Dispatch from Ukraine III

Dear friends,

Here is my last dispatch from my recent trip to Ukraine. As always, I welcome your feedback.

I’m also set to discuss my trip in a livestream hosted by Defense Priorities at 2:00 PM ET today (less than an hour from now). You can tune in live or watch it later at this link: https://defp.org/live/ukraines-counteroffensive.

Thank you for reading,

Rajan

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I’m wrapping up this dispatch from Warsaw, Poland, following a nearly three-week visit to Ukraine, my third since the war began last year on February 24. Like the previous two, this trip required a roughly 16-hour drive from Warsaw to Kyiv. The nighttime curfew makes a non-stop tough, so we—I was traveling with an American friend who has extensive “in country” experience in Ukraine—stayed overnight in Lviv, about 40 miles from the Polish border. You can take the train to Kyiv, but I never have. You can’t, however, fly into Ukraine: Its airspace has been closed since the Russian invasion.

The Lviv to Kyiv route brought home yet again the vastness of Ukraine, which, aside from Russia, is Europe’s largest country. Though there are mountain ranges in Carpathia and Crimea, Ukraine is mostly one vast stretch of land punctuated occasionally by rolling hills of unremarkable height. What is remarkable, though, is Ukraine’s wealth of fertile farm land, which, dark and rich, nourishes wheat, corn, and sunflowers that make the country a major food exporter. After Russia took over Ukraine’s Azov Sea coast and part of its Black Sea littoral, its food exports stopped and global wheat and sunflower oil prices soared. (Exports resumed last July after Turkey brokered an agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Though it has been renewed, most recently in May for 60 days, there’s no guarantee that it will hold indefinitely.)

One immediately apparent change since my previous visit in December was the absence of the frequent vehicular checkpoints on the road. Having an American passport certainly helped, but you still had to wait in long lines to reach the barriers, where police, soldiers, and intelligence officers scrutinized your documents, surveyed your car’s interior, and sometimes asked where you were going and why. Once you neared Kyiv, these check points—or “block posts”—increased, and the scrutiny intensified. This time, however, we drove uninterrupted all the way to Kyiv, past a bridge the Ukrainians had blown up to delay the Russian army’s advance toward the capital and war-damaged homes. The blown-out bridges and residential and commercial structures were repaired or under reconstruction.

War zones

This trip provided a first-time opportunity to visit past and present battlegrounds in eastern Kharkiv province—the largely Russian-speaking eponymous city was Soviet Ukraine’s capital until 1934—and the Ukrainian-controlled parts of Donetsk province. (Donetsk and Luhansk provinces together constitute the Donbas.)

In September, a lightning Ukrainian counteroffensive swept the Russian army from eastern Kharkiv province, surprising Russia’s high command as well as Western military mavens. Still, because eastern Kharkiv and the part of Donetsk Ukraine holds could change hands again, those familiar block posts—most of them squat concrete box-like structures with camouflage netting and heavily-armed soldiers and police at the ready—which seemed to have vanished west of Kyiv, reappeared, frequently; and the closer we got to the frontlines, the more stringent became the security protocols.

East of Kharkiv city are towns that have made Western headlines frequently because they’ve been the scene of major battles or were close to being overrun by the Russian army: Balakliya, Izium, Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, and the best known of them, Bakhmut. They lie cheek-by-jowl to one another, so the fall of one endangers the others, which explains why the Ukrainian army fought tenaciously to defend or retake them. For example, Izium, from which Ukraine expelled Russian forces as part of the Kharkiv offensive, is only 35 miles northwest of Slovyansk. The distance from Slovyansk and Kramatorsk to Bakhmut, which lies to their southeast, is even shorter. A journalist who lives in Kramatorsk, and who was one of the few young people we saw, told us that last summer the Russian army was around 20 miles away, but the reporter added that they’d never considered leaving: they believed it was their duty to cover the war and added that Kramatorsk was their home now (they grew up in Donetsk) and they weren’t about to flee.

Many Western military experts wondered why Ukraine’s commanders chose to continue defending Bakhmut despite odds that seemed impossible by the spring, as the Russian army closed in. After all, the town contains only a few thousand people now, and even before the war fewer than 75,000 lived there. Russia had been trying to occupy Bakhmut since last August, once Ukrainian forces withdrew from Popasna 15 miles to the east, but once its Russian troops gained ground and entered the eastern parts of the town this spring, a tactical retreat by Ukraine seemed wise.

On some days the Russians fired 10,000 or more artillery shells at the town and also used white phosphorous: incendiary munitions, which stick to the skin and burn through it, reaching temperatures of 1,400 Fahrenheit. White phosphorous sucks oxygen from the air, making breathing hard, and also contaminates the bloodstream as it burrows deep into the body, where it can continue to burn even after initial treatment. The unremitting carnage and destruction made the Ukrainian decision to keep defending seem suicidal.

Yet had the Ukrainian army retreated from Bakhmut, it would have had to immediately defend another town to the west: The Russians weren’t about to stop advancing and, in fact, would have concluded that the wind was now at their back. Plus, Bakhmut and the outskirts of Kostyantynivka are pretty much adjacent. Had the former fallen, the latter would have been next—and possibly Kramatorsk and Slovyansk after that.

Eventually, Ukraine might have lost all or most of the parts of Donetsk province under its control. (Luhansk has been in Russian hands since Ukraine’s retreat from Lysychansk last July.) The dogged defense of Bakhmut also tied down and killed or wounded thousands of Russian troops, as well as Wagner Group fighters, though Ukraine’s soldiers have certainly paid a high price as well.

Recently, the Russians have been losing ground in Bakhmut, despite having taken almost the entire town. Moreover, the Ukrainian army might even succeed in encircling the town. If that happens—and it’s far from certain that it will—the decision to keep fighting for Bakhmut will be vindicated. But even if that doesn’t happen, Ukrainian commanders’ decision to not abandon Bakhmut was scarcely a blunder. The Russian army has struggled for every small advance. The battle for Bakhmut also created a public rift between the Wagner Group and the Russian military brass, with Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin repeatedly savaging Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov as incompetents who had no idea what was occurring at the front.

Some impressions

As we approached Izium the ravages of war were immediately visible. Many homes were demolished, others so badly damaged as to be uninhabitable. Cars hit by shells lay scattered along the roadsides—mangled, torched, the steel frames that remained having all turned a ghostly gray. The crumpled tanks and armored personnel carriers resembled massive desiccated insects, such as one might see in some sci-fi movie. Thousands of soldiers likely perished in the fields and woods beyond and those areas are full of live mines and unexploded ordnance, Russian and Ukrainian. Clearing the land of these explosives will take years and be an expensive undertaking. But it has to be done, not just to protect people—especially children, who might pick up unexploded shells or tread on live mines—but also so that fields left fallow for safety’s sake can be cultivated once again.

Kramatorsk, where we stayed overnight before heading southeast to Kostyantynivka the next day, was once home to 150,000 people. Now, about half as many live there, and during the early months of the war only 40,000 remained. The town has been hit by Russian artillery and missiles more than a hundred times, including, the local journalist said, a day before we turned up. (Slovyansk, too, was struck the day before we drove through it.) Most of Kramatorsk’s factories have closed; and as is true in all Ukrainian towns under attack, schools operate online, unless they have bomb shelters. Not that there are many school-age kids around, in stark contrast to cities like Kharkiv, Poltava, and of course Kyiv.

During the war’s early months people from surrounding areas rushed to Kramatorsk, frantic to board trains to safe havens further west. On the morning of April 9, as had become common, some 4,000 people had gathered at the local station when it was hit by a Russian Tochka-U missile laden with cluster munitions. At least 50 people, including children, were killed; many more were injured. Near a spot where one of the munitions fell, scarring the platform, the townspeople had placed small granite slab marking the spot and built a makeshift memorial at the gate of the station, which included stuffed animals in memory of the kids who died.

Kramatorsk was probably a dreary place even in the best of times. Many of its apartment buildings typify drab but utilitarian Soviet-era construction, each one, perhaps per the directives of central planners, a near replica of its neighbors. The town’s administration decreed that all elevators had to be shut down for the winter to conserve energy. That edict has made hardscrabble life in Kramatorsk harder still. Imagine yourself as, say, a 75-year-old person (the elderly account for a disproportionate share of the town’s population) or someone burdened by a severe disability. You’d have to trudge up and down the stairs, perhaps to an apartment on the eighth floor—which is where our flat happened to be, in a building whose elevator was still not working—to buy food and other basic necessities, take out the trash, refill essential prescriptions, take a stroll or meet friends to break the tension and tedium, walk your dog so that it can relieve itself. You might even be confined to your apartment for weeks at a time and be dependent on the kindness of others. The prices of goods and food were higher in Kramatorsk than in safer towns, and further you got to the front lines (like Kostyantynivka), the higher they became because of the danger that truckers bringing in supplies faced.

At night—starting at around 9:00 PM and continuing till about 4:00 AM—we heard the constant thud of artillery and the woosh of missiles, hoping they were “outgoing.” Kramatorsk’s residents may well be used to these noises of war, but if you visit, don’t plan on getting much sleep. A drink or two might calm your nerves and help you nod off instead of tossing and turning amidst the din; but unless you’ve brought booze with you, you’re out of luck. You won’t find any in the stores. Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk’s authorities banned alcohol sales for the duration of the war—the leaders of other occupied provinces did so as well, but they suspended the directive last summer—that has almost certainly created smuggling rackets whose operatives bribe bureaucrats to look the other way. (Win-win works even in war.) We’d brought some beer for the people we’d planned to talked to, and they chuckled when we said we’d come bearing gifts of “zaprashenka” (contraband).

After spending the night in Kramatorsk, we headed to Kostyantynivka (20 miles to the southeast) clad in Kevlar flak jackets and sturdy helmets, perhaps evidence of Western military assistance. The drive seemed interminable. The horrendous state of the road made fast driving impossible. Pockmarked by craters and huge potholes, probably created by tanks and other tracked military vehicles, it was far worse than any I’d traveled on in wartime Ukraine. The soldier who drove our vehicle—he wisely took the wheel—weaved left and right the whole way during the jarring ride. As we crept along, I wondered what the survival rate was for badly wounded soldiers who had to be evacuated from Bakhmut through roads like this before reaching ones that were paved and suitable for a dash to the nearest large military hospital—in Dnipro, about 162 miles away. Their chances of survival seemed bleak. Vehicles, except for tanks and APCs or those built for off-road, risked flat tires and breakdowns if they pushed the pace.

Once we reached Kostyantynivka, one of the soldiers who accompanied us walked me through various neighborhoods, automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, instinctively scanning his surroundings, as he pointed out some of the homes, apartment buildings, shops, and other buildings that had been struck by artillery and missiles. Kostyantynivka seemed even more deserted than Kramatorsk, not surprising given that it’s even closer to Bakhmut’s “zero line.” The only people remaining appeared to be those too old or too ill to travel, had no place to go, or simply refused to leave their homes—something that’s been common during this war and ones before it. We’d been told that more than half of the people remaining in Kramatorsk were retirees. The proportion in Kostyantynivka was undoubtedly higher.

Conditions in Bakhmut, which has largely been demolished, are infinitely worse. After the war ends, the town, once famous for its salt mines and sparkling wine, will have to be rebuilt from scratch. When we were back in Kyiv, my friend and I had discussed going there, but a Ukrainian friend, aghast that I was heading to Donbas, implored me not to venture into Bakhmut. I’d effectively be buying a “one-way ticket,” she said. The soldiers we were with offered to take us closer to Bakhmut’s outlying areas, but we declined. It was not just that we feared getting injured or killed, though we certainly did. It also seemed irresponsible and self-indulgent to endanger the lives of men who faced death daily just so that we could have the experience of being closer to the front. And in any event, the battle lines had been pushed beyond the town, which the Russians had occupied by then.

Military matters

The morale of the troops we spoke to in Kramatorsk and during the trip to and from Kostyantynivka, and smaller villages beyond it, was high. (That wasn’t surprising and mirrored the disposition of soldiers I’d met previously in other places near the frontline, such as Kherson.) They derided the fighting spirit of both regular Russian troops and those from the Wagner Group and mocked the reputedly fierce Chechen irregulars—who have been sent to fight in Ukraine by the pro-Putin head of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, and are known as Kadyrovtsy—as “Tik Tok fighters.”

The Ukrainians can’t hope to match the Russians in firepower, but their stronger morale may offset that disadvantage. The imbalance in resolve may be the single best explanation for why a war that Russia should have won handily given its vast numerical superiority in the tangible elements of military power—troops, ammunition, tanks, IFVs, artillery, warplanes, and so on—continues to drag on 16 months after it started. It’s telling that, unlike in Russia, Ukrainians have volunteered to fight in droves and donated fulsomely to help cover the costs of war. As Owen Matthews reports in his recently-published book, Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin did not anticipate that Ukrainians would rally to defend their country and refuse to surrender. He had therefore bet on a short war.

The Russian army’s lackluster performance in Ukraine raises an important question about the big-bucks military modernization drive Putin kicked off in 2008—one that almost all Western military experts concluded that overhauled the Russian army and turned it into a fearsome fighting machine. The Economist even devoted the cover of its November 2, 2021, issue to a supposedly transformed Russian military. “Russian Military Forces Dazzle after a Decade of Reform: NATO Will Need to Step Up,” the caption proclaimed. Why did so many Western experts, some of whom are nevertheless in high demand as commentators on the war in Ukraine, get it wrong?

The comments that the soldiers we met made about the Russian army did not, however, amount to grandstanding; nor did they predict an imminent, or even rapid, Ukrainian victory. They talked without hesitation insufficient ammunition and remarked that the shortage puts Ukraine at a massive disadvantage because, in their view, the Russia army, whatever its problems, has plenty of shells, thanks to large stockpiles and continuing production. They added that even a big infusion of western shells might not solve the problem because there weren’t enough platforms from which to fire them. (Back in Kyiv, a member of the presidential administration had told me that the Russian army was learning from its mistakes and adapting.)

On the other hand, the soldiers said that the accuracy of Russian artillery shells was primitive compared to those Ukraine has received from the West and that the Russian army, at least in part, relies on high volume fire to compensate for subpar precision. We asked them what Russian weapons put them in the most danger. Incendiary munitions, they said. That answer will not surprise anyone who has read about white phosphorus bombs or seen videos of the showers of bright, white-hot chemicals they spread over large areas, bringing to mind a gigantic sparkler, but ones that kill, and with unimaginable cruelty. When asked what scared the Russians, the soldiers singled out high-precision Western weapons like HIMARS, which they said have made a huge difference, not just by giving Ukraine a fighting chance, but also by enabling tactical victories. Still, they wondered whether Western arms and ammunition would continue to arrive in sufficient quantities were the war to continue for months, perhaps years.

Looking forward

During the long drive back to Kyiv, two thoughts coursed through my mind. First, the Ukrainian counteroffensive might well prove successful but not enough to end this war on Kyiv’s publicly-stated terms—the return of all territories seized by Russia since 2014—or even to force Putin to make big territorial compromises. We are, then, nowhere near the end of the worst war Europe has experienced since World War II. Second, the longer the war continues, the greater will be the costs of rebuilding Ukraine’s shattered country and economy (estimates vary: the World Bank’s, offered in March, is $440 billion over 10 years) and reintegrating millions of refugees and internally displaced people, as well as former soldiers into society—tasks that could take decades.