British and American legionnaires with Ukraine’s International Legion who just left Bakhmut tell Military Times that Ukrainian forces lack the basics — mechanized vehicles and artillery ammunition — to keep up the fight, with the Russians slowly squeezing the city in a north-south pincer movement. But Ukraine’s high command refuses to abandon the city, counting on the grinding warfare to bleed Russian manpower and materiel, kneecapping any wider Russian spring offensive.

Indeed, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, reports that Russian forces haven’t even managed to cross the river that partitions Bakhmut, and nor do Russians appear to have the combat power to expand further westward beyond the besieged city.

“Bakhmut must stand” said Sam, a 37-year-old former U.S. Marine gunner with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, echoing determined Ukrainian officials. Speaking to Military Times near Konstantinovka, outside of Bakhmut, the veteran acknowledged heavy losses defending the city, including his unit’s translator and senior officer, but said it has “symbolic significance.”

To keep holding Bakhmut, the Ukrainian troops need to be resupplied, fast. Troops complain that they have so little ammunition that artillery units are forced to pick and choose which fellow troops under fire to help. The soldiers said Ukraine’s military leadership may be hoarding shells for the upcoming larger offensive, griping that shows plummeting morale.

That frustration is what drove troops to speak out, most only giving first names or asking to remain anonymous, for fear their commanders would censure them for their criticism.

Ukrainian defense officials did not respond to requests for comment, as their troops fight on, staving off a rout of Bakhmut, for now.

Six miles from the front

Chasiv Yar, a small town about six miles west of the besieged city, hosts an unknown number of Ukrainian artillery pieces hidden throughout the town, their blasts of fire reverberating through the nearly empty streets, in support of Ukrainian forces miles away.

Sergey Chaus, the head of Chasiv Yar’s civilian and military administration, bluntly described the situation in the town as “stably fucked.” Speaking frankly about the military situation, he reflected on the town’s importance to the operation around Bakhmut.

The town is essential “because it’s practically the only road into Bakhmut” and would be an important lifeline to safety should Ukrainian forces pull back westward.

With Russians focusing on Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar is spared from the volume of shelling that Bakhmut withstands, though the city is far from safe. Russian incoming happens “all the time,” Chaus said, adding that a volley from a Russian Grad multiple rocket launcher pummeled apartments throughout the town earlier last week.

In Konstantinovka to the southwest, a Ukrainian combat medic named Alexsander said he’s treating trauma caused by bullets and shrapnel, and a high number of concussions, the kind of wounds caused by nearby explosions that are invisible but nonetheless debilitating.

The fighting around Bakhmut is “like 2014,” Alexsander said, a reference to this conflict’s early years in the east after the Russians seized Crimea and kept marching toward the Donbas. Front lines froze into a World War I-style battle of attrition fought from static, dug-in positions.

Besides basic emergency first-aid like applying tourniquets, blood transfusions and stitches, there is little more he can do in the field to save Ukraine’s wounded. On his hand, a tattoo of a syringe reads “HOPE” in bold lettering. He wishes he had more advanced medical treatment options to give the injured more than hope.

Russian manpower reserves are, if not of a high caliber, deep. Armed with little more than assault rifles and ammunition, waves of recently mobilized Russians bellycrawl from their lines through crater-pocked no-man’s land toward Ukrainian forces arrayed in and around the beleaguered city.

Alexsander added that Russian and Ukrainian forces sometimes fire at each other at point-blank range, directly “shooting from trenches,” which is a very different battle than during last summer, when troops often fought each other from a greater distance. Firing that close produces even more brutal injuries.

Green troops on all sides

That close fight also means both sides are losing senior officers and troops with advanced training and expertise. Though Russia’s Wagner group was once a powerful presence on the battlefield, the recent injection of new conscripts and convicts from prisons across Russia has diluted the fighting force’s potency. Russians sent to the front are often poorly trained and often must buy their own equipment.

And the Ukrainians sent to replace their fallen and injured often have just two weeks’ basic training, a lack of preparation that partly helps to explain Ukraine’s heavy losses in Donbas.

NATO-led training initiatives in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere across Europe, aim to raise multiple brigades of trained Ukrainian soldiers, but could take until mid to late summer to yield results. The British Defence Ministry’s program will take roughly four months to turn out 10,000 soldiers.

But even with that pipeline ramping up, Ukrainian officials worry that the longer the war goes on, they may be forced to throw increasingly untrained troops into the breach, arrayed against a country with a significantly larger population than Ukraine. Moscow’s ability to rapidly conscript and ship hundreds of thousands of men dwarfs Ukraine’s manpower reserves.

High-tech equipment to help make up for that personnel disparity is pouring into Ukraine at a clip not seen since the start of the full-scale invasion. Speaking to reporters March 15, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III stated that NATO must supply Ukraine with the “training, spare parts and maintenance support” that Ukrainian soldiers need “to use these new systems as soon as possible.”

That will help, but Marine Corps veteran Sam says the incoming Western tanks and other advanced equipment, “aren’t a silver bullet.” He and the other expats said Ukrainian forces also need just about everything, from specialized equipment like mine clearing hardware to more armored trucks, instead of the soft-skinned jeeps and passenger vans they’ve scrounged into service after losing so many armored vehicles to Russian assault.

Case in point: Eugene, a tall Virginian, spends his days working to keep a Nissan SUV running in a war zone. On Konstantinovka’s outskirts, he pulls on a Marlboro and scratches at some dried blood caked on his face as he checks the fluid levels, lamenting that “Something is rubbing one of the tires.”

Sam tried to end on a high note, insisting that Ukraine is slowly but surely transforming into a professionalized force equipped with NATO-standard weaponry, given sufficient time to integrate those weapons, expand training and leverage spare parts for NATO systems.

But to hold the Russians off in the close, grinding fight of Bakhmut, they need the basics: ammunition, artillery shells and armored vehicles to fight on, or get out.

In Donbas, Sam explained, “every trench is its own battle.”

Chub — a nom de guerre — was our guide through Kupiansk, a city contested by Russian and Ukrainian forces that lies directly on the front line and is less than 30 miles from the Ukraine-Russia border.

Bisected by the Oskil River and located in the Kharkiv Oblast region, Kupiansk is an important regional rail hub and one that ferried supplies to Russian forces in a broad swath of Northeast Ukraine during the region’s occupation.

Kupiansk lies near the zero line, a dimly defined and hotly contested zone along Ukraine’s expanding front. Although parts of eastern Kupiansk are contested, the city’s western side fell virtually without resistance.

We squeezed together into Chub’s battle-scarred Mitsubishi truck, a donation from Sweden. One window was missing, a section of plastic tarp duct taped over the opening, and the left side of the car riddled with jagged shrapnel holes from a nearby artillery strike. A puncture in the windshield — right in front of the driver’s seat — was patched with silicone.

The situation in Kupiansk is tense, and there is shelling virtually “every day,” Chub explained, adding that the town was within range of Russian artillery positions less than 10 kilometers from the river.

En route to Kupiansk, Chub told us his war stories. He fought the Russians during engagements at Bucha, Zaporizhia, and Lysychansk. He was among the first Ukrainian troops to liberate Balakliya, a hamlet occupied by the Russians during the early days of the war.

Chub’s M4A1 carbine, stamped “Columbia, S.C.” on the lower receiver, fit neatly on the dashboard against the windshield, a tangible sign of the immense military aid the United States has rushed to Ukraine.

Though some of the changes to the Ukrainian military — like Chub’s American-supplied M4 carbine — are easy to spot, significant structural changes are much more difficult to observe but have a greater effect on the battlefield than small arms used by individual soldiers.

Ukraine is moving away from the Soviet Union’s highly centralized and top-heavy command structure. It’s trying to empower noncommissioned officers to make decisions in battle — a concept the U.S. military calls “mission command.” The strategy ensures junior officers understand their commander’s intent but allows them considerable leeway in achieving their objective.

The strategy is bearing fruit.

Chub explained that before NATO established the training pipeline, officers would shout orders and cared more about rank than results. Now, though, “a young officer is usually a good officer.” There is a higher likelihood that Ukraine’s budding NATO-modeled officer corps have been trained “according to NATO standards” and are more likely to treat the soldiers under them with respect. They are also more effective on the battlefield.

Training aside, one of the most dramatic examples of how western weaponry has turned the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor is evident in Ukraine’s recent counteroffensive in the south, around Kherson, and in the northeast, around Kharkiv.

The success of Ukraine’s push east hinged on mitigating Russia’s considerable advantage in artillery firepower. Rather than targeting individual artillery pieces, however, Ukraine leveraged American-supplied HIMARS rocket artillery systems and British-supplied M270s to target Russian ammunition dumps.

Daily shelling

Driving along with Chub, the mist and cloud cover thankfully provide some respite from the drones Russian spotters use to adjust artillery fire. But the rain also disguises the many potholes and crater’s actual depth, making for slow going on the road.

At the edge of Kupiansk, a Marshrutka taxibus stuffed to the ceiling with boxes is passing out humanitarian aid to residents. Here, Alexander, a 46-year-old local, explains what Kupiansk was like before liberation.

“Life during occupation was like being part of a colony,” Alexander said. Though Russian forces passed out some humanitarian aid, Alexander and his wife preferred to rely on food they had at home, as well as their backyard garden, rather than take Russian handouts. Alexander explained that the Russians also provided fuel to Kupiansk residents in limited, rationed quantities.

Despite the daily shelling, Alexander is happy Ukrainian forces liberated Kupiansk — “our entire street was happy!” But he acknowledges that some in Kupiansk had few qualms about receiving Russian aid or working with Russian forces.

After Ukrainian forces retook the city’s administrative buildings, they found a list of approximately 175 people in the Kupiansk Oblast region who accepted Russian passports. However, the list is incomplete, and the SBU — Ukraine’s military intelligence service — screens residents in newly liberated areas to weed out Russian collaborators and sympathizers.

Due to Kupiansk’s strategic significance and the rapidity with which Russian forces captured the city, Kupiansk escaped much of the wanton destruction Russia inflicted on other cities. Now, soldiers and residents are forced to take cover in basements, hiding from incessant Russian bombardment.

The city has no power or gas and only intermittent cell phone coverage. The few people in Kupiansk — those too infirm or stubborn to leave — subsist on humanitarian aid delivered by volunteers and cooked over open fires.

Shamil, a 25-year-old Ukrainian soldier, explained the current military situation from a basement bunker command post, but asked to hide his face to protect his identity. A native of Lutsk, in western Ukraine, Shamil’s parents are from Dagestan, a republic of Russia that borders Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Black Sea.

He is not worried about Russia’s recent mobilization order. “More Russians will come,” he shrugged apathetically. “More will die.” But Russian mobilization puts him in a moral quandary.

He has friends and family in Dagestan. “It’s possible” they could be caught in Russia’s conscription net and sent to fight in Ukraine. However, the Russian region has become a hotbed of anti-war protest in recent days, prompted both by mobilization and the disproportionately high number of Russian casualties from Dagestan.

Shamil’s friends and family “aren’t zombies. They don’t support Russia’s war,” he emphasized with his hands. “First, I am Ukrainian,” and if they were to fight in Ukraine, “I would see an enemy,” Shamil said, “but I don’t know.”

Basement prison

Shelling follows a somewhat predictable pattern in Kupiansk: mornings are more active, the lunch hour generally quieter. Kupiansk’s residents take advantage of lulls in the shelling to get humanitarian aid, cook, or move about the small city.

One of Kupiansk’s main plazas sits next to the Oskil River and offers a view of the contested east bank. Minutes after arrival, the staccato of strafing machine gun fire could be dimly heard through the drizzle on the east side of the river.

Signs of the Russian occupation are visible throughout the city. A large propaganda poster still hangs on an administrative building near the plaza. “We are with Russia, one people,” it reads, a Russian flag emblazoned across the center.

Mere minutes after arriving at the plaza, the audible shriek of incoming artillery shells marks the end of the Russians’ lunch break and a good time to leave.

Russian occupation forces used the Kupiansk police station, a multi-story building with a below-ground basement prison, as a holding center for hundreds of locals. Alexander, an 18-year-old with a boyish face and the beginnings of a mustache, detailed his detention.

The Russians nabbed him off the street, ostensibly for breaking curfew while on his way home, and stuffed him in a prison cell built for three. There were already about 20 others inside the cell.

At night, Alexander slept on the floor under a bunk. During the day, he and other prisoners worked around the police station, filling sandbags and cleaning up after the Russian police officers. The prisoners also swept Kupiansk’s streets and cleaned up garbage.

While in detention, he was subjected to electric shocks and beaten. “Nobody said anything about when we would be freed,” Alexander explained. Only when Ukrainian forces approached the city did the Russians release the prisoners.

Despite the station’s thick concrete walls, the impact of nearby artillery reverberated through the basement, drowning out Alexander’s voice and cutting our conversation short.

Outside Kupyansk, Russian forces repurposed a sand quarry as an ammunition dump. Several stories below the ground surface and surrounded by heaped waste rock and soil, the area seemed a logical place for hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Volodymyr, a 58-year-old retiree who volunteered for the army after Russia’s invasion on February 24th, explained that the quarry offered little protection from a recent HIMARS strike.

The approach to the quarry was littered with mangled bits of shrapnel, increasing in size with our proximity to the dump. Dented and unserviceable 152mm and 122mm artillery shells cluttered the steps into the quarry, some with their detonators still fixed in place.

Although most of the unexploded ordnance was too damaged to be useful, Volodymyr said that some had somehow escaped destruction and were examined for serviceability in Ukrainian weapons.

Outside the charred dump, Volodymyr scratched his chin and motioned with his rifle butt at the cardboard Russian ration boxes, empty tins of canned beef, and other refuse scattered haphazardly on the ground. “This is Russian culture,” he said sardonically before wandering back to his guard post, rifle slung smartly over his shoulder.

The latest reports from the Kupiansk front indicate Ukrainian forces have expanded the initial toehold they carved on the eastern bank of the river, and the counteroffensive appears to be rolling forward toward Lyman, another significant railway hub in Ukraine’s Donbas region. Capturing the city, occupied since late May, would consolidate Ukrainian gains and serve as a springboard for retaking surrounding parts of the region.

Driven from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, pushed back behind the border around Kharkiv in the east, and fought to a standstill outside Ukraine’s Black Sea port city, Odesa, mauled Russian troops have regrouped around Donbas.

Units cobbled together from the surviving remainders of other theaters, backed up by some of Russia’s newest military hardware, are attempting to capture the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts — two coal and mineral-rich provinces that together form the Donbas region. If successful, Russia would control virtually all of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukrainian infantry officers on the ground offer frank and unfiltered accounts that paint a vivid picture of the situation. Taking cover in a ditch at the side of a road near Bakhmut in Donetsk and mere kilometers from the front line, Yuri, a gray-bearded Ukrainian officer, explained that it has been a “tough” fight closer to the front.

“The Russians hit us with cluster munitions, phosphorus,” Yuri explained, rubbing his chin in grim contemplation. Outgoing Ukrainian mortars boomed nearby from behind a thickly wooded area, and the crash of incoming Russian artillery exploded in a field opposite the road.

Militaries use white phosphorus to illuminate battlefields and create smoke screens, though deliberately using its toxic properties against people could breach the Chemical Weapons Convention. Ukraine has previously accused Russian forces of using the substance against civilians, but those accusations have been difficult to verify.

This war “is not like 2014; it’s like 1941. It’s a war of vehicles,” Yuri explained. He estimated an armored vehicle’s lifespan in the war at about two weeks.

In addition to indiscriminate and constant artillery barrages, Yuri’s men must contend with Russian helicopters, which they see “every day.” Yuri explained that “we do manage to shoot some of the helicopters down,” adding that he and his men have been at or near the front for forty days. “The Javelins are good, but we need more tanks.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that his forces remain set on recapturing all occupied territories, even though it appears increasingly difficult to do so. At the moment, the Ukrainians are struggling to push Russia back at Severodonetsk and around Sloviansk. U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior officials have maintained that it’s up to Ukraine to decide when to stop fighting.

“It’s their territory. I’m not going to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do,” Biden said June 3. “But it appears to me that, at some point along the line, there’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here. And what that entails, I don’t know.”

In the meantime, Biden added, the U.S. will continue supplying weapons, but manpower is another hinge point for Ukrainian forces.

While Ukraine has broadcast carefully tabulated figures of Russian losses, Ukrainian officials have been extremely tight-lipped about their own casualties, part of the country’s informational campaign to control the wartime narrative. Recently, however, Zelenskyy alluded to his country’s losses, estimating casualties at 60-100 each day, in addition to 500 wounded daily. The toll is most significantly felt in Donbas.

During a visit to Lysychansk, the embattled Ukrainian city just behind the front line, a Ukrainian major — callsign Spartak, or Spartacus — lamented the shortage of tank and artillery ammunition in the east. Ukrainian troops, he said, are forced to conserve their ammunition due to lengthier supply lines. Their Russian adversaries, meanwhile, now benefit from relatively short supply lines.

The fighting at Lysychansk and Severodonetsk is a “meat grinder,” Spartak said, adding that he expects the two cities in the east will suffer “the same [fate] as Mariupol,” a city at the Black Sea flattened by heavy ordnance during the city’s siege by the Russians. The SUVs and transport vans many Ukrainian troops rely on in place of armored vehicles are rapidly destroyed in combat, Spartak explained, hampering transport logistics and medical evacuation.

Russian forces initially seized over half of Severodonetsk, though Ukrainian media reported a successful counterattack, the details of which remain murky. Russian-language media reports that Russia now controls virtually the entire city, but the situation remains fluid.

Despite the Donbas’ extreme danger, Zelenskyy made a trip to the region on Monday, going to Soledar and as far as Lysychansk to talk with Ukrainian troops and present awards to soldiers.

In a video Zelenskyy posted to his Telegram channel, the president alluded to new weaponry reaching the Donbas region, though he refused to delve into specifics. “We brought something to the military. I will not talk about it in detail.” But “we brought confidence,” the president said, “and strength.”

Though Ukraine has already taken delivery of some of the most advanced conventional artillery pieces in NATO arsenals, Kyiv has long pleaded for longer-range weaponry from the west — which they are poised to receive.

During a recent press briefing, a senior American military official explained that the U.S. Department of Defense will send four M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, a long-range rocket artillery system, to Ukraine.

“What the HIMARS will allow them to do is to get greater standoff. Right now, the howitzers we provided them have about a 30 km range,” said Colin H. Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy. “The HIMARS have more than twice that, which will allow them — even with fewer systems — greater standoff.”

“These are precision guided systems with extended range,” Kahl said. “For high value targets, that, that allows them to keep some of the pressure off of Ukrainian forces on the front, [which] we think these systems will be very useful.”

Britain is to join the United States and send M270 multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine, a tracked vehicle similar to the United States’ wheeled HIMARS that can fire the same long-range ammunition the HIMARS uses.

The shortage of heavy, mobile weaponry is acutely felt in Donbas.

Alexei and Nikita, a pair of soldiers on leave in Bakhmut, a small city in Donetsk, complained of the lack of heavy weaponry with which to strike back against Russian vehicles. They explained that the war today is “drastically different” than what they experienced in 2014.

“Now it’s mostly artillery. That’s it. The ordinary firearm, the ordinary infantry — they are not needed,” one soldier said. The Ukrainians on the front are “bombed by planes, helicopters, tanks, mortars, Grads… a machine gun against a Grad or a tank, or a BTR — it’s…” the soldier trailed off despondently.

Until Ukraine takes delivery of the kind of long-range firepower it is poised to receive from the United States and the United Kingdom, the momentum in Donbas appears to have swung in Russia’s favor. The Russians appear intent on encircling Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. Stopping the Russians in Donbas will be a grave and costly undertaking.

“It’s the kind of place where you find out what kind of person you are,” Yuri said, reflecting on the war and nodding to the soldiers under his command. “The guys grow up fast here. One or two battles and the boys become men.”

Moments later, a blue passenger van screeched to a halt beside us, the driver yelling that he needed “four more.” A group of Ukrainian soldiers hustled out from the ditch and jumped inside, and the van tore down the road toward the front line.