Insight: Ukraine outnumbered, outgunned, ground down by relentless Russia
[1/8]Servicemen
of the Ukrainian Armed Forces complete a first-person view drone in an
undisclosed location in Donetsk region, February 3, 2024. REUTERS/Alina
Smutko Purchase Licensing Rights - War enters 3rd year with Russia in ascendancy
- Ukrainian soldiers increasingly exhausted
- Motivation high, fighters and ammo in low supply
- Conflict combines trench and drone warfare
KRAMATORSK,
Ukraine, Feb 21 (Reuters) - As the Ukraine war enters its third year,
the infantry of 59th Brigade are confronting a bleak reality: they're
running out of soldiers and ammunition to resist their Russian invaders.
One
platoon commander who goes by his call sign "Tygr" estimated that just
60-70% of the several thousand men in the brigade at the start of the
conflict were still serving. The rest had been killed, wounded or signed
off for reasons such as old age or illness.
Heavy
casualties at the hands of Russian forces have been compounded by
dreadful conditions on the eastern front, with frozen soil turning into
thick mud in unseasonably warm temperatures, playing havoc with
soldiers' health.
"The
weather is rain, snow, rain, snow. People get ill with simple flu or
angina as a result. They're out of action for some time, and there is
nobody to replace them," said a company commander in the brigade with
the call sign "Limuzyn". "The most immediate problem in every unit is
lack of people."
On the cusp of the second anniversary of its
Feb. 24 invasion,
Vladimir Putin's Russia is in the ascendancy in a conflict that
combines attritional trench combat reminiscent of World War One with
high-tech drone warfare that's sending tens of thousands of machines
into the skies above.
Moscow
has made small gains in recent months and claimed a major victory at
the weekend when it took control of Avdiivka in the hotly contested
eastern Donetsk region. A spokesperson for 3rd Separate Assault Brigade,
one of the units that tried to hold the town, said the defenders were
outnumbered seven to one.
Reuters
spoke to more than 20 soldiers and commanders in infantry, drone and
artillery units on different sections of the 1,000-km frontlines in
eastern and southern Ukraine.
While
still motivated to fight Russian occupation, they spoke of the
challenges of holding off a larger and better supplied enemy as military
support from the West slows despite pleas for more from Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Another
commander in the 59th Brigade, who only gave his first name Hryhoriy,
described relentless attacks from groups of five to seven Russian
soldiers who would push forward up to 10 times a day in what he called
"meat assaults" - highly costly to the Russians but also a major threat
to his troops.
"When
one or two defensive positions are fighting off these assaults all day,
the guys get tired," Hryhoriy said as he and his exhausted men were
afforded a brief rotation away from the frontlines near the
Russian-occupied eastern city of Donetsk.
"Weapons
break, and if there is no possibility of bringing them more ammunition
or changing their weapons, then you understand what this leads to."
Russia's defence ministry didn't respond to a request for comment on the state of play on the frontlines.
Ukrainian
Deputy Defence Minister Ivan Havryliuk told Reuters that Ukraine had
been forced onto the defensive by a lack of artillery ammunition and
rockets, and that Kyiv was expecting Russia to intensify its assaults on
several fronts.
"If
there are further delays to the necessary military aid, the situation
on the front could become even more difficult for us," he said in a
written response.
WANTED: FIGHTERS AND AMMO
Kyiv
relies heavily on money and equipment from abroad to fund its war
effort, but with $61 billion in U.S. aid held up by political
bickering in Washington it is looking more exposed than at any time since the start of the invasion.
A
soldier serving in a GRAD rocket artillery unit, whose call sign is
"Skorpion", said that his launcher, which uses Soviet-designed
ammunition held by few of Ukraine's allies, was now operating at about
30% of maximum capacity.
"It became like this recently," he said. "There aren't as many foreign munitions."
Artillery
shells are also in short supply as a result of Western countries'
inability to keep up the pace of shipments for a drawn-out war. On top
of the U.S. supply pause, the EU has conceded it
will miss its target to supply a million shells to Ukraine by March by nearly half.
Michael
Kofman, a senior fellow and Russian military specialist at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think-tank,
estimated that Russia's artillery was firing at five times the rate of
Ukraine's, a figure that Hryhoriy of the 59th Brigade also gave.
"Ukraine
is not getting a sufficient amount of artillery ammunition to meet its
minimum defensive needs, and this is not a sustainable situation moving
forward," Kofman added.
Moscow
now controls almost a fifth of Ukrainian territory including the Crimea
peninsula it annexed in 2014, even if the frontlines of the war have
largely stagnated in the last 14 months.
Ukrainian
officials have said their armed forces number around 800,000, while in
December Putin ordered Russia's forces to be increased by 170,000 troops
to 1.3 million.
Beyond
personnel, Moscow's defence spending dwarfs that of Ukraine. In 2024 it
earmarked $109 billion for the sector, more than twice Ukraine's
equivalent target of $43.8 billion.
A
new law aimed at mobilising 450-500,000 more Ukrainians is slowly
making its way through parliament, but for some soldiers fighting now,
significant reinforcements seem a distant hope.
Ukrainian
Defence Minister Rustem Umerov recently referred to Ukraine's artillery
ammunition deficit as "critical" in a letter to the European Union,
urging its national leaders to do more to bolster supplies.
His
letter said Ukraine's "absolute critical daily minimum requirement" was
6,000 artillery shells, but his forces were able to fire just 2,000 a
day, the Financial Times reported.
DRONE WAR ON MASSIVE SCALE
Conventional
warplanes are a relatively rare sight over the frontlines, largely
because air defences act as a deterrent. Yet a different battle is
raging in the skies, with both sides striving for the upper hand in
drone technology.
Drones
- or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - are cheap to produce and can
surveil enemy movements and drop ordnance with pinpoint accuracy.
Kyiv
has overseen a boom in drone production and innovation and is
developing advanced, long-range UAVs, while Moscow has more than matched
its rival with huge investments of its own, allowed it to
nullify Ukraine's early advantage.
The scale is astonishing.
On the Ukrainian side alone, more than
300,000 drones were ordered from producers last year and more than 100,000 sent to the front, digital minister Mykhailo Fedorov told Reuters.
A
strong focus now is on light, nimble FPV drones, where operators, or
pilots, get a first-person view from an onboard camera. President
Zelenskiy has set a target for Ukraine to produce one million FPV drones
this year in light of the battlefield advantages delivered by the
technology.
Limuzyn,
the company commander in the 59th Brigade, said Russia's widespread use
of drones had make it difficult for Ukrainian troops to establish or
strengthen fortified positions.
"Our guys start to do something, a drone sees them, and a second drone arrives to drop something onto them."
Drones
have also forced the Russians to move valuable vehicles and weapons
systems back by several kilometres, according to two Ukrainian drone
pilots in different units.
"It's
now very hard to find vehicles to hit... most vehicles are 9-10 km away
or more," said a pilot in the 24th Brigade with the call sign "Nato".
"At the beginning they were very comfortable being 7 km away."
Two
other Ukrainian drone pilots, "Leleka" and "Darwin", both serving in
the elite Achilles drone unit of the 92nd Brigade, described queues of
two or three UAVs sometimes forming above the battlefield, waiting to
hit enemy targets.
Leleka
recalled watching four drones from different Ukrainian units coming in
to strike a target on one occasion: "It's like taxis at the airport, one
drone comes, then another, then a third."
The
same situation is true for the Russians, whose drones now comfortably
outnumber Ukraine's, according to Ukrainian pilots from three units. The
Russian defence ministry said this month that the country had
ramped up its production of military drones in the past year, without giving figures.
As
the use from drones grows, both sides are bolstering deployment of
electronic warfare systems which can disrupt the frequencies that feed
commands from the pilot to the drone, making them drop out of the sky or
miss their target.
Darwin,
a 20-year-old who dropped out of medical school to enlist when Russia
invaded, compared the current drone arms race to that between aviation
and air defence: planes dominated in World War Two, but modern air
defence systems greatly limited their use in this war, he said.
"In
future, I am sure there will be an analogous situation with drones: The
concentration and effectiveness of electronic warfare will become so
big that any connection between an aerial vehicle and its pilot will
become impossible."
Reporting by Max Hunder; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Pravin Char