by The Ukrainian soldier stared at the Russian tank. It was destroyed more than a year ago in the east of the country and is now far from the front line. He shrugged and cut away the rusty hull with a gas torch.
The soldier was not there to see the tank’s engine, turret, or tracks. Those had already been rescued. He was there because of the thick armor of him. The metal would be cut and tied as protection to Ukrainian armored personnel carriers defending the besieged city of Avdiivka, about 65 miles away.
The need to cannibalize a destroyed Russian vehicle to help protect Ukraine’s dwindling supply of equipment underscores kyiv’s ongoing challenges on the battlefield as it prepares for another year of pitched fighting.
“If our international partners had acted faster, we would have kicked their butts so hard in the first three or four months that we would have been over it by now. We would be planting fields and raising children,” said the soldier, who called himself Jaeger, according to military protocol. “We would be sending bread to Europe. But it’s been two years.”
Ukraine’s military prospects appear bleak. Western military aid is no longer assured at the same levels as years ago. Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive in the south, where Jaeger was wounded days after beginning, has ended having failed to meet any of its objectives.
And now, Russian troops are attacking, especially in the east of the country. The city of Marinka has practically fallen. Avdiivka is slowly being surrounded. An advance on Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut, is expected. Further north, on the outskirts of Kupiansk, fighting has barely let up since the fall.
The joke among the Ukrainian troops is this: the Russian army is neither good nor bad. It’s just long. The Kremlin has more of everything: more men, ammunition and vehicles. And they do not stop despite the increasing number of injuries and deaths.
But the soldiers’ joke had another true truth. Neither side has distinguished itself with tactics that have led to a breakthrough on the battlefield. Instead, it has been a deadly dance of small technological advances on both sides that have yet to turn the tide, leaving a conflict that looks like a modernized version of the Western Front of World War I: pure mass against mass.
It is that tactic that gives Russia the advantage as it tries to secure Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Moscow’s main war target after its 2022 defeat around Kharkiv, Kherson and the capital Kiev. Russia has a population three times that of Ukraine and its military industrial base is operating at full speed.
“The Russian advantage at this stage is not decisive, but the war is not a stalemate,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently visited Ukraine. “Depending on what happens this year, particularly with Western support for Ukraine, 2024 will likely take one of two trajectories. “Ukraine could regain the advantage in 2025, or it could start losing the war without enough help.”
For now, Ukraine is in a dangerous situation. The problems affecting its military have been exacerbated since the summer. Ukrainian soldiers are exhausted from long periods of combat and shorter periods of rest. The ranks, thinned by mounting casualties, are only partially being replenished, often with older and poorly trained recruits.
A Ukrainian soldier, part of a brigade tasked with holding the line southwest of Avdiivka, pointed to a video he took during recent training. The instructors, trying to suppress their laughter, were forced to hold the man, who was in his 50s, so he could fire his rifle. The man was crippled by alcoholism, the soldier said, insisting on anonymity to candidly describe a private training episode.
“Three out of ten soldiers who show up are no better than the drunks who fell asleep and woke up in uniform,” he said, referring to new recruits arriving at his brigade.
kyiv’s recruitment strategy has been plagued by overly aggressive tactics and more widespread attempts to circumvent conscription. Efforts to rectify the problem have generated a political discussion between military and civilian leaders.
Military officials reinforce the need for broader mobilization to win the war, but Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office fears introducing unpopular changes that could end a campaign to mobilize 500,000 new soldiers. That figure, analysts say, takes into account Ukraine’s staggering losses and what it will likely take to push back the Russians.
While Ukrainian casualties remain a closely guarded secret, over the summer U.S. officials estimated deaths and injuries to far exceed 150,000. Russian forces have also suffered heavy casualties, according to those officials, but Kremlin forces still managed to repel a concerted Ukrainian counteroffensive, regroup and are now attacking in frigid winter conditions.
“We are tired,” said one Ukrainian platoon commander, speaking anonymously given the sensitivity of his comments. “We could always use more people.”
Troop shortages are only part of the problem. The other, currently more pressing issue is Ukraine’s dwindling ammunition stockpile, as continuity of Western supply remains anything but certain. Ukrainian commanders now have to ration their ammunition, not knowing whether each new shipment will be the last.
In late 2023, members of a Ukrainian artillery crew from the 10th Brigade sat inside a bunker nestled among a line of bare trees in the east of the country, their Soviet-era 122-millimeter howitzer wrapped in camouflage netting. and leafless branches.
Only when a truck arrived with two artillery shells could the crew get to work for the first time in days. They quickly loaded the shells and fired at the Russian soldiers attacking Ukrainian positions five kilometers away.
“Today we had two shells, but some days we don’t have any in these positions,” said the crew commander, whose call sign is Monk. “The last time we fired was four days ago, and it was only five shells.”
Ammunition shortages – and changing momentum on the battlefield – mean that gunners are no longer supporting Ukrainian attacks. Instead, they only shoot when Russian troops are storming Ukrainian trenches.
“We can stop them for now, but who knows,” Monk said. “Tomorrow or the next day we may not be able to stop them. “It’s a really big problem for us.”
Near Kupiansk, a deputy battalion commander of the 68th Brigade, which uses the Italian call sign, echoed Monk’s concerns.
“I have two tanks, but only five shells,” Italian said, walking through a line of bare trees splintered by shelling about 500 meters from Russian positions in the Luhansk region. “The current situation is bad, especially in Avdiivka and Kupiansk.”
This ammunition imbalance has been felt across much of the more than 600-mile front line, Ukrainian soldiers said. Russian units find themselves in a position similar to summer 2022, where they can simply wear down a Ukrainian position until kyiv’s forces run out of ammunition. But unlike that summer, there is no longer a frantic scramble in Western capitals to arm and reequip Ukrainian troops.
And unlike that summer, drones have assumed a much larger presence in both sides’ arsenals, especially FPV racing drones equipped with explosives and used as remotely controlled missiles.
These drones have supplemented traditional artillery as Russia and Ukraine struggle to stockpile enough shells to fight a long and bloody war. In the past nine months, the number of FPV drones has increased by at least 10-fold, and in some parts of the front drones cause more casualties than artillery, Ukrainian soldiers said.
Even the tranche of U.S.-supplied cluster munitions, controversial because they harm civilians long after the end of the war, have lost some of their battlefield potency.
“At first in September we could attack in large groups, but now they attack in much smaller units,” said the platoon commander, who was fighting on the outskirts of Bakhmut. He added that the Russians have made their trenches even deeper and more difficult to attack.
Outside Avdiivka, where Russian forces are massing much of their forces to the east, the roar of artillery on a recent afternoon was almost incessant. It was a soundtrack not heard since the early months of the war, when Russian paramilitary forces attacked Bakhmut and eventually captured it.
Soldiers defending Avdiivka’s flank said that on some days, Russian formations had attacked in nine separate waves, hoping that the Ukrainian trenches would retreat. It is a tactic replicated across the front by Moscow’s infantry, with little sign of stopping despite a high attrition rate common for a force attacking entrenched positions.
Washington’s suggestion that Ukraine go on the defensive in 2024 will mean little if kyiv does not have the ammunition or personnel to defend the territory it currently occupies, analysts have said.
“Our guys are being hit hard,” said Bardak, a Ukrainian soldier working alongside Jaeger next to the abandoned tank. “It’s hot everywhere now.”
Finbarr O’Reilly and staffers of The New York Times contributed reporting.
