‘What choice do we have?’: no end in sight for Ukraine’s war-weary frontline troops

default

For almost all of their 62-day deployment on the frontline east of Pokrovske, Bohdan and Ivan hid – first in a village shop, then, after a deadly firefight with Russian soldiers, in a tiny basement where the infantrymen from Ukraine’s 31st Brigade had to survive seven more weeks.

Food, water, cigarettes and other supplies were airlifted in by a friendly drone, their toilet was their 3 sq metre room, their nearest comrades 200 metres or so away. Their only hope was to remain underground, because they knew if they were detected a Russian drone could kill them all.

Though the fight in Ukraine is characterised as a war of remotely piloted craft, the role of infantry is easily forgotten. In large parts of the front, the job of Ukrainian ground troops is to quietly hold a position, while danger looms overhead. “I can’t sleep properly now,” says Bohdan, easily the more talkative of the pair. “It’s too quiet for me.”

When the infantrymen headed out to the front at the end of September, a diplomatic effort to end the near four-year war after the Alaska summit appeared to have faltered. But by the time the crew had returned at the end of November, from the south-east of the Dnipropetrovsk region, a new Russian-US peace plan had emerged.

Hand over all of Donetsk province, just east of the soldiers’ position, abandon occupied territory to Russia, give up permanently on joining Nato, and only then, Moscow said, it would be willing to consider peace. It was in effect a demand for a surrender. Ukraine objected. But a revised plan with Ukrainian input was then deemed “unacceptable” by Russia.

If Ukraine fights on, it is infantrymen like Bohdan, 41, who installed heating insulation before he volunteered in 2022, and Ivan, a 45-year-old handyman who joined up in July, who will have to risk their lives and resist for some time to come.

“Nobody, of course, wants the war to continue because there have been a lot of sacrifices, a lot of victims. But at the same time we don’t want to give up, to give our land because we don’t then want those sacrifices to be wasted,” Bohdan says, dirt still on his hands and uniform.

It is a familiar sentiment across the unit. Andriy, a 31-year-old sergeant responsible for drone operations at the unit’s command point, when asked about Ukraine handing over land for peace responds by saying, “Do you want me to be honest?”, before adding: “It’s fucking bullshit.” A group of comrades who have been quietly listening in burst out laughing in agreement.

But for all the defiance of Bohdan and many other soldiers like him, there are strains elsewhere. A Ukrainian military psychologist said between 3% and 5% of those returning from frontline deployments needed further examination or treatment, in addition to those killed or wounded. Bohdan and Ivan were being monitored to ensure they could be sent back to the front.

A record 21,602 went absent without leave from the Ukrainian army in October. A frequent complaint across the military is the lack of reserves, meaning there is a shortage of troops available for rotations. Long deployments at the front are common. It emerged last month that a platoon medic with the 30th Brigade, Serhiy Tyshchenko, spent 471 days in one combat position in Donetsk province.

Interactive

Bohdan and Ivan had not expected to be on the frontline for so long. “I told my wife I’ll be there for two weeks,” says Bohdan, a father of five. “She was calling everyone here, almost eating their brains, asking them why was it taking so long?” But the soldiers did not know of their families’ concerns.

While frontline drone crews have access to the internet through Starlink and can video call their families, the infantry have no such option. They can send radio messages home, but family members are not allowed to send messages back in return.

The ubiquity of drones, whose feeds are visible at command points well behind the frontlines, has fundamentally changed Russian tactics. Armoured attacks, common in 2023, have long been abandoned, because so many Russian tanks were destroyed.

Instead they have been replaced by a perpetual probing of scattered Ukrainian positions to find weak points, or weaker brigades, which can be followed up by more substantive attacks, as appears to have happened east of Huliaipole, in Zaporizhzhia province to the south-west, where about six miles of territory was lost last month.

Ruslan, a battalion commander in the 31st Brigade, says the Russians “are infiltrating in groups of two or three people” to avoid being spotted by drones in the “kill zone” about 15km (9 miles) on either side of the front. Some rely on thermal hoods of varying quality to try to avoid being detected by heat-seeking cameras that so clearly mark out a human body in white on black.

They are “95% likely to be killed if we see them,” the commander says, though he acknowledges the worsening weather conditions – fog or heavy rain – mean it has become easier for the Russians to accumulate numbers behind the frontline with the aim of attacking and exposing the defenders’ positions.

For Ivan and Bohdan, a moment of danger came suddenly, at 7am one morning, when three Russians stumbled near their location appearing “across the road 10, 15 metres away”. The Ukrainians shot back immediately, killing two, but the survivor was able to call in drone strikes on their position, before he in turn was killed by a Ukrainian drone.

The infantrymen scattered. After a time, they regrouped in the basement, isolating at about the time the US envoy Steve Witkoff was wooing the Kremlin with phone calls offering up Ukrainian territory. At one point, a Russian Baba Yaga drone bombed the entrance, half blocking it with rubble. “We were thinking it would come back. Two more mines and we’d have been done,” Bohdan recalls.

No other strikes followed, so the soldiers concluded it was a speculative attack, though it became harder to scramble outside and pick up supplies dropped from above. Gear recovered included a fresh pair of boots for Bohdan, though they were two sizes too big for him.

It was the trip back that was the most terrifying. The journey to safety was a 10-15km walk, with drones making it too dangerous to travel by any vehicle, an easy target in the open countryside. A relief team had arrived, but for three days it was too dangerous to depart.

When the moment came, the trio were given just 10 minutes’ notice. The moment was opportune because visibility had deteriorated overhead: “It was rainy and foggy,” Bohdan says. Even so, the walk back took three days – “we were not moving in the night”, he explains – the men hid in tree lines in the dark to avoid drones with thermal sights.

Finally, it was possible to pick them up. But even then, there was a final moment of drama. “Just when we were driving we saw another car that was hit by a drone. So there wasn’t a relief moment then,” Bohdan says. Now, in the calm of the rear, they feel a little more relaxed, ready to return “in a week maximum” if needed.

Are they ready to risk their lives in another 62-day stint? “What choice do we have?” Bohdan says, adding there is no reason why after all this fighting Ukraine should have to accept a bad deal. “We have a saying in Ukraine: if you let a cat under the table, it will appear on the table. It’s the same with Putin.”