Military briefing: Russia’s barrage hits Ukrainian morale in the Donbas

In first world war descriptions of an artillery barrage, there is the whistle of the approaching shell, then a flash, a concussive blast and the air is filled with flying metal. Last comes the sound of the explosion. The ground trembles. As Harry Patch, a British soldier, put it in a BBC interview: “if any man tells you . . . he wasn’t scared — he’s a liar.”

It has been seven weeks since the Russian army gave up its poorly thought out assault on Kyiv and concentrated its forces in the Donbas, where Ukrainian troops have faced incessant shelling from their better armed adversaries and suffered conditions often compared to the first world war.

Constant bombardment has taken a toll on battlefield morale, reflecting a darkening mood in Kyiv as Russia’s army uses its advantages in massed artillery to make incremental progress in the Donbas and its weeks-long effort to take the provincial city of Sievierodonetsk.

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Western defence officials and military analysts stress that Russia’s grinding advance in Luhansk, part of Ukraine’s eastern industrialised Donbas region, does not by itself represent a decisive turning point in the war.

“Strategically it’s not clear what, if any, credible high-level goals Russia” is trying to achieve through force, a western official said. “There’s a sense of strategic improvisation . . .[and] its armed forces increasingly face strategically impactful shortages of key munitions and capabilities.”

Even so, Ukraine’s rhetorical step-down is striking compared with the bullishness it briefly enjoyed in April after its troops all but routed Russian forces around the capital and forced them to retreat close to the border.

Shortly after visiting the frontlines, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, told the Financial Times by video link this week: “Victory must be achieved on the battlefield.” But he added: “We are inferior in terms of equipment . . . we are not capable of advancing . . .[and] we are going to suffer more losses.”

The central problem for Ukrainians fighting in the Donbas is a mismatch of artillery capabilities. As some Russian guns have greater range, its ground forces can sit back from the fight.

Ukrainian forces, sometimes equipped with only small arms, are, meanwhile, forced to “sit in position, as cannon fodder”, said Oleksandr V Danylyuk, head of the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Reforms, a think-tank.

“We don’t have the range and amount of artillery,” Danylyuk added. “We fire once. They fire back 40 times. They retaliate to each of our strikes at least 20 times.”

Ukraine’s casualties are mounting. Oleksii Reznikov, the country’s defence minister, said on Thursday that every day it suffered “up to 100 of our soldiers killed and up to 500 wounded . . . the Kremlin continues to press by sheer mass”. Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has told the BBC as many as 200 soldiers are killed daily.

Morale is particularly low among territorial defence fighters who lack the battle experience of regular troops. A draft bill sent to Ukraine’s parliament on May 5 that would have given officers greater leeway to punish rebellious soldiers was considered and rejected under two weeks later.

Russia’s intelligence services have pressed home the advantage. According to Ukrainian intelligence, servicemen are being sent SMS messages that threaten harm to themselves and their families, and that Sievierodonetsk will become another Mariupol, the Ukrainian port effectively razed by Russian artillery.

Multiple videos posted on social media, which may be part of Russia’s propaganda effort, also depict Ukrainian soldiers complaining about poor conditions, lack of food and need for rest.

In one, a captured scout says: “Food rarely came up at all. The wounded were not evacuated. After a while, many guys laid down their arms.” In another, the leader of a platoon says: “Morale is so low that no one can do it any more. Everyone is exhausted . . . We have no equipment, nothing to fight with except AK-47s.”

“The videos are hard to impossible to verify, but they are not unbelievable,” said Samuel Cranny-Evans, a military analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London. “Like the foreign volunteers who went to the front, Ukraine’s territorial defence volunteers have discovered that high-intensity war is hard, and even harder if there is no support.”

In time, the long-range rockets that Ukraine has repeatedly asked for and that have been promised by the US and UK will arrive at the frontlines and be manned by Ukrainian troops trained to use them.

Whether they will arrive in time to prevent the capture of Sievierodonetsk is another matter. And even if the west eventually sends the hundreds of rocket systems that Ukraine has asked for, according to a person close to the president, Zelenskyy privately envisions a war that could drag on for years, depleting Ukraine’s population as the economy collapses and people move to Europe.

But Russia has its own race against time. Its army is throwing all it has — short of nuclear weapons, Podolyak said — into the Donbas fight. That includes, according to front-line reports, expensive and disproportionally powerful Iskander ballistic missiles to take out small Ukrainian positions.

Russian forces are suffering from low morale, have problems recruiting fresh forces, and face political pressure to show progress so that Moscow can announce the takeover of Luhansk.

Casualties are also rising. The UK’s Ministry of Defence estimates as many as 20,000 Russian troops have been killed in action, up from its May estimate of about 15,000, while Ukraine estimates 31,200 Russians have died compared with 26,350 a month ago.