The town Russia couldn't take

Telegraph

23-02-2025

For long stretches of the day nothing stirs on the surface of the ruined town.
Venturing above ground invites swift retribution from the hunters in the sky, the omnipresent drones that lurk above Toretsk's apocalyptic landscape, ready to drop their small but deadly explosive charges at the first hint of movement.
The town's 30,000-strong population has long fled. For the Ukrainian and Russian soldiers battling over its skeleton, life – bleak and tenuous – mostly exists in a subterranean world of basements, trenches and dugouts carved out of the coal-rich soil of the Donbas, eastern Ukraine's bitterly contested industrial heartland.
Karina – 'Octopus' to use her call sign – is a hunter.
As a reconnaissance and attack drone pilot in Ukraine's Khyzhak 'Predator' Brigade, it is the job of her four-person squad to identify and target enemy soldiers, using hand-held drones armed with fragmentation grenades to attack them as soon as they emerge onto the streets.
If the Russians attempt to muster in numbers, Octopus can unleash havoc. Over the course of a single 24-hour shift in December, her team estimates it killed or wounded 30 Russian soldiers.
'There may well have been others,' she says. 'Those are just the ones we could confirm.'
The long and grinding battle for Toretsk, once an important mining town, is significant in its own right. Should it fall, the Russians would be better placed to advance on the industrial city of Kostiantynivka, a key target 12 miles north-west of Toretsk. From there it could progress to the last unoccupied urban strongholds of the Donetsk region: Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and Lyman.
Were they to capture those cities, Russia would finally have full control of Donetsk, thus achieving one of its principal war aims amid talks between Moscow and Washington that could see Ukraine forced to cede swathes of territory in exchange for peace.
But the protracted seven-month battle for Toretsk is illustrative of the broader war in Ukraine as it nears its third anniversary, helping to explain why Russia is making slow, if relentless, progress on the battlefield – despite the immeasurable blood price.
Russia lost as many men in the past 12 months as it did in the first two years of the war, according to Ukrainian estimates.
'We struggle to push them back because they don't care how many of their men die,' says Yuri – callsign 'Gargarin' – who leads a mortar company in Toretsk. 'If one soldier dies, they simply send two more.'
This cavalier approach explains why soldiers are being killed in Ukraine at a pace unseen in Europe since the Second World War — although it is more the First World War that the conflict resembles, with Russian troops charging repeatedly across no-man's land under constant fire.
The human toll the war is inflicting is staggering as a result. Recent months have been the deadliest of the war for the Russians, with casualties frequently exceeding 1,500 a day.
Over the course of 2024, Russian forces may have gained 4,168 square kilometres (1,609 square miles of territory) – an area the size of Somerset – but they suffered 427,000 killed and wounded in the process, according to estimates from the Institute for the Study of War, a US think tank.
If Toretsk and other urban battlefields in the Donetsk region are anything to go by, it seems more likely that Russia will continue having to eke out costly, marginal victories rather than achieve a significant breakthrough in an effort to seize as much territory as possible before a freeze in the conflict.
Or so Ukrainian battlefield commanders hope, an optimism perhaps justified by the fact that the Russian rate of advance has dropped significantly since the end of November.
The battle for Toretsk, which Russia attacked in June, is an attritional one.
Along this front, Russia has a clear numerical advantage, according to Ukrainian military officers. From Pokrovsk, south of the town, to Chasiv Yar to the north, Russia has so concentrated its forces along this stretch of the line that in some areas they outnumber Ukrainian troops 10 to one.
Yet while Russian forces have made more rapid progress around Pokrovsk, capturing nearby settlements and advancing along the city's flanks, they have made much heavier going in Toretsk.
Despite fighting for seven months and with superior numbers, they have not indisputably captured the town, despite claims in Moscow that it has fallen. In fact, Ukrainian forces still control a pocket in the southwest of Toretsk that amounts to roughly 12 percent of the town's territory, according to two Ukrainian battlefield commanders and independent researchers.
Throughout the battle, Russian and Ukrainian forces have fought street to street and house to house with the latter generally in retreat but the front line often oscillating.
With Russian forces advancing along their flanks most analysts expect the town will most likely fall in the coming weeks. The question for Ukraine's military command is how much further damage they can inflict on the enemy before they have no choice but to withdraw their troops to avoid encirclement.
Back at brigade headquarters near the city of Kramatorsk, Maj Dmytro Mokych is watching a bank of screens in an underground bunker that serves as the unit's command centre.
Such is the nature of electronic warfare that no corner of Toretsk is obscured from view.
The overview from the cameras makes it swiftly apparent why it is so hard to advance in Toretsk. Anything that moves on either side becomes a target for drone operators like Octopus. Using armoured vehicles in a theatre of operations like this is asking for trouble, notes Maj Mokych.
'The nature of war has changed,' he says. 'A modern T-90 tank costs millions of dollars but we can destroy it with a handful of first-person drones that cost a couple of thousand dollars each.
'The Russians now mainly move around on foot, or on motorbikes and buggies. Even then, this is a risky business.'
Watching what unfolds on their screens, the officers of the Khyzhak Brigade are staggered by the indifference displayed by the Russians towards their own men.
'They don't seem to care about their wounded,' Maj Mokich says. 'In fact we have seen a number of them commit suicide. They don't even bury their dead – they just leave them out to be eaten by the pigs and the dogs.'
For Russian officers, wounded soldiers seem to be a burden. Rather than evacuate them to field hospitals, they instead send their stricken subordinates on suicidal missions across no-man's land with orders to drop anti-tank mines into basements sheltering Ukrainian soldiers.
One wounded Russian crawling painfully through the rubble makes it just a few metres from his own lines before a Ukrainian drone attacks, detonating the mine in his hands. There is little left of the soldier's corpse once the smoke clears.
The Ukrainians treat their wounded rather differently. Five days earlier, a Russian drone attacked Octopus's dugout in Toretsk, seriously wounding one of her squad – a case, as often happens on the battlefield, of the hunter becoming the hunted.
Field medics promptly evacuated the wounded man. Only later did Octopus realise the blood on her uniform came not from her wounded comrade but from a shrapnel wound to her leg. Refusing evacuation, she received medical advice about how to bandage her wound and remained on the battlefield.
Providing adequate care for the wounded is one of the reasons why Ukraine's casualty rate is thought to be half that of the Russians.
It is not enough, however, to negate Russia's numerical advantage. Russia has a population four times that of Ukraine, has mobilised large numbers of convicts and has a more effective recruitment mechanism to replace losses since, unlike its neighbour, it does not have to deal with democratic niceties.
Aside from supplementing its numbers with North Korean recruits, Russia has managed to recruit between between 600 and 1,000 new soldiers a day, explaining why Russia is able to muster 400,000 soldiers along the front line against just 250,000 Ukrainians.
As a result, Russia has so far been able to absorb losses as it has advanced through Donetsk, capturing the city of Vuhledar last October and the towns of Kurakhove and Vella Novosilka this year.
Those gains follow the capture of Bakhmut in May 2023 and Avdiivka in February 2024 – battles that have become synonymous with Moscow's tactic of unleashing human waves across no-man's land, whatever the casualty rate – a strategy it now employs across the front lines.
By the time Russia had captured Avdiivka in February last year, its forces were already losing hundreds of soldiers a day.
In the struggle for the city, located in the Donetsk region, Russia's commanders repeatedly ordered their soldiers over the top, an endless series of infantry assaults that eventually overwhelmed Ukraine's defences in the town.
The capture of Avdiivka was Russia's first major battlefield victory since the equally hellish campaign that led to the seizure of Bakhmut the previous summer.
But it came at an immense price.
An entire Russian brigade – comprising anywhere between 2,000 and 8,000 soldiers – was wiped out in just a matter of weeks, according to Ukrainian military assessments. By the time Avdiivka was finally seized, Russia had suffered an estimated 50,000 casualties.
As in Toretsk, Russia deployed its 'human waves' in Avdiivka with apparent indifference to the cost of human life, willing to sacrifice vast numbers to probe weaknesses in the Ukrainian defences.
Though Ukrainian troops would often manage to stave off the initial assault, they ultimately lacked the manpower to avoid being overrun by the enemy infantry, which were able to advance along paths blasted out by Russian artillery and aerial bombardment.
As the onslaught intensified, Ukrainian forces would find themselves caught in a cycle of exhaustion, unable to hold on as gaps emerged in their defences.
As seen in Avdiivka and other battles since, Russia's approach is costly. In fact, to some extent, that may be the point.
'Russian troops are easily expendable… they don't believe that their men are worth saving,' says Angelica Evans, a Russian analyst at the ISW.
Despite Russia's heavy losses, the steady retreat of the Ukrainian army from the Donbas, which includes the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, has raised fears among some that a Russian battlefield victory is inevitable
But Ukrainian commanders dispute this, arguing that by holding on in towns like Toretsk, they are extracting such a high price in Russian manpower that it will eventually break the enemy's capacity to wage war.
Coupled with an escalation in its strikes against Moscow's military-industrial complex after Britain and the US dropped objections to the use of their missiles on targets deep inside Russian territory late last year, Ukrainian officers believe they will eventually break the enemy's resolve.
Maj Mokych believes Ukrainian strikes on munitions factories hundreds of miles from the front line are already having an impact, with his soldiers facing fewer artillery attacks in Toretsk since the start of the year.
Nor is it just on the Toretsk battlefield where the Russian advance appears to be stuttering. According to DeepState, a Ukrainian group that monitors the front lines, the Russian is capturing territory at less than half the rate it was in November, a trend that appears to be accelerating.
The picture for Russia is grim in other ways, too. As well as the loss of Russian soldiers, Moscow is expected to run critically low on tanks and armoured personnel carriers towards the end of the year.
Take Kharkiv for example. At the start of May, Russia launched offensives near the city. Moscow's initial assault led to Russia's biggest territorial gains in 18 months, according to the Guardian, but advances had stalled by the start of June.
The irony is that as Russia's battlefield momentum has slowed, its diplomatic advantage has received a significant boost thanks to the overtures of the Trump administration, which is pushing for a rapid end to the war on terms many in Europe fear will be advantageous to Moscow.
Even those battlefield gains Russia has made are not necessarily as significant as they might initially appear, some experts suggest.
Nick Reynolds, a military analyst at RUSI, said: 'The map hasn't changed dramatically; we're talking about relatively small areas of the Donbas.
'The largest of the four mid-sized settlements Russia has seized in 2024 – Avdiivka, Selydove, Vuhledar, and Kurakhove – had a combined pre-war population of just over 31,000 people,' noted the ISW.
Ukraine has also managed to retain control of the key logistics hub Pokrovsk, despite Russia's systematic attempt to pummel the city into submission.
But Russia's tactics are not just designed to take land: it is about imposing so much pressure on Ukraine's soldiers and resources that its ability to wage war will eventually crack.
Realistically, as military intelligence officers in Kyiv admit, Russia has enough military and economic firepower, despite losing three times as many armoured fighting vehicles as Ukraine, to maintain an edge until early 2026 – a longer time than Donald Trump, the US president, appears willing to wait.
'Unlike Russia, Ukraine is a smaller country with a dwindling ability to mobilise its population and sustain morale,' Mr Reynolds explained. 'They're slowly draining Ukraine's capacity to fight.'
Russia's upper hand is undeniable, he said.
'The pressure on Ukraine is mounting. Their recruitment efforts and military capabilities now hinge on their international allies. Without a deal or US military support, Ukraine will continue to endure heavy losses and lose more territory.'
Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic International Studies, was asked if Russia would eventually run out of men. His reply was blunt: 'No, they've got a lot of men, they have a lot of people, more than Ukraine.'
In an indication that Russia's recruitment drive is coming under strain, the Kremlin has been forced sharply to double payments to attract volunteers to join up.
The Putin regime will be equally alarmed by estimates that the number of Russians being killed or wounded now exceeds the number of new recruits by a ratio of two-to-one.
If 2024 was Russia's deadliest year of the war – the toll on Ukraine has been no less profound.
Though Ukraine has kept its official death toll secret, estimates suggest as many as 100,000 soldiers may have been killed during the war so far – although Mr Zelensky put the figure at more than 46,000, with tens of thousands more missing. US officials reckon that between 60,000 and 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, far fewer than the Russian casualty rate.
Ukraine has struggled even more than Russia to replenish its manpower, with an army increasingly made up of older soldiers after Mr Zelensky resisted pressure from the Biden administration to lower the age at which men can be mobilised from 27 to 18. Amid concerns of a public backlash, the conscription age was instead reduced to 25 in April last year.
Whatever the fluctuating fortunes on the battlefield, there is a growing resignation in Ukraine that the war is now less likely to be settled not on the battlefield but at the negotiating table – a table to which Ukraine may not even be invited.
Regardless of the political machinations, the soldiers of the Khyzhak Brigade say they will keep fighting, drawing Russian troops into combat as often as possible in an attempt to inflict maximum losses for as long as they can.
A volunteer brigade consisting entirely of police officers, it has been mired in some of the heaviest fighting in the Donbas for months, holding back the Russians not just in Toretsk but also also in Chasiv Yar and along the approaches to Kostiantynivka, a city now under almost constant attack.
There are plenty of reasons to hang on as long as possible in both towns. Were Toretsk to fall, it would give the Russians control of four slag heaps from which they could rain down even more fire on the highway into Kostiantynivka.
The loss of Chasiv Yar, a hilltop town contested for even longer than Toretsk, would provide the enemy with new positions to launch artillery strikes on Druzhkivka, to the north of Kostiantynivka.
It is their duty, members of the brigade say, to fight until the last moment, inflicting as much pain on Russia as they can in the process. For all the despondency that now dominates the narrative about Ukraine's military prospects, they insist their morale remains as high three years into the war as it did at its outset.
'We are all here to fight for our land and to get it back,' says Octopus, who joined the brigade after her husband was killed in action in the city of Kherson in October 2022. 'Everyone is going to do the best they possibly can. It is a job and it needs to be done.'
With additional reporting by Kostiantyn Yaremenko, visual journalism and development by Connor James Ibbetson