Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023 | 2 a.m.
The slow start to Ukraine’s counteroffensive spurred gloomy predictions that Kyiv’s fight for freedom will bog down in an endless war of attrition. But having spent time talking to soldiers and commanders on the front lines, I find myself much more optimistic than I expected.
The level of commitment of frontline troops is astounding. Despite mammoth challenges, their outlook is far more positive than many Ukrainians I spoke with in big cities, who were deeply worried about the country’s future.
These fighting men, nearly all volunteers, are driven by a fervent belief that they face one of two options: either a genocidal Russia destroys their country along with their children’s future or they drive out the “Orcs” — their nickname for the Russian invaders, which is drawn from the monsters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
These are ordinary men who have become extraordinary heroes under pressure.
Their steadfastness — plus a revised Ukrainian strategy for the counteroffensive — convinced me that Kyiv can still win this war.
A new direction
I traveled about 11 hours by car from the Black Sea port city of Odesa, across the Dnipro River, to the Zaporizhzhia region in eastern Ukraine. There, about six miles from the zero line — the divider between Ukrainian land and Russian-held territory — I visited the 74th Battalion of the 102nd Brigade.
Zaporizhzhia contains the key front lines where Ukraine is slowly pushing forward to reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian supply lines to its occupation forces in southern Ukraine and Crimea.
The 74th Battalion is clearing and protecting villages and farmland that Ukraine is holding. When I was there late last month, the fighting was too intense to get any closer to the front.
For the last two hours of our journey, my interpreter and I wove through rural farmland, much of it carpeted with stunning 5-foot-tall sunflowers. We bumped over narrow potholed roads twisting through villages whose bungalow-style homes with slanted roofs stood half-
destroyed by Russian rockets.
Most soldiers from the battalion set up camp in abandoned houses, spread out over several mostly destroyed villages.
The fighters I met were not the same newly minted troops trained and armed in Europe by the U.S. and its allies for the start of a new counteroffensive in June that went poorly.
Whoever crafted that strategy, whether the NATO nations or Kyiv, made serious errors. NATO forces would never launch an offensive without strong air support. Yet Ukrainian forces were sent into battle despite having only limited cover from a small number of aging Soviet-era planes (in part because the U.S. is still slow-walking the delivery of F-16s — 18 months after the start of the war).
Moreover, these new brigades lacked combat experience and had only brief training. They were sent into flat terrain that the Russians have filled with so many land mines that military experts say Ukraine is now the world’s most mined country. It is also lined with rows of fortified trenches, which the Russians built while Ukraine waited for Western tanks to arrive.
The troops I met with were experienced fighters who have mostly served on the front line for the past 15 months, with no rotation. Army command apparently can’t afford to spare them until it develops more cadres with extensive experience and raises new battalions.
So these men have held the line and bought time for the new brigades to get seasoned, some of them now moving forward to train alongside these blooded units.
They are fighting with 50-year-old Soviet-made tanks and archaic demining equipment. Their fight relies mostly on infantry and artillery (helped by new ammunition supplies and cluster munitions).
They badly need longer-range weaponry. They must raise money from friends and family to buy their own drones, as well as the used cars they drive around frontline roads.
In their “spare time,” these fighters work on designing new weapons to compensate for their lack of critical items such as attack drones and advanced demining equipment.
Still, they are making slow progress in demining and clearing the way for the new Western-provided equipment to eventually break through.
These soldiers have made it possible for Kyiv to pursue its revamped strategy of moving forward much more deliberately while clearing mines and trenches.
They have also bought time for Kyiv to pursue a strategy of destroying Russian arms depots and other logistics centers behind enemy lines.
Using their own sea drones, Ukrainians recently hit two Russian ships, one near Crimea and one in the Russian port of Novorossysk. (If the White House would finally give the Ukrainians U.S.-made ATACMS long-range missiles, which travel further and carry a heavier payload, they could put all Russian-occupied territory, including Crimea, under the gun.)
The current goal, according to two high-level special operations officers whom I met with in a gloomy hotel lobby late one night in Zaporizhzhia, is for frontline troops in the region to gradually advance 30 miles south, possibly to the town of Tokmak. From there, Ukrainian fire can control the main coastal road and railroad line that link Russia to occupied southern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. These links are known as the “land bridge,” which is critical for resupplying occupation troops.
Ultimately, the Ukrainians want to move a further 30 miles southward to the Azov Sea, destroying the land bridge.
They also want to take out the Kerch Bridge, a long span linking Russian territory across the Kerch Straits to Crimea; Kyiv recently damaged a span of the Kerch Bridge with sea drones.
“Without resupplies, the Russian army cannot control the south and Crimea. They can last two to three months only,” I was told by a special operations commander code-named Quadrat. “We want to force the Russians to retreat.”
Toward that end, Ukrainian forces are also targeting smaller bridges in the towns of Henichesk and Chonhar that are already within their firing range and link Russian-occupied territory with Crimea.
“They have more people, a lot of rockets, and strong electronic warfare,” said Quadrat’s colleague, call sign NATO. “But we are stronger. We feel that.”
If Ukraine had ATACMS, it could destroy the Kerch Bridge any time it chose. If it had F-16s now, it could range even further to attack Russian supply lines and bases in Crimea.
But with sea drones, ingenuity, and steadfast soldiers on the front line, I’m still betting on Ukraine, and hoping Washington will recognize the need to help it end this war now.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
