A Ukrainian soldier: "The Russian offensive consists of sending more and more soldiers to die"

Velika Novosilka is the ideal place to get closer to God.

Yuri, a 39-year-old Ukrainian soldier, codenamed Sneg, assures that he prayed for the first time in his life in this town in eastern Ukraine besieged by Russian troops.

He is convinced that this saved him from dying.

“I fell to the ground under enemy fire.

Curled up, I looked at the sky and began to pray," he says from his new duty station, a highway checkpoint on the southern front of the Donetsk province, where the most intense fighting of the war is taking place: "That howitzer it impacted in front of me and did not explode.

Is it or is it not a miracle?

Yuri has decorated the wooden cabin where the soldiers at his checkpoint take shelter from the cold: he has done it with Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox prints, also with a plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary: "It doesn't matter if they are Buddhists, Muslims or Christians, they all believe in the same God, in the one who saved me”.

What is happening in Velika Novosilka, and especially in its neighboring town, Vuhledar, is terrifying, says Yuri.

Valeri Zaluzhni, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, said last weekend that the bloodiest fighting of the war is taking place in this area and in Marinka, 30 kilometers further east, also in Donetsk.

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The offensive on Vuhledar is on a par in intensity with that of Bakhmut, the Ukrainian High Command indicates.

Both this municipality and Vuhledar and Velika Novosilka are closed to civilians, including journalists —officially because of the risk to their lives in urban fighting.

10 days ago the Russian offensive intensified to surround the Ukrainian positions in Donetsk.

The Ukrainian and NATO intelligence services expect that another offensive by the invader will also begin in the coming days, from the province of Lugansk, to try to gain control of the entire Donbas region.

Each Russian attempt to advance in the Vuhledar sector has ended with dozens of lifeless bodies and armored vehicles destroyed under Ukrainian precision artillery, located more than 15 kilometers away, and infantry ambushes.

Every meter the invader advances in the Donetsk province, he achieves it with a high death toll among his ranks.

"The only tactic Russia follows is to send waves of infantry to die, there's no more," says Igor, code name Lishey, commander of a three-tank squad of the Ukrainian 1st Armored Brigade.

Lishey is 28 years old and says that even the statistics of Russian deaths provided by the Ukrainian General Staff are not close to reality.

According to kyiv, more than 140,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the invasion began in February 2022.

There are more moderate estimates from NATO allies: Norwegian chief of staff Eirik Kristoffersen stated in late January that Russian casualties – including wounded and missing – were 180,000, compared with 100,000 for Ukraine.

The percentage of deaths with respect to the total casualties ranges between 10% and 33%, according to the main academic studies on the subject, depending on the medical reaction and evacuation capacity on the battlefield.

However, the UK Ministry of Defense, in its February 12 part on the Ukrainian war, wrote that the figures from the Ukrainian General Staff are "possibly accurate", that is, with the battle of Bakhmut and the battle of Vuhledar underway, Russia would have more than 800 daily casualties, four times more than last summer.

on January 20, Ukrainian casualties would have doubled.

“There are no tactics, only cannon fodder”

"The Russian dead cannot even be counted, they remain there on the battlefield without anyone picking them up, there are too many," explains Lishey: "Their soldiers have no training, their advance is typical of World War II, there is no tactics, nothing, just cannon fodder.”

The words of this commander match the reports from the Ukrainian and British intelligence services, but also from other military analysis centers, both Russian and American, on Moscow's offensive in Vuhledar.

The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) described last Monday as “catastrophic” the virtual total elimination of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, one of the most competent brigades on paper in the Russian army.

The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has ensured that it was almost completely destroyed, that is, with about 150 armored vehicles and about 5,000 men.

The ISW gives veracity to the information, citing Russian sources that indicate that up to 90% of the platoons of the 155th Brigade were made up of improperly prepared recruits.

The Gray Zone, a Russian military Telegram channel of the Wagner mercenary company, assured on February 13 that it is difficult to imagine how bad the advance of the Russian army in Vuhledar has been: "Our troops have not had enough information intelligence, nor sufficient artillery support in the face of the most precise Ukrainian artillery”.

Soldiers of the 1st Ukrainian Armored Brigade, on February 15 in the vicinity of Vuhledar. Cristian Segura

The region where the battle of Vuhledar is being fought is a plain of agricultural fields and coal mines, with few forest masses, an ideal space for an offensive with tanks, according to experts consulted by EL PAÍS.

But the gentle hills that break the monotony of the landscape are also perfect positions to stop a military offensive.

There is nothing on the horizon that goes unnoticed from miles away.

A few kilometers from Velika Novosilka, from a hill, this newspaper was able to observe the maneuvers of a mechanized battalion in formation to face a possible Russian outpost: Ukrainian soldiers, armed with rifles and anti-tank rockets, were preparing to dominate the flanks of the enemy, supported by howitzer fire.

Russia on the radio

Most of the stations that are tuned in the town of Kostiantinopil are Russian.

They are radio frequencies that emit from the city of Donetsk, 30 kilometers away, the provincial capital taken over by pro-Russian separatists in 2014 and unilaterally annexed by the Kremlin in 2022. The proximity of the enemy in this town founded in the 18th century by Greeks from Crimea it is intuited by the waves and by the rapid movement of the jeeps that transport Ukrainian soldiers.

Vuhledar is only 25 kilometers away.

Soldiers from the 68th Separate Brigade of Hunters, a detachment that was key in the defeat of the 155th Russian Naval Infantry Brigade, are loading food in a grocery store in Kostianinopil.

Anatoli and Ilya are two soldiers with almost a year of fighting in Donetsk behind them.

His leisurely way of speaking, his look and his combat uniform confirm his experience.

Mick Ryan is an Australian major general and one of the most quoted Ukraine analysts.

Ryan ventured last Tuesday on his social networks that Russia had possibly only launched reconnaissance attacks in the Vuhledar area so far, to weigh up the Ukrainian defense force.

Anatoli denies it: "The enemy offensive has begun, we have already stopped three large waves this February."

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of the 68th Hunter Brigade

they believe that this will be the strategy they will face in the coming months: "The Russians have more people, nothing more, they will continue to send them to the slaughterhouse because Vladimir Putin has said that he wants to conquer the entire Donbas by spring."

"The Russian offensive consists of sending more and more soldiers to die, but they always keep coming," confirms Yaroslav Chepurnoi, spokesman for the 79th Airborne Assault Brigade.

His troops are located in the defense axis of Kostiantinivka and Marinka.

Chepurnoi says that before last November, Russian raids were usually with columns of between 10 and 20 soldiers, but now these raids are with 40 infantrymen.

Chepurnoi warns against the risk of underestimating the enemy: “Until now, waves of troops arrived without following any tactic that we easily liquidated.

But they are learning from our mistakes, they are testing us to study our weaknesses."

The 79th Assault Brigade has detected changes in the Russian way of fighting, according to Chepurnoi.

The first is that they better use the support of reconnaissance drones and Lancet bomb drones against artillery;

The second change is that the Russians are spending less artillery, concentrating it mainly on the advance of their infantry.

"Depending on which unit they belong to and where they come from, they fight better or worse, but all the Russians, even if there are only three men left surrounded by ours, fight to the end," says the 79th Brigade spokesman.

Other Ukrainian military sources indicate to this newspaper that on this front neither side prioritizes taking soldiers prisoner, although officers do.

In the 1st Armored Brigade they have also detected that the invader fires less artillery, according to a commander of the 231st Fire Support Battalion who prefers to speak on condition of anonymity.

This soldier, stationed in the Vuhledar region since last May, believes that this is because the Russian offensive is more geographically spread out and that the enemy has possibly assumed that such a high and inefficient consumption of projectiles is unsustainable.

But if the current Russian offensive is at the cost of enormous sacrifices, so would a Ukrainian counterattack.

The invader's defenses have been fortified on the southern front, especially on the Zaporizhia front, which borders Donetsk and protects the conquered coast of the Azov Sea.

The military consulted for this report agree that to reverse the situation, the Ukrainian Armed Forces need much more support from abroad: more precision and long-distance artillery —especially NATO 155-mm cannons—, anti-drone weapons, drones bomb and above all, tanks.

"My tank is over 50 years old, twice my age," says Lishey in front of his armored vehicle, a Soviet T-64.

The tracks are visibly worn and this commander reveals that the cannon has jammed up to five times and has had to leave the front during defensive actions.

Lishey claims that his squad alone pushed back four Russian platoons in the spring at Chernihiv in northern Ukraine.

When he can fight with the German Leopard tanks and the best shooting accuracy from him, he says, he is convinced that the situation at the front will turn around.

Western heavy tanks are scheduled to be combat-ready in the first weeks of spring, just when Russia wants to raise its flag in Bakhmut and Vuhledar.

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