Thunderous explosions shook the ground as the Ukrainian crew prepared to maneuver their American-made plane. Bradley Fighting Vehicle out of camouflage and, once again, into fire.
The team commander, a sergeant with the call sign Avocado, scanned the sky nervously. “If we are spotted, the KABs will come,” he said, referring to the one-ton bombs that Russia uses to target Ukraine’s most valuable armor and defenses.
What began as a small Russian push into the small town of Ocheretyne was growing into a substantial breakthrough, threatening to destabilize Ukrainian lines across a large part of the Eastern Front. The crew’s mission was to help contain the breach: protect the undermanned and outgunned infantrymen, evacuate the wounded, and use the Bradley’s powerful 25-millimeter cannon against as many Russians as possible.
But the 28-ton vehicle was quickly spotted. Mortars and rockets exploded all around, and the shooter was seriously wounded, said the commander, identified only by his call sign according to military protocol.
A combat mission had turned into a mission to rescue his comrade. The shooter survived and is recovering, the lawyer said days later. But the Russians have gained ground and continue to try to advance.
Ukraine is more vulnerable than ever since the first harrowing weeks of the 2022 invasion, said Ukrainian soldiers and commanders of various brigades interviewed in recent weeks. Russia is trying to exploit this window of opportunity, intensifying its attacks in the east and now threatening to open a new front by attacking Ukrainian positions along the northern border, outside the city of Kharkiv.
Month of delays in American aida growing number of victims and severe ammunition shortages took a toll, as evidenced by the exhausted expressions and tired voices of soldiers engaged in daily combat.
“Frankly, I have fears,” said Lt. Col. Oleksandr Voloshyn, 57, veteran commander of the tank battalion of the 59th Motorized Brigade. “Because if I don’t have shells, if I don’t have men, if I don’t have equipment that my men can fight with…” he said, trailing off. “That’s it.”
The sudden advance of the Russians Ocheretyneabout nine miles northwest of Avdiivka in late April illustrates how even a small crack in the line can have cascading effects, as already strained platoons risk being flanked and surrounded and other units rushing in to plug the breach.
“It’s like you have a knocking engine in your car and you keep driving it,” said Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, deputy battalion commander of the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “The car works, but at some point it will stop. You will then end up spending even more resources to restore it.
“Similarly, here there are errors that do not seem critical,” he said. “But they have led to the need to stabilize the situation now. And it is not clear where this stabilization will occur.
“Every event you didn’t anticipate can completely turn your situation upside down,” Lt. Shyrshyn said. “And that’s what happened in Ocheretyne.”
The ripple effect
After the fall of Avdiivka To Russian forces in February, the small town of Ochertyne served as a Ukrainian military strongpoint along a highway. Most of the 3,000 residents fled. Abandoned apartment buildings and other urban infrastructure provided good defensive positions and for two months the situation remained relatively stable.
But then something went wrong.
The Russians appeared so suddenly in the devastated streets around Ivan Vivsianyk’s home in late April that he, at first glance, mistook them for Ukrainian soldiers. When asked for his passport, the 88-year-old knew Ocheretyne’s defense had collapsed.
“I thought our soldiers were going to come and knock them out,” he said in an interview after crossing what he called a harrowing front line to escape. “But that didn’t happen.”
Three weeks later, what began as a small Russian advance turned into a bulge of about 15 square miles this complicates the defense of the Donetsk region.
Expanding the bulge further north could give the Russians a chance to bypass some of Ukraine’s strongest fortifications in the east, which have held for years. Russia can now also launch a new line of attack targeting Konstiantynivka, a town that provides a logistical pillar for Ukrainian forces.
The Kremlin’s attempt to advance from one ruined village to another was captured in hours of combat footage shared by Ukrainian brigades at the front.
Russian infantry cross mine-strewn fields on foot and use dirt bikes and buggies to try to outrun Ukrainian explosive drones. They attack in armored columns of varying sizes, with large assaults often led by tanks covered in huge metal hangars and equipped with sophisticated electronic warfare equipment to protect against drones. Western observers nicknamed them “turtle tanks.” Ukrainians call them “wundervaflia,” which combines the German word for wonder with the Ukrainian word for waffle.
“We allow their infantry to move closer to us, which creates closer contact and direct firefights“, said Lt. Shyrshyn. “As a result, our losses are increasing.”
The Russians are also paying a huge price for every step forward. Some 899 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded every day in April, British military intelligence agency reported recently.
Despite committing so many soldiers to the fight, the Russians took an area covering only about 30 square miles in April, according to military analysts. And capturing Ukraine’s last fortified towns in the Donbass – urban centers like Kramatorsk and Pokrovsk – would almost certainly involve long and bloody battles.
However, Russian advances in recent weeks in the east and northeast are beginning to dangerously modify the geometry of the front.
The fraying line
“Look at the map, where we are and where Ocheretyne is,” said Colonel Voloshyn, commander of the tank battalion. He studied the terrain as he prepared to go on a mission to target a house where 20 Russians were believed to be hiding. “I can now assume that they can just go around us from the left, from the right. They have tactical success, they have equipment, men, shells. So we can expect anything.
The absence of dramatic changes at the front for more than a year has obscured the exhausting positional combat necessary to maintain this precarious balance. In a war where the battle over a single treeline can rage for weeks, the sudden Russian advance into the area around Ocherytne was the most dangerous type of problem – fast, deep and surprising .
There is a bitter debate over who is responsible for the failure to hold the line there.
The Deep State Telegram channel, which has close ties to the Ukrainian military, accused the 115th mechanized brigade to leave critical positions without orders, thus allowing the Russians to infiltrate and storm the colony.
The brigade issued a furious denial, saying its soldiers were outnumbered 15 to one and had held out as long as possible under a devastating bombardment.
“We would like to emphasize that no regular units of the 115th Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine left or fled their positions,” the brigade said. A special military commission was created to determine exactly what happened.
Soldiers familiar with the fight were reluctant to publicly criticize a neighboring brigade and said a host of problems — ranging from poor communication to a considerable lack of weaponry — likely all played a role.
Lieutenant Shyrshyn of the 47th, who manned positions alongside the 115th, would not speculate on what went wrong, but said the consequences were immediate: it was soon clear that the 47th would have to withdraw or risk encirclement and catastrophic losses.
“The Russians sensed weakness in that direction as they used the gaps to get behind the Ukrainian soldiers,” he said. “Then we lost Ocheretyne, then Novobakhmutivka, then Soloviove.”
The Ukrainian high command does not like to cede any territory, the lieutenant said, adding that “it is very complicated to discuss with them and explain why it is not good to occupy this position.”
Lieutenant Shyrshyn hoped the situation would improve with the arrival of Western weapons but until then, he said, “we will continue to die, we will continue to lose territory.”
“The question is whether it will be done at a slow and defensible pace,” he said. “Or in a quick and foolish way.”
Lyubov Choludko contributed to reporting on eastern Ukraine. Anastasia Kuznietsova And Natalia Novosolova contributed to the research.
