Russia goes after Ukraine with distant strikes and new tactics

Boston Globe

4 days ago

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Moscow is betting that, no matter the diplomatic wrangling, it can eventually come out on top in a long war of attrition in which it has both numeric and military superiority.
Russia has been unable to turn small gains on the battlefield into strategic breakthroughs, although it has suffered staggering human losses. For more than a year, its troops have concentrated on Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, with relentless attacks from a large force that has been getting closer.
Late last month, a few Russian soldiers infiltrated the city for the first time, according to Ukrainian troops defending it. The Russians set ambushes and attacked vehicle convoys before they were tracked down in several city blocks, and at least four people were killed, said Staff Sgt. Oleksandr Kanivets, a mortar battery commander with the Ukrainian 68th Jaeger Brigade.
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Since then, attacks by small groups of Russian soldiers backed by drones have increased, Kanivets said. 'Our clearing operations continue, just as their raids into the city do,' he said when reached by phone Monday.
Driving the Ukrainians out of Pokrovsk would allow Russian troops to bolster their attacks on the remaining cities of the Donbas region that form the spine of the Ukrainian defense in the east.
In the fight for Pokrovsk, Moscow has deployed some 110,000 troops, attacking from multiple directions, Ukrainian officials say. 'This is an army capable of capturing a medium-sized European country,' said Viktor Trehubov, a Ukrainian military spokesperson.
Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine's top military commander, said Russia continues to expand the size of its forces fighting inside Ukraine, which, he said, needed to intensify its own struggling mobilization effort.
After a siege that has lasted more than a year, Moscow has increasingly been turning to small units like the one that infiltrated Pokrovsk last month, backed by drones.
The troops are integrating the drones into offensive operations, deploying them with elite units to wreak havoc on Ukrainian supply lines.
'How Ukraine adapts to and counters this evolving drone threat is critical,' said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently visited Ukrainian troops on the front.
Fighting also continues to rage across a long front, from the Dnieper River and Kharkiv in the north, to Chasiv Yar in the heart of the eastern Donbas region and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
In the northeast near Sumy, months of persistent attacks by Russia have yielded minimal gains and the Ukrainians have pushed the troops back in places, according to combat footage verified by military analysts. Major assaults in the south have also recently been repelled, soldiers said.
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The fiercest fighting is in the eastern Donetsk region. Most of Russia's gains in June and July -- which amounted to about 400 square miles, according to military analysts -- were there.
But the fighting that has taken place this summer scarcely resembles the war's early days, or even last year's battles, military experts say.
Coordinated assaults with armored columns battling between trench lines are rare. Now, Ukrainian forces are scattered in small teams occupying foxholes or basements, watching mine-strewn fields under constant drone surveillance.
'The lines are not comprised of sprawling trenches, but small defensive positions which serve as pickets, while much of the fighting is done by drones and artillery,' Kofman said.
While maps show clear front lines, in reality, both sides bleed into each other across vast battlefields.
The Russians more often than not move in small groups on foot, occasionally followed by groups racing forward on motorbikes or buggies, sometimes even bypassing Ukrainian positions rather than engaging them.
The Ukrainians at times do not open fire so as to not reveal their positions.
Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's former top military commander and now ambassador to Britain, offered a blunt description of the new reality in a recent interview on Ukrainian television. 'Now the front line is mainly designed so that people are killed there,' he said.
This grim calculus can be seen in underground command posts, where Ukraine's losses are tracked on whiteboards with code names for fighting positions and tallies of drones lost, electronic warfare systems destroyed and soldiers killed or wounded.
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Capt. Dmytro Filatov, who oversees a 3-mile section of the front, spends day and night monitoring nine video feeds offering near-constant bird's-eye views of his patch of land.
One morning this summer, a drone team spotted a lone Russian soldier emerging from a tree line.
'There is the Russian. There!' Filatov barked, ordering attack drones launched. But the soldier vanished back into foliage before a large bomber drone, the Vampire, could strike.
The captain angrily threw down his phone in frustration.
Six men in his regiment had died a day earlier after being sent forward to block an assault. Surrounded, they fought for five days before being overrun.
'Did I know it was a big risk? Yes,' he said. 'Did I hesitate? No.'
While Russia has kept up relentless attacks across the front, Pokrovsk faces a particularly urgent threat, Ukrainian soldiers and commanders said.
Kanivets, the Ukrainian mortar unit commander, was sent to the Pokrovsk area in March 2024.
Russian troops had recently taken Avdiivka, about 25 miles to the east, and were moving steadily in the direction of Pokrovsk, which at the time was a critical logistical hub for Ukrainian forces in the region.
They reached the outskirts of the city before their march was halted.
A year later, as Russian forces once again ramp up attacks, the skies are thick with drones, Kanivets said. Soldiers are often forced to spend weeks at fighting positions without rotation and only limited resupply.
Squeezed from all sides, Ukrainian forces could once again be faced with a choice they have confronted time and again, deciding when the price of holding their ground outweighs the cost of retreating.
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They have dug extensive defensive lines behind the city. Families in nearby villages are being evacuated as the war closes in. And the city itself is steadily being destroyed.
Filatov, on the front line, said there was no time for wishful thinking about diplomacy or leaders bringing an end to the conflict.
'We've fought so long that we rely only on ourselves, not on presidents, gods or talks,' he said. When asked if his men maintain hope, he glanced at a passing soldier: 'Vasyl, do you have hope?'
The soldier laughed. 'No,' he replied.
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