Robert F. Worth
Two Russian soldiers emerged from the woods and walked slowly down a dirt road, seemingly unaware that they were being monitored from the sky. By the time they raised their rifles to fire at a buzzing Ukrainian drone, it was too late: The drone had dropped a bomb that exploded with a bright-orange flash on the ground between them. But as the smoke drifted clear, the soldiers got up and staggered into the trees. The first strike had failed.
I watched all of this on a screen from a Ukrainian command post about 10 miles back from the front line.
“We know the two wounded Russians are in those trees,” said the Ukrainian commander alongside me, a powerfully built man of 39 who goes by the call sign YG. He didn’t look happy. The Russians probe the front line every day in small groups, and his job is to stop them while doing all he can to protect his own, far more limited supply of soldiers. But drones were not his only weapons against these two.
Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition. Any hopes that might have been raised by President Trump’s red-carpet diplomacy with Vladimir Putin have expired, and it is impossible to spend more than a few minutes near the front line without being confronted by Ukraine’s greatest vulnerability: lack of soldiers. Yet I came away from a recent trip to Ukraine believing that the country may actually be able to achieve its military goals.
Despite Russia’s demographic advantage, its efforts to envelop Ukraine’s formidable fortress belt—a string of strategic cities and logistics hubs in the country’s northeast—have had little success. Capturing the belt would take several years of hard fighting, given Ukraine’s recent success in damaging Russia’s oil pipelines and rear bases. Putin tacitly acknowledged Russia’s failure by demanding that Ukraine voluntarily cede the entire region in August, an idea that no one took seriously.
All of the officers I met with, during a week in northeastern Ukraine, told me that the key to keeping the Russians at bay lies in finding better ways to compensate for Ukraine’s desperate shortage of manpower. Part of the answer is drone technology, which has done a great deal to help Ukraine protect itself in an uneven fight. But commanders are now taking a range of other measures to minimize casualties, including more careful use of artillery, more precise troop movements, and better rotation plans. “Our main purpose is to not let direct contact happen, so Ukrainian troops don’t have to engage,” one local commander told me.
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