LYMAN– Most of the attention in Ukraine recently has been focused on the country’s south where Ukrainian troops are engaged in a brutal, months-long campaign to push Russian forces back to the sea and strike a decisive blow.
But in war, the enemy also gets a vote. The Russian counteroffensive in Ukraine is already underway, this time focused on the country’s northeast, in some of September’s fiercest fighting that has gone largely underreported.
Over the past two months, the stretch of land between Kupyansk, a town at the eastern edge of Kharkiv oblast liberated by Ukrainian forces last September, and Lyman, in the heart of the Donbas, has been subjected to endless Russian assaults. Ukrainian officials have claimed that Moscow has deployed over 100,000 soldiers to this area, seeking to disrupt Ukraine’s own offensives elsewhere and score a propaganda victory by capturing territory. Footage of the fighting shows battles as intense as anything in the country’s south.
A bombed apartment building in the Lyman region of Ukraine. Photo captured by Neil Hauer for Paradox.
The Ukrainian soldiers stationed in the region agree. Sasha, a platoon commander in the 125th Territorial Defense Brigade, active on the frontline between Lyman and the Russian-held town of Kreminna, took a short break from the front to describe to Paradox the nature of the current fighting.
“I won’t lie and say the situation is not difficult, because it is,” says Sasha, his uniform caked in dirt and detritus, a sign of just how much time he has spent recently on the line of contact. “[The Russians] come out [towards us], we kill them, then they come out again and we kill them again. The number of them is incredible – they’re like cockroaches,” he says.
The assault started in earnest in early July, Sasha says. Russia had kept up pressure on the area for months, but it was only then that the massed infantry assaults returned, as well as active use of Russian tanks and armor. That coincided with a drop in Ukrainian manpower in the area, as new recruits were prioritized for reconstituting those brigades meant to take part in Ukraine’s own offensives.
“It’s difficult because we don’t have enough people,” Sasha says. “My unit should have 22 people, but in reality, we only have 14. Eight men is a lot to be short – you can be missing two or three, but eight is difficult,” he says.
Sasha himself has been on this section of the front for almost a year, since Ukrainian forces, including his unit, liberated Lyman last September. In that time, he’s only had a single 10-day break – aside from that, he’s been here in the trenches.
They were not supposed to stop here. Ukraine’s goal last winter had been to follow up the successful Kharkiv-Lyman operation by pushing into Kreminna and towards Severodonetsk, lost last summer. Kyiv wished to take advantage of Russia’s manpower shortage, addressed by last fall’s chaotic partial mobilization, but a lack of ammunition saw the push stall out.
A blown up Russian tank in the Severodonetsk region of Ukraine. Captured by Neil Hauer for Paradox.
“We wanted to liberate Kreminna last winter,” Sasha says, of the Luhansk oblast junction town that links Russian lines between Severodonetsk and the city of Svatove. “We started to surround Kreminna, moving from the west, but we didn’t have enough weaponry. We needed to block the roads [from Svatove and Severodonetsk], but we failed. They have been on the attack ever since,” he says.
Stanislav Krasnov is another Ukrainian fighter in the area, active with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a volunteer battalion. He says the recent fighting here has been more intense than anything in nearly a year.
“For more than two weeks, assault groups of 10-20 Russians came at our positions, again and again,” Krasnov says. “Such a density of [Russian] artillery fire had not been seen since last summer, when the Russians were attempting to enter [the city of] Sloviansk from the Izyum direction. Our trenches were literally razed to the ground by Russian artillery – tanks, howitzers, 203mm Pion guns, and even UR77 line charges, meant for demining. We held out – but you what the price was,” he says, referencing the endless casualty notices that have appeared from this part of the front.
Despite their failure, the Russian counteroffensive attacks keep coming, with little change in tactics. Moscow hopes to be able to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders here with sheer force of numbers and firepower.
Krasnov says that only by matching this volume of fire, or at least reducing the disparity, can Ukraine both continue to hold and eventually seize back the initiative.
“Everyone who is not yet at war – demand more shells for the Armed Forces,” he says, asked what is needed for the army. “We will only be able to win this war when we finally begin producing ourselves tens of thousands of shells and rockets a day,” Krasnov says.
For this to happen, Ukrainian forces will have to overcome internal issues that have long plagued the country. For Sasha, the main internal enemy is obvious: corruption.
“The corruption here [in Ukraine] is disgusting,” he says, recalling his civilian life as business owner in his hometown of Dnipro. “It affects the armed forces (AFU) massively. For example, [a liter of] diesel fuel costs 50 hryvnias at a petrol station. The AFU buys it for 76 hryvnia. The difference is 26 hryvnia. Someone just steals that money,” Sasha says.
Ukraine’s Defence Ministry has been rocked by numerous scandals this year, with the most recent earlier this month, alleging graft in the procurement of winter clothing, prompting the resignation of former Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov. For the Ukrainian soldiers on the front in Lyman and elsewhere, they will just have to wait and hope that they get the support they need.
