Exhausted, on the defensive and at ‘Hell’s Gate’ in Ukraine

ZAPORIZHZHIA REGION, Ukraine – Under the cover of darkness, hunched over under the weight of backpacks and guns, a group of soldiers walked along a muddy road and slipped into a village house.

They were Ukrainian infantrymen from the 117th Separate Mechanized Brigade, who gathered for a final briefing and roll call several kilometers from Russian positions before heading to the frontline trenches. Bold men in helmets and rubber boots listened silently as an intelligence officer informed them of a new route to their positions.

“Morale is good,” said the deputy battalion commander, who uses the call sign Shira and stood nearby to see the men off. “But physically we are exhausted.”

Ukrainian forces along most of the 900-kilometer front line are officially in defense mode. Only in the southern Kherson region are they still on the offensive during a heavy attack across the Dnipro River.

But the fighting has not abated and Russian forces are now on the offensive.

With the capture of the town of Robotyne in the southeastern region of Zaporizhia, Ukrainian forces had failed to advance in their summer counter-offensive. No breakthrough occurred. Now Russian units attack in the trenches around Robotyne every day. Ukrainian forces will try to counterattack immediately if they lose ground, commanders said.

“It’s like a game of ping-pong,” said a platoon commander in the Ukrainian National Guard, who uses the call sign Planshet, which means “tablet.” “There is always a portion of 100 to 200 meters of land being taken and reclaimed,” he said.

Ukrainian soldiers and commanders interviewed along much of the central and eastern fronts in recent weeks said Russian attacks were so intense that operating near the front lines has never been more dangerous.

Russia has in recent days shifted its focus to bombing Ukraine’s major cities to exhaust civilians; For weeks, ground forces have been carrying out attacks to regain territory lost last summer and capture long-held Ukrainian redoubts along the eastern front.

Soldiers, well accustomed to Russian artillery fire, said they had suffered since March the added destructive power of glide bombs, half-ton explosives unleashed by planes crashing through underground bunkers.

“They sent them two by two by two, eight in an hour,” said a 27-year-old soldier known as Kit, from the 14th Chervona Kalyna National Guard Brigade. Like others interviewed, Kit identified himself by his call sign, as per military protocol. “It sounds like a plane is coming down on you,” he said, “like the gates of hell.”

The devastation caused by glide bombs is visible in towns and villages near the front line. The city of Orikhiv, about 20 kilometers north of Robotyne, once served as the command center for the counteroffensive. Now it is an empty shell, the main street deserted, the school and other buildings torn apart by huge bomb craters.

A lone worker, Valera, was cycling through the city. He said he had stayed despite the heavy bombardment because he had paid work repairing generators. He lived on humanitarian aid and raised 20 stray cats at his home, he said.

Soldiers moved cautiously through the area, mostly living in basements and staying undercover, out of sight.

That’s because the latest threat is Russia’s use of FPV kamikaze drones, which has largely forced Ukrainian soldiers to abandon vehicles in frontline areas and operate on foot.

A cheap commercial drone, the FPV – for first person view – has become the latest weapon of the moment in the Ukrainian war. It can fly as fast as a car, carries a deadly load of explosives and is guided to its target by a soldier holed up in a bunker several miles away.

Both the Russian and Ukrainian armies use them to hunt and attack targets, as they eliminate the delay in transmitting coordinates and requesting artillery strikes. Ukrainian soldiers said they often use the drones instead of artillery because grenades have become increasingly scarce and the drones are a cheap, fast weapon for attacking nearby Russian vehicles, bunkers and infantry.

Military units from both sides post videos online of their successful attacks, which end with a coded black screen at the moment of the blast. Several Ukrainian drone units allowed journalists from The New York Times to view live operations from positions near the front lines as they followed Russian soldiers and selected targets attacked.

One unit showed videos of a hit that destroyed Russian surveillance cameras and an antenna on an office building. Another targeted a Russian bunker in a tree line, although the drone was deflected by Russian electronic jamming before impact.

Only one in many drones hits its target, and many are lost to jamming and other interference, soldiers said.

For those on the receiving end of FPV drones, defending and supplying the front lines has become increasingly risky.

“It is extremely dangerous to go by car,” said a Ukrainian National Guardsman, who uses the call sign Varvar. Men from his unit said they had abandoned their armored vehicles since September and walked six miles to their positions. “You can only enter on foot,” Varvar said.

The men of the 117th Brigade, who were deploying to the front line in the Zaporizhia region on a recent night, faced with a four-mile walk through rain and mud, the intelligence commander said. If they were injured and captured, Russian troops would execute them, he warned them.

The long, arduous work of bringing in ammunition and food to supply troops and transporting the wounded was one of the reasons Ukraine could not sustain its counter-offensive, company commander Adolf, 23, said.

Ambulances and supply vehicles came under fire from kamikaze drones so often that his unit stopped using them and instead resorted to a four-wheeled buggy that volunteer engineers had rigged to carry a stretcher. The buggy was hidden under some trees next to his command post, several kilometers from the front line.

Ukrainian units are giving the same treatment to FPV drones on Russian lines, saying they were the first to start using drones to attack targets. But the Russians have copied the tactic in recent weeks, flooding frontline areas with drones, with deadly results, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders said.

“My impression is that Russia is interested in drones at the state level,” said the soldier known as Kit, but Ukraine, by contrast, was still largely dependent on volunteers and civilian donors for its drone program. “My feeling,” he said, “is that the government should do more.”

The Russians also used subterfuge, Planshet said, playing tapes of gunfire on drones to trick Ukrainian soldiers into thinking they were under attack, leaving the bunkers and announcing their positions.

Some members of his platoon said the Russians were using drones to drop smoke grenades into their trenches. One soldier, who goes by the call sign Medic, said it looked like some kind of tear gas.

“It causes a very severe pain in the eyes and a fire, like a piece of coal, in your throat and you can’t breathe,” he said.

Several soldiers wore gas masks to treat the stricken men, but when two men in the platoon crawled out of the bunker to escape the gas, they were killed by grenades dropped by Russian drones hovering above, soldiers said.

The toll is heavy for all units along the front. Nearly everyone was injured or barely survived in recent months, soldiers said.

“We are short of people,” said an intelligence commander from the 117th Brigade who uses the call sign Banderas, after the actor. “We have weapons, but not enough men.”

Yet many remain optimistic. Further east in the Donetsk region, Major Serhii Betz, a battalion commander of the 72nd Separate Mechanized Brigade, set out before dawn on a recent day, driving over muddy, ice-packed roads to check on his drone units close to the front line. He invited journalists from the New York Times.

The teams work underground, in bunkers lined with tree trunks and covered with earth. On a computer monitor, the commander turned on a livestream drone feed from a neighboring brigade where a battle was taking place.

“Russian tanks are entering the village,” a commander said over a walkie-talkie. “Is everything ready?” the major asked the drone team. “A tank is a cool target to destroy; let us help our brothers.”

Mice scurried around their bunker, rustling in a garbage bag, while the newly deployed team, fresh from training, fumbled with wiring and switches to get an FPV over the Russians’ positions for their first attack.

They were too slow and their first two flights crashed, brought down by Russian electronic jamming.

But the major was satisfied. “We are developing,” he said.

Olha Konovalova reported from the Zaporizhia region, and Christiaan Triebert from Auriac-du-Périgord, France.