On Saturday, Rolling Stone writer Mac William Bishop published an account of a visit he made to Ukrainian forces fighting in the east of the country along the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
That area around the “Kramatorsk gap” represents the defensive line between Ukrainian forces and the territories that Russia, along with their separatist allies, has occupied since 2014. Since the invasion began, Russia has almost continuously attempted to push through this line from the east, making dozens of temporary breakthroughs. Day after day they’ve been pushed back. That conflict has been one of the least talked about parts of the entire invasion, but it’s been one of the most costly in terms of the lives of Ukrainian soldiers.
Holding that line along the eastern side of Ukrainian controlled territory has been an effort measured in blood.
The Ukrainians fighting in the area include regular members of the military, reservists called up during the conflict, and volunteers who have left their day to day jobs behind to join the fight. Bishop’s visit to the area took him to an abandoned school building near Donetsk, a few miles from the front line, where a mixed group of soldiers is fighting every day at the limits of their training, equipment, and strength.
There’s a fifty-something chef who has become famous in Ukraine for walking away from his home to take the lowest rank as a volunteer among a squad of much younger marines. There are long term members of the service. There’s a grizzled guy who claims to have killed two Russians with a knife. There’s an IT manager who used to troubleshoot networks, and who asks Bishop if he can instruct him on how to fire a Javelin. Every one of these people is an individual. They are all at the center of their own story. They are all making the most terrible of sacrifices.
Olena is from Mariupol. She’s shy and diminutive, thirtysomething, with a long black ponytail. She has a fearsome reputation as a sniper. Even as her unit was sacrificing lives to stop the tide of Russian armor pushing into Donetsk, her daughter was trying to flee Mariupol. Olena could do nothing to help her daughter. Her duty was with her unit.
That sacrificing lives part is the key to this whole story. These people are tired. They’re not just tired of seeing their companions cut down—and they are getting cut down, in numbers large enough that Ukraine hasn’t given official casualty numbers in weeks—they’re tired of killing. They want to go home. They want to resume the lives they walked away from to enter this horror.
“I had a video chat with my son today for the first time in a while,” Oleksiy says happily. Then a brief flash of emotion creases his face. “He told me to make sure I didn’t die. What am I supposed to say to that?”
It’s very easy when looking at the maps and collecting images of tanks and talking about the various models of drones, to forget that at the center of this story people are being ripped apart. Sometimes metaphorically. Often literally. Those individual stories are getting shredded every day, in large numbers.
That eastern line doesn’t end where the Izyum salient extends out to the M03 highway and hooks south toward Slavyansk and Kramatorsk. It extends up to and past hard-hit Kharkiv, where Russia continues to deliver a withering daily attack from their base across the border at Belgorod. While areas around Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kyiv may now be clear of Russian troops, the same can’t be said for Kharkiv. Despite how long and how hard that city has held out, Russia is still ramping up pressure in the area.
U.S. defense officials have also reported more forces moving into the Donbas. Those officials also indicate that the roughly 1,000 troops of the mercenary Wegner Group have been moved to the Donbas. The goal of all those movements remains what is has been since the start of the invasion, and forms one of Russia’s key strategic objectives.
"We still believe that one of their objectives is to fix Ukrainian Armed Forces in the Donbas and then engage them in combat to occupy the Donbas completely."
When they “fix,” what they mean is “pin down” or “trap.” The Russian military means to push down from the north and up from the south, isolate the Ukrainian forces fighting along the defensive lines in the Donbas, eliminate those forces and capture the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast. But the constant pressure all up and down the line means it’s difficult for Ukraine to peel away any forces to meet the north-south thrust.
If Putin can do this one thing, he can claim a kind of victory. Not only would he have expanded the scope of the “breakaway republics” that he intends to immediately make a part of Russia, it would give him control of the area around Kramatorsk, which has been identified as a possible source of oil and gas that might compete with Russian fields.
With the relief of pressure on Kyiv and Chernihiv, Ukraine can also shift some forces east. If the fight at Kherson draws to some good intermediate position—like Russia retreating across the Dnipro and blowing the bridges behind them—Ukraine might be able to shift even more. And they need more. Because while their resistance to the Russian invasion has become legendary, they’re not superheroes. Their losses are terrible
On the way back to Kyiv, Bishop stops at a graveyard where the friend of one of the men he’s met is being buried.
The gravediggers are using a backhoe to cut into the asphalt of the parking lot to make room for more. They want to keep all of the fallen soldiers together in one area, and there just isn’t enough space for the amount of death.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine isn’t swatches of color on a map, or pictures of tractors pulling tanks. It’s people genuinely dying for their country, in large numbers, every day.
That territorial guardsman in the picture at the top of the page is in Barvinkove, northwest of Kramatorsk. Russian forces in tanks pushing southwest from Izyum tried to get into that man’s small town on Wednesday. They were repulsed. An air strike hit the town on Thursday. On Saturday evening, Russian forces are reported to be massing in the area for another push through this town.
The Ukrainians will be waiting.
Saturday, Apr 9, 2022 · 8:01:14 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
When it comes to some of those Russian troops who were pulled out of northern Ukraine, shipped around through Belarus, and are now being directed to re-enter the conflict on the east, it seems that some are saying "Nyet!”
“Russian forces are increasingly refusing to reenter combat, and the Kremlin remains unlikely to quickly redeploy effective forces from northeastern Ukraine to operations in Donbas. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that more than 80% of personnel in some unspecified Russian units previously involved in combat operations are refusing to return to the front.”
It’s hard to know how much credence to put behind reports like this, especially since they originated with a report from the Ukrainian ministry of defense. But the idea of thousands of Russian troops just walking home is cheering.
