The day dawns covered in fog in Ocheretine, the best protection against Russian air dominance. The Ukrainian self-propelled artillery takes the opportunity to unleash a rain of shells on the enemy that lasts about 20 minutes, until the sky begins to clear in this village on the Avdiivka front, in the east of the country. The area is controlled at all times by Russian drones. The artillery operations will be extended for a short time to avoid being identified. Last Friday morning, the Ukrainian guns were aimed at the most decisive sector of the battle, six kilometers away: the train tracks that connect the town of Avdiivka with free Ukraine.
Ivan plucks a few blades of dry grass and uses them to reproduce on a table the map of the area where his men are fighting. Ivan, like all the soldiers interviewed for this article, prefers not to provide his full name. His role is to coordinate assault companies of the 47th Mechanized Brigade, one of the Ukrainian brigades founded with NATO weapons and training. A civil engineer himself, he spent a year training before joining the war, with four months of training in Germany and Lithuania. His men are defending those train tracks on the northern flank of Avdiivka: this railway line is elevated, it serves as a retaining wall against the advance of armor, and from it the movement of infantry can also be stopped. “If the Russians take control of the roads, it will be a disaster,” says Iván. Before the war, Avdiivka had more than 30,000 inhabitants. Now they don’t reach 2,000.
By disaster this officer understands that the Russians, dominating the roads, can ensure the advance of their troops to surround Avdiivka from the north. The assault is focusing on the vicinity of the coke factory in this city, the largest production plant for this fuel in Europe. The problem is that the enemy has already gained access to a three-kilometer stretch of the train line. “They have no control, in one day we can take and lose positions there three times each, the combats are at 30 meters,” Ivan explains, “they keep coming, in platoons of 10 to 15 men. “They don’t stop attacking us.” The casualties on the Russian side are innumerable, says Ivan, but on the Ukrainian side they are also very high: he himself has lost his entire platoon, 17 companions, killed and captured by the enemy.
The bulk of the 47th Mechanized Brigade was transferred to Avdiivka in mid-October, when the current Russian offensive to conquer this city began. Ivan and his men previously participated in the failed summer Ukrainian counteroffensive on the Zaporizhia front. The 47th Brigade suffered the most in the first three months of the counteroffensive, when kyiv opted for a strategy of assaults with large columns of armor. Russian minefields and fortified defenses slowed the advance, and enemy artillery and drone bombs easily destroyed vehicles and troops.
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Military sources on the Zaporizhia front assured this newspaper last September that the 47th lost more than 30% of its soldiers, nearly 2,000 of its 5,000 components. Iván claims that he saw 16 of his companions die. “But emotionally it is worse in Avdiivka,” he adds, “because defending is morally harder than attacking, you have to pray, sheltered in the trench for four days, the time the reliefs last, so that their artillery does not kill you, and then resist assault and another infantry assault.”
Russian casualties in the Avdiivka siege number in the hundreds of armored vehicles and thousands of human lives. Ukrainian military propaganda profiles on social networks have shared many videos of the destruction caused to the invader, especially with the cluster munitions provided by the United States. But Ivan shakes his head from side to side, as a sign of disapproval: except in troop formation, he says, the Russians are superior in everything and, what’s more, they have plenty of resources. “If they take the train tracks, they will send the armored vehicles again, and if 10 vehicles leave from their second line, our artillery will hit them, yes, but four will pass and reach their destination.”
In Zaporizhzhia Ivan understood the main difference between the armies of kyiv and Moscow: his squadron surrounded a Russian position defended by professional soldiers of an airborne division. They ran out of ammunition and were repeatedly urged to surrender, according to his story. The enemies blew themselves up with grenades: “I don’t know any Ukrainian who did this. “They have another conception of life: Russians are more prepared for war and to die.” His words coincide with statements this November in The Economist from Valeri Zaluzhni, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. His biggest mistake, Zaluzhni claimed, was believing that the 150,000 Russian deaths in Ukraine, by his count, would be enough to provoke Russia’s rejection of the war. It hasn’t been like that.
“Like zombies”
The fog recedes in Ocheretine and nerves appear among the soldiers of the 110th Separate Mechanized Brigade. The troops take shelter in underground shelters and vehicles are placed among the trees. pick-up with large caliber machine guns to shoot down the drones that will soon arrive. Seth, code name of an infantry company commander, corroborates what experts and other officers consulted on the Avdiivka front indicate: one of the biggest changes in the war has been the Russian leap forward in terms of drone technology and production. . This air superiority over the defending army is overwhelming, point out soldiers like Seth. The most cited models are the same: Orlan reconnaissance drones observe everything from three kilometers high; They identify the target and within minutes the Lancet bomb drones arrive. Seth also emphasizes that they have verified an increase in the enemy’s Zoopark radars, which detect the coordinates of artillery pieces through their sound waves.
Seth refers to the Russian infantry as “zombies” because they advance without being turned back by certain death. According to what he has been able to verify, the enemy troops have the mission of not retreating under penalty of being executed by order of his superiors. The US intelligence services assured last October that they are certain that the orders of the Russian high command are to shoot those who withdraw in the assaults.
“It’s like in Bakhmut, they advance like crazy, like zombies, because they want to take Avdiivka at any cost,” agrees Alexander, commander of a unit that operates an American Paladin howitzer in the 47th Brigade. Alexander refers to the Battle of Bakhmut, which lasted nine months and ended with the Ukrainian defeat, and with the city razed. As in Bakhmut, Alexander indicates, there have been days in Avdiivka when between the two armies there were 300 drones in the sky. The main difference, he warns, is that his Paladin does not have enough ammunition: if in April in Bakhmut, and in summer in Orijiv – on the Zaporizhia front -, they fired between 100 and 150 shells a day, in Avdiivka they can fire 15 shells, 10 times less. Not only this: according to this military veteran, when used so much, the howitzers lose precision. In the summer, his Paladin had a margin of error of seven meters on target and now it is 70 meters.
Inferiority in ammunition
The lack of ammunition for artillery has been confirmed by the Government and by Zaluzhni himself, who in an essay published by The Economist He estimated that his troops would not have enough arsenal to go on the attack for at least a year. Their NATO allies have practically run out of missile reserves and the Western military industry will not be fully operational to arm their countries and Ukraine until the end of 2024, according to estimates by Zaluzhni and US and US defense analysis centers. Europeans.
The lack of ammunition would also explain one of the greatest Russian advantages in the war, according to Roman, commander of a mortar unit of the Ukrainian 110th Separate Brigade: its trenches. “The Russians give us a lot of thought in trench engineering,” says Ivan, who agrees with other soldiers consulted this fall on the various Donetsk fronts: “The Russians advance 300 or 500 meters and dig, they advance 300 meters and dig again now.” dig. Trenches deeper and safer than ours. They gain ground and secure it. When we win their position we are happy because we are safer than in ours.”
Roman replies that this Russian ability to build trenches is because they do not have enough ammunition to prevent it. According to his calculations, if at the beginning of the war his mortars could fire one for every three enemy projectiles, now the difference is one to eight. “We also cannot operate for long because the air attacks are constant,” adds this soldier.
Zaluzhni detailed in his report to The Economist that the conflict had entered a new phase, that of positional war, in which large maneuvers and rapid advances had been left behind. Now deterrent fire and infantry assaults on specific positions would predominate. To do this, the commander in chief of the Armed Forces asked his international allies for the most advanced technology to take air control, with drones and electromagnetic wave weapons against the enemy’s unmanned vehicles. Zaluzhni’s writing was disavowed by the president, Volodymyr Zelensky. His pessimism was a shock to the Ukrainian population and the international community, but not to his soldiers, says Ivan: “Nothing he said is new for us. It was a message to our partners abroad, to warn them that this is the situation.”
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