Under the thunder of artillery fire, waves of Russian soldiers throw themselves across a corpse-littered no man’s land against Ukrainian trenches around the town of Bilohorivka. Grim faced, Ukrainian machine-gunners set to work, methodically changing out barrels and ammunition belts until the last of the attackers falls or retreats.
There are anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours of respite before it all starts over.
This is how Marta Yuzkiv, an army surgeon at the front-line town, some 20 kilometers west of the Russian occupied city of Lysychansk, described the stalemated conflict this month.
“Combat medics face unusual challenges in the Donbas battles,” Marta said, referring to Ukraine’s eastern coal region. “Normal fighting lasts 30 or 40 minutes, an hour at most, and when interrupted we carry the casualties out, but the fighting in Donbas is almost endless.”
Russian forces have tried to gain ground in the region for months. But ultimately, without air superiority and suffering from a shortage of artillery shells, the only thing left for Russia to throw into the fight is bodies.
“Russia’s tactic is just throwing away soldiers, the same way the Soviet Union did in World War II against Germany,” said Marta. The Soviet military death toll by 1945 numbered about 10 million.
A mother of three in her 50s, Marta speaks in a gentle, calm tone that belies the unimaginable stress of her daily existence. She has served in Ukraine’s territorial defense force since before the war and has been on the front lines in the Donbas region since November.
Each time wounded are brought into her field hospital from the front, Marta scans the faces with fear, followed by relief: One of them could be her husband, Sergiy who has been fighting on the same front. His unit guards entrenched positions in shifts of several hours. The front-line troop rotation lasts five days, sometimes as long as two weeks.
“It is mentally difficult and our soldiers are of course exhausted,” Marta said in Kyiv, when she came back from the east for training, “but our soldiers are much more motivated than the enemy.”
A year of terror
I first met Marta in January last year, a month before Russia’s full-scale invasion, when I was covering the military training of citizen volunteers in Kyiv for the Japanese media. She took part in training every week, along with her husband. Now, we are a year into a war that began on Feb. 24, 2022 — a war few expected Ukraine to be fighting and even fewer expected it to be winning.
Every day brings new dead and injured in a fight that looks grimly like the trench warfare of World War I. It is a war of attrition in which the side that can kill the most — and die the most — will ultimately win.
Russia has been testing this grim math. It has suffered the highest body counts of the war this month, with about 800 soldiers killed per day for seven days, according to an intelligence report published by the U.K. Defense Ministry on Feb. 12. Its human wave attacks against Ukrainian positions are designed to dislodge defenders from a string of strategically important towns in the Donbas region.
Although casualties on the Ukrainian side are believed to be much fewer, its daily losses in killed and wounded also run into triple digits, according to a leak from Germany’s foreign intelligence service in late January.
In Marta’s field hospital, the constant shelling brings a steady stream of wounded soldiers. While her husband has survived, she suffers. “Everyone in the unit is like my children, so it’s hard,” said Marta.
Marta describes living through a year of fear and dread, but also a year of heroism and hope. Our friendship has spanned the war; Like Marta, I am a resident of Kyiv, where I have lived since 2021 with my Ukrainian wife. When I meet fellow residents to look back on the past 12 months, we talk of fear for our families.
“I discussed the possibility of a Russian invasion with my husband,” Marta said when we first met, “We decided to stay in the country no matter what, and not to accept the occupation silently. Our wish is to continue a normal life. … [I]f we show citizens’ strong will to resist the invasion, maybe we can stop Russia.”
Once the invasion came, most in the West reckoned Russia’s victory would be swift. Even the U.S. government expected that Kyiv could fall under Russian control within days. I was no exception. Most observers overestimated the Russian military and downplayed Ukrainian defiance.
The hollow images were burned in my head in early March 2022 in central Kyiv, when I heard frequent air raid sirens and intermittent explosions. The city streets were almost deserted, with Czech anti-tank barricades erected everywhere.
But even after the invasion, my attempts to convince my wife to flee ended in arguments. At one point she became furious: “You have irritated me, because you don’t believe in Ukrainians at all. You are totally assuming we are going to lose.”
Last March, however, when my wife’s company organized buses to evacuate its employees, we finally moved to the western city of Lviv with my wife’s sister, her two children and their cat.
But my wife was right. I had underestimated Ukraine. I returned to the capital alone, as soon as Russian troops withdrew from the Kyiv region in early April, and set out to cover the Ukrainian resistance from the ground.
Dogged determination
Marta has not seen her two 14-year-old children since early in the war, when she sent them abroad in the care of a friend. Marta then joined the territorial defense force together with her husband. Deployed first to defend the Kyiv airport, the couple moved on to battles near Bucha, a town on the outskirts of the capital, then to the northeast region of Kharkiv and, since November, to the Donbas region.
Her year has been punctuated by terror. Once, near Kharkiv, she spent the night within the perimeter of a Russian position, while attached to a reconnaissance unit, and saw shells churn the earth 30 meters from where she lay pinned to the ground.
“I don’t know how I survived. I got so wrapped up in [giving ] first aid [to] the wounded, and I ended up feeling scared afterwards. … The worst thing is when you store the bodies of fallen soldiers. I feel like I don’t want to do it again and yet, when the morning comes, I repeat it,” Marta told me in July when she returned to Kyiv.
“I am optimistic that Ukraine will win. But I don’t know if I’ll survive until then, and many of us will die,” she said. “But the worst thing you can do is stop fighting halfway. If you look at history, Russia has always invaded Ukraine and killed many of its citizens. Our generation has to finish this, and never let our children face the same danger.”
This war is existential for Ukrainians. In April, images from Bucha, which was under Russian occupation for a month, shook the world. After Russian forces withdrew, bodies of residents lay in the streets, some with their hands tied.
I witnessed the destruction and corpses of civilians in the cities and villages near Kyiv firsthand, and was horrified to hear residents’ accounts of the atrocities committed by Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian people I spoke to after were shaking not from fear, but from anger.
One Ukrainian journalist put it this way: “Everyone is angry. What Russia does is medieval. We can’t lose to those lowly barbarians. After Bucha, our unity has grown stronger, Ukraine will win for sure.”
Ninety-two percent of Ukrainians believe that they can defeat Russia, according to a poll conducted by the Ukrainian sociological group Reitynh on March 8-9, 2022. Eighty percent said they were helping the war effort in some way, through volunteer work, donations or participating in territorial defense.
Power shortages have become severe this winter due to Russian missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure. Kyiv has imposed rolling blackouts, and heating and water supplies are sporadic in some districts.
Ukrainians overwhelmingly say they want to keep fighting. Ninety-three percent would reject a cease-fire unless it requires the full withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014, according to a poll commissioned by the Munich Security Conference that was conducted in November last year. Indeed, 89% of respondents said they are prepared to keep fighting even if Russia launches tactical nuclear strikes, the same poll found.
Ukraine’s optimism has tracked the momentum of the war. Russia, initially overconfident of victory, was unprepared to meet such spirited resistance, and went on the defensive starting in August and September 2022 under the weight of a massive Ukrainian counterattack, emboldened by arms transfers from the West.
At the time, I was attending a conference in Kyiv full of government officials and Western leaders. When word got out that Ukrainian forces had begun to retake the Kharkiv region, I saw people in the hall spring up in surprise. “To be honest, no one would have expected this huge success,” said one senior official with Ukraine’s presidential office, “which also exposed the fragility of the Russian army.”
In reaction to the defeats, Russian President Vladimir Putin organized a sham “referendum” and unilaterally declared the annexation of four occupied provinces, including Kherson, by the Russian Federation on Sept. 30. He also announced the mobilization of 300,000 reservists and threatened the possible use of nuclear weapons.
But this did not halt the Ukraine counteroffensive. On Nov. 11, Ukrainian forces recaptured the state capital of Kherson after eight months of Russian occupation.
“Shoot more, shoot more”
Traveling to Kherson in January, two months after the Russian withdrawal, I met Olga, a 26-year-old volunteer who helps children and elderly people. We sat down at one of the few cafes still open in the city. The sound of artillery fire was constant and the streets were largely deserted.
Olga told me her story. Some men who broke into her home in September, pinned her arms and handcuffed her, put a cloth bag over her head and took her in a car to a makeshift jail in a basement, where she was held for two weeks. The men interrogated her and demanded that she post support for Russia on the social media page she uses for her volunteer work.
Olga’s kidnappers locked her in the basement along with three Ukrainian men. Her abductors frequently took her to another room and tortured her with electric shocks. When she still refused to cooperate, they splashed her with water, which intensified the pain of the shocks.
The men who tortured her were all masked. Some days there were three of them, and at other times she was surrounded by as many as eight. “They clearly enjoyed watching me frightened and suffering. When I put up with the pain, the men got irritated and hurt me even more. They wanted to see me cry,” Olga said.
Olga was released after agreeing to post support for Russia on social media. But she never actually made the posts, she told me.
After interviewing Olga, I visited one of Kherson’s abandoned torture chambers. It was in a four-story building in the city center, a couple of blocks from a marketplace off Ushakova Avenue, a major thoroughfare.
Descending into the dimly lit basement with my cellphone flashlight in hand, I could see several rooms in front of me, each iron door numbered with black spray paint. It was pitch-black, cold and moldy.
Each basement room could hold about four to 10 people. Inside, a video camera was installed and there were bottles on the corner to urinate and defecate in, and small thin makeshift carpets that detainees laid onto the cold floor for sleeping.
The occupying Russian forces, who were at first friendly toward the people of Kherson, soon became frustrated by people who opposed them. By April, residents were demonstrating daily in defiance of the Russian occupation, waving Ukrainian flags and confronting Russian soldiers and tanks with their bare hands.
Residents compare the occupation to the Soviet era. A cafe waitress named Arina in her 20s reflected on her experience of the occupation:
“I thought we would be free in a few weeks, so the sense of despair grew day by day. We had to talk carefully because we don’t know where the ‘collaborators’ are and whether they will be tipped off. I didn’t experience the Soviet Union myself, but it must be the same as in the Stalin era.”
Each night, Ukrainian flags and yellow ribbons symbolizing resistance were painted on walls along Kherson’s streets. Every time the Russians painted over them, a yellow ribbon appeared anew. Even today, three months after the end of the occupation, a number of those paintings remain.
When the Ukrainian army launched a counteroffensive around August and the sound of artillery fire began to be heard again in Kherson, residents said they felt joy, not fear.
“I cheered with my cafe mates after work. We screamed ‘shoot more, shoot more,'” said Arina.
Nina, a teacher in her 60s, said: “When the city fell silent, I couldn’t sleep over fears [the effort had been] abandoned. Then I heard the shelling and I jumped for joy. It was as if I was listening to Vivaldi’s music, and I could sleep soundly while listening to the explosions.”
Having retreated to the east bank of the Dnieper River, Russian forces continue shelling the region heavily. While I was speaking to people in front of the Kherson provincial administration building in December, there was a huge explosion and I saw smoke rising from the upper floors of the building as rockets hit some 30 meters from where I stood.
The army and ambulances rushed to the scene, and those on the streets took cover in an underground crossing. A woman who ran from the building spoke to me breathlessly. “We were on the ground floor … with such explosions and tremors … like it hit the fourth floor. There should have been no one there, I believe no one died.”
Olga showed me photos of her home, where the roof had collapsed. Artillery fire destroyed her home early in the new year and she is now taking refuge at a friend’s house, working alone to support elderly people and children in villages around Kherson. Her mother lives in a village in the province that is still under Russian military occupation.
“When Kherson was liberated, I was in no mood to celebrate, because there are many areas that are still suffering under the Russian occupation,” Olga said.
“It is not a victory until we expel the invaders from every territory, including Crimea. There are so many people who need help and I’m not going anywhere.”
Calls for help
The pipeline of Western aid and arms has been critical to Ukraine’s war effort. But fears of Western fatigue appear to be overblown. An opinion survey conducted by Maru Public Opinion finds 70% of Americans support sending Ukraine U.S.-made tanks and the majority still want the U.S. to stay militarily involved in the war.
“Time is on Ukraine’s side at this point,” said one Western military attache in Kyiv, “Ukraine’s capability is sure to grow with more arms supply, as Russia begins to struggle to procure weapons and equipment.”
The U.S. and Europe, which at first supplied Ukraine with a relatively modest flow of weapons — from the portable anti-tank system, Javelin, to high-mobility artillery rockets and air defense systems — decided in January to provide battle tanks, which Ukraine has been requesting since the Russian invasion began.
Germany and the U.S. approved the supply of Leopard 2 and Abrams tanks, respectively. Until then, they had been cautious about providing offensive weapons.
“There is no turning back [when it comes to] Western support for Ukraine,” the military attache said, adding that NATO had committed itself to the cause. “The supply of fighter jets and long-range missiles, which Ukraine desperately needs, should also come into view.”
Still, Putin may be betting that he can outlast the West. This month he compared his invasion of Ukraine to the fight against Nazi Germany in his speech marking the 80th victory anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), the deadliest battle of World War II.
The U.S. approved roughly $78 billion in assistance to Ukraine between Jan. 24, 2022 and Jan. 15, 2023, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank. And opposition among Western taxpayers to offering more may grow alongside the cost of supplying Kyiv. A source close to the Russian government said the Kremlin is planning to fight a war of attrition that will stretch beyond 2024, waiting for the West to lose its nerve and give in.
It has been confirmed by Western satellite images in recent months that large trenches, anti-tank barriers and land mines have been laid on the eastern and southern front lines of Russian occupied areas to prevent the advance of the Ukrainian army. Military analysts also see Russia’s operational tactics in Donbas — throwing overwhelming manpower onto the battlefield, regardless of casualties — as designed to wear Ukraine forces and Western support down.
“The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions and depleting allied stockpiles,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned earlier this month. “We need to ramp up new production and invest in our production capacities.”
A series of surprise trips by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — to Washington last December and to London, Paris and Brussels this month — showed his urgency to acquire powerful weapons to liberate more territory before Russia feeds fresh troops and equipment into the fight. Fighter jets and long-range missiles from the West remain off-limits.
In return, U.S. President Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kyiv on Feb. 20, a few days ahead of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion, to underscore his continued solidarity with Ukraine.
“One year later, Kyiv stands, Ukraine stands, democracy stands,” said Biden in a speech at the Mariinsky Palace in Kyiv. “America stands with you, and the world stands with you.” He promised an additional half a billion dollars worth of military aid to Ukraine during the visit.
The determination of Ukraine to win has never been stronger. While Putin plays a waiting game, hoping to win a war of attrition, Ukraine feels an urgency to win quickly, and requires Western weapons to do so.
“Much will depend on how and when the West overcomes its fear of Russia. If they respond to our requests and provide us with weapons promptly, we can drive out the Russians,” said Mykhailo Podolyak, a close aide to Zelenskyy, when I met him in January at the president’s office in Kyiv.
“The West must understand that there can be no stability without defeating Putin. Falling for Russia’s threats and delaying the supply of needed weapons would cost our lives.” (Courtesy: Nikkie Asia) Eiji Furukawa is a Japanese journalist and former Nikkei Asia editor. He is living in Ukraine since 2021 Russian invasion with his Ukrainian wife
