Stepped up attacks by Russia are heightening longstanding concerns over how Ukraine manages its military and countering assumptions that Moscow’s offensive would slow, soldiers and military analysts say.
Damage in November in Myrnohrad, eastern Ukraine, on the road to Pokrovsk, a strategic city that is a main target of the Russian offensive in the Donetsk region. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Three Russian soldiers race down a cratered road on electric scooters, the video shows, while others speed across muddy fields on all-terrain vehicles.
More Russians surge forward on foot, scrambling for cover in the ruins of blasted out homes, according to the video of the battle on the outskirts of Toretsk in eastern Ukraine filmed by the Ukrainian military. As the fighting raged, other Russian troops arrived in armored personnel carriers.
The 12th Special Operations Brigade Azov, a Ukrainian unit, rained down cluster munitions, chased the Russians with drones and engaged in close-quarter combat, the video shows. The footage was verified by military analysts and some has been posted on YouTube.
At the end of the day, the assault failed, said Lt. Col. Dmytro Pavlenko-Kryzheshevskyi, the 36-year-old chief of intelligence for the brigade, which provided the video.
The battle, he said, was typical of the assaults taking place across hundreds of miles of the front, where Ukrainian forces are waging dozens of pitched battles for patches of land no bigger than a few city blocks.
Despite staggering Russian losses — with more than 1,500 killed and wounded every day in recent weeks, according to Western estimates — the scope of attacks continues to grow, according to soldiers at the front and military analysts.
And Russia is throwing greater numbers of soldiers into the assaults than it did in some earlier stages of the fighting, Colonel Pavlenko-Kryzheshevskyi said.
The Russian troops have also been increasingly using electric scooters, motorcycles and ATVs, which allow them to disperse quickly across the front, he said.
“Hitting just one piece of equipment carrying 15 people, well, that’s possible, it can be done quite easily,” he said. “But when those 15 people are riding electric scooters, then that’s a very big problem.”
Ukrainian soldiers preparing to fire at advancing Russian forces in the Donetsk region in November. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
“For them, it’s quite normal to use 150 to 200 soldiers at a time for offensive actions,” he said, speaking via video from a command post on the front and describing the battle around Toretsk in late December that was shown on the video footage.
The relentless Russian attacks have led to a buckling of the lines in parts of eastern Ukraine, experts say.
“This has been the most difficult period for Ukraine since early 2022,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Russia has “gained momentum, seizing more territory each month since August,” he said.
The widespread assumption that Russia could not sustain this punishing pace of operations has proved misplaced, Ukrainian soldiers said.
“It’s important to understand that they have significant reserves,” Colonel Pavlenko-Kryzheshevskyi said.
The most critical situation for the Ukrainian forces remains in the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, where the Russians have been slowly but steadily advancing on Pokrovsk, a vital military hub.
The Russians have advanced to within two miles of the main highway into the battered city, according to the Center for Defense Strategies, a Ukrainian research group.
To the north, fierce urban battles are raging in Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, towns that have long stood as the barricades holding back direct Russian assaults on the agglomeration of the major cities at the heart of the Donetsk region.
To the south, a pocket of Ukrainian resistance around the small city of Kurakhove is steadily eroding, opening the prospect of a Russian push through the southern Donbas to the Dnipro region, which is now the industrial heart of the nation.
Civilians in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in November. Russian forces have advanced to within several miles of the main highway to the city, analysts said. Credit: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
In recent days, Russia has also mounted a series of attacks on the islands that dot the Dnipro river south of Zaporizhzhia.
“I almost daily receive intelligence reports,” said Oleksandr, a 21-year-old drone operator with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, said when reached by phone. “And damn it, almost every day, trucks arrive carrying boats on trailers.”
Like most soldiers interviewed for this article, he asked to be identified only by his first name in accordance with military protocol.
While Ukrainian commanders and military analysts do not think Russia will be able to mount a successful large-scale offensive across the Dnipro, they said that the Kremlin may be trying to further extend Ukrainian forces.
At the same time, Ukraine appears determined to hold a stretch of land it seized last summer in the Russian region of Kursk, where the Kremlin’s bid to drive the Ukrainians back across the border is being bolstered by more than 11,000 North Korean soldiers. Russia’s renewed offensive has failed to dislodge the Ukrainians and more than 1,000 North Koreans have been killed or wounded in recent days, according to the United States.
The fierce fighting is taking place against a backdrop of deep political uncertainty.
While military analysts believe recent shipments of American and other Western military assistance should sustain Ukraine for several months, it remains to be seen how President-elect Donald J. Trump will try to achieve his stated goal of bringing the war to a rapid end.
At the moment, Ukraine’s tenuous position on the front puts it at a disadvantage.
Ukrainian Army mechanics repairing an American-made Stryker military vehicle at a warehouse in northern Ukraine this month. Credit: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
With Russian forces holding the initiative on the battlefield, President Vladimir V. Putin has rejected any settlement short of a deal that would be tantamount to Ukrainian surrender.
The only way to force the Kremlin to negotiate, supporters of Ukraine have argued, is to create leverage by raising the cost of the war for Moscow.
But first, the Ukrainian military needs to stabilize its defenses, soldiers and analysts say.
“The question is whether the front line will stabilize,” said Major Taras, the deputy battalion commander of the 68th Jaeger Brigade, which is fighting around Pokrovsk. “Unfortunately, there are no signs of that yet.”
As Ukraine’s lines have fragmented along parts of the front, longstanding problems in troop management have grown more urgent, soldiers and analysts said.
Mr. Kofman of the Carnegie Endowment said that Ukraine needed to address how it both mobilizes and manages its troops at the front.
Soldiers said that instead of replenishing and rebuilding battle-proven brigades in a sustained way, reinforcements had been pulled from various units piecemeal to plug gaps in defenses. That has undermined cohesion, communications and morale, the soldiers said.
“All of this is an emotional action within a collapsing system,” said Taras Chmut, a former military officer and the head of Come Back Alive, a charity that supports the Ukrainian military.
“You extinguish one part of the house, then go to another, and it’s already burning again,” he said. “And you don’t change anything fundamentally.”
Those concerns were echoed by dozens of soldiers and commanders in interviews during repeated visits to the front recently and in interviews conducted by phone over the past week.
Ukrainian fortification in the Kharkiv region in December. Credit: Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
In response to concerns over military management, President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday announced the creation of a new ombudsman to attend to the concerns of soldiers.
“It is very important that each of our military feel that it is really possible to ask for support and receive it,” he said.
Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s top military commander, has also vowed to address issues raised by soldiers, including improvements in basic training standards.
At the end of November, General Syrsky also named a new commander of ground forces, Gen. Mykhailo Drapatyi, who is well regarded both inside and outside Ukraine.
Russia has seized around 1,300 square miles of land in 2024, its fastest gains since the first months of the war but that amounts to less than 1 percent of Ukrainian territory. More broadly, the Kremlin now controls substantially less territory than it did in the first months of its invasion.
While Russian forces churn a destructive path through small villages in the southern Donbas region, they have yet to show themselves capable of achieving large-scale breakthroughs.
Still, Ukrainian soldiers said they were worried about the current trajectory.
“The war is far from over,” said Major Taras of the 68th Jaeger Brigade, who recently spent three months at home recovering from an injury. “There’s this impression that everyone is already talking about peace, waiting for it to come soon,” he said. “But in reality, the fighting continues. Every day, lives are being lost — our soldiers’ lives.”
Liubov Sholudko contributed reporting from Kyiv, and Arijeta Lajka from New York.
Marc Santora has made numerous visits to the front over the past year to speak with Ukrainian soldiers. He reported this article from Kyiv, Ukraine.
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