Ukraine’s defenders anxiously dig in for a looming Russian assault
BATHED IN afternoon sun and the scent of lilac, the hamlet near Kostiantynivka, a small town in Ukraine’s Donbas region, could be a picture of bucolic peace. But the sounds of birds and lawnmowers are interrupted by the constant boom of artillery less than 10km away. The few remaining villagers go about their lives, paying little attention to the pickup truck parked outside a small brick cottage. At first glance the cottage seems little different from the village’s other houses, with their little vegetable plots round the back.
But walk inside and you find yourself in the headquarters of the air-defence battalion of Ukraine’s legendary 92nd assault brigade. It is currently fighting in Chasiv Yar, the most intense part of the Donbas front. Behind the house, steps lead down through a trench and into a large van, dug into the ground and covered in camouflage. Inside this command centre, officers monitor two screens. One shows radar images of the skies above the front line and some 50km into Russian-held territory. The other shows a half-dozen live feeds from Ukrainian reconnaissance drones.
“This used to be an old Soviet radio station, but we have gutted it and installed this equipment given to us by volunteers. We did it all ourselves,” Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Timchenko, commander of the air-defence unit, says proudly. Plots on the monitor show the flight paths of Russian jets, helicopters and missiles. Lines showing Smerch rockets travelling at 1,400kph (900mph) criss-cross the screen; one heads directly towards the hamlet, but passes overhead. A Russian warplane comes close to the front, releases its bomb and makes a U-turn. Less than a minute later the glide bomb (a regular bomb fitted with fins to greatly increase its range) disappears from the screen, exploding well inside Ukraine.
Colonel Timchenko’s air-defence unit cannot hit the Russian planes and has no way of intercepting glide bombs. Its job is to warn artillery units and mobile groups operating along the front. Hidden in the brush on a hill a few kilometres from the hamlet, three of the battalion’s 250 men huddle around a Strela-10, an old Soviet short-range mobile surface-to-air missile system. Designed to bring down NATO planes, it now hunts Russian drones. In the eight months that Colonel Timchenko has been here his men have shot down 50.
Tall and composed, the commander is a Russian-speaker from Kharkiv. He has been fighting since February 2015, a year after Vladimir Putin first invaded Crimea and the eastern Donbas, supposedly to “save” Russian-speakers like him. The war, he says, is not about language, ethnicity or even territory, but a way of life. “I don’t want to be part of Russia. I don’t want to go to prison for expressing my opinions. I want my children to grow up in a normal country, maybe not a rich country, but a free country.” An avid reader of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he does not want to live in a new “Gulag Archipelago”.
The purpose of the fighting around Chasiv Yar is not to retain every inch of land, but to prevent the Russian army from sweeping across the rest of Ukraine and taking its main cities, including Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odessa and Kyiv. Similarly, Mr Putin is not interested in the Donbas for its territory; he is trying to subjugate Ukraine and end its quest to become part of the European order. Last week Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, told The Economist that this order could perish “much more quickly than we think”. Ukraine is where the fight is taking place.
A year ago, as Ukraine readied for its counter-offensive, just holding its own positions was considered the most pessimistic scenario. Now, as Russia prepares for a fresh push, it is considered the best case. From soldiers to generals, everyone The Economist spoke to over the past week knows that Ukraine lacks the resources to get back to its 1991 borders, as its politicians have promised. “I suggest to anyone who talks of 1991 borders to come as far as Bakhmut,” Colonel Timchenko says, referring to a town Ukraine lost a year ago after months of savage fighting.
At stake now is not Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but its survival. Slowing Russian forces in the Donbas is crucial. Colonel Pavlo Fedosenko, commander of the 92nd, who helped liberate Kharkiv province in September 2022, is now fighting some 350km south-east of the city. “Everyone knows that if we don’t fight for Kostiantynivka and Druzhkivka [Russia’s probable next target], Russian forces will be in Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kryvyi Rih a few weeks later,” he says. He thinks there is a “70% chance” that Russia can occupy the rest of the Donbas region. The question is how long it might take, and how much damage Ukraine can inflict in the process.
Dribs and drabs
Fearing escalation, the West has never given Ukraine all the weapons it needs. After a six-month gap in American supplies caused by Republican obstruction, it has enough ammunition to survive but not to defeat Russia’s forces. By the time a new American aid package was approved on April 24th, it was rationing ammunition. Colonel Fedosenko says he was down to five shells a day for his American Paladin howitzers. “What am I supposed to do with this number of shells? My men were fighting with spades in trenches.” He hopes the $61bn package’s effects will be felt in days, as many of the weapons have been pre-positioned in Poland.
Although Russia has the edge in shells and manpower, Colonel Fedosenko feels it may have reached its peak. Only a few weeks ago, he says, Russian infantry backed by ten to 20 armoured vehicles and tanks were launching assaults every two to three hours. Now they attack only every five days or so, using motorcycles and quad bikes to avoid kicking up dust and advancing in small groups to hunt for weak spots.
Some 70% of the Russian soldiers in such assaults are former convicts, says Colonel Fedosenko. He also sees Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen, Cuban and Somali mercenaries. Many soldiers have never been in combat before. “Our interceptions suggest they are scraping the barrel, using whoever they can force into battle—cooks, builders, mechanics, anyone.” He knows that many Russian soldiers have no choice. “Most of the prisoners I take are guys from small towns and villages. They tell us that either they get killed here or they get killed there if they run.” Some shoot themselves rather than surrender.
For now, however, Russian forces continue to advance. While Ukraine is not collapsing, it is losing about 20 sq km a week. Mr Putin may want to inflict maximum damage before NATO’s 75th anniversary party in July, to humiliate the West and force Ukraine into negotiations. But since he has not advertised his fresh offensive he would not need to admit its failure either.
Meanwhile, Mr Putin is strangling Ukraine’s economy by knocking out much of its electricity generation and wearing down the civilian population by bombing cities. Kharkiv, which is already rationing electricity, is being hit by glide bombs almost daily. Yet the city of more than 1m people is keeping calm and carrying on. On a sunny afternoon last week, residents strolled through a park and attendants went on emptying rubbish bins, even as two glide bombs landed with huge explosions less than a kilometre away. Keeping the city functioning and clean is a way to stand up to destruction and chaos.
With around 50,000 fresh Russian troops gathering across the border some 40km away, Kharkiv’s commanders know they may be a target in Russia’s next push. One scenario would be to isolate the city by cutting the main road to Kyiv. Another would be to move some 10km closer, putting the city’s eastern outskirts within artillery range and creating a buffer zone to protect Belgorod, a Russian city that is being hit by Ukrainian drones.
Konstantin Nemichev is a fighter with the famous Kraken regiment, a special-forces outfit formed in the early days of the invasion in 2022 that defended Kharkiv. He expects the enemy to attack the province again in mid-May, but reckons they will fail to get near the city. Interviewed outside a ruined school building in the east of town, the site of an intense firefight in 2022 in which invading soldiers were wiped out, Mr Nemichev says the defence is much stronger now. It has three lines of fortifications and a full brigade to stop the Russians. “They can move a few kilometres into the province,” he says, “but I don’t think they can get as far as 10km.” His predictions seemed to have been borne out on May 10th, when Russia’s new offensive appeared to kick off with an attack on the small town of Vovchansk, just inside the border, which was apparently repulsed. But it is early days.
The Ukrainian armed forces know they have no choice but to fight on. “We can either fight for Ukraine against Russia, or we will be overrun and forced to fight for Russia against Europe,” says Oleg Tkach, a lieutenant colonel in the 3rd tank brigade, which defends the Kharkiv region. But this sense of urgency and existential threat, he says, needs to penetrate into the whole of Ukrainian society. “People need to know the truth,” he says. And Ukraine needs unity as it enters a new stage of conflict.
So far this war, the biggest in Europe since 1945, has been extremely localised. For most of the country it almost seems a distant reality. But as Russia presses again, it will knock on everyone’s door. Anyone who wished to fight for Ukraine has already enlisted. Now conscription is cranking up. Any man between 25 and 60 who lives in Ukraine knows it could be his turn next. On May 8th parliament passed a law allowing some convicts to enlist and have their sentences erased (though unlike in Russia, murderers and other serious criminals are not eligible). Pressure is building on Ukrainian men who have fled the draft to return. “If they don’t come back, they may not have a country to come back to,” says Colonel Timchenko in his dugout near Kostiantynivka, as he studies the screens showing waves of incoming Smerch rockets. ■
This article was updated on May 10th
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