On Ukraine's front lines the kill zone is getting deeper

Hindustan Times

16 hours ago

CARTEL AND HIS men are moving. Today his artillery covers part of Ukraine's Zaporizhia front, and he controls his guns from a house 8km from the line of contact. His team, from the 128th Mountain Assault Brigade, monitors the war-scarred farmland here with surveillance drones, and Cartel orders strikes when a target is identified. Until January they were billeted closer to the front line, but enemy artillery forced him to move deeper into Ukrainian-held territory. Now enemy drone saturation has expanded the kill zone, so 'we are going underground,' Cartel says. Their bunker will be ready by the middle of August.
In Ukraine's east and in its north-eastern Sumy region, the fighting is fierce. There are daily battles along the Zaporizhia front, but troops see no preparations for any major new Russian offensive here. In terms of ammunition, in stark contrast to earlier periods, Ukrainian soldiers are not complaining about a lack of artillery shells.
The nature of the war is changing, though, and Ukrainian forces are readying for it. The increasing depth of the kill zone, a territory up to 15km on either side of the front line in which drones make movement extremely dangerous, is rendering operations ever harder. Over the next year the ramping-up of mid-range drones will add a second tier to it. This will endanger logistics, artillery and military concentrations 60km or more from the front. Mid-range drones will fill the gap between long-range ones, of the kind that Ukraine uses for deep strikes and Russia uses to batter Ukrainian cities, and the short-range ones used on the front.
The road to Orikhiv from Zaporizhia leads through the village of Komyshuvakha. Farmers are busy with the harvest and there is plenty of military and civilian traffic, even though Russian troops are just 18km to the south. Locals and soldiers billeted here have become so accustomed to the sound of distant artillery that they barely notice it any more. Plumes of smoke might be from positions which have been hit or from farmers burning stubble. For now, the road is relatively safe.
Being spotted within 2km of the front is tantamount to a death sentence. The risk declines with distance: small kamikaze drones have limited flight times, and the farther they fly the greater the chance they will be shot down or jammed.
Fighting on the central part of the Zaporizhia front has become desultory. That is not the case at either end of it. Russian forces have advanced in the past few days at Kamianske in the west. In the east they aim to surround the Huliapole, an important logistics hub. Ruslan Mykula, co-founder of Deep State, a Ukrainian online map tracking front-line movements, says the Russian aim is to move north and seize territory up to the Konka river. A tributary of the Dnieper, by Komyshuvakha it runs next to the main road. The Russians lack the manpower to make this thrust now, he says. Many of their soldiers who were fighting here before have been redeployed to Sumy.
Along the front lines, Ukrainian soldiers say, small groups of badly trained and ill-equipped Russian troops are being sent on mostly suicidal missions to try to secure positions. Properly prepared soldiers follow them only if they succeed. Ukrainian soldiers have long puzzled as to why so many Russians obey such orders when their chances of survival are slight. But Vladyslav Pinchuk, commander of an artillery unit of the 241st Brigade, says that in the past few weeks he has noticed increasing reluctance. 'They don't have enough men here, and those they have don't have the motivation.' Intercepts reveal that troops do not openly defy orders they consider suicidal, but rather play for time and come up with excuses to evade them.
In a wheat field, a soldier from the Typhoon drone unit with the call sign Tofu has come to watch trials of four medium-range Shersh drones. They have a wingspan of 3.5 metres and can carry 8kg of explosives. These are for 'big, very important targets', says Tofu. A strike with one can stop a train, let alone a tank, he says. Now they are mainly used to destroy Russian artillery. Targets for this type are typically 50-60km away, but they can fly farther. That means the crew can operate from deep inside safe Ukrainian territory, rather than close to the front.
The Shersh flies high to evade electronic-warfare systems. It plummets sharply to hit its target, rather than descending gradually, and a target-locking device means it cannot be jammed as it comes in for the kill. But the Russians have an equivalent, says Tofu: the Molniya. It flies very low and its quality and precision are inferior to the Shersh, but the Russians have more of them. Unlike cheap short-range kamikaze drones, a Shersh costs some €7,000 ($8,000), seven times as much as a Molniya. Both sides are racing to develop sophisticated artificial-intelligence targeting for their mid-range drones. Over the next year, they could transform the battlefield yet again.