Russia talks peace while troops threaten new region in Ukraine

Boston Globe

21-02-2025

The Ukrainian backpedaling can be seen in the westward relocation of the aid station where medics of the 33rd Mechanized Brigade treat wounded soldiers. Late last year, they retreated three times in as many months, hauling medical beds and blood banks in trucks with them.
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The medics never thought they would be forced to entirely abandon Donetsk, an area where their unit had fought for a year, and retreat over its western boundary into Dnipropetrovsk.
Earlier this year, that became a reality. Now, the medics fear Moscow's troops will soon follow.
'It always happens this way,' said Lieutenant Vitalii Voitiuk, head of the brigade's medical unit. 'When medical units start moving into an area, it means the front line isn't far behind.' He was speaking at his new aid station near the front line where injured soldiers receive lifesaving care before being sent to a hospital farther behind the lines.
Outside the aid station, the distant rumble of outgoing artillery fire echoed through the night. 'That alone tells you the war is getting closer,' said Voitiuk, a burly 34-year-old.
Civilians, too, are bracing for the fight. Some have already evacuated — including those who fled the war in the east earlier and do not want to be caught in the violence again — while others are making plans to relocate.
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'When we read the requests to evacuate people from Dnipropetrovsk, it felt terrifying,' said Bohdan Zahorulko, a worker at East SOS, a Ukrainian nongovernment organization helping internally displaced people. 'But it was also a wake-up call about the reality of the fight.'
Russia's push toward Dnipropetrovsk, an area of more than 3 million people with major steel mills, builds on six months of rapid advances in Donetsk. Since August, its troops have captured an average of about 180 square miles of territory each month in Ukraine, nearly four times the size of San Francisco, according to the Black Bird Group, a Finland research company. Most of those gains were in Donetsk.
In recent weeks, Russia's advance has slowed. Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military expert who recently returned from a research trip in eastern Ukraine, attributed the slowdown to bad weather hindering Russian mechanized assaults and airstrikes. He also noted Ukraine's effective use of drones to hit troops and armored vehicles.
'But drones can't hold territory,' said Lieutenant Colonel Vadim Balyuk, commander of the Shkval Special Forces Assault Battalion in Ukraine's 59th Brigade. Speaking from a small wooden house in the border area, where he monitors live battlefield footage on screens, he said his unit's job is to do what drones cannot: secure control of villages and clear a path for Ukrainian infantry to move in.
Balyuk said his unit had recently cleared two settlements of Russian forces, which could have been used to support their push toward Dnipropetrovsk. But he had no illusions that the fight was over. 'The enemy is just regrouping now,' he said.
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Soldiers returning from the Donetsk front said Ukraine's biggest battlefield challenge remains unchanged: an enemy whose overwhelming manpower advantage allows for relentless assaults.
Dmytro, 35, an infantryman with a concussion, was evacuated to the 33rd Mechanized Brigade's aid point one recent night. He described a four-hour trench battle so fierce that he could not lift his head above the parapet to spot attacking Russian troops. But from the incoming fire, he said, he could tell they were advancing in small groups, methodically closing in.
'All the soldiers from my section of the trench were evacuated,' said Dmytro, who declined to give his last name per military rules.
In Mezhova, a small town in Dnipropetrovsk standing in the path of the Russian advance, the number of soldiers at times appears to outnumber civilians — they queue at the post office and crowd into cafes, and their olive-green pickups line the streets.
The new reality weighs heaviest on refugees who fled the Donetsk region earlier in the war and resettled in Mezhova and nearby settlements. Over the past three years, the population has surged from 14,000 to 21,000 with their arrival.
'For so long, we thought this place was safe,' said Nelia Seimova, who moved to Mezhova in August after escaping Novohrodivka, which is now under Russian occupation. 'I had plans — buying a house, getting a job, sending my child to school. A normal life.'
Now, Seimova, 33, is planning to move again, farther west. She knows from experience not to wait for the town to be hit with regular bombardment. 'We've been through this before,' she said, tears filling her eyes.
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Volodymyr Zrazhevsky, the mayor of Mezhova, is also worried about airstrikes, particularly glide bombs — powerful weapons carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives that Russia often uses to level towns before ground assaults.
Each day, Zrazhevsky studies a battlefield map marked with circles indicating which cities are within the range of the bombs as Russian forces advance. For now, Mezhova is safe. 'But we understand that if it happens — and it will at some point — we'll need to take drastic measures,' he said, possibly mandatory evacuations.
This article originally appeared in
.