Ukrainian forces fire from a Grad rocket-launching vehicle in Donetsk, the eastern region at the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war. Rockets are increasingly precious as Kyiv receives fewer replacements from allies.
The Soviet-era Grad launching vehicle bounced to a halt on the broken road and tilted its payload upward, toward the front line five kilometres away. Moments later, a single rocket tore an orange trail through the dull grey sky.
A fully loaded Grad launcher can fire 40 rockets in quick succession, dealing devastating blows to targets well beyond the horizon. But the olive-green Ukrainian vehicle working the road west of Avdiivka, a city recently captured by Russian forces, was loaded on a recent morning with only 17 rockets.
Such munitions are usually fired one at a time these days – and only when Ukrainian commanders deem it absolutely necessary.
“This is not normal. We received only 10 rounds yesterday, and 10 the day before that,” said Roman, the 49-year-old commander of the Grad unit attached to Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade.
The unit, he said, prefers to strike targets with a salvo of two rockets, then two more just to make sure. “It’s very difficult to hit a target with just one shot,” Roman said in an interview at his base near the front line in Ukraine’s battle-scarred Donetsk region. The Globe and Mail is not using his family name because it could be used by Russian intelligence to build a profile of the unit.
Roman, last name withheld, is the commander of a Grad unit with Ukraine’s 59th Motorized Brigade. In Donetsk, his team is up against Russian forces that appear to be mobilizing for another big push after they seized the cities of Avdiivka last month and Bakhmut last year.
Siversk
Kramatorsk
UKRAINE
Avdiivka: Russia
captured city in
Feb. 2024 by
overwhelming
Ukrainian forces
with large numbers
of troops and
superior air and
artillery firepower
Bakhmut
UKRAINE
Under Russian
control
Pokrovsk
Horlivka
Russian gains since
Oct. 5, 2023
20 km
Donetsk
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap; graphic news
Siversk
Kramatorsk
UKRAINE
Avdiivka: Russia
captured city in
Feb. 2024 by
overwhelming
Ukrainian forces
with large numbers
of troops and
superior air and
artillery firepower
Bakhmut
UKRAINE
Under Russian
control
Pokrovsk
Horlivka
Russian gains since
Oct. 5, 2023
20 km
Donetsk
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap; graphic news
Siversk
Kramatorsk
UKRAINE
Bakhmut
Avdiivka: Russia
captured city in
Feb. 2024 by
overwhelming
Ukrainian forces
with large numbers
of troops and
superior air and
artillery firepower
UKRAINE
Under Russian
control
Pokrovsk
Horlivka
Russian gains since
Oct. 5, 2023
20 km
Donetsk
the globe and mail, source: openstreetmap; graphic news
After two years of static, positional warfare on this part of the 1,200-kilometre-long front line that winds through eastern and southern Ukraine, the shape of the battle for Donetsk is suddenly shifting.
The Feb. 17 fall of Avdiivka – a city Ukrainian troops proudly referred to as a “fortress” – has been followed by a slow but steady Russian advance west. Several nearby villages have fallen over the past three weeks, as Russian forces slowly push down the artillery-scarred road from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk, a city that has been a key Ukrainian supply and transit hub since the start of the war.
The Grad unit’s base is an anonymous house in a small village between Pokrovsk and Avdiivka. Inside, the team of six monitors feeds from reconnaissance drones operating over the front line, waiting for orders from the regional command about where and when to fire one of its remaining rockets.
As House Republicans aligned with Donald Trump continue to hold up US$60-billion in military aid for Ukraine, the distance between the Grad unit’s base and the front line is now half of what it was before the fall of Avdiivka.
With residents fleeing, troops physically and emotionally depleted and hospitals stretched thin, “it could be hard for us to hold this territory,” said Roman, a father of two who worked as an IT system administrator before the war. “If we’re out of shells and equipment, what can we do?”
A Pokrovsk resident surveys the damage to his house a day after a Russian rocket strike. The city is a regular target for such attacks because of its role as a Ukrainian military transit and supply hub.
Svitlana Gerasimenko, 52, was preparing for a day of work at an open-air market when a rocket landed in front of her home. She had moved here from the Pokrovsk city centre, believing it would be safer.
Sunday morning started with a fiery explosion on the southeastern edge of Pokrovsk, as a Russian Iskander ballistic missile smashed into the parking lot in front of a five-storey apartment block on Defenders of Ukraine Street.
Three hours later, Svitlana Gerasimenko was wandering around the edge of the two-metre-deep crater in front of her home, trying to make sense of what had happened. She had bandages on her nose and left hand and dozens of other cuts caused by flying glass from the shattered windows of her apartment. “I was just getting ready to go to work when the rocket landed,” said the 52-year-old, who usually sets up shop each weekend in the city’s small open-air market. “I just moved here from the city centre because I thought it would be safer.”
Serhii Dobryak, the head of Pokrovsk’s military administration, said it was the 12th missile attack this year on his city. “First, they attack industrial facilities, then schools, kindergartens and hospitals, and now they strike high-rise apartments,” he said. The most baffling part, Mr. Dobryak said, was why the Russians targeted an apartment block of no strategic importance with an Iskander missile worth US$3-million. He said he expected Russian propaganda channels would soon claim the building was full of Ukrainian soldiers or foreign mercenaries, as the Kremlin’s spin doctors had done after previous attacks.
The Globe found a single pack of Ukrainian army rations – which can be bought in grocery stores or even online – on the ground near the crater. There were no other signs of a military presence in the working-class apartment block, though the city is otherwise bustling with soldiers.
A few metres from the blast site, Svetlana Batichko and Oleksandr Li stared up at their blown-out window on the second floor of their building. Ms. Batichko decided there and then that she would leave Pokrovsk and move somewhere safer in the west of Ukraine. “We’re leaving as soon as possible,” the 29-year-old said, adding that she would stop only to collect their two children, who were staying with their grandparents elsewhere in the region. “Thank God they were not here.”
Mr. Li declared he would stay behind in Pokrovsk. But the 31-year-old unemployed mechanic wasn’t optimistic. “After Avdiivka, we’re screwed,” he said, laughing and cursing at the scene around him.
Volodymyr Rehesha, alias Santa, is part of a far-right militia that fought against Russian-backed forces in Avdiivka, regional capital of Donetsk. The invaders broke past the city's defences this past January.
The man they call Santa fought for almost nine years to keep the Russians out of Avdiivka – not as part of the Ukrainian military but as the head of his own unit of volunteers associated with the controversial Right Sector movement.
Santa, whose real name is Volodymyr Rehesha, and his unit of far-right fighters helped liberate Avdiivka’s industrial zone in 2015, driving back the Russian-backed militia that had occupied the regional capital of Donetsk. In the aftermath, Ukrainian troops began building a dense network of fortifications that held off wave after wave of Russian assaults after the full-scale invasion two years ago.
Russian troops finally broke into “fortress Avdiivka” after a daring sneak attack in January that saw them use the city’s sewer system to emerge behind Ukrainian lines.
But Mr. Rehesha said it was the use of the war’s latest cruel innovation, “glide bombs” – large bombs outfitted with wings and satellite guidance systems – that really turned the tide against Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Sunday that Russian forces had dropped 400 glide bombs, which can range from 550 to 1,500 kilograms, over the previous week alone. They are particularly difficult to track and intercept because, unlike drones or missiles, they do not have a propulsion system and thus no heat signature.
While glide bombs can be dropped from a distance by warplanes, Ukrainian forces say they have nonetheless shot down an astonishing 15 Russian planes in the past three weeks, nearly all of them near the front line in the Donetsk region. But the Russian aircraft and their glide bombs keep coming.
The Russian air war involves a fleet of Sukhoi fighter-bombers, like this one competing at war games outside Ryazan, Russia, in 2021.Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russia seems willing to tolerate losses to its estimated fleet of 300 Sukhoi fighter aircraft in order to keep up the barrage. Britain’s Ministry of Defence estimates that Russian forces suffered an average of 983 killed or wounded a day in February, the highest casualty rate since the start of the war.
“Although costly in terms of human life, the resulting effect has increased the pressure on Ukraine’s positions across the front line,” the ministry posted on X.
In the end, Mr. Rehesha said, Ukrainian troops could simply no longer hold Avdiivka. And now that it has fallen, he’s worried Ukraine’s defences in the rest of the region aren’t nearly as formidable.
“We cannot say the second and third lines of defence were prepared in a proper way,” he said in an interview in Selydove, a city halfway along the road from Pokrovsk to Avdiivka. “Speaking honestly, the front line is so long that we could not create these dense fortifications. The Russians have more people, so they could.”
Sitting on Selydove’s central square, as the sounds of distant artillery mingled with the laughter of children in a nearby playground, Mr. Rehesha – a 49-year-old who resembles Saint Nicholas far more in appearance than in demeanour – opined that families with kids should have left the city already. He suggested that many of those who have remained in Selydove have consumed Russian propaganda and believe their lives would be better under Moscow’s rule.
Russian President Vladimir Putin claims he sent his troops into Ukraine to protect the country’s Russian-speaking minority – specifically the 6.5 million who lived in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – from persecution by the Ukrainian government. (While Mr. Rehesha’s fighters are unabashed Ukrainian nationalists, Right Sector has almost no political clout under Mr. Zelensky, and Mr. Rehesha says he keeps the battalion separate from the regular Ukrainian army because the general staff discriminates against Right Sector members.)
Russian forces, meanwhile, have obliterated Russian-speaking cities such as Mariupol, Bakhmut and Avdiivka with artillery and air strikes during their grinding advance through the Donbas region. Surviving residents have been put through a harsh system of filtration camps to determine their loyalties.
Mr. Rehesha said the last few hundred residents in Avdiivka had been waiting to greet the Russian army and that “40 to 50 per cent” of Selydove residents felt similarly about the war. “Some of them even say, ‘If you didn’t shoot at them, the Russians wouldn’t attack us.’”
Marina and Oleksandr Finko, a couple from Kurakhove, recover with son Glib at the Pokrovsk Clinical Hospital for Intensive Care. A day earlier, they were wounded in a Russian air strike.
Before it was torn apart by war, there were more than 100 hospitals in the Donetsk region. Today, just six are still functioning – and the Pokrovsk Clinical Hospital for Intensive Care is both the biggest and the closest to the front line.
Its wards were filled this week with the walking wounded from the Iskander missile attack on the city, plus a series of Russian strikes on towns along the road toward Avdiivka.
Yuriy Borodin, the hospital’s chief doctor, says he and his staff can cope for now, since the most seriously wounded victims are taken to the larger centre of Dnipro, a further 200 kilometres from the front. Things aren’t yet as bad as they were during the first weeks of the invasion, when most of the hospital staff evacuated, leaving only a skeleton crew that included just two surgeons and a single anesthesiologist.
Nearly all the doctors and staff have since returned, but as the Russian army pushes closer to Pokrovsk, Dr. Borodin says some of his team are again discussing whether to stay or go. “The captain should be the last one to leave the ship,” he added grimly.
Upstairs in the recovery ward, Lyudmilla Obmachevska sat in a five-bed room with her left arm in a sling. The 79-year-old widow was cut by flying glass when a Russian jet dropped a glide bomb that exploded Sunday near her home in Kurakhove, another town the Russians are slowly closing in on.
Ms. Obmachevska began to weep as she recounted all she’d been through over the past 18 months. She had lived for decades in Mariinka, a city near Avdiivka that is also now under Russian occupation. Then, in September, 2022, she sustained a head injury when the windows and door of her apartment were blown in by an explosion.
She was taken to hospital in Kurakhove, and stayed in the city after being released three weeks later. Then the war found her again.
She said she had no idea where she would go next. “I’d rather not be crying, but the tears keep coming,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a paper napkin. “I just want peace. Everything hurts a lot.”
A soldier with Roman's unit drives the launcher across Donetsk, keeping a wary eye on a landscape where Russian drones can fly overhead.
The Ukrainian troops holding the front line east of Pokrovsk believe Russia’s military command waited until they knew the Ukrainians were low on ammunition, then launched a large-scale offensive.
In addition to the shortages of artillery shells and rockets, members of Roman’s unit say troops in the area are also low on air-defence weapons, making it difficult to shoot down the Russian drones that buzz over the front lines, taking reconnaissance videos and dropping grenades into trenches.
Most of the troops stationed in Donetsk have been fighting since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, if not longer. They speak fondly of the period in late 2022 when Ukrainian forces were on the offensive, driving Russian forces out of some of the territories they had captured.
“At that time, we attacked the Russians not with one shell but with 14 or 15 at a time,” said Sasha, a 28-year-old who worked as a policeman in western Ukraine until the war. “Now, there are times when we send two shells, and the Russians reply with 60.”
Major Serhiy Tsehotsky, the head of the press service for the 59th Motorized Brigade, acknowledged that fatigue was also a factor for the troops. “They’re tired. For some of us, the war started 10 years ago,” he said, referring to the proxy conflict that Russia launched in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014.
For months, Mr. Zelensky’s government has been wrangling over the exact wording of new legislation that will allow the army to call up as many as 500,000 more soldiers some time this year. “It’s not that some of us need a rest and others should fight,” Maj. Tsehotsky said. “We need more personnel, more soldiers.”
The members of Roman’s Grad unit are simultaneously watching the mobilization debate in Kyiv and listening for news about the aid package from Washington. They’re disheartened by the slow pace of both and feel deserted by Ukraine’s Western allies as their supply of munitions runs down.
“I’m not sure they understand their responsibility for what’s happening here,” Roman said. As artillery resounded somewhere nearby, he added an appeal for Canada to send more rockets, shells and anti-aircraft equipment. “Please keep helping us. Our soldiers are dying. We’re running out of blood.”
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