LYMAN, Ukraine - A Ukrainian soldier looked through an infrared scope at heads poking out of a trench a few dozen meters away.
Asked:
"Are there any of ours ahead of us?" according to the account of the shooting followed by his fellow Ukrainian soldiers.
A Ukrainian Orthodox church destroyed by fighting in the village of Bohorodychne, Ukraine.
(Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)
There weren't.
Two Ukrainians crept through the quagmire of artillery craters between the two lines of trenches on the outskirts of the eastern city of Lyman, until they came to the wreckage of an armored personnel carrier.
Using it as cover to fire from an unexpected angle, they forced the Russians to withdraw.
When it was all over, they found the corpse of a soldier.
"Every day, sometimes more than once a day, small groups are coming up and trying to take over our positions," said one of the Ukrainian soldiers who took part in the fighting, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Diesel, for safety reasons.
For months, military analysts have anticipated that the Russian military, under pressure from President
Vladimir Putin
, would try to regain momentum in the war as the anniversary approached.
A recent series of attacks along the front lines in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine were initially seen as exploratory attacks.
But, increasingly, they are seen as the best the exhausted Russian forces can do.
"The new big Russian offensive is underway," Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine's military intelligence agency, said in an interview last week with the Ukrainian edition of Forbes magazine.
"But moving forward in a way that not even everyone can realize."
Balance
After a year of war in Ukraine, the Russian military has suffered staggering losses: up to 200,000 soldiers killed or wounded, according to Western officials, and thousands of tanks and armored vehicles destroyed or captured by Ukraine.
Russia is running out of artillery shells and cruise missiles, and is having trouble replenishing its stocks due to Western sanctions.
Many of its elite, best trained and most experienced units have been decimated, leaving it in a
state of ruin
from which experts say it will take years, rather than months, to recover.
Instead, Russia has been forced to turn to tens of thousands of newly recruited soldiers who have rushed to the front lines with little time to train.
His inexperience was evident to Diesel from what he saw on the battlefield.
"From the way they move," he said, "I see that they are not professionals."
Experts increasingly doubt that Russia in its latest offensive offers much more of a threat than Diesel and his colleagues have been seeing for a month.
The Institute for the Study of Warfare, a US-based analytical group, said the Russian assault near Lyman had already entered its most intense phase, with no territorial gains for
Russia
.
Russia "likely lacks sufficient uncommitted reserves to dramatically increase scale or intensity" in the winter, the group said in a recent note.
Plagued by shortages of tanks and other vehicles, the Russian offensive "will most likely end well short of its objectives," the analysts concluded.
Things were very different at the start of the war, when military experts and Putin apparently expected Ukraine to fold to the Russian onslaught within days.
But after faltering at first, the Ukrainians found their footing, driving the Russians away from the capital and halting their advances elsewhere.
In early September, they launched a swift counter-offensive that allowed them to recapture large tracts of territory in the north-east and around the city of
Kherson
in the south.
Desperate to turn their fortunes around, the Kremlin responded in September by announcing the mobilization of
300,000 men
and, according to Western intelligence agencies, preparing an offensive aimed at capturing all of
Donbas,
an area that includes the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk.
But a month into the campaign, the Russian forces have hardly moved.
Fighting between small units in fields and pine forests east of Lyman is typical of the daily whirlwind of violence along the front line.
Ukraine's strategy has been to absorb the blows, inflicting as many casualties as possible while preparing a counterattack in the spring with a
new arsenal
of Western-supplied weapons, including tanks.
President
Volodymyr Zelensky
has described the static fighting as fierce, but to Ukraine's benefit, inflicting heavy losses on the Russian army.
"The more losses there are in Donbas," he said in a late-night speech last week, "the sooner we can end this war with a victory for Ukraine."
It would be a mistake to write off the Russian army as a completely spent force, analysts say.
It still has thousands of tanks and artillery pieces and the ability to produce more, and the generals could have troops in reserve for a spring offensive.
The generals could be reserving troops for a spring offensive.
In addition, they have an advantage in manpower, although in a bitter war led by artillery barrages this is not decisive.
Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this month that the Russian offensive, albeit "with great difficulties," still posed
a risk
because of its sheer numbers.
"Putin called up several hundred thousand people, who have been arriving on the battlefield," he said.
"So they have numbers, and whether or not they are successful in pressing the fight, that remains to be seen."
An exception has been the battle for Bakhmut, where Russian forces, swelled by conscripts from Russian prisons fighting in the Wagner paramilitary group, have closed in on the city, seizing key villages to the north and now threatening the only access road. Ukrainian troops have left to
resupply
the forces.
But even there, the Russian military has failed to take the city after months of bloody fighting, and a bitter dispute has recently broken out in public between the leader of the
Wagner group
and those of the regular military forces.
In the current offensive, Russia has chosen to attempt half a dozen attacks along the Donbas front, rather than concentrating on a single assault.
However, the initial attack, a tank assault on the coal mining town of Vuhledar, ended in failure, with dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers blown up through the mines or left in the fields.
The destruction was reminiscent of the scenes of burned and destroyed Russian armor that characterized the fighting around kyiv last winter.
"Their mistake is that
they don't learn from their mistakes
," Diesel said.
On a recent morning, on the rolling plains of the Donbass, the sun shone on snow-covered fields and frost-covered trees, and the burnt-out hulls of last autumn's tanks were visible on the road to the front line.
After a year of fighting and destruction in the region, the two armies fight mostly over the ruins of an unpopulated region.
The Ukrainian authorities calculate that
80% of the inhabitants
of their side of the front have fled.
Most of the cities and towns lie empty and forlorn.
The village of Bohorodychne was eerily silent, save for the dripping water through the tangled ruins of what had been homes.
The town changed hands twice last summer.
However, half a dozen residents have returned, saying they are confident the Ukrainian army can hold the front line this time.
"When you see someone else's house destroyed, it's one thing," said Yuriy Ponurenko, who was starting to rebuild his house.
"When you see your own house, it's something else."
Looting has become a problem, said Andriy Kondratyuk, a volunteer from a nearby town visiting to repair the church.
Cars, laden with coolers and other supplies, sometimes collide on bumpy roads, he said.
At the front, the landscape is a ravaged landscape of mud, shell craters and trees hacked to pieces by explosions.
In open country areas, Russia has attacked with infantry supported by armored vehicles.
In the pine forests further north, the fighting is mostly between infantry units, the soldiers say.
Sarmite Cirule, a Latvian volunteer medic working at a position outside Lyman, said Ukrainian troops had also suffered heavy casualties in the month since the offensive began, despite having successfully defended the strategic town.
"We are mainly holding our positions," he said, "and there are a lot of dead and wounded."
Diesel, interviewed over tea in an abandoned house far from the front line and decorated with children's drawings sent to encourage soldiers, said Russian attacks picked up steam in January.
"It's like two different wars," he said of the intensity of the fighting after the start of the Russian offensive and as new Russian recruits joined the front lines.
Still, he recalled multiple mistakes.
Recently, he said, he opened fire on two Russian soldiers who were casually walking across a field, apparently unaware that they were within range of the Ukrainian lines.
"It looked like they were picking mushrooms," he said.
They both managed to run away.
"They are looking for weak spots in small groups," he said.
"They have quantity and we have spirit."
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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