Two Weeks at the Front in Ukraine
Soldiers on the front in Ukraine adhere to a maxim that grows more sacrosanct the longer they survive: If you want to live, dig. In mid-March, I arrived at a small Army position in the eastern region of the Donbas, where shock waves and shrapnel had reduced the surrounding trees to splintered canes. Artillery had churned up so much earth that you could no longer distinguish between craters and the natural topography. Eight infantrymen were rebuilding a machine-gun nest that Russian shelling had obliterated the previous week, killing one of their comrades. A torn piece of a jacket, from a separate blast, hung on a branch high above us. A log-covered dugout, where the soldiers slept, was about five feet deep and not much wider. At the sound of a Russian helicopter, everyone squeezed inside. A direct hit from a mortar had charred the timber. To refortify the structure, new logs had been stacked over the burned ones. Ukrainian soldiers often employ netting or other camouflage to evade drone surveillance, but here subterfuge would have been futile. Russian forces had already pinpointed the position and seemed determined to eradicate it. As for the infantrymen, their mission was straightforward: not to leave and not to die.
The helicopter deployed several rockets somewhere up the tree line. The soldiers climbed back into the light, found their shovels, and resumed working. One of them, called Syava, had a missing front tooth and wore a large combat knife on his belt. The others began mocking the knife as unsuitable for a modern industrial conflict.
“I’ll give it to you as a gift after the war,” Syava said.
“ ‘After the war’—so optimistic!”
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Everybody laughed. On the front, to talk about the future, or to imagine experiencing a reality distinct from the baleful present, smacked of naïveté or hubris.
The term “infantry” derives from “infant,” and was first applied to low-ranking foot soldiers in the sixteenth century. Five hundred years later, infantrymen remain the most disposable of troops. But in Ukraine they are also the most essential. Syava and his comrades belonged to an infantry battalion in the 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade, which had been fighting without respite for more than a year. The brigade was originally based near Odesa, the historic port city on the Black Sea. At the start of the invasion, Russian forces from Crimea, the southern peninsula that Vladimir Putin had annexed in 2014, failed to reach Odesa but did capture another coastal city, Kherson. The 28th Brigade was at the forefront of an ensuing campaign to liberate Kherson. For some six months, the Russians staved off the Ukrainians with a deluge of artillery and air strikes, exacting a devastating toll whose precise scale Ukraine has kept secret. Finally, in November, Russia withdrew across the Dnipro River. Battered members of the 28th Brigade were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter Kherson. Crowds greeted them there as heroes. Before they could recover, they were sent three hundred miles northeast, to the outskirts of Bakhmut, a besieged city that was becoming the scene of the most ferocious violence of the war.
Syava’s battalion, which numbered about six hundred men, was posted on the edge of a village south of Bakhmut. The village was controlled by the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary organization notorious for committing atrocities in Africa and the Middle East. For the war in Ukraine, Wagner recruited thousands of inmates from Russian prisons by offering them pardons in exchange for combat tours. The onslaught of expendable convicts proved too much for the Ukrainians, who were still reeling from Kherson and had not yet replenished their ranks and matériel. The commander of the battalion, a thirty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel named Pavlo, said of the Wagner fighters, “They were like zombies. They used the prisoners like a wall of meat. It didn’t matter how many we killed—they kept coming.”
Within weeks, the battalion faced annihilation: entire platoons had been wiped out in close-contact firefights, and some seventy men had been encircled and massacred. The dwindling survivors, one officer told me, “became useless because they were so tired.” In January, what was left of the battalion retreated from the village and established defensive positions in the tree lines and open farmland a mile to the west. “Wagner kicked our asses,” the officer said.
The Russian mercenaries subsequently left for Bakhmut, to shore up other forces there, and the conventional troops who replaced them were far less numerous and suicidal. By the time I joined the battalion, about two months had passed since it had lost the battle for the village, and during the interim neither side had attempted a major operation against the other. It was all the Ukrainians could do to maintain the stalemate. Pavlo estimated that, owing to the casualties his unit had sustained, eighty per cent of his men were new draftees. “They’re civilians with no experience,” he said. “If they give me ten, I’m lucky when three of them can fight.”
We were in his bunker, which had been dug in the back yard of a half-demolished farmhouse; the constant rumble of artillery vibrated through the dirt walls. “A lot of the new guys don’t have the stamina to be out here,” Pavlo said. “They get scared and they panic.” His military call sign was Cranky, and he was renowned for his temper, but he spoke sympathetically about his weaker soldiers and their fears. Even for him, a career officer of twenty-three years, this phase of the war had been harrowing.
On a road that passed in front of the farmhouse, a board had been nailed to a tree with the painted words “TO MOSCOW” and an arrow pointing east. No one knew who’d put it there. Such optimistic brio seemed to be a vestige of another time.
Just two of the soldiers who were rebuilding the machine-gun nest had been with the battalion since Kherson. One of them, a twenty-nine-year-old construction worker called Bison—because he was built like one—had been hospitalized three times: after being shot in the shoulder, after being wounded by shrapnel in the ankle and knee, and after being wounded by shrapnel in the back and arm. The other veteran, code-named Odesa, had enlisted in the Army in 2015, after dropping out of college. Short and stocky, he had the same serene deportment as Bison. The uncanny extent to which both men had adapted to their lethal environment underscored the agitation of the recent arrivals, who flinched whenever something whistled overhead or crashed nearby.
“I only trust Bison,” Odesa said. “If the new recruits run away, it will mean immediate death for us.” He’d lost nearly all his closest friends in Kherson. Taking out his phone, he swiped through a series of photographs: “Killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . killed . . . wounded. . . . Now I have to get used to different people. It’s like starting over.”
Because the high attrition rate had disproportionately affected the bravest and most aggressive soldiers—a phenomenon that one officer called “reverse natural selection”—seasoned infantrymen like Odesa and Bison were extremely valuable and extremely fatigued. After Kherson, Odesa had gone AWOL. “I was in a bad place psychologically,” he said. “I needed a break.” After two months of resting and recuperating at home, he came back. His return was prompted not by a fear of being punished—what were they going to do, put him in the trenches?—but by a sense of loyalty to his dead friends. “I felt guilty,” he said. “I realized that my place was here.”
Although the dugout where Bison and Odesa slept had become a target for Russian artillery, it was about four hundred yards behind the Zero Line—the trenches where infantrymen clashed directly with Russian forces. To reach the Zero Line, you had to traverse a barren valley pocked with mortar holes, where owls and pheasants sometimes burst from the scant underbrush, and then follow a densely wooded ravine that snaked eastward. Sleeping quarters had been constructed on the steep slope, but the ravine ran through a chalk vein, which inhibited digging. Some soldiers had used axes to hack into the white stone; others had cobbled together shelters with sandbags and branches.
The boundary of Ukrainian-held territory was marked with loops of barbed wire. Steps cut into the ravine ascended to an observation post behind a berm. One morning in March, a draftee I’ll call Artem was there, peering through a periscope. From where he stood, an expanse of rotting sunflower stalks led to a tree line occupied by Russian soldiers. The distance was a few hundred yards.
During previous reporting trips to Ukraine, I had encountered the Russian military almost exclusively as a remote, invisible source of bombs that fell from the sky. It was eerie to look across such a short gap at an actual Russian position—and to know that an actual Russian might be looking back. Artem shared my unease. “I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I’m not a soldier.”
He was a forty-two-year-old father of three who managed a grain elevator in a small farming community in central Ukraine. Men who have three children are legally exempt from conscription but, in December, Artem was still in the process of adopting one of his daughters when he was summoned by his local draft board. A physician, citing a skull fracture that Artem had once suffered during an ice-skating accident, deemed him medically unfit to serve; the board dispatched him to a military training center anyway. His training lasted a month and consisted of tutorials and marching drills—“theoretical stuff, nothing practical.” He shot a total of thirty rounds during two trips to a firing range. From the training center, Artem was assigned to the 28th Brigade, and a day after joining Pavlo’s infantry battalion he was on the Zero Line.
Source: The New Yorker
