succession of swear words in three languages—Ukrainian, Russian, and English—before firing the grenade.
Outnumbered, outgunned, overstretched and nearly surrounded, a small group of Ukrainian soldiers do everything they can to hold Marinka, a small, strategic town reduced to a heap of smoking rubble and now a few blocks away from collapse. . The soldiers here fight from house to house, from room to firing room, so close they can hear each other’s cries for help.
Clashes escalate all along the eastern frontline as Ukraine’s long-awaited counter-offensive to take back conquered lands gets under way, and some of the fiercest battles are currently being fought over a string of eastern cities — Avdiivka, Vuhledar, Chasiv Yar and Marina.
The fate of war turns against none of these places. Yet each one matters. Even if the Ukrainian forces make gains in some areas, they remain on the defensive in others. If the Ukrainians lose another city, it could be a gateway for the Russian army to move on.
In Marinka, the Ukrainians say the Russians have stepped up their attacks in recent days, throwing in more soldiers and armored vehicles to break through the front line. The Ukrainian forces trying to stop them are the 79th Air Assault Brigade, better known by their nickname, “The Cyborgs.”
The Cyborg legend dates back to 2014, when long-standing tensions between Russia and Ukraine suddenly exploded in this eastern region, the Donbas, a vast, mineral-rich region on the border with Russia. The 79th Brigade was crouched at an airport in Donetsk, the largest city in the Donbas, trying to repel an attack by separatist proxy forces and Russian troops supporting them. The airfield was shelled from all sides.
The story goes that Ukrainian officers intercepted the radio traffic between the rebels and their Russian commanders and said they couldn’t believe the Ukrainian soldiers were still fighting and that they must be ‘cyborgs’, half man, half machine. The name stuck, and the Cyborgs’ last stand at Donetsk airport went down among the Ukrainians as one of the most heroic battles of the early war, though they ultimately lost it.
Nine years later, the Cyborgs once again have their backs against the wall. Fueled by patriotism, fatalism and an almost desperate bravado, along with lots of cigarettes and unhealthy energy drinks, they’ve been pushed back to a few ruined blocks on the western edge of Marinka.
The Ukrainians are so desperate to protect themselves from Russian shelling that when they find a house that is still standing, or at least has some intact walls, the first thing they do is break up the floor and dig. Building an underground shelter is the only way to survive, they said. They live in a maze of tunnels and pulverized cellars, in the dark, like moles.
“The Russians outnumber us, four to one in soldiers, six to one in artillery,” said Captain Fritz. “Some of their guys are real professionals – you can see it in the way they move, their tactics, how their tanks advance two by two.”
“But others,” he shook his head, “they’re just gun meat.”
“Weapon flesh,” he explained, was untrained Russian troops who made blind charges, which the 79th claims to have killed in large numbers.
Marinka is, or was, a suburb of Donetsk. The town once supported schools, a museum, a population of 10,000. Now there is not a single citizen left. Ukrainian officials said the last holdouts fled months ago.
As the Russians advanced, they blasted apart every apartment building, house, shed, bus stop and vehicle, reducing Marinka to a wasteland as apocalyptic as Bakhmut, the ruined city Russian troops took a few weeks ago.
“Step by step, meter by meter,” said another Ukrainian soldier, who goes by the call sign Hunter, “the Russians are destroying the buildings in front of us. They start from the top floor and level everything. It doesn’t matter if we use them or not.”
The Russians are attacking their basement and crawlspace shelters almost every day, the soldiers said. Sometimes they drop 15-pound anti-tank mines through holes in the ceiling. Close-quarters fighting then breaks out, bullets whizzing through the underground spaces filling with screams and gun smoke.
“It is normal to be afraid,” admitted another soldier, Gennadiy. “If you’re not, you’re dead.”
The brigade, like others in Ukraine, would not disclose the number of casualties or even the total number. But Captain Fritz said that by that point, so many of their regulars had been wounded or killed that the 79th had turned to recruits with little previous military experience to fill the gaps.
He himself was almost killed. In June, he jumped out of a trench in Lysychansk, another flashpoint city, just as a mortar round came through.
Shrapnel cut into him in nine places, including his liver. He would take a few months off to recover. He took one.
Today, he commands a battalion and holds quick meetings in underground bunkers reeking of coffee, sweat, mold, and dust. He dives into the trenches that snake around Marinka and peeks through slits in the sandbags to check out enemy positions. Sometimes, like the other day, he can’t resist shooting it.
Marinka is at a critical juncture, and since last August, Russia’s bulldozer style of warfare, to simply wipe out everything in front of it, has pushed the 79th back by about 700 yards. If the Ukrainians are completely driven out, Captain Fritz said, the Russians could move to the next cities of Kurakhove, Vuhledar and Pokrovsk, bringing them closer to the fulfillment of President Vladimir V. Putin’s dream of conquering the entire Donbas.
This war, said Captain Fritz, will last “years.”
“Many people know war from the cinema, from computer games, from books. And they don’t understand,” he said. “War is not just adrenaline and shooting. War is not funny. It’s blood, it’s bodies, mud on your legs. You are stressed all the time. You can be without sleep, without food, without water. And you understand that under these circumstances you have to fight for your future children, so that they don’t have to understand what war is.’
He stopped himself and smiled and added, “Or something like that.”
Then he lit a ninth cigarette and leaned back against the trench wall. He took a drag and exhaled, enjoying the smoke.
Evelina Riabenko reporting contributed.